Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  The most celebrated place in which he does that is the passage in the first section of ‘Zarathustra’s Discourses’ in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he describes the three metamorphoses of the spirit and concludes that it is in its ideal state when, having shed the weights of the camel and the ferocities of the lion, it becomes a child. Many readers of that passage must have rubbed their eyes and wondered whether it is a planned effect, so unmistakably to echo the words of Christ. Nietzsche’s point, I think, though he doesn’t make it explicitly, is that we must retain the innocence of the child as we mature. But is that possible? Whatever his answer, the point about Christ is that he wants us to remain as little children, just as (according to Nietzsche) he himself did in crucial and finally damaging respects. Christ didn’t suffer from passions, because he didn’t have any, at any rate not the ones that usually accompany adulthood. Thus he was unacquainted with sin and guilt, and his evangel is utterly uncombative. ‘If I understand anything of this great symbolist’, Nietzsche writes in number 34 of The Anti-Christ, ‘it is that he took for realities, for “truths”, only inner realities.’ The idea of cultivating pure inwardness, freed from any external demands, including that of physical culture (in both these books Nietzsche is very emphatic about the primacy of the body), is clearly one that Nietzsche found very attractive, mainly because of the central place that music played in his life, so long as music is regarded as the most intense form of inwardness that we can possess without importing large quantities of metaphysics and religion. For he insisted, finally, on regarding it as the ultimate refreshment of the hard-worked spirit, and not as a source of truth – in which latter role it would lead us straight back to Schopenhauer and Wagner. But to cultivate inwardness and nothing more, as Christ did, is to avoid life in an absolute, in its way glorious, but ultimately perverse fashion. Indeed, no one but Christ managed to do it. He was bound to be comprehensively misunderstood, and the history of Christianity is a history of misunderstanding. ‘This “bringer of glad tidings” died as he lived, as he taught – not to “redeem mankind” but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What he bequeathed to mankind is his practice’ (number 35, The Anti-Christ).

  Inevitably Christ’s disciples, and especially Paul, didn’t see things that way, according to Nietzsche. They turned action into doctrine, mistook symbols for facts, and produced the most repulsive set of teachings known to mankind (not, alas, that mankind was disposed or able to recognize them for what they were). After the haunting beauty of the pages dedicated to Christ, Nietzsche returns sadly to his overriding theme. The beginning of number 38 runs: ‘At this point I shall not suppress a sigh. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy – contempt of man. And so as to leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am fatefully contemporary.’ Most of the rest of the book is devoted to attacking Christianity in its institutional form, and especially the way in which it has corrupted consciousness to such an extent that it isn’t even true to its own vile self. Nietzsche is embarrassed at the obviousness of the point he is making in number 38:

  Everyone knows this: and everyone none the less remains unchanged. Where have the last feelings of decency and self-respect gone when even our statesmen, in other ways very unprejudiced kind of men and practical anti-Christians through and through, still call themselves Christians today and go to Communion?… A young prince at the head of his regiments, splendid as the expression of his people’s egoism and presumption – but without any shame professing himself a Christian!… Whom then does Christianity deny? what does it call ‘world’?

  The charge is unanswerable: we are faced with a debasement of a debasement of something fundamentally life-denying. No wonder Nietzsche became a hermit.

  Dionysos against the Crucified… But who might be Dionysos? Who is adequate to command the imagination in the face of a symbol as profound as that of Christ on the Cross? Especially when our imaginations are permeated by that symbol, however comprehensively we have betrayed it. Nietzsche has either to find an exemplary anti-Christian from the past, or to postulate a kind of figure who hasn’t yet existed. He had tried the latter in Zarathustra, with questionable success. In these last books he resorts to two historical figures, the first of them a notorious product of the Renaissance, the second ‘a grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature, through a going-up to the naturalness of the Renaissance, a kind of self-overcoming on the part of that century’. This second figure is, of course, Goethe, and number 49 of ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ is a magnificent celebration of him. The first figure is Cesare Borgia, no doubt chosen partly for shock-value, but also because Nietzsche did – all his references to Borgia show it – have a genuine admiration for him as an embodiment of the Renaissance, which he interprets as: ‘The revaluation of Christian values, the attempt, undertaken with every expedient, with every instinct, with genius of every kind, to bring about the victory of the opposing values, the noble values…’ (The Anti-Christ, number 61). It becomes a bit clearer why Nietzsche should have been so determinedly provocative: ‘Cesare Borgia as Pope… Am I understood?… Very well, that would have been a victory of the only sort I desire today: Christianity would thereby have been abolished!’ (number 61). My only criticism of this is that Nietzsche seems to be far too retrospectively hopeful. When one thinks of what Christianity has survived, it seems unlikely that anyone or anything could abolish it. Nor is it clear that if an adequate Dionysos-figure appeared he wouldn’t suffer the same fate that afflicts all great men – he would acquire disciples, whether or not he wanted them – and if he were truly great, he wouldn’t want them. And once again there would be a new ‘-ism’, most of whose members would be mean and degrading, because most people are. Nietzsche wanted to envisage a figure so prodigiously magnificent that he could not be traduced. Even the furious pages of these two books show that he still hoped for such a person, and for the transformation of consciousness that he might achieve. If the word ‘pathetic’ can ever be applied to Nietzsche – it is certainly the last term he would have found tolerable – it would be for his optimism about man, in the face of our accumulated record of mean-spiritedness, which no one knew better than he did.

