Philosophizing With a Hammer

With that, Nietzsche closes his book, Twilight of the Idols or, How One Philosophizes With a Hammer. It is quite natural for someone to wonder about the content of a book. After all, if you are choosing which philosophy book to read, you might be interested in knowing the subject of the books you are contemplating. This book has a fairly simple subject matter. The topic is “Nietzsche’s Ego.”

That Nietzsche had a large ego is obvious to anyone who has ever read anything he wrote. That close of the book reprinted above, for example, is a passage from one of Nietzsche’s other books; after all, he is so brilliant, he might as well quote himself. This is the guy whose wrote an autobiographical book entitled Ecce Homo with four sections: “Why I Am So Wise,” “Why I Am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Good Books,” and “Why I Am Destiny.”

So, to say Twilight of the Idols is about Nietzsche’s Ego may seem a bit underdefined. All Nietzsche’s books put his ego on display. What makes this one different is that it is nothing other than a roundabout paean to Nietzsche’s genius. His last book published before he went insane (insert the usual joke that he was always insane), it is in one way just a summary of his previous books, but as he notes in one of the maxims which lead off the book, “I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.” No system here folks. Just Ego.

After 44 of the enigmatic aphorisms he loved so much, Nietzsche sets out to take down Socrates. One can see why Nietzsche needed to do this. Who is the wisest and most enjoyable philosopher of all? Nietzsche wants you to think of him, but, alas, you answered “Socrates.” So, what is “the problem of Socrates”?

Whenever authority still forms a part of good bearing, where one does not give reasons but commands, the dialectician is a kind of buffoon: one laughs at him, one does not take him seriously. Socrates was the buffoon who got himself taken seriously: what really happened there?

One chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this. It can only be self-defense for those who no longer have other weapons.

The dialectician leaves it to his opponent to prove that he is no idiot: he makes one furious and helpless at the same time. The dialectician renders the intellect of his opponent powerless. Indeed? Is dialectic only a form of revenge in Socrates?

And there you have it. You might think that reasoned philosophical discourse is a good way to think about Truth. You buffoon. You have bought into the Greek lie that there is only one choice “either to perish or—to be absurdly rational.” You want “Reason-virtue-happiness”?

The most blinding daylight; rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts—all this too was a mere disease, another disease, and by no means a return to ‘virtue,’ to ‘health,’ to happiness.

With that Nietzsche is off on his usual themes, philosophizing with a hammer, not a stiletto. The message of the book is clearly written on every page: “I, Nietzsche, am right. All others are wrong.”

Beyond the fact that he is right, what is the philosophy he is summarizing here? This is where talking about Nietzsche always gets one into trouble. No matter what you write, it needs qualifications and elaboration. Nietzsche was not systematic; he explodes on the page in prose so wild, your jaw just gapes as you follow the wild ramblings. I want to say that Twilight of the Idols is not a good starting place for reading Nietzsche, but truth be told, there is no good starting place for reading Nietzsche. The art of reading Nietzsche is to dive in and go along for the ride until the shape of things begins to appear. While at times (or more accurately, while most of the time) he is totally incomprehensible, his prose is so carefree, it is an easy matter to just keep going looking for a place to stand.

Nietzsche doesn’t like the world in which you live, that world in which you believe there is a moral code, that you are a mere human who needs to care about human rights, that world in which the weak rule the strong. Nietzsche is screaming that you should liberate yourself from all such thoughts, that your trust of reason is simply denying your animal desires, that we should all rise up and live true human lives, that the strong should no longer be told to act like the weak, that the tarantulas have poisoned the society so that you no longer are willing to acknowledge your will to power and seize what you can. That description of Nietzsche is woefully incomplete and inaccurate.

Why read Nietzsche? When he is wrong, he is spectacularly wrong in ways that help make clear the important questions. But, he isn’t always wrong; sometimes he is right for the wrong reasons, which means he makes the Truth even clearer than it otherwise would be. A couple of examples. First:

Anti-natural morality—that is, almost every morality which has so far been taught, revered, and preached—turns, conversely, against the instincts of life: it is condemnation of these instincts, now secret, now outspoken and impudent. When it says, ‘God looks at the heart,’ it says No to both the lowest and the highest desires of life and posits God as the enemy of life. The saint in whom God delights is the ideal eunuch. Life has come to an end where the ‘kingdom of God’ begins….One would require a position outside of life, and yet have to know it as well as one, as many, as all who have lived it, in order to be permitted even to touch the problem of the value of life: reasons enough to comprehend that this problem is for us an unapproachable problem.

Fascinatingly, that is about as good a description of the theology of Christian morality as could be written by any Christian theologian. Remove Nietzsche’s sneering tone and you are left with the statement that morality is a denial of human instincts and that the only way to examine the value of human life and thus the need for a moral code is to have a starting place outside of humanity. Without that standpoint outside of humanity, it is an unapproachable problem. This is exactly what Christians say: man is born with original sin, and the Law and Grace were both provided to allow man to lead a more properly human life, a life that runs counter to the sinful desires of the flesh, and that such a law is found only from outside humanity, in the revelation of God Himself. Nietzsche and the most devout Christian theologian ever agree that all attempts by humans to create a moral code independent of the existence of a God are doomed to fail because they are grounded on nothing.

A second example:

In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our ‘higher schools’ are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims. And everywhere an indecent haste prevails, as if something would be lost if the young man of twenty-three were not yet ‘finished,’ or if he did not yet know the answer to the ‘main question’: which calling? A higher kind of human being, if I may say so, does not like ‘callings,’ precisely because he knows himself to be called. He has time, he takes time, he does not even think of ‘finishing’: at thirty one is, in the sense of high culture, a beginner, a child.

Here again, one does not have to agree with Nietzsche’s story of the slave revolt and the rise of the weak and the sickness of Western Civilization to see in that description one of the best explanations for the collapse of the liberal arts even in the liberal arts colleges.

To read Nietzsche is to experience the thrill of watching the guy with the hard hammer smash everything in his sight. Reading Nietzsche is work; he never even tries to make his ideas clear to the reader. But reading Nietzsche is fun if you give up the attempt to finish reading him, if you start by saying, “I am only a beginner, a child, reading Nietzsche;” then you find therein whatever you find therein.