Twilight of the Idols

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Twilight of the Idols or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer
Author Friedrich Nietzsche
Original title Götzen-Dämmerung
Translator R. J. Hollingdale
Country Germany
Language German
Publication date
Media type Paperback, hardcover
Pages 208 (1990 Penguin Classics ed.)
ISBN 978-0140445145
OCLC 22578979
Preceded by The Case of Wagner (1888)
Followed by The Antichrist (1888)



Twilight of the Idols was written in just over a week, between 26 August and 3 September 1888, while Nietzsche was on holiday in Sils Maria.[1] As Nietzsche's fame and popularity was spreading both inside and outside Germany, he felt that he needed a text that would serve as a short introduction to his work.[citation needed] Originally titled A Psychologist's Idleness, it was renamed Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer.

The former title, Götzen-Dämmerung in German, is a pun on the title of Richard Wagner's opera, Götterdämmerung, or 'Twilight of the Gods'. Götze is a German word for "idol" or "false god". Walter Kaufmann has suggested that in his use of the word Nietzsche might be indebted to Francis Bacon.[2]



The book is divided into twelve sections:


Maxims and Arrows[edit]

Single sentence aphorisms on a variety of topics.

The Problem of Socrates[edit]

Throughout history, Nietzsche asserts, the most learned seem to have shared a common belief that life is worthless. Nietzsche argues that this idea was not a symptom of a healthy society but of one in decline. Philosophers such as Socrates or Plato, Nietzsche explains, shared a common physiological disposition to feel negatively about life, which reflected the decay of the superior Greek culture that preceded them.

Nietzsche holds Socrates in special contempt. Socrates, he believes, was subject to all manner of vice and lustful impulses and was a product of the "lower orders" of society. Nietzsche singles out two particular ideas of Socrates for attack. The first is the interconnectedness of reason, virtue, and happiness. The second is Socrates's introduction of the dialectic method to philosophy (the process by which two or more people with different points of view reach a conclusion through a process of discourse, logic, and reason, also called the Socratic method). Nietzsche thought that the dialectic allowed weaker philosophical positions and less sophisticated thinkers to gain too large a foothold in a society. Nietzsche's program valued instinct over reason, but because of Socrates and the dialectic, Greek culture now became "absurdly rational."[3] A key part of Nietzsche's thesis is that "happiness and instinct are one," but reason stands in direct opposition to instinct.

Ultimately, Nietzsche insisted, the value of life cannot be estimated, and any judgment concerning it only reveals the person's life-denying or life-affirming tendencies.[4]

Reason in Philosophy[edit]

Nietzsche denies many of Plato's ideas, specifically that of Being and Becoming, the world of the forms, and the fallibility of the senses. More precisely, he does not believe that one should refute the senses, as Plato did.[5] This goes against Nietzsche's ideals of human excellence in that it is a symptom of personal decadence.[6] By decadence, Nietzsche is referring to a fading of life, vitality and an embrace of weakness. In Nietzsche's view if one is to accept a non-sensory, unchanging world as superior and our sensory world as inferior, then one is adopting a hate of nature and thus a hate of the sensory world - the world of the living. Nietzsche postulates that only one who is weak, sickly or ignoble would subscribe to such a belief.


How the "True World" Finally Became Fiction[edit]



Morality as Anti-Nature[edit]

Nietzsche is not a hedonist, arguing that any passion in excess can "drag their victim down with the weight of their folly." However, he maintains that it is possible for the passions to ultimately become "spiritualized." Christianity, he criticizes, instead deals with immoderate passions by attempting to remove the passion completely. In an analogy, Nietzsche claims that the Christian approach to morality is not much different than how an unskilled dentist might treat any tooth pain by removing the tooth entirely rather than pursue other less aggressive and equally effective treatments. Christianity doesn't attempt to "spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire," which leads Nietzsche to conclude that the Christian Church is "hostile to life." Taking a psychological turn, Nietzsche writes that people who want to exterminate certain passions outright do so mainly because they are "too weak-willed, too degenerate to impose moderation" upon their own selves.[7]

Nietzsche develops his idea of spiritualizing the passions through examining the concepts of love and enmity. Love, he claims, is actually the "spiritualization of sensuality." Enmity, on the other hand, spiritualizes the state of having enemies since having opponents helps us to define and strengthen our own positions. Even with the anti-Christian sentiment that pervades his thinking, Nietzsche makes it very clear that he has no interest in eliminating the Christian Church. Instead, he recognizes that his own philosophical program would be neither as effective or necessary without it. If his enemy the Church denies the "instincts of life," this helps him to develop a position that affirms them. Using theological language, Nietzsche insists that the real blasphemy' is the Christian "rebellion against life." Christian morality is ultimately symptomatic of a "declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life."

