By April of 1888, Nietzsche had established himself in Turin, which became his last creative home. Twilight of the Idols was the second work finished this year. He worked on it through the summer of 1888 and made brief additions and changes as late as September. While it was printed during this period, it was not published until the following year, after Nietzsche had suffered his mental collapse. It is the last work that Nietzsche saw through the whole process. Subtitled "How to Philosophize with a Hammer," the book reveals its chief purpose as a "declaration of war" --- a hammering on all the idols of our lives so that we can hear their emptiness. Little of this effort is new but it is a good opportunity to reflect on Nietzsche's positions in their final form. The style departs from his most recent focused works and is more like a "conversation" covering all the issues that have interested him throughout his career.
Socrates and his student, Plato, have not been forgotten! The ugly Socrates is the first to receive Nietzsche's hammer --- appropriately so? After all, he is the idol of Western philosophy. To what does Nietzsche refer his strong objections? It would seem to be Socrates's elevation of reason (dialectics) above all else and, subsequently, the formula for "the morality of improvement," reason = virtue = happiness. Precisely that which Socrates and Plato elevated as an attack on decadence (a declining Athens) leads us into yet a different form of decline. In the core of Nietzsche's objection is the central idea that "to have to combat one's instincts . . . is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one." It is to Socrates and Plato that we owe the idea of "Platonic love" --- that notion of a love that stares through and past its "object" into the eternity of Ideals and misses, therewith, both the erotic energy of the lover and the true ownership of beauty by the beloved. Everything that is vivid but perishable is denied in favor of the Ideal. Life itself is viewed in a bizarrely negative cast, as "embodied" life, hence affirming that real life is outside of the realm of appearance. All life is lived, therefore, in a struggle to connect with what is not appearance, what is deemed real. The dying Socrates has no regrets and looks back at "life" as an illness.
Is this also where ressentiment begins? Is Socrates also waging war on the decadent aristocrats of his time? Quite intentionally making them look small in the cross-hairs of his dialectical scrutiny? Look at the charges against Socrates and look at his Apology.
Ironically, this is where Western philosophy begins its run of more than two thousand years. The love of wisdom becomes fixed to the love of reason and the course of reason is mapped toward being as the denial of becoming. This is no mere "reasoned" outcome; this is the placement of fundamental value on one thing or another. Reality must be something that we do not see and that lies (causally) behind it all. Reason becomes the sole access to being and life is to be seated in being rather than in becoming. But if life itself lies in being, human behavior can only be guided by reason. The instincts which carry us through the realm of becoming must be combated and eliminated so that we are free to perform in accord with being. "Virtue" retires from the realm of individual strengths to be reified as the ideal other-worldly formulae. Happiness is a matter of living contentedly in a world of our rational creation outside the hustle and bustle of the world of Heraclitus.
Were these wise choices? The question means that philosophy itself cannot have died in Athens (an early death indeed) and that the love of wisdom remains possible, even though Western thinkers may have been on the wrong track for all these years. The alliance with Christianity was, of course, a catastrophic coincidence of mind, reifying being in God and giving God the overwhelming power to assail instinct from within. "Life is at an end," Nietzsche says, "where the 'kingdom of God' begins." Can life and wisdom prevail? This, clearly, is Nietzsche's quest.
[It is interesting to consider why science occasionally rubs elbows with Christianity in Nietzsche's mind. In fact, there is considerable similarity between the two, yet there is a side of science that seems "redeemable" and that may be what Nietzsche celebrated in his Gay Science. Christianity and science have always been strongly at odds in the social realm. Perhaps this indicates that they compete for the same stakes. Both are strongly metaphysical; both are reasoned through; both are life denying in Nietzsche's sense. Individuality is negated in both visions, yet in oddly opposing ways. While the individual remains within Christianity, he/she is belittled to the dimension of a mere target of God's wrath so life itself declines into nihilism. In science, the individual gets completely disassembled into mass and energy and remains only as a sort of virtual entity of no genuine importance. It was this state of affairs that European Existentialists popularized as the absurd. But science, unlike Christianity, does not have to be metaphysical. A life of self-honesty can begin where we accept ourselves in becoming and shun escape into other worlds.]
