The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume SixteenNietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
PhilosophyPhilosophy
The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichrist: Complete Works, Volume Sixteen
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm
Philosophy
And what are these truths? They are things that are not yet held to
be true. They are the utterances of a man who, as a single exception,
escaped for a while the general insanity of Europe, with its blind
idealism in the midst of squalor, with its unscrupulous praise of
so-called “Progress” while it stood knee-deep in the belittlement
of “Man,” and with its vulgar levity in the face of effeminacy and
decay;—they are the utterances of one who voiced the hopes, the
aims, and the realities of another world, not of an ideal world, not
of a world beyond, but of a real world, of _this_ world regenerated
and reorganised upon a sounder, a more virile, and a more orderly
basis,—in fact, of a perfectly _possible_ world, one that has already
existed in the past, and could exist again, if only the stupendous
revolution of a transvaluation of all values were made possible.
This then is the nature of the truths uttered by this one sane man in
the whole of Europe at the end of last century; and when, owing to his
unequal struggle against the overwhelming hostile forces of his time,
his highly sensitive personality was at last forced to surrender itself
to the enemy and become one with them—that is to say, insane!—at
least the record of his sanity had been safely stored away, beyond the
reach of time and change, in the volumes which constitute his life-work.
* * * * *
Nietzsche must have started upon the “Antichrist,” immediately after
having dispatched the “Idle Hours of a Psychologist” to the printers,
and the work appears to have been finished at the end of September
1888. It was intended by Nietzsche to form the first book of a large
work entitled “The Transvaluation of all Values”; but, though this work
was never completed, we can form some idea from the substance of the
“Antichrist” and from the titles of the remaining three books, which
alas! were never written, of what its contents would have been. These
titles are:—Book II. The Free Spirit. A Criticism of Philosophy as a
Nihilistic Movement. Book III. The Immoralist. A Criticism of the most
Fatal Kind of Ignorance,—Morality. Book IV. Dionysus. The Philosophy
of Eternal Recurrence.
Nietzsche calls this book “An Attempted Criticism of Christianity.”
Modest as this sub-title is, it will probably seem not quite modest
enough to those who think that Nietzsche fell far short of doing
justice to their Holy Creed. Be this as it may, there is the solution
of a certain profound problem in this book, which, while it is the key
to all Nietzscheism, is also the justification and the sanctification
of Nietzsche’s cause. The problem stated quite plainly is this: “_To
what end_ did Christianity avail itself of falsehood?”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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