The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichri
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~72,800 words · 346 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichri. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-twilight-of-the-idols-or-how-to-philosophize-with-the-hammer-the-antichri
- MLANietzsche. "The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichri." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-twilight-of-the-idols-or-how-to-philosophize-with-the-hammer-the-antichri.
- ChicagoNietzsche. The Twilight of the Idols; or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer. The Antichri. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/the-twilight-of-the-idols-or-how-to-philosophize-with-the-hammer-the-antichri.
What it is about
Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist (1888) in a single volume.
Context and history
Twilight is all of Nietzsche summed up in a hundred pages, written in a week, and the best place to start if you have read none of him. 'Philosophising with a hammer' does not mean destroying: it means tapping the idols to hear whether they ring hollow. **Note:** The Antichrist also appears as a separate work. They are not a duplicate — the volume and the single work are different editorial units — and both stay. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
To maintain a cheerful attitude of mind in the midst of a gloomy and exceedingly responsible task, is no slight artistic feat. And yet, what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing ever succeeds which exuberant spirits have not helped to produce. Surplus power, alone, is the proof of power.—A _transvaluation of all values,_—this note of interrogation which is so black, so huge, that it casts a shadow even upon him who affixes it,—is a task of such fatal import, that he who undertakes it is compelled every now and then to rush out into the sunlight in order to shake himself free from an earnestness that becomes crushing, far too crushing. This end justifies every means, every event on the road to it is a windfall. Above all _war._ War has always been the great policy of all spirits who have penetrated too far into themselves or who have grown too deep; a wound stimulates the recuperative powers. For many years, a maxim, the origin of which I withhold from learned curiosity, has been my motto: _ increscunt animi, virescit volnere virtus._ At other times another means of recovery which is even more to my taste, is to cross-examine idols. There are more idols than realities in the world: this constitutes my “evil eye” for this world: it is also my “evil ear.” To put questions in this quarter with a hammer, and to hear perchance that well-known hollow sound which tells of blown-out frogs,—what a joy this is for one who has ears even behind his ears, for an old psychologist and Pied Piper like myself in whose presence precisely that which would fain be silent, _must betray itself._ Even this treatise—as its title shows—is above all a recreation, a ray of sunshine, a leap sideways of a psychologist in his leisure moments. Maybe, too, a new war? And are we again cross-examining new idols? This little work is a great declaration of war; and with regard to the cross-examining of idols, this time it is not the idols of the ag