Previous
What the Germans Lack
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight of the Idols, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
History and the Decline of Civilization
The Will to Power
The Ideal vs. The Real
Christianity and the “Revaluation of All Values”
Summary
Analysis
1. My impossibles. Nietzsche derides various philosophers, assigning them scathing and insulting titles. He calls Seneca “the toreador of virtue.” He calls Rousseau “the return to nature in impuris naturalibus.” And so on.
Seneca (c. 4 B.C.E. – 65 C.E.) was a Roman Stoic philosopher. The Stoics believed that virtue is the highest good, and that virtue is based on knowledge and reason. The Stoics also condemned human passions as the effects of poor judgment or moral/intellectual inferiority. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an important Enlightenment philosopher. In this section, Nietzsche undermines philosophers whose concepts contradict his own. So here, he’s attacking philosophers who prioritize reason and virtue over instinct and sensory experience. This sets the stage for the project of “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” the book’s longest chapter. Nietzsche is going to attack influential thinkers whose ideas, he feels, have contributed to the degradation of culture in the modern world.
Active
Themes
2. Renan. Nietzsche attacks the writer Renan, who gets more positive praise than he deserves. Renan aspires to be a serious intellectual, but he is unable to leave Christianity out of his work. Nietzsche compares Renan to a Jesuit or “father confessor,” referencing how Renan “becomes dangerous only when he loves.” He implies that Renan’s work endangers France’s “poor, sick, and feeble-willed.”
French rationalist writer Ernest Renan was a popular historian of religion. He also held racist and nationalist views. Nietzsche is suggesting that Christianity is what prevents Renan from being a serious scholar and what shapes his more problematic views.
Active
Themes
3. Saint-Beuve. Nietzsche calls Sainte-Beuve effeminate, a gossip, and accuses him of having no taste. He longs to be a revolutionary but is too constrained by fear. He is “embittered against” great men, and “like the celebrated worm, […] constantly feels himself trodden on.” He aspires to be a libertine but is too cowardly to admit it.
Active
Themes
4. Nietzsche can’t stand The Imitatio Christi, which reeks of what he calls the “eternal feminine.” Its author’s views on love would confound even the French, he asserts.
Active
Themes
Get the entire Twilight of the Idols LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
5. G. Eliot. Nietzsche sees Eliot’s work as indicative of the English move to get rid of “the Christian God” only to hold tightly to Christian morality. Nietzsche thinks this is impossible. Because Christianity is a system, breaking free of one component (God, for example) shatters the entire system. Christianity centers around the idea that humans don’t know what’s good for them and only makes sense if one assumes the existence of God. For the English to stop believing in God but continue subscribing to Christian values in counterintuitive.
Active
Themes
6. George Sand. Nietzsche criticizes George Sand. He’s read the first Lettres d’un voyageur and finds it just as “false, artificial, fustian, [and] exaggerated” as everything else inspired by Rousseau. He also attacks Sand for “coquetting with male mannerisms.”
Active
Themes
7. Moral code for psychologists. Nietzsche attacks psychology’s effort to “observe for the sake of observing,” which he claims leads to a “false perspective.” When we experience things, we can’t redirect our gaze back toward ourselves, or else “every glance becomes an ‘evil eye.’” Nietzsche compares born psychologists to born painters. Neither actually works “from nature,” instead turning to their instinct to inform their painting/observing. They care about “the universal, the conclusion, the outcome” but can’t see the “individual case” at hand. Artistic nature “exaggerates, […] distorts, [and] leaves gaps.”
Active
Themes
8. Towards a psychology of the artist. Art can’t exist without intoxication, claims Nietzsche. Intoxication can be sexual, but it can also be an intoxication of other strong emotions—of bravery, victory, anger, cruelty. Nietzsche defines intoxication as a state of “feeling of plenitude and increased energy.” Intoxication leads to “idealizing,” which—contrary to popular belief—isn’t about creating a better version of “the petty and secondary.” Instead, it’s an “expulsion of the principal features.”
