Twilight of Idols and Anti-Christ

by Friedrich Nietzsche

  5

  – Let us, in conclusion, set against this the very different way in which we (– I say ‘we’ out of politeness…) view the problem of error and appearance. Change, mutation, becoming in general were formerly taken as proof of appearance, as a sign of the presence of something which led us astray. Today, on the contrary, we see ourselves as it were entangled in error, necessitated to error, to precisely the extent that our prejudice in favour of reason compels us to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, materiality, being; however sure we may be, on the basis of a strict reckoning, that error is to be found here. The situation is the same as with the motions of the sun: in that case error has our eyes, in the present case our language as a perpetual advocate. Language belongs in its origin to the age of the most rudimentary form of psychology: we find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason. It is this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as cause in general; this which believes in the ‘ego’, in the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and which projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things – only thus does it create the concept ‘thing’.… Being is everywhere thought in, foisted on, as cause; it is only from the conception ‘ego’ that there follows, derivatively, the concept ‘being’.… At the beginning stands the great fateful error that the will is something which produces an effect – that will is a faculty.… Today we know it is merely a word.… Very much later, in a world a thousand times more enlightened, the security, the subjective certainty with which the categories of reason* could be employed came all of a sudden into philosophers’ heads: they concluded that these could not have originated in the empirical world – indeed, the entire empirical world was incompatible with them. Where then do they originate? – And in India as in Greece they committed the same blunder: ‘We must once have dwelt in a higher world’ – instead of in a very much lower one, which would have been the truth! – ‘we must have been divine, for we possess reason!’… Nothing, in fact, has hitherto had a more direct power of persuasion than the error of being as it was formulated by, for example, the Eleatics: for every word, every sentence we utter speaks in its favour! – Even the opponents of the Eleatics were still subject to the seductive influence of their concept of being: Democritus, among others, when he invented his atom.… ‘Reason’ in language: oh what a deceitful old woman! I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar…

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  It will be a matter for gratitude if I now compress so fundamental and new an insight into four theses: I shall thereby make it easier to understand, I shall thereby challenge contradiction.

  First proposition. The grounds upon which ‘this’ world has been designated as apparent establish rather its reality – another kind of reality is absolutely undemonstrable.

  Second proposition. The characteristics which have been assigned to the ‘real being’ of things are the characteristics of non-being, of nothingness – the ‘real world’ has been constructed out of the contradiction to the actual world: an apparent world indeed, in so far as it is no more than a moral-optical illusion.

  Third proposition. To talk about ‘another’ world than this is quite pointless, provided that an instinct for slandering, disparaging and accusing life is not strong within us: in the latter case we revenge ourselves on life by means of the phantasmagoria of ‘another’, a ‘better’ life.

  Fourth proposition. To divide the world into a ‘real’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the manner of Christianity or in the manner of Kant (which is, after all, that of a cunning Christian –) is only a suggestion of décadence – a symptom of declining life.… That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For ‘appearance’ here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected.… The tragic artist is not a pessimist – it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian…

  How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth

  HISTORY OF AN ERROR

  1. The real world, attainable to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man – he dwells in it, he is it.

  (Oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, convincing. Transcription of the proposition ‘I, Plato, am the truth.’)*

  2. The real world, unattainable for the moment, but promised to the wise, the pious, the virtuous man (‘to the sinner who repents’).

  (Progress of the idea: it grows more refined, more enticing, more incomprehensible – it becomes a woman, it becomes Christian…)

  3. The real world, unattainable, undemonstrable, cannot be promised, but even when merely thought of a consolation, a duty, an imperative.

  (Fundamentally the same old sun, but shining through mist and scepticism; the idea grown sublime, pale, northerly, Königsbergian.)†

  4. The real world – unattainable? Unattained, at any rate. And if unattained also unknown. Consequently also no consolation, no redemption, no duty: how could we have a duty towards something unknown?

  (The grey of dawn. First yawnings of reason. Cockcrow of positivism.)‡

  5. The ‘real world’ – an idea no longer of any use, not even a duty any longer – an idea grown useless, superfluous, consequently a refuted idea: let us abolish it!

  (Broad daylight; breakfast; return of cheerfulness and bons sens; Plato blushes for shame; all free spirits run riot.)

  6. We have abolished the real world: what world is left? the apparent world perhaps?… But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world!