  MICHAEL TANNER

  Translator’s Note

  Nietzsche was born in Röcken, a village in Prussian Saxony, in 1844. His father and both grandfathers were Lutheran pastors and as a boy he was a pious believer. He attended Pforta school, the Rugby of Prussia, from 1858 to 1864, and then went to Bonn and subsequently Leipzig University (1864–9). At Bonn he studied theology but gave it up when he lost his religious faith; he continued as a student of philology and gained so great a reputation in it that he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University at the age of twenty-four before having obtained his doctorate, which was awarded him by Leipzig without examination. He taught at Basel for ten years (1869–79), becoming a Swiss to do so, and published his earliest books: The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the four Untimely Meditations (1873–6). He also became a ‘disciple’ of Richard Wagner and devoted much time and energy to assisting in establishing the Bayreuth Festival, which was inaugurated in 1876. But by that time Nietzsche had come to think he had been mistaken in seeing in Wagner the new saviour of German art, and this disillusionment, combined with his sense that the newly established Reich was a victory for philistinism, turned him against all things German and he became year by year more critical of the ‘new Germany’ (see ‘What the Germans Lack’ in Twilight).

  In 1876 he began writing Human, All Too Human, and when it appeared in 1878 his breach with his past was complete. A year later he suffered an almost total collapse of health and was compelled to abandon his university career: for the next ten years he lived in a state of recurring ill-health which culminated in final collapse and insanity. During these years he wrote all his important books, living in lodgings and hotel rooms mainly in Switz
erland and Italy. He was for that decade certainly one of the loneliest of men, though fundamentally he liked and needed solitude. He never married.

  The Birth of Tragedy and the first of the Untimely Meditations won him a certain small notoriety, but his subsequent books fell dead from the press – only 170 copies of Human, All Too Human were sold during its first year – and from the fourth part of Zarathustra onwards he had to pay for their publication himself (which he could ill afford to do). Until the end of 1887, in spite of having produced a series of books without equal in the German literature of their time and now world-famous, he was virtually unknown. In 1888 he began to acquire a name: a few, mainly hostile articles were written about him in journals, and the Danish critic Georg Brandes lectured in Copenhagen on his works. But it was not until the 1890s that the public in Germany and abroad became aware of him, and then his reputation suddenly soared, so that by 1900 he was famous, not to say notorious. Of this he knew nothing, having become mentally a child again. Alone, ill and unsuccessful, Nietzsche in the 1880s is however not a figure to pity: in one book after another, couched in a style it must have been a perpetual delight to realize, he celebrated as no one else has ever done the splendour, power and joy of life.

  Note on the Text

  Götzen-Dämmerung, oder: Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert was published by C. G. Naumann of Leipzig in January 1889, a few weeks after Nietzsche’s collapse. It was the last book Nietzsche himself saw printed. It was written between the end of June and the beginning of September 1888, with the foreword, the chapter ‘What the Germans Lack’ and some of the ‘Expeditions of an Untimely Man’ added at the end of September, and it was printed by the end of October. The book originally bore the title Müssiggang eines Psychologen (A Psychologist’s Leisure, or The Idle Hours of a Psychologist): this modest title was objected to by Nietzsche’s enthusiastic admirer Peter Gast, who urged him to find something more ‘splendid’; Nietzsche acceded to this request with a parody of Wagner’s Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods). The change seems to have been made while the book was already being set up in type (the title page of the manuscript from which it was set is missing, indicating perhaps that Nietzsche had taken it back to make the alteration and that it was subsequently mislaid), and this explains a few otherwise puzzling references to the superseded title in the text.

