Introduction

 

     Friedrich Nietzsche. His name alone is a sentence. He is the subject, the verb, and the object. He is an event. Has ever a man been at one and the same time so captivating and confusing? Enthralling and enraging? A man who does not only stand, but also towers above his peers, he is thought to be without match. What did he say, what did he do, that continues to evoke such acclaim even a century after his death? To start, he offered the most forceful attack upon the Christian faith to emerge from the 19^th century. His shadow loomed large over the 20^th century, and his voice continues to echo into our own day. Nietzsche chased down Christianity as with a baseball bat. He wrote with “letters to make even the blind see.” As he hated the first day of Christianity, so he dreamed of seeing its last.[1] Why the fury? Why the fire? Why still the ringing in our ears? 

 

     These questions drive not only the unbeliever, but also the Christian, to attempt to measure this man of such stature. Though we dare not hope to comprehensively understand Nietzsche, let alone explain him, we choose to ignore him at our own peril. In order to avoid such danger we endeavor here to rummage through his Twilight of the Idols. We will briefly look at the historical context of the writing, jog through the work itself, and in conclusion offer some anecdotal remarks. Onward!

 

A Sketch of the Historical Context[2]

 

     1888 was a prolific year for Nietzsche. Within the span of 12 months he penned no less than four of his major works. The blazing speed of his hand was only matched by the blistering intensity of the works that it produced. In comparison to other works of the period, such as The Antichrist or Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols is surprisingly well paced and rather lucid. In it, Nietzsche manages to combine his raw wit and keen observation in way that is not entirely overbearing, as it can often be in his other works of this period. One can hardly tell that he is less than a year away from insanity, which will take hold in January of 1889 and continue until his death in 1900. Twilight of the Idols’ unique position in Nietzsche’s corpus, and its close proximity to the end of his career make it a distinctive portrait of Nietzsche’s later period, and has led some scholars to view it as “a hundred-page epitome of his thought.”[3]

 

Summary of the Work 

 

     Attempting to summarize Nietzsche is like trying to trap a wave of the sea in a bottle; you may come away with water, but you can never hold “the wave.” In placing Nietzsche in a bottle we will almost certainly strip him of his power, his force, his movement, maybe even his beauty (though he would never wish to be characterized by this adjective), but our attempts will not be fruitless. After all, it is water, not waves that quench the thirst.[4] Here we will glance at the preface and each of the 11 sections, in hopes that we might grab hold of some of the substance that makes up Twilight of the Idols [hereafter TI], come away with a deeper appreciation for Nietzsche, and be made more aware of the hazards of the Dionysian undertow.

 

     In his preface, Nietzsche pokes about, looking for the right words and concepts to introduce the work. He keys in on the subtitle (“Or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer”) and uses it as a metaphor for the contents and approach of the book. The “idols,” featured in the main title, are to be “touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork.” The idols in view are “eternal idols…those in which people have the most faith” (466).[5] Though he does not return to this metaphor throughout the work, it may serve as an adequate hermeneutical framework for reading TI. What is Nietzsche doing if not tapping on the idols of religion, Greek philosophy, Germany, etc, in order to show them to be naked and hollow?

 

     The first proper section of the book, “Maxims and Arrows,” is made up of forty-four terse statements, each consisting of a few sentences or less. This section is engaging, disquieting, humorous, and frightening all at once. It causes the reader to sit up straight. Quickly we realize that Nietzsche is telling jokes that we are not supposed to be laughing at. As he has designed, these statements act the part of arrows, flying through the air at an assortment of topics, nearly always striking their targets. “Is man merely a mistake of God’s? Or God merely a mistake of man’s?” (467). “Morality must be shot at” (472). “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them” (470). Here Nietzsche reveals himself to be the tragic beast-god, perishing under a burden he “can neither bear nor throw off,” seeking his happiness in “a straight line, a goal.”[6] We are to follow this strange creature wherever he may lead. 

 

     In “The Problem of Socrates,” the second section of TI, the author aims his powerful bow at said giant of Greek philosophy. This monstrum is hard for Nietzsche to stomach, a plebeian “buffoon” of the lowest sort (474-476). He is nearly blasphemous! To think that the untainted, instinctual glory of the Greek tragedians was overthrown by Socrates, a “misunderstanding,” the prophet of reason, virtue, and rationality; this is repugnant.

 

     And we are swept into the third section addressing “‘Reason’ in Philosophy.” That which was wrong with Socrates is wrong with nearly all philosophers. In their attempts to escape the “apparent” world for the “true” world they undermine all of their own philosophizing. “Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses” (481). In an attempt to do away with the body, the senses, the instincts, they have brought about the “decline of life” (484). They have failed to realize that “the apparent world is the only one.” (481). The fourth section, “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” comes about as close to systematization as Nietzsche will allow. In this short section he sums up the previous (‘Reason’ in Philosophy), and paints a portrait of a life without this “reason” as its basis. In short, “high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA” (486). 

 

     Nietzsche, the self-proclaimed immoralist, sets forward a diatribe against morality in the fifth section, “Morality as Anti-nature.” Against whom does he rant? All who seek to say “No” to life, who posit God “as the enemy of life,” whose hatred of passion and instinct amounts to hatred of life. “Life has come to an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins” (490). And if not in the kingdom of God where shall we dwell? To whom shall we answer? “We ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer” (492).

