The Philosopher’s Hammer: Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Twilight of the Idols” (Part 1)

Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Götzendammerung, oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt, 1889), was one of the last two philosophical works (the other being The Anti-Christ) written by Friedrich Nietzsche at lightning speed (he completed it in a week) before he succumbed to insanity the following year. By this time Nietzsche had already established a name for himself with Thus Spoke Zarathustra in Europe’s literary-philosophical enclaves, though his incorrigible cynicism made him believe that most readers had not adequately grasped the work. In order to rectify the situation, he felt he had to simplify its main ideas and present them in a more digestible format à la Cliff Notes. The result is Twilight of the Idols, a summary of sorts of the philosophical thoughts that had preoccupied him all his life. But the book, furious and acerbic in tone, is also something else: it functions as a metaphorical hammer that seeks to destroy everything that is deemed “good” and “acceptable” by traditionalists.

All of Nietzsche’s bêtes noires are present: Church-sanctioned morality, Christianity, Judaism, Reason, equality, liberalism, democracy, altruism, complacency. Unlike the poetic statement that is Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in this work Nietzsche’s voice is (at times offensively) direct and leaves little to the imagination. It is in this fiery fashion that he accuses philosophers past and present and religion of having deluded mankind with Reason. A promulgator of change, transience, and mutation, Nietzsche blames our over-reliance on Reason for leading us to believe in “unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality” (47). It is Reason which “sees everywhere deed and doer; which believes in will as cause in general; which believes in the ‘ego’” (48). He then homes in on Kant, his perennial enemy, saying that philosophers of his ilk are responsible for reinforcing the notion that there is a “higher world” next to the empirical one. This he calls “a suggestion of décadence – a symptom of declining life,” because belief in another world (the basis of all religions) is hostile to life in the real world (49). It follows that Nietzsche should also aim his arrow at Plato towards the end of the work, stating that Plato is “that ambiguity and fascination called the ‘ideal’ which made it possible for the nobler natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to step on to the bridge which led to the ‘Cross’” (117). Plato is indirectly accountable for the concept ‘Church’.

Nietzsche’s animosity towards the Church needs no reiteration. In Twilight of the Idols, he does re-state some of the anti-Church arguments we have encountered in his earlier works (“the practice of the Church is hostile to life,” 52), but the reader also finds here a lucid and pithy explanation as to why our perception of God is false. Nietzsche points us towards the “error of a false causality,” the belief that all our actions can be traced back to a reliable consciousness – or a set of “motives.” The philosopher warns us that “the ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms and false lights: the will is one of them” (60). The so-called “motive” is an error, “merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, an accompaniment to an act, which conceals rather than exposes the antecedentia of the act” (60). The same goes for the spirit, the will, and the ego – notions which have led us to create – mistakenly – a world of (divine) causes. Nietzsche reinforces the idea that Man has only created a world he wants to see (but does not realise it):

Man projected his three ‘inner facts,’ that in which he believed more firmly than in anything else, will, spirit, ego, outside himself – he derived the concept ‘being’ only from the concept ‘ego,’ he posited ‘things’ as possessing being according to his own image, according to his concept of the ego as caus. No wonder he later always discovered in things only that which he had put into them! – The thing itself, to say it again, the concept ‘thing’ is merely a reflection of the belief in the ego as cause… (61)

What Man defines as “cause” or “God” is therefore only a reflection of his inner self, which he has projected onto the outside world. “So God created Man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27) is a fallacy to Nietzsche’s mind. The “cause” has been misconstrued and confused: it is Man who has created God in his own image, not the other way around.

What the modern reader may find intriguing about this work is that the philosopher also comments on less abstract issues that he may relate to. Nietzsche’s remarks on German higher education in his time are particularly caustic. He writes that “there is a need for educators who are themselves educated; superior, noble spirits, who prove themselves every moment by what they say and by what they do not say,” adding sarcastically that German education does not need “the learned boors which grammar school and university offer youth today as ‘higher nurses’” (74). He feels that German youths are being mollycoddled and are not given enough challenges to really excel. The democratisation of higher education is to blame: “Great and fine things can never be common property: pulchrum est paucorum hominum (beauty is for the few). – What is the cause of the decline of German culture? That ‘higher education’ is no longer a privilege – the democratism of ‘culture’ made ‘universal’ and common” (75). Nietzsche’s assertion is no less relevant today.

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

Link to Part 2: http://ed-is-a-stranger-on-earth.blogspot.nl/2013/01/the-philosophers-hammer-friedrich.html