Nietzsche concludes that insisting people ought to be one way and not another leads to a form of bigotry that devalues the goodness of human diversity, the "enchanting wealth of types." Also, the belief that people can truly change their nature disregards the fact that any person is a "piece of fate." It is not possible for a person to divorce him- or herself from either the past events or present circumstances that cause them to be who they are. Ultimately, Nietzsche concludes that it is "immoralists" such as himself who have the highest respect for inherent worth of individuals because they do not value one person's approach to life over any others.[8]

The Four Great Errors[edit]

In the chapter The Four Great Errors, he suggests that people, especially Christians, confuse the effect for the cause, and that they project the human ego and subjectivity on to other things, thereby creating the illusionary concept of being, and therefore also of the thing-in-itself and God. In reality, motive or intention is "an accompaniment to an act"[9] rather than the cause of that act. By removing causal agency based on free, conscious will, Nietzsche critiques the ethics of accountability, suggesting that everything is necessary in a whole that can neither be judged nor condemned, because there is nothing outside of it.[10] What people typically deem "vice" is in fact merely "the inability not to react to a stimulus."[11] In this light, the concept of morality becomes purely a means of control: "the doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty."[12]


The 'Improvers' of Mankind[edit]

In this passage, Nietzsche proclaims his lack of belief of an objective morality, stating that there is no such thing as moral fact. With this information, he lists two examples of cases where moralization of mankind was attempted, despite the lack of complete moral truth. The people pushing for this morality are called 'improvers' by Nietzsche, the quotes representing the fact that these certain people fail at their goal of improving man.

The first of these examples is that of religion. In this example, Nietzsche tells a fictional story of a priest who converts a man to Christianity, in order to keep him moral. However, his man eventually falls into basic human instinct such as lust, and is thus labeled as a sinner. Afterwords, the man is full of hatred, and is ostracized by others. The priest in this story represents the 'improver,' as he attempts to moralize someone, but only makes the man's life miserable.

The second of these examples is that of the Caste System in India. This system made an attempt of moralizing man by method of demoting and dehumanizing the Dalit who were at the very bottom of society. The 'improvers' in this scenario are those who perpetuate the Caste System, and contribute to the dehumanization of the Dalit for the goal of moralization.

What the Germans Lack[edit]

In examining German society of his day, Nietzsche attributes any advantage Germans hold over other European countries to basic ethical virtues and not to any cultural sophistication. Nietzsche attributes the decline he sees in the sophistication in German thought to prioritizing politics over the intellect. The state and culture are in tension because one of the pair thrives at the expense of the other.

Culture and the state--one should not deceive oneself over this--are antagonists: the ′cultural state′ is merely a modern idea. The one lives off the other, the one thrives at the expense of the other. All great cultural epochs are epochs of political decline: that which is great in the cultural sense has been unpolitical, even anti-political [13]

Nietzsche also attributes this decline in the German intellect to problems he saw in higher education in his day. First, Nietzsche calls into question the qualifications of college instructors, insisting on the need for "educators who are themselves educated." Educators, he argues, are vital to teach three key skills: seeing (the ability to think before acting on impulse), thinking ("Thinking has to be learned in the way dancing has to be learned."), and speaking and writing ("One has to be able to dance with the pen."). Second, he is highly critical of opening colleges and universities to all classes of society, because when stripped of its "privilege," the quality of higher education declines. "All higher education belongs to the exceptions alone: one must be privileged to have a right to so high a privilege. Great and fine things can never be common property."[14]

Skirmishes of an Untimely Man[edit]

What I Owe to the Ancients[edit]

The Hammer Speaks[edit]

Nietzsche speaks of Part III 'Of Old and New Law Tables' in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.[15]

Cultural impact[edit]

Nietzsche's original line "From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger" has been referenced many times. G. Gordon Liddy, former assistant to President Richard Nixon, paraphrased[citation needed] it as "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." In that phrasing, it has appeared in many places, including the opening of the film Conan the Barbarian (1982),[16] Kanye West's song "Stronger" (2007), and Kelly Clarkson's song "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You)" (2012). Marilyn Manson, in his song "Leave A Scar" (2009), paraphrases Nietzsche to make a different point: "whatever doesn't kill you is gonna' leave a scar." Norwegian black metal band Gorgoroth recorded an album called Twilight of the Idols in 2003.


  1. ^ Large, Duncan (trans). Twilight of the Idols (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pg. ix
  2. ^ Kaufmann W., The Portable Nietzsche, New York: Viking, 1954, p463
  3. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 2003, pg. 43.
  4. ^ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols; and the Anti-Christ. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977, pgs. 40, 55.
  5. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 45.
  6. ^ a b Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 49.
  7. ^ Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ.: trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books; 2003. p. 52
  9. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 60.
  10. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 65.
  11. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 54.
  12. ^ Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, pg. 64.
  15. ^ Nietzsche Twilight of the Idols p. 122
  16. ^ Whitaker, Albert Keith (2003). "In the Classroom: California Dreamin' in the Postmodern Academy". The Journal of Education. Massachusetts, United States: Boston University. 184 (2): 123–124. ISSN 0022-0574. 


  • Bernd Magnus: The Deification of the Commonplace: Twilight of the Idols, in: Solomon, Robert C. / Higgins, Kathleen M. (ed.): Reading Nietzsche, New York / Oxford 1988, pp. 152–181.
  • Duncan Large: Götzen-Dämmerung from the Perspective of Translation Studies, in: Nietzscheforschung. Jahrbuch der Nietzsche-Gesellschaft 16: Nietzsche im Film, Projektionen und Götzen-Dämmerungen, Berlin 2009, pp. 151–160.
  • Andreas Urs Sommer: Kommentar zu Nietzsches Der Fall Wagner. Götzendämmerung (= Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften (ed.): Historischer und kritischer Kommentar zu Friedrich Nietzsches Werken, vol. 6/1). XVII + 698 pages. Berlin / Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2012 (ISBN 978-3-11-028683-0).

External links[edit]