Nietzsche finished The Genealogy of Morals in mid-July 1887 and it was published by November. He stayed late into the summer in Sils-Maria and then moved to Venice, where he visited his closest friend Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast). It was a refreshing period of musical composition and relaxation. Nietzsche was even at work on his own music, "Hymn to Life." In late October, he moved to Nice to prepare for the winter. Nietzsche's mood was sober, partly depressed by his illness and fears of impending death and partly encouraged by what he saw as a synthesis of his thought. In the winter of 1888, he began writing notes for a work he would call "The Transvaluation of All Values;" The Anti-Christ was the first part of this. By the fall of 1888, The Anti-Christ was finished but remained unpublished until 1895. The Case of Wagner was also finished during this time and did appear in print in November of 1888. From late June through early September, 1888, Nietzsche worked on "Müssiggang eines Psychologen," or "A Psychologist's Leisure." This title, however, did not impress Peter Gast who urged Nietzsche to pick something "more grand." Instead, Nietzsche called it Götzen-Dämmerung as a parody on Wagner's Die Götterdämmerung. The book Twilight of the Idols appeared in November 1888; according to Nietzsche himself, it is "a general introduction to his philosophy." Finally, it should be noted that, when Nietzsche arrived in Turin for the fall, in late September, his health changed suddenly and inexplicably. Nietzsche was filled with a kind of euphoria which undoubtedly prevented him from detecting the other symptoms that preceded his mental collapse, later that winter.
Twilight of the Idols is a return to broader themes than either the critique of Christianity or morality; its mood is very different from The Genealogy of Morals. Indeed, it is much more self-reflective; and in that sense, it makes way for the more extensive intellectual biography, Ecce Homo, which Nietzsche began to write on the day of his 44th birthday, in October. The book begins with a section titled "The Problem of Socrates," which returns to Nietzsche's appraisal of Socrates and Plato, begun in The Birth of Tragedy. It ends with a strikingly lucid section, "What I owe to the Ancients." In between, we find loosely gathered aphorisms that reveal summarily what Nietzsche himself thought he had achieved through his writing.
Socrates and Plato are once again identified with decay in Greek society and now Nietzsche sees even the dialectic method of Socrates as a sign of that decay. Reason itself is made into a tyrant. "Socrates was a misunderstanding: the entire morality of improvement, the Christian included, has been a misunderstanding . . . to have to combat one's instincts -- that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one." (Problem of Socrates, #11, p.34) "'Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing, away, change, they do not lie. . . But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly added. . ." ("Reason" in Philosophy, #2, p. 36) Within this, language is a co-conspirator. "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 . . . I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar." ("Reason" in Philosophy, # 5, p. 38) In #6 Nietzsche includes a definitive four-point thesis on appearance and reality. The true reality of "this" world lies in its appearance to us. What has been erected as the "real" world is a moral-optical illusion. All talk about another "real" world is nihilistic, that is, life-negating. The real-apparent distinction, wherever it appears, is decadence; it is the tragic artist who saves appearance as the real and "affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence . . . he is Dionysian." There is probably no single clearer statement of the connection between Western metaphysics and nihilism, that is, the necessity of nihilism being built into metaphysics itself.
The final section clarifies Nietzsche's relationship to the Greeks considerably. While The Birth of Tragedy was tied up completely with Greek tragedy, this section finds Nietzsche's emphasis on Greek decadence. "I saw their strongest instinct, the will to power, I saw them trembling at the intractable force of this drive -- I saw all their institutions evolve out of protective measures designed for mutual security against the explosive material within them. The tremendous internal tension then discharged itself in fearful and ruthless external hostility: the city states tore themselves to pieces so that the citizens of each of them might find peace within himself." (What I Owe to the Ancients, #3, p. 107-8) "The Socratic virtues were preached because the Greeks had lost them." It is Dionysus that allows us to understand the older Hellenic instinct. "What did the Hellene guarantee to himself with these [Dionysian] mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal recurrence of life." (What I Owe to the Ancients, #4, p. 109) It is clear that Nietzsche's thought has never been far from the ancients.
Internally, the sections on "Morality as Anti-Nature," "The Four Great Errors," "The Improvers of Mankind," and "What the Germans Lack" are also clear summaries of other parts of Nietzsche's work. It is the large internal section, "Expeditions of an Untimely Man," that gives one pause. Far from being lucid, this section is rambling, perhaps even petty and childishly boastful. Clearly, it reflects his earlier "untimely" critique of modernity, but the quality seems mostly lacking.
copyright 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711