Twilight of the Idols
How One Philosophizes with a Hammer1
1
This essay of less than 150 pages,2 cheerful and ominous in tone, a demon that laughs—the work of so few days that I hesitate to mention how many, is an exception among books: there is none richer in substance, more independent, more subversive3—more evil. If you want a quick idea how before me everything stood on its head,4 begin with this essay. What is called idol on the title page is simply what has been called truth so far. Twilight of the Idols—that is: the old truth is approaching its end.
2
There is no reality, no “ideality” that is not touched in this essay (touched: what a cautious euphemism!). Not only eternal idols, also the youngest which are therefore feeblest on account of their age. “Modern ideas,” for example. A great wind blows among the trees, and everywhere fruit fall down—truths. The squandering of an all-too-rich autumn: one stumbles over truths, one steps on and kills a few—there are too many.
But what we get hold of is no longer anything questionable but rather decisions. I am the first to hold in my hands the measure for “truths;” I am the first who is able to decide. Just as if a second consciousness had grown in me; just as if “the will” had kindled a light for itself in me so that it might see the inclined plane, the askew path5 on which it went down so far.—The askew path—people called it the way to “truth.”
It is all over with all “darkling aspiration;” precisely the good man was least aware of the right way.6— And in all seriousness: nobody before me knew the right way, the way up; it is only beginning with me that there are hopes again, tasks, ways that can be prescribed for culture—I am he that brings these glad tidings.— And thus I am also a destiny.—
3
Immediately upon finishing this work, without losing even one day, I attacked the tremendous task of the Revaluation,1 with a sovereign feeling of pride that was incomparable, certain at every moment of my immortality, engraving sign upon sign on bronze tablets with the sureness of a destiny. The Preface was written on September 3, 1888: when I stepped outdoors the morning after, I saw the most beautiful day that the Upper Engadine ever showed me—transparent, the colors glowing, including all opposites, everything that lies between ice and south.
It was only on September 20 that I left Sils Maria, detained by floods—in the end by far the only guest of this wonderful place on which my gratitude wants to bestow an immortal name. After a journey with incidents, including some danger to my life in Como, which was flooded—I got there only late at night—I reached Turin on the afternoon of the 21st—my proven place, my residence from now on. I took the same apartment I had occupied in the spring, Via Carlo Alberto 6, fourth floor, opposite the imposing Palazzo Carignano in which Vittorio Emanuele2 was born, with a view of the Piazza Carlo Alberto and of the hills beyond. Without hesitation and without permitting myself to be distracted for a moment, I went back to work: only the final quarter of the work remained to be done. On the 30th of September, great victory; seventh day; the leisure of a god walking along the Po river.3 On the same day I wrote the Preface for Twilight of the Idols:4 correcting the printer’s proofs of that book had been my recreation in September.
Never have I experienced such an autumn, nor considered anything of the sort possible on earth—a Claude Lorrain5 projected into the infinite, every day of the same indomitable perfection.
1For the meaning of this famous phrase, see the Preface to the book: “… not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are … none more hollow.”
2Portable Nietzsche.
3Umwerfenderes: literally, more overthrowing.
4Nietzsche’s revaluation, like Marx’s correction of Hegel, represents an attempt to put things right-side up again. Yet Nietzsche and Marx have usually been misrepresented as if they had boasted that they had stood everything on its head.
5Here six words have been used to render die schiefe Bahn; in the next sentence, only three words. The ordinary German reader would assume at first that an inclined plane was meant; then, coming to the second occurrence of schiefe, emphasized by Nietzsche, he would interpret it as askew, crooked.
6Allusion to Goethe’s Faust, lines 328f.
1That is, The Antichrist, which Nietzsche conceived as the first of the four parts of the Revaluation of All Values. Cf. the Preface (Portable Nietzsche.).
2Born 1820, King of Sardinia 1849-1861, the first King of Italy from 1861 until his death in 1878.
3Müssiggang eines Gottes am Po entlang.
4When he wrote the Preface he still intended to call the book Müssiggang eines Psychologen (a psychologist’s leisure). A letter from Peter Gast (cited in Portable Nietzsche), asking for a less unassuming title, changed Nietzsche’s mind. The book appeared with the new title in January 1889, a few days after Nietzsche’s collapse. The Case of Wagner, on the other hand, had appeared in the fall of 1888: with respect to these two books, Nietzsche does not adhere to the chronological order. The Antichrist, which is not reviewed here by Nietzsche, and Nietzsche contra Wagner, which was composed after Ecce Homo, were first published in 1895.
5French painter (1600–1682). His real name was Claude Gelée (also spelled Gellée), but he is remembered as Claude Lorrain.