Active
Themes
9. Intoxication magnifies the artist’s senses, transforming their surroundings to mirror their powerful inner state. Art, then, is a “compulsion to transform into the perfect.” An anti-artist, by contrast, “impoverishes and attenuates things and makes them consumptive.” These artists replicate existing styles of art—they don’t create anything new. As an example of this type of artist—of which there are many throughout history—Nietzsche points to Pascal, a Christian, arguing that one can’t be a Christian and an artist because Christians are incapable of celebrating life. By contrast, Raphael, who was not a Christian, was an artist.
Active
Themes
10. Nietzsche considers Apollonian and Dionysian, opposing “forms of intoxication” he created and introduced in The Birth of Tragedy. Apollonian intoxication—which affects visual artists and poets— involves sight, while Dionysian intoxication involves all the senses and is impossible to resist. The Dionysian is also intuitively wise and aware of their emotions. Music is a kind of art that requires Dionysian intoxication.
Active
Themes
11. Nietzsche lists actors, mimes, dancers, musicians, and lyric poets among artists whose crafts involve the instincts. These crafts were once one but have become more distinct and specialized over time. The architect, by contrast, is neither Dionysian nor Apollonian. Instead, the “act of will” inspires them. Only the most powerful men have inspired architects, who have historically been inspired by “power.” Architecture is a power so mighty it speaks for itself.
Active
Themes
12. Nietzsche attacks Thomas Carlyle, referring to him as an “involuntary farce.” He claims that Carlyle was both a man who wanted a strong faith and “the feeling of incapacity for it,” and in this way he’s “a typical Romantic.” In fact, wanting a strong faith isn’t “proof of a strong faith,” but, in fact, the opposite.
Active
Themes
13. Emerson. Nietzsche argues that Emerson is “happier” and “more refined” than Carlyle. He also has better taste, and his “cheerfulness […] discourages all earnestness."
Active
Themes
14. Anti-Darwin. Nietzsche challenges the “struggle for life” Darwin outlines in his theory of evolution. Nietzsche argues that this struggle isn’t for life but for power. Nietzsche thinks that it’s not the strong who defeat the weak, as Darwin suggests, but the weak who rule the strong. Nietzsche thinks that the weak rule the strong because they outnumber them. He also thinks that the strong suffer (even as they survive) because rote survival doesn’t fulfill their innate drive for power and creation. Meanwhile, the weak are content to survive and not aspire to more.
Active
Themes
15. Psychologist’s casuistry. Nietzsche compares psychologists to politicians—both desire leverage and power over their patients. This is true even of “impersonal” psychologists, for it’s just as bad—worse, even—“to have the right to look down on them” and feel oneself better or superior.
Active
Themes
16. Nietzsche criticizes Germans’ “psychological taste.” He hates how they’ve wrongfully elevated the “backdoor philosophy” of Kant.
Active
Themes
18. On the subject of ‘intellectual conscience’. Nietzsche thinks that “genuine hypocrisy” is absent from today’s culture. He thinks that hypocrisy arises from “strong belief,” which today’s people lack. He attributes this to “self-tolerance,” which allows people to “possess several convictions,” more so than they’d been able to have before. Nietzsche is afraid that contemporary humanity is “too indolent for certain vices,” and that humanity will die out as evil (which requires strong will) gives way to virtue.
Active
Themes
19. Beautiful and ugly. Nietzsche thinks that our attitudes toward beauty are “conditional.” There’s no such thing as “beautiful in itself,” since people judge beauty against “a standard of perfection.” They tie beauty to humanity’s self-worship, which reflects their instinct for “self-preservation and self-aggrandizement.” When humanity basks in beauty, they forget they were the ones who created those standards of beauty in the first place.
Active
Themes
20. Nietzsche criticizes the aesthetic view that “only man” is beautiful. As well, aesthetics suggests that “nothing is ugly but degenerate man.” Humanity tends to associate ugliness with anything that feels dangerous and uncomfortable, and beauty with anything it finds pleasurable. Nietzsche thinks that ugliness inspires hatred because a person equates ugliness with “the decline of his type.”