  (Mid-day; moment of the shortest shadow; end of the longest error; zenith of mankind; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA)*

  Morality as Anti-Nature

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  There is a time with all passions when they are merely fatalities, when they drag their victim down with the weight of their folly – and a later, very much later time when they are wedded with the spirit, when they are ‘spiritualized’. Formerly one made war on passion itself on account of the folly inherent in it: one conspired for its extermination – all the old moral monsters are unanimous that ‘il faut tuer les passions’.* The most famous formula for doing this is contained in the New Testament, in the Sermon on the Mount, where, by the way, things are not at all regarded from a lofty standpoint. There, for example, it is said, with reference to sexuality, ‘if thy eye offend thee, pluck it out’: fortunately no Christian follows this prescription. To exterminate the passions and desires merely in order to do away with their folly and its unpleasant consequences – this itself seems to us today merely an acute form of folly. We no longer admire dentists who pull out the teeth to stop them hurting.… On the other hand, it is only fair to admit that on the soil out of which Christianity grew the concept ‘spiritualization of passion’ could not possibly be conceived. For the primitive Church, as is well known, fought against the ‘intelligent’ in favour of the ‘poor in spirit’: how could one expect from it an intelligent war against passion? – The Church combats the passions with excision in every sense of the word: its practice, its ‘cure’ is castration. It never asks: ‘How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a desire?’ – it has at all times laid the emphasis of its discipline on extirpation (of sensuality, of pride, of lust for power, of avarice, of revengefulness). – But to attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots: the practice of the Church is hostile to life…

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  The same expedient – castration, extirpation – is instinctively selected in a struggle against a desire by those who are too weak-willed, too degenerate to impose moderation upon it: by those natures which need La Trappe,* to speak metaphorically (and not metaphorically –), some sort of definitive declaration of hostility, a chasm between themselves and a passion. It is only the degenerate who cannot do without radical expedients; weakness of will, more precisely the ina
bility not to react to a stimulus, is itself merely another form of degeneration. Radical hostility, mortal hostility towards sensuality is always a thought-provoking symptom: it justifies making certain conjectures as to the general condition of one who is excessive in this respect. – That hostility, that hatred reaches its height, moreover, only when such natures are no longer sufficiently sound even for the radical cure, for the renunciation of their ‘devil’. Survey the entire history of priests and philosophers, and that of artists as well: the most virulent utterances against the senses have not come from the impotent, nor from ascetics, but from those who found it impossible to be ascetics, from those who stood in need of being ascetics…

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  The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualization of enmity. It consists in profoundly grasping the value of having enemies: in brief, in acting and thinking in the reverse of the way in which one formerly acted and thought. The Church has at all times desired the destruction of its enemies: we, we immoralists and anti-Christians, see that it is to our advantage that the Church exist.… In politics, too, enmity has become much more spiritual – much more prudent, much more thoughtful, much more forbearing. Almost every party grasps that it is in the interest of its own self-preservation that the opposing party should not decay in strength; the same is true of grand politics. A new creation in particular, the new Reich for instance, has more need of enemies than friends: only in opposition does it feel itself necessary, only in opposition does it become necessary.… We adopt the same attitude towards the ‘enemy within’: there too we have spiritualized enmity, there too we have grasped its value. One is fruitful only at the cost of being rich in contradictions; one remains young only on condition the soul does not relax, does not long for peace.… Nothing has grown more alien to us than that desideratum of former times ‘peace of soul’, the Christian desideratum; nothing arouses less envy in us than the moral cow and the fat contentment of the good conscience.… One has renounced grand life when one renounces war.… In many cases, to be sure, ‘peace of soul’ is merely a misunderstanding – something else that simply does not know how to give itself a more honest name. Here, briefly and without prejudice, are a few of them. ‘Peace of soul’ can, for example, be the gentle radiation of a rich animality into the moral (or religious) domain. Or the beginning of weariness, the first of the shadows which evening, every sort of evening, casts. Or a sign that the air is damp, that south winds are on the way. Or unconscious gratitude for a good digestion (sometimes called ‘philanthropy’). Or the quiescence of the convalescent for whom all things have a new taste and who waits.… Or the condition which succeeds a vigorous gratification of our ruling passion, the pleasant feeling of a rare satiety. Or the decrepitude of our will, our desires, our vices. Or laziness persuaded by vanity to deck itself out as morality. Or the appearance of a certainty, even a dreadful certainty, after the protracted tension and torture of uncertainty. Or the expression of ripeness and mastery in the midst of action, creation, endeavour, volition, a quiet breathing, ‘freedom of will’ attained.… Twilight of the Idols: who knows? perhaps that too is only a kind of ‘peace of soul’…

