Nietzsche’s Critique of Philosophers and Western Morality in Twilight of the Idols
Fragment 1
Summary
This fragment from Nietzsche’s The Twilight of the Idols, beginning with “You ask me …” and ending with “… if it were real,” critiques philosophers’ lack of historical sense and their rejection of change. Nietzsche accuses them of conceptualizing everything as immutable, seeking a false and immoral sense of certainty by creating a “real” world to justify their ignorance. He criticizes their denial of death, the body, and aging, seeing these as sources of deception leading to a false reality.
Notions: “The Senses and the Body”
Following Parmenides and Plato, the senses are often seen as deceptive, leading us away from the “real” world. Plato believed the senses, showing us change and plurality, must be rejected to eliminate this deception. Nietzsche, in his confrontation with traditional Western philosophy, attacks two main targets: the Platonic emphasis on reason as the sole path to knowledge and truth (with its subsequent rejection of the senses and the body), and the Christian transformation of this approach, creating a separation and value difference between the spiritual and the corporeal, the divine and the human.
For Nietzsche, reason falsifies the testimony of the senses, forcing us to impose concepts like unity, identity, and causality onto what we observe. He suspects philosophy has been a misunderstanding of the body. The “death of God” signifies a shift in history, as “Christian morality falsely pretends a ‘soul’ and a ‘spirit’ to ruin the body.”
Human existence, unable to cope with the perfection of God, is marked by decline and resignation. Nietzsche argues the body integrates us into reality, enabling knowledge of the world and ourselves, and manifesting the will to power.
Theoretical or Doctrinal Synthesis: “Nietzsche’s Criticism of Philosophers”
In The Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche calls for a balance between the Dionysian and Apollonian, arguing that the overemphasis on the Apollonian (reason and measure) and the relegation of the Dionysian (instinct and passion) contribute to the decay of Western culture and humanity.
Nietzsche sees Socrates and Plato as detrimental figures in philosophy. He criticizes Socrates for introducing dialectic and rationality as the sole path to virtue, rejecting the inherent balance of the Dionysian and Apollonian within humans. Plato’s concept of the world of ideas, accessible only through reason and rejecting the changing sensible world, is seen as a further step towards the devaluation of the physical and the embrace of a static, immutable “being.”
Nietzsche aligns himself with Heraclitus, who believed the only immutable being is an empty fiction, and that the changing, sensible world is the truly real one.
Traditional morality, rooted in Platonism and later adopted by Christianity, is deemed “unnatural” by Nietzsche. This morality, focused on an afterlife and the devaluation of the physical world, is seen as life-denying. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality: the master morality (characterized by a love of life, power, and greatness) and the slave morality (represented by Judeo-Christian values like humility, compassion, and resignation). He argues that the slave morality has unfortunately dominated Western culture, suppressing the master morality.
To overcome this decline, Nietzsche proposes a new morality centered on the will to power, embracing life in its entirety, including its inherent creativity and destruction. This morality, embodied by the Übermensch (Superman), is free from religious dogma and embraces the natural flow of becoming.
The Problem of Truth and Language
Nietzsche criticizes the limitations of language and concepts, arguing they arbitrarily group disparate things together, ignoring individual differences. He challenges the Platonic notion of universal forms, suggesting they imprison the true reality of being, becoming, and change.
He believes humans can escape this linguistic trap through art and intuition, becoming more attuned to the dynamic nature of reality. Art allows us to transcend the limitations of language and connect with the intuitive, creative aspects of our being.
Contextualization: “Work or Works of the Author”
Friedrich Nietzsche (born 1844), a controversial figure in the history of philosophy, was a scholar of classical culture and a profound critic of Christianity. Despite his religious upbringing, he became a staunch atheist and launched one of the most scathing attacks on Christianity in philosophical history.