Active
Themes
21. Schopenhauer. Nietzsche identifies Schopenhauer as Germany’s most recent significant intellectual figure. Still, Nietzsche argues that Schopenhauer misinterpreted every subject he covered, from knowledge, to art, to “the will to truth,” to genius. Only Christianity has escaped Schopenhauer’s intellectual gaze. Yet Nietzsche also claims that Schopenhauer is merely “the heir of the Christian interpretation,” since he took the ideals that Christianity rejected and reinterpreted them through a Christian lens.
Active
Themes
22. Nietzsche continues his tirade against Schopenhauer. He cites Schopenhauer’s “melancholy” take on beauty, which Schopenhauer sees as both a “redeem[ing]” force against the baser instinct of sexuality and “the ‘focus of the will.’” Nietzsche heckles Schopenhauer, claiming that the existence of nature, which is full of beauty (and procreation) disproves this assertion. Nietzsche adds that Plato, too, discredits Schopenhauer’s claim (Plato argued that beauty encourages procreation).
Active
Themes
23. Nietzsche expands on Plato’s views on beauty. Plato argued that Platonic philosophy would not exist had Athens “not possessed such beautiful youths.” Nietzsche scoffs at this erotic assertion. Still, Nietzsche appreciates Plato’s eroticism, for today’s philosophy is devoid of the erotic. Nietzsche also argues that dialectics came from Plato’s eroticism.
Active
Themes
24. L’art pour l’art. Nietzsche equates the struggle to find purpose in art with the struggle against moralizing art. Furthermore, Nietzsche claims that the sentiment “art for art’s sake” only reaffirms morality’s hold on art. To claim that art does nothing if it doesn’t moralize is to discount how art praises and glorifies, for instance.
Active
Themes
Not only is art “the great stimulus to life,” art also sheds light on all that is ugly and hard about life. But does this mean that art “suffer[s] from life?” Schopenhauer seemed to think so—he thought that art’s purpose was to “liberate from the will.” But Nietzsche rejects this “pessimist’s perspective” on art and wants the artist more involved in ideas about art.
Active
Themes
25. Nietzsche argues that “keeping open house in one’s heart” is “liberal.” For even open houses “capable of noble hospitality” keep certain rooms closed to guests. This is because they have more desirable guests they’d like to invite into those rooms.
Active
Themes
26. People today don’t know how to communicate what they really mean—they’ve “grown beyond whatever we have words for.” Words are for basic ideas and speaking only “vulgarize[s]” the speaker.
Active
Themes
27. Nietzsche quotes the opening line of Tamino’s aria in The Magic Flute: “This picture is enchanting fair!” Then Nietzsche mocks “The literary woman,” who anguishes over having to choose between “aut liberi aut libri,” (freedom or books) and who praises (in French) her own intellectual abilities.
Active
Themes
28. The ‘impersonal’ take the floor. People have no trouble “being wise, patient, superior,” and sympathetic to the less fortunate. Nietzsche thinks we ought to redirect some of this energy toward the occasional “emotional vice,” since this is the only way to overcome “the virtue of the ‘impersonal.’”
Active
Themes
29. From a doctorate exam. In a mock question-and-answer format, Nietzsche argues that the purpose of a higher education is to “turn a man into a machine.” Higher education does this by making learning boring and by instilling in students “the concept of duty.” Kant’s philosophy is most effective at turning students into obedient “civil servants.”
Active
Themes
30. The right to stupidity. In our “Age of Work,” we see the “good-natured” and tired worker in all economic and social classes. Today, the worker intrudes upon our culture’s art, too. This “man of the evening” has (in the words of Faust) his “wild instincts lulled to sleep.” He likes to vacation at the seaside or Bayreuth. Today, Nietzsche argues (as, he suggests, Wagner knows) that “art has a right to pure folly—as a kind of holiday for the spirit, the wits and the heart.”
Active
Themes
31. Another problem of diet. Julius Caesar used “tremendous marches” to protect himself against sickness. To Nietzsche, this is the most ingenious way to protect oneself against ruin.
Active
Themes
32. The immoralist speaks. Philosophers are most offended by people who express desire. They like to see people being shrewd and cunning, but they despise it when people stoop to desire. But what’s so bad about desire? Why do we need to pretend, absurdly, that desire does not exist?