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  – I formulate a principle. All naturalism in morality, that is all healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life – some commandment of life is fulfilled through a certain canon of ‘shall’ and ‘shall not’, some hindrance and hostile element on life’s road is thereby removed. Anti-natural morality, that is virtually every morality that has hitherto been taught, reverenced and preached, turns on the contrary precisely against the instincts of life – it is a now secret, now loud and impudent condemnation of these instincts. By saying ‘God sees into the heart’ it denies the deepest and the highest desires of life and takes God for the enemy of life.… The saint in whom God takes pleasure is the ideal castrate.… Life is at an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins…

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  If one has grasped the blasphemousness of such a rebellion against life as has, in Christian morality, become virtually sacrosanct, one has fortunately therewith grasped something else as well: the uselessness, illusoriness, absurdity, falsity of such a rebellion. For a condemnation of life by the living is after all no more than the symptom of a certain kind of life: the question whether the condemnation is just or unjust has not been raised at all. One would have to be situated outside life, and on the other hand to know it as thoroughly as any, as many, as all who have experienced it, to be permitted to touch on the problem of the value of life at all: sufficient reason for understanding that this problem is for us an inaccessible problem. When we speak of values we do so under the inspiration and from the perspective of life: life itself evaluates through us when we establish values.… From this it follows that even that anti-nature of a morality which conceives God as the contrary concept to and condemnation of life is only a value judgement on the part of life – of what life? of what kind of life? – But I have already given the answer: of declining, debilitated, weary, condemned life. Morality as it has been understood hitherto – as it was ultimately formulated by Schopenhauer as ‘denial of the will to life’ – is the instinct of décadence itself, which makes out of itself an imperative: it says: ‘Perish!’ – it is the judgement of the judged…

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  Let us consider finally what naïvety it is to say ‘man ought to be thus and thus!’ Reality shows us an enchanting wealth of types, the luxuriance of a prodigal play and change of forms: and does some pitiful journeyman moralist say at the sight of it: ‘No! man ought to be different’?… He even knows how man ought to be, this bigoted wretch; he paints himself on the wall and says ‘ecce homo’!*… But even when the moralist merely turns to the individual and says to him: ‘You ought to be thus and thus’ he does not cease to make himself ridiculous. The individual is, in his future and in his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him ‘change yourself’ means to demand that everything should change, even in the past.… And there have indeed been consistent moralists who wanted man to be different, namely virtuous, who wanted him in their own likeness, namely that of a bigot: to that end they denied the world! No mean madness! No modest presumption!… In so far as morality condemns as morality and not with regard to the aims and objects of life, it is a specific error with which one should show no sympathy, an idiosyncrasy of the degenerate which has caused an unspeakable amount of harm!… We others, we immoralists, have on the contrary opened wide our hearts to every kind of understanding, comprehension, approval. We do not readily deny, we seek our honour in affirming. We have come more and more to appreciate that economy which needs and knows how to use all that which the holy lunacy of the priest, the diseased reason of the priest rejects; that economy in the law of life which derives advantage even from the repellent species of the bigot, the priest, the virtuous man – what advantage? – But we ourselves, we immoralists, are the answer to that…

  The Four Great Errors

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  The error of confusing cause and consequence. – There is no more dangerous error than that of mistaking the consequence for the cause: I call it reason’s intrinsic form of corruption. None the less, this error is among the most ancient and most recent habits of mankind: it is even sanctified among us, it bears the names ‘religion’ and ‘morality’. Every proposition formulated by religion and morality contains it; priests and moral legislators are the authors of this corruption of reason. – I adduce an example. Everyone knows the book of the celebrated Cornaro in which he recommends his meagre diet as a recipe for a long and happy life – a virtuous one, too. Few books have been so widely read; even now many thousands of copies are printed in England every year. I do not doubt that hardly any book (the Bible rightly excepted) has done so much harm, has shortened so many lives, as this curiosity, which was so well meant. The reason: mistaking the consequence for the cause
. The worthy Italian saw in his diet the cause of his long life: while the prerequisite of long life, an extraordinarily slow metabolism, a small consumption, was the cause of his meagre diet. He was not free to eat much or little as he chose, his frugality was not an act of ‘free will’: he became ill when he ate more. But if one is not a bony fellow of this sort one does not merely do well, one positively needs to eat properly. A scholar of our day, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy, would kill himself with Cornaro’s regimen. Credo experto. –