  Der Antichrist was written between 3 and 30 September 1888, immediately after the completion of Twilight. It was first intended as the first part of The Revaluation of all Values: a plan for that book which has been preserved reads: ‘Revaluation of all Values. Book 1: The Anti-Christ. Attempt at a Critique of Christianity. Book 2: The Free Spirit. Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement. Book 3: The Immoralist. Critique of the Most Fatal Kind of Ignorance, Morality. Book 4: Dionysos. Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.’ There are two surviving manuscript title pages of The Anti-Christ: the earlier follows the above plan: The Anti-Christ. Attempt at a Critique of Christianity. Book One of the Revaluation of all Values, and was presumably written on 3 September. The later one reads: The Anti-Christ. Revaluation of all Values, but the subtitle has been crossed out and A Curse on Christianity substituted. The book was first published in 1895, in volume VIII of the Gesamtausgabe in Grossoktav (Naumann, Leipzig); a small number of omissions from the text were subsequently published and are restored in Karl Schlechta’s edition (Werke in drei Bänden, vol. II, 1955).

  R. J. HOLLINGDALE

  FURTHER READING

  David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche (2001)

  MaudeMarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Morality (1990)

  R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy (1965; 1999)

  Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (2002)

  Bernd Magnus and Kathleen Higgins (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (1996)

  Alexander Nehemas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985)

  F. Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by M. Tanner (1982)

  ______, Dithyrambs of Dionysus, trans, with introduction and notes R. J. Hollingdale (1984; 2001)

  ______, Untimely Meditations, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, introduction by J. P. Stern (1983)

  John Richardson and Brian Leiter (eds.), Nietzsche (2001)

  Rudiger Safranski, Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, trans. Shelley Frisch (2002)

  Henry Staten, Nietzsche’s Voice (1990)

  Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration (1988)

  TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS

  or How to Philosophize with

  a Hammer

  Foreword

  To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only excess of strength is proof of strength. – A revaluation of all values, this question-mark so black, so huge it casts a shadow over him who sets it up – such a destiny of a task compels one every instant to run out into the sunshine so as to shake off a seriousness grown all too oppressive. Every expedient for doing so is justified, every ‘occasion’ a joyful occasion.* Above all, war. War has always been the grand sagacity of every spirit which has grown too inward and too profound; its curative power lies even in the wounds one receives. A maxim whose origin I withhold from learned curiosity has long been my motto:

  increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus.†

  Another form of recovery, in certain cases even more suited to me, is to sound out idols.… There are more idols in the world than there are realities: that is my ‘evil eye’ for this world, that is also my ‘evil ear’.… For once to pose questions here with a hammer and perhaps to receive for answer that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels – what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears – for an old psychologist and pied piper like me, in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible…

  This book too* – the title betrays it† – is above all a relaxation, a sunspot, an escapade into the idle hours of a psychologist. Perhaps also a new war? And are new idols sounded out?… This little book is a grand declaration of war; and as regards the sounding-out of idols, this time they are not idols of the age but eternal idols which are here touched with the hammer as with a tuning fork – there are no more ancient idols in existence.… Also none more hollow.… That does not prevent their being the most believed in; and they are not, especially in the most eminent case, called idols…

  FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

  Turin, 30 September 1888,

  on the day the first book of the

  Revaluation of all Values was

  completed.

  Maxims and Arrows

  1. Idleness is the beginning of psychology. What? could psychology be – a vice?

  2. Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows…

  3. To live alone one must be an animal or a god – says Aristotle. There is yet a third case: one must be both – a philosopher.

  4. ‘All truth is simple’ – Is that not a compound lie? –

  5. Once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. – Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge.

  6. It is by being ‘natural’ that one best recovers from one’s unnaturalness, from one’s spirituality…

  7. Which is it? Is man only God’s mistake or God only man’s mistake? –

  8. From the military school of life. – What does not kill me makes me stronger.

  9. Help thyself: then everyone will help thee too. Principle of Christian charity.

  10. Let us not be cowardly in face of our actions! Let us not afterwards leave them in the lurch! – Remorse of conscience is indecent.

  11. Can an ass be tragic? – To be crushed by a burden one can neither bear nor throw off?… The case of the philosopher.

  12. If we possess our why of life we can put up
with almost any how. – Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

  13. Man created woman – but what out of? Out of a rib of his God, of his ‘ideal’…

  14. What? you are seeking? you want to multiply yourself by ten, by a hundred? you are seeking followers? – Seek noughts! –*

  15. Posthumous men – like me, for instance – are not so well understood as timely† men, but they are listened to better. More precisely: we are never understood – and hence our authority…

  16. Among women. – ‘Truth? Oh, you don’t know the truth, do you! Is it not an outrage on all out pudeurs?’ –

  17. This is an artist as an artist should be, modest in his requirements: there are only two things he really wants, his bread and his art – panem et Circen…‡