Active
Themes
33. The natural value of egoism. Egoism’s value varies from person to person. The value of a person’s ego depends on whether they have an “ascending or descending line of life,” and all people are one or the other. People on an ascending line preserve and advance themselves, which makes their ego valuable. Meanwhile, people on a descending line are sickly and decaying, which makes their ego worthless.
Active
Themes
34. Christian and anarchist. Anarchists who demand “‘rights’” and “‘justice’” are only bitter over their “want of culture.” They don’t understand why they suffer and feel unfulfilled. They also find value in the “cause-creating drive,” since it gives them a reason for their suffering. Whether or not a person complains about themself or others makes little difference (Christians complain about themselves, Socialists complain about others). In either case, the complainer seeks to alleviate suffering with “revenge” instead of “pleasure.”
Active
Themes
35. A criticism of décadence morality. Nietzsche asserts that “altruistic” morality dampens the ego. To seek out “disinterested” motives is almost decadent. But to not “seek one’s own advantage” more accurately points to not knowing what one’s advantage is. Nietzsche sees this as a “[d]isintegration of the instincts!”
36. A moral code for physicians. “The invalid is a parasite on society,” asserts Nietzsche. Physicians ought to be disgusted by patients who continue to live despite their lives no longer being worth living. The job of physicians is to maintain “ascending life” and “suppress[] […] degenerating life.” To Nietzsche, it’s more noble to die when it’s one’s time to die than to prolong the inevitable.
Active
Themes
Nietzsche thinks we need to determine what makes a death “natural” versus “unnatural.” We should also stop thinking of suicide as a shameful thing. The only proud, free, and natural death is death by suicide. We might not be able to control the circumstances of our birth, but we can control the circumstances of our death through suicide.
Active
Themes
37. Whether we have grown more moral. “Moral stupidity” (or just plain morality in Germany) has demonized Nietzsche’s concept of “beyond good and evil.” His critics accuse him of trying to eradicate “all decent feeling.” The backlash has prompted Nietzsche to reflect on the notion that today’s moral judgment is the greatest in history. People think society has achieved a new height of morality. But Nietzsche insists that contemporary people’s “nerves” couldn’t survive under Renaissance circumstances. And this isn’t a good thing. Nietzsche thinks our sensitivity has made us weak, not moral.
Active
Themes
Our loss of “hostility” reflects an inner “decay of vitality.” To Nietzsche, everyone today is either an “invalid” or a “nurse.” What we today call “virtue,” men of another time would call “cowardice” or “old woman’s morality.” Furthermore, equality is not compatible with greatness. A widening of the distance between individuals, classes, and types is one characteristic of a great age. By contrast, becoming more equal reflects a civilization in decline.
Active
Themes
38. My conception of freedom. A thing’s value isn’t in what it gives us, but in what it costs us. Nietzsche argues that liberal institutions imperil freedom. They dampen “the will to power” by leveling the playing field. Liberalism makes “herd animal[s]” of people. By contrast, freedom is the consequence of the “manly” instincts to war overcoming other instincts, such as the “instinct for ‘happiness.” A free person has risen beyond the feeble wants of “shopkeepers, Christians, cows, women, Englishmen and other democrats.”
39. Criticism of modernity. Democracy is what a society becomes when it lacks “the power to organize.” For an institution to exist, it must be “anti-liberal to the point of malice” and possess “the will to tradition, to authority, to centuries-long responsibility, to solidarity between succeeding generations backwards and forwards in infinitum.” This is the only way a nation can become as great as the Roman Empire.
Active
Themes
It’s a critical time for the German Reich. In contemporary Germany, people live in the moment and advance ideas that lead to “dissolution” rather than progress. Marriage used to have a man at the center, which gave it a “centre of gravity.” But now that women have more agency, marriage “limps with both legs.” Indulging love as part of romance is also destructive. Formerly, the institution of marriage rested on sexual drive and the desire to own property (women and children). Thus, today, marriage is meaningless.
Active
Themes
40. The labour question. We can blame the labour question for today’s social ills. The contemporary European worker feels comfortable enough to ask questions, which implies that he feels dissatisfied with his current life. This is bad for society. Nietzsche argues that “if one wants slaves, one is a fool if one educates them to be masters.”
