Key ideas: Published in 1888. “This work of not even 150 pages, cheerful and fateful in tone, a demon that laughs—the product of so few days that I hesitate to say how many—is the absolute exception among books: there is nothing richer in substance, more independent, more subversive—more wicked. Anyone who wants to get a quick idea of how topsy-turvy everything was before I came along should make a start with this work. What the title-page calls idol is quite simply what till now has been called truth. Twilight of the Idols—in plain words: the old truth is coming to an end.” (Nietzsche)
Anti-Darwin*—As far as the famous ‘struggle for life’ is concerned, it seems to me for the moment to be more asserted than proven. It occurs, but it is the exception; life as a whole is not a state of crisis or hunger, but rather a richness, a luxuriance, even an absurd extravagance—where there is a struggle, there is a struggle for power…
Malthus* should not be confused with nature.—But given that there is this struggle—and indeed it does occur—it unfortunately turns out the opposite way to what the school of Darwin wants, to what one perhaps ought to join with them in wanting: i.e. to the detriment of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions.
Species do not grow in perfection: time and again the weak become the masters of the strong—for they are the great number, they are also cleverer…
Darwin forgot intelligence (—that is English!), the weak are more intelligent… You must have need of intelligence in order to gain it—you lose it if you no longer have need of it…
By ‘intelligence’ it is clear that I mean caution, patience, cunning, disguise, great self-control, and all that is mimicry (which last includes a large part of so-called virtue).
From a Doctoral Viva—‘What is the task of any high-school education system?’—To turn man into a machine.—‘By what means?’—He must learn to be bored.—‘How is this achieved?’—Through the concept of duty.
—‘Who is his model in this?’—The philologist: he teaches how to swot up.—‘Who is the perfect human being?’—The public servant.—‘Which philosophy gives the highest formula for the public servant?’—Kant’s: the public servant as thing in itself set in judgement over the public servant as appearance.-
The Right to Stupidity.—The weary, slow-breathing worker who looks around good-naturedly and lets things go their own way:* this typical figure whom you come across now, in the age of work (and of the ‘Reich’!—), in all social classes, is laying claim these days to art, of all things, including books, above all magazines—and even more to the beauties of nature, Italy…
The man of the evening, with the ‘nodding wild drives’ of which Faust speaks, needs the freshness of summer, sea-bathing, glaciers, Bayreuth… In such ages art has a right to pure folly—as a kind of vacation for the spirit, the mind, and the soul. Wagner understood this. Pure folly restores one’s health..
Natural Value of Egoism.—Selfishness is worth as much as the physiological value of whoever is exhibiting it: it can be worth a great deal; it can be worthless and contemptible. Every single person can be considered from the point of view of whether he represents the ascendant or descendent line of life. A decision on this point gives you a criterion for the value of his selfishness.
If he represents the line ascendant then his value is indeed extraordinary—and for the sake of the totality of life, which takes a step further with him, extreme care may even be taken in maintaining and creating the optimum conditions for him. For the single person—the ‘individual’, as the people and the philosophers have understood him thus far—is an error: he is nothing by himself, no atom, no ‘ring in the chain’, nothing which has simply been inherited from the past—he is the whole single line of humanity up to and including himself…
If he represents a development downwards, a falling-off, a chronic degeneration, or illness (—illnesses are by and large already the consequences of a falling-off, not the causes of it), then he is worth little, and in all fairness he should detract as little as possible from those who turned out well. He is merely a parasite on them…
Critique of Décadence Morality.—An ‘altruistic’ morality, a morality which has selfishness wither away—remains a bad sign whatever the circumstances. This is true of the individual; it is particularly true of nations. The best thing is lacking if a lack of selfishness begins to be felt.
Instinctively choosing what is harmful to oneself, being tempted by ‘disinterested’ motives—this is practically the formula for decadence.
‘Not seeking one’s own advantage’—this is simply the moral fig-leaf for a quite different state of affairs, namely a physiological one: ‘I can’t find my own advantage any more’… Disgregation of the instincts!
—Humanity is finished when it becomes altruistic. —Instead of naïvely saying ‘I am now worthless’, the moral lie in the mouth of the décadent says: ‘Everything is worthless—life is worthless’… ch a judgement remains a great danger in the end, for it is infectious—right across the morbid soil of society it will soon shoot up into a rampant tropical vegetation of concepts, one moment as religion (Christianity), the next as philosophy (Schopen-hauerishness). The vegetation from a poisonous tree like that, grown from putrefaction, can continue for millennia to poison life with its fug…
The value of a thing sometimes depends not on what we manage to do with it, but on what we pay for it—what it costs us. Let me give an example.
Liberal institutions stop being liberal as soon as they have been set up: afterwards there is no one more inveterate or thorough in damaging freedom than liberal institutions.
Now we know what they achieve: they undermine the will to power, they are the levelling of mountain and valley elevated to the status of morality, they make things petty, cowardly, and hedonistic—with them the herd animal* triumphs every time.
Liberalism: in plain words herd-animalization… While these same institutions are still being fought for, they produce quite different effects: then they are actually powerful promoters of freedom.
On closer inspection, it is war that produces these effects, war waged for liberal institutions, which as war allows the illiberal instincts to persist. And war is an education in freedom. For what is freedom! Having the will to be responsible to oneself.
Maintaining the distance which divides us off from each other. Becoming more indifferent towards hardship, harshness, privation, even life itself. Being prepared to sacrifice people to one’s cause—oneself included. Freedom means that the manly instincts which delight in war and victory rule over other instincts, for example the instincts for ‘happiness’. The liberated man—and the liberated spirit even more so—tramples over the contemptible kind of well-being that shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen, and other democrats dream about. The free man is a warrior.
Our institutions are no longer any good: this is universally accepted. But it is not their fault, it is ours. Once we have lost all the instincts from which institutions grow, we lose the institutions themselves because me are no longer good enough for them.
Democratism has always been the form taken by organizing energy in decline: in Human, All Too Human* I already characterized modern democracy, along with its inadequacies like ‘German Reich’, as the form of the state’s decay….
The whole of the West has lost those instincts from which institutions grow, from which future grows: nothing perhaps goes against the grain of its ‘modern spirit’ so much.
People live for today, they live very quickly—they live very irresponsibly: and this is precisely what is called ‘freedom’.
Dostoevsky, the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had anything to learn: he was one of the most splendid strokes of luck in my life, even more than my discovery of Stendhal.
This profound person, who was right ten times over in his scant regard for the superficial Germans, had a very different experience of the Siberian convicts in whose midst he lived for a long time—nothing but hardened criminals for whom there was no way back to society left—to what he himself had expected: roughly, that they were made of the best, sternest, and most precious stuff ever produced by Russian soil.