 

     Continuing his exposition of the absurdity of philosophical and religious morality, Nietzsche lays out “The Four Great Errors” in the sixth section. Here his recovered reason stands high above the immortal unreason of his opponents. They have confused cause and effect, devalued the power of the will, imagined effects as causes, and created “free will” as a means to coerce obedience (499). Moral order, punishment, guilt, ideals, responsibility, ultimate ends…all of these conceptions are worthless. “In reality there is no end” (500). “We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world” (501).

 

     Still in his sights, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind” become the subject of the seventh section. On two accounts they are seen to be against life: they seek to “tame” it, and they seek to “breed” it (though the second is not nearly as bad as the first). “To call the taming of an animal its ‘improvement’ sounds almost like a joke to our ears” (502). It is the Christian ideal to tame and breed men, to make them sick. The conclusion is formulaic: “all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral” (505).

 

     The focus is narrowed and in the eighth section Nietzsche turns to expound upon “What the Germans Lack.” In some sense the Germans lack their own spirit, which has become “cruder” and “shallower.” This, however, is not without explanation: “This people has deliberately made itself stupid” (507). The decline of German culture is seen most clearly in its system of higher education, where nothing is really “higher.” The result is “huge numbers of young men [being trained], with as little loss of time as possible, to become usable, abusable, in government service” (510). For Nietzsche, the saddest part of this entire narrative is that his worst fears are played out before him in his homeland. The spirit has been killed. Passion and instinct has been smothered. Dionysius no longer dances amidst the tragedy.

 

     “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man,” the ninth and longest[7] section, is wide ranging in its focus and intent. Throughout, Nietzsche oscillates between commenting on philosophers and books that he likes/dislikes, and a sincere communication of his views on varying subjects. We’ll only touch on a few of these subjects here. One subsection of note is the fifth. Here the author goes after “G. Eliot,” an Englishman who is rid of the Christian God, but intent on clinging to Christian morality. Nietzsche’s response is stinging: “When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet” (515). Who are we to disagree?

 

     Subsections eight through eleven of “Skirmishes of an Untimely Man” are extremely interesting in that they lay out Nietzsche’s views as they are applied to art and aesthetics. What is an artist? One who is given to unimpaired Dionysian “frenzy;” “in art man enjoys himself as perfection” (518-519). He continues to muse about art and eventually contemplates “beautiful and ugly” in subsection nineteen. His insights are profound. “At bottom, man mirrors himself in things; he considers everything beautiful that reflects his own image: the judgment ‘beautiful’ is the vanity of his species” (525).

 

     Nietzsche is perhaps at his most frightening in subsection thirty-six on “morality for physicians.” “The sick man is a parasite of society” (536). Or,

 

“It is not in our hands to prevent our birth; but we can correct this mistake –

              for in some cases it is a mistake. When one does away with oneself, one

              does the most estimable thing possible: one almost earns the right to live” (537).

 

On one hand, this is shocking. To hear human life construed in such indifferent terms is chilling. However, if one has followed Nietzsche up to this point, this is only a small step to take.

 

     However, Nietzsche is not done asking good questions. For example: “I take the liberty of raising the question whether we have really become more moral” (538). It is only honest for him to ask, and it seems that more of us should be asking this question along with him. Though we may mean something different by our answers, we can generally agree with his answer: no.

 

     In the second to last section, Nietzsche begins to draw TI to a close. After much deliberation, it appears that the way forward is, in some ironic sense, to look backward. In “What I Owe To the Ancients,” he sets forth the tragic, instinctual, orgiastic, overflowing, will-to-life of the Greek tragedians as the ideal (this in contrast to tasteless Platonic idealism). At last, Nietzsche crystallizes himself: “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus” (563). With this he moves to the final section, “The Hammer Speaks,” a quotation from his own Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and the philosophizing hammer opens its mouth: “This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: become hard!” (563).

 

Conclusions and Implications

 

     As we predicted, this attempt at summary has fallen short in many respects. The words of Walter Kaufmann are helpful here: “[Nietzsche] does not want to be read as an arsenal of arguments for or against something, nor even for a point of view. He challenges the reader not so much to agree or disagree as to grow.”[8] If this is so, our labors have not been entirely futile, for we have certainly grown. 

 

     Nietzsche’s keen understanding of Christianity challenges even the most ardent believer. As he said so clearly in TI, “Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together” (515). If only we might live up to such an accusation, and one day match a great thinker like Nietzsche in depth of thought and reflection. Equally challenging is the breadth of his philosophy. What area of life remained untouched in TI? Hardly any. From literature to history, science to art, medicine to politics, marriage to psychology, sexuality to ethnicity, Nietzsche’s philosophy created an entire way of looking at the world. Herein lies his greatest challenge to Christianity.

 

     Whatever the church may be doing, Nietzsche has looked at the world and claimed it as his own. We imagine he might say, I the kingdom, and the power, and glory – “the teacher of the eternal recurrence” (563). In this sense, Nietzsche is the antichrist. Yet another man has already claimed the world as his own, not with words alone, not with philosophy, but with his own life. To quote Nietzsche out of context, he “flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself” (548). The man is not a Nietzschean beast-god, but the true God-man, Christ Jesus, the eternal Word, who never rings hollow and silences all hammers.

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