The Philosopher’s Hammer: Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols” (Part 2)

Perhaps the biggest surprise to the 21^st century reader of Twilight of the Idols, assuming he has not read its predecessors, is its aggressive attack on ideas he holds dear and never thinks of challenging. Nietzsche never had an appreciation for liberal politics. This is expressed in clear and therefore philosophically atypical language in Section 38 “My Conception of Freedom.” Of liberal institutions, Nietzsche opines that they “cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: subsequently there is nothing more thoroughly harmful to freedom than liberal institutions” (103). The reason why Nietzsche distrusts liberalism is consistent with his philosophy: liberal ideas “undermine the will to power, they are the leveling of mountain and valley exalted to a moral principle, they make small, cowardly and smug – it is the herd animal which triumphs with them every time” (103). Since liberalism preaches equality, harmony, and attempts to erase dissonance, it is seen by Nietzsche, who propounds fearlessness and competitiveness, as something reprehensible.

Nietzsche’s definition of freedom is not at all like ours. He says that it is “the will to self-responsibility,” by which he means the free man “has become more indifferent to hardship, toil, privation, even to life” (103). In layman’s language, the free man, whom Nietzsche also calls a “warrior,” has succeeded in surmounting life’s obstacles – a consequence that can only come about if he has been solely responsible for his own thoughts and deeds - something he can never do as a “herd animal” in the confines of liberalism. Nietzsche then gives the reader his definition of freedom: “… the manly instincts that delight in war and victory have gained over the other instincts – for example, over the instinct for ‘happiness’ (complacency).” The language of war here is contentious and can easily be taken out of its metaphorical context. Nietzsche extols the “manly instincts of war” because Man needs these to keep himself from sinking into the bog of self-complacency. He adds: “The man who has become free … spurns the contemptible sort of well-being dreamed by shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats” (104). These are the people (and creatures) Nietzsche considers weak, and weakness of the body and mind is undesirable in the philosopher’s scheme: Freedom is “something one has and does not have, something one wants, something one conquers…” (104).

Nietzsche by Edvard Munch

The writing of Twilight of the Idols is also an act of affirmation and celebration. This is most evident in the passages where Nietzsche displays his veneration for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and praises Art for its ability to “intoxicate.” A German who loathes nationalism, Nietzsche confesses Goethe is “the last German before whom I feel reverence” (115). He calls Goethe “a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature … a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century” (114). He admires him for his aspiring to “totality,” his striving against the “separation of reason, sensuality, feeling, will” (114). In Nietzsche’s eyes, Goethe was a “convinced realist … a man of tolerance, not out of weakness, but out of strength, because he knows how to employ to his advantage what would destroy an average nature” (114). Nietzsche even goes so far as to baptize Goethe “Dionysos,” the god of the base senses, before bemoaning that Goethe’s legacy has not changed Europe for the better.

Nietzsche is never secretive about his passion for Art (refer to The Birth of Tragedy, 1872). In Twilight of the Idols, he describes the artistic process in lurid (and controversial) terms. He says that for an artist to create art, he must first be intoxicated. This is not strictly alcoholic intoxication:

All kinds of intoxication, however different their origin, have the power to do this: above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement … Likewise the intoxication which comes in the train of all great desires, all strong emotions, the intoxication of feasting, of contest, of the brave deed, of victory, of all extreme agitation; the intoxication of cruelty; intoxication in destruction… (83)

The same language can be found in other areas of Nietzsche’s philosophy. It is an unashamed plea for triumph, strength, and excess. Why does the artist have to be intoxicated to create? Nietzsche says intoxication is “the feeling of plenitude and increased energy” (83). This feeling is essential for the artist, for “from out of this feeling one gives to things, one compels them to take, one rapes them” (83). The diction here is graphic, but once again the reader must approach it poetically. For Nietzsche, intoxication leads to a procedure called “idealising,” where the artist becomes the absolute ideal who triumphs over his instincts and creates art of the purest and highest quality.

Despite the work being a “hammer” that aims to destroy all commonly (and blindly) accepted systems of belief, Twilight of the Idols is a joyous, life-affirming text that compels the reader to re-examine age-old ideas and open himself up to all of life’s possibilities and paradoxes.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. London: Penguin Books, 2003.