The Twilight of the Idols

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The Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung) is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche, written in 1888, and published in 1889. It is a summary of his later philosophy.

Originally titled A Psychologist's Idleness but renamed "Twilight of the Idols. How One Philosophizes With a Hammer." Nietzsche is an iconoclast. Thus, the hammer is a metaphor for diagnosing the ills of the idols as a doctor, as a doctor beats the knee of his patient to test his reflex. In this case, however, he hears the hollow resonance of the false gods. The title, 'Twilight of the Idols', Götzen-Dämmerung in German, is a pun on the title of Richard Wagner's opera, Götterdämmerung, or 'Twilight of the Gods',

The book is arranged as follows:

• "Foreword"
• "Maxims and Arrows"
• "The Problem of Socrates"
• "Reason in Philosophy"
• "How the Real World at Last Became a Myth"
• "Morality as Anti-Nature"
• "The Four Great Errors"
• "The Improvers of Mankind"
• "What the Germans Lack"
• "Expeditions of an Untimely Man"
• "What I Owe to the Ancients"
• "The Hammer Speaks"

He establishes early on in the section The Problem of Socrates, that the value of life cannot be estimated and any judgment concerning it only reveals the person's life-denying or life-affirming tendencies. He tries to show how philosophers from Socrates onwards were in his own words "decadents," employing dialectics as a tool for self-preservation as the authority of tradition breaks down. Nietzsche not only criticizes Christian morality, but also reason itself. He argues in the section The Four Great Errors how people, especially Christians, confuse the effect for the cause, and how they project their ego, their subjectivity to other things, thereby creating the illusionary concept of being, and therefore also of God. He critiques the concept of accountability and will and suggests everything is necessary in a unity that cannot be judged nor condemned.

He also criticizes the German culture of his day as unsophisticated, and shoots some disapproving arrows at key French, British, and Italian cultural figures. In contrast to all these alleged representatives of cultural decadence, Nietzsche applauds Caesar, Napoleon, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Thucydides and the Sophists as healthier and stronger types. The book states the transvaluation of all values as Nietzsche's final and most important project, and gives a view of antiquity wherein the Romans for once take precedence over the ancient Greeks.

Nietzsche's claim about morality: “My demand upon the philosopher is known, that he take his stand beyond good and evil and leave the illusion of moral judgment beneath himself. This demand follows from an insight which I was the first to formulate: that there are altogether no moral facts. Moral judgments agree with religious ones in believing in realities which are no realities. Morality is merely an interpretation of certain phenomena—more precisely, a misinterpretation. Moral judgments, like religious ones, belong to a stage of ignorance at which the very concept of the real, and the distinction between what is real and imaginary, are still lacking: thus "truth," at this stage, designates all sorts of things which we today call "imaginings." Moral judgments are therefore never to be taken literally: so understood, they always contain mere absurdity.”

[edit] External links

• Götzen-Dämmerung, available at Project Gutenberg. — German language edition.
• English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale

v • d • e Friedrich Nietzsche
Major Works	The Birth of Tragedy · Human, All Too Human · The Gay Science · Thus Spoke Zarathustra · Beyond Good and Evil · On the Genealogy of Morals · The Case of Wagner · The Twilight of the Idols · The Antichrist · Ecce Homo · Nietzsche contra Wagner
Philosophy	Apollonian and Dionysian · Eternal return · God is dead · Herd instinct · Last Man · Master-slave morality · Perspectivism · Ressentiment · Übermensch · The Will to Power
Related	Works by Nietzsche · Works about Nietzsche · Comparison with Kierkegaard