Outside of the overt practices of religion or modern science, we continue to make a number of rationalizations or reasonings that are thematically related to the ultimate "problem of Socrates." Language itself defeats us. Nietzsche explores these as "Four Great Errors."
To escape these fateful rationalizations, means to invent new languages and, hence, new ways of thinking about ourselves. We must remain faithful to the realm of becoming and purge thought of illusory being. "The concept 'God' has hitherto been the greatest objection to existence. . . We deny God; in denying God, we deny accountability: only by doing that do we redeem the world." The challenge, of course, is meeting questions about what life will be without accountability, purpose, etc. We "social animals" have made our home place in such concepts; how will we survive without them?
[Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents) seems to have assumed that we cannot avoid harsh repression of instinctual energy if we are to remain civilized. Herbert Marcuse, on the other hand, (Eros and Civilization) pleased a generation of "flower children" by asserting that erotic energies could be variously self-sublimated without harsh repression. Life can be happy and yet cultivated. In a way, Freud set himself up for this problem by splitting eros and thanatos and using the destructive force, thanatos, to effect repression. Hence, repression would always have to cause unhappiness and you couldn't have re-direction of instinctual energy without pain. Nietzsche's single concept of the will to power enables "sublimation" in diverse directions and forms so long as we have broken down the barriers that attempt to turn all instinctual energies inward onto ourselves. Thus, we find Nietzsche easily suggesting ("Expeditions . . .", #8) that "for art to exist . . . a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication." And he sees "above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement." Certainly, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and Pablo Picasso couldn't disagree. What is interesting in this is that Nietzsche sees no problem with assuming that energy can be transformed in many different ways and directions to build a happily cultivated life. It is the metaphysical monsters, the idols, that inhibit this and, ultimately, deny life.]
Did Nietzsche believe that embrace of becoming and abandonment of the moralistic slaughter of instinct would produce an uncivilized race? Heraclitus himself seems to have been a very noble character and no savage. Perhaps Nietzsche's chapter on the Germans is most indicative. His appeal here is for real education and not for no education. Just as he believes in the decadence of German society and its educational system, he clearly believes in the possibility of true education replacing it. And what would true education be? Three tasks of education: to see, to think, and to speak and write. These are probably not dissimilar to what we might have come up with ourselves. As always, the issue for Nietzsche is not in the affirmation but rather in the critique. Do we really do these things in the present system at all?! Consider also his comments on freedom (#38) and modernity (#39). Everywhere the individual has been lost. In a central sense, what civilization has come to mean is a "social system" which is an "alienated" structure in Marx's sense. That is, the individual-in-society has allowed most of his/her power to be taken over by built-in structures of society. Society (poorly) exercises the powers that only humans should. The individual's stance, thus, is to sit back and expect. [This is very close to Ortega's theme in Revolt of the Masses --- that the true problem of European modernity is that fact that people no longer understand what it takes to build the great works of civilization and, instead, simply avail themselves of everything as though such fruits grew naturally on trees.] Nietzsche's "morality" is first of all a restoration of individual activity, a destruction of modern alienation that has made humans into house pets. "The free man is a warrior." Why? Because to be free means to step outside of every way that we have hitherto defined safety, hence, to take risks of self-assertion and to try one's personal strength.
Take note of this. "In Germany they even have phrase-books for the use of lovers, and it will end with lovers sitting together talking anonymously. In fact, there are hand-books for everything, and very soon education, all the world over, will consist in learning a greater or lesser number of comments by heart, and people will excel according to their capacity for singling out the various facts like a printer singling out the letters, but completely ignorant of the meaning of anything. Thus our own age is essentially one of understanding, and on the average, perhaps, more knowledgeable than any former generation, but it is without passion." And "the life of an individual without passion is not the development of a self-revealing principle. On the contrary, his inner life is something hurrying along, always on the move and always hurrying to do something 'on principle'. A principle, in that sense, becomes a monstrous something or other, an abstraction, just like the public." Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age (1846).