Active
Themes
41. “Freedom as I do not mean it,” begins section 41. Today, Nietzsche argues, one can no longer rely on one’s instincts, for the various instincts contradict and confuse one another. Nietzsche argues that the central defining characteristic of modernity is “physiological self-contradiction.” Education today encourages people to dampen one instinct to entertain another, and society makes individuals by “pruning” them. But, Nietzsche insists, it takes strength—not suppression—to make an individual.
Active
Themes
42. Where faith is needed. Saints and moralists mostly lack integrity. But many people believe the opposite, for “faith is more useful, effective, convincing than conscious hypocrisy.” Faith works only because its preachers emphasize certain truths while concealing others.
Active
Themes
43. In the ear of the Conservatives. Priests and moralists have long wanted to force society back to a time that enforced “an earlier standard of virtue.” Some politicians also want this. But the only direction to move is forward.
Active
Themes
44. My conception of the genius. Great men contain “explosive material.” Genius happens when great men conserve their energy over time. When the tension inside of them grows too intense, a stimulus sets it off and they release their genius into the world. Nietzsche argues that neither “circumstances,” nor “the Zeitgeist,” nor “public opinion” can stop this eruption.
Active
Themes
While the world needs great men, “the epoch” in which great men appear is arbitrary. Nietzsche cites Napoleon as an example of a great man. Revolutionary France, had it the choice, would have created a much different great man than Napoleon. And yet, Napoleon is what it got. The relationship between the genius and their epoch is much like “that between strong and weak.” The genius is older than their epoch and more mature. People in contemporary France have an opposite stance on this idea.
Active
Themes
England, too, has bad ideas about great men. The English think greatness comes from democracy (like Buckle) or from religion (like Carlyle). But Nietzsche argues that society (mainly Christianity and moralists) misunderstand the sacrifices that great human beings make. The great human being doesn’t sacrifice himself and demonstrate an “indifference to [his] own interests.” Rather, he has a “devotion to an idea,” and so “he uses himself up.”
Active
Themes
45. The criminal and what is related to him. Nietzsche defines the criminal as a “strong human being under unfavorable conditions, […] being made sick.” The criminal needs the freer state one finds in “the wilderness” to recover, for society has rejected his virtues. He must do what he does and likes to do best in secret, and this hurts him. As an example, Nietzsche cites Dostoevsky’s surprisingly positive experience living among criminals in Siberia.
46. Here is the prospect free. Nietzsche lists a series of contradictions. For instance, sometimes a silent philosopher is evidence of an inner “loftiness of soul.” And sometimes good manners can conceal lies.
Active
Themes
47. Beauty no accident. A people or a race must work for their good fortune—it’s not just given. “Good things are costly beyond measure,” argues Nietzsche. Maintaining beauty and goodness takes physical effort and involves the body. This is why German culture has failed at this endeavor, and why the Greeks “remain the supreme cultural event of history.” Because the Greeks “knew [and] did what needed to be done.” Christianity, in contrast, rejects the body.
Active
Themes
48. Progress in my sense. Nietzsche wants to “return to nature,” but his return is a “going-up” rather than a “going-back.” Napoleon wanted to return to nature in the way Nietzsche understands it. Rousseau, however, suffered from “unbridled self-contempt” and preached equality—both of which Nietzsche condemns.
Active
Themes
49. Goethe. Nietzsche praises Goethe’s “grand attempt to overcome the eighteenth century through a return to nature[.]” Goethe has all the “instincts” that Nietzsche values, such as the “anti-historical” instinct and the “idealistic” instinct. Nietzsche considers Goethe’s “joyful and trusting fatalism” to be Dionysian, since it’s “the highest of all possible faiths.”
Active
Themes
50. Nietzsche contends that 19th-century society has, to a degree, wanted some of the same things Goethe wanted, such as “universality in the understanding and affirmation,” and “reckless realism, reverence for everything factual.” How, then, has society become so chaotic and nihilistic? Nietzsche thinks the chaos is the result of society wanting to return to the 18th century.
Active
Themes
51. In response to people who have asked Nietzsche why he writes in German if nobody reads him there anyway, Nietzsche jokes that nobody even knows if he wants to be read in the first place.
Active
Themes
