In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche makes the reasonable case that what is required of the overman is a shift within reach of human instinct and not so much a great leap depicted as beyond our means. This goes in line with the perspectivism which becomes fully developed during this late period of his life, as included in the introductory part of the text. From another perspective a great leap is just a shift. What is needed are not the resources under conditions of scarcity that would allow for a material leap to take place, but to realize a distinct and new kind of life fully in recognition of the consequences of each relative end of all possible perspectival shifts. They are many in that they constitute all the differences of life, and have mostly gone unnoticed – masked by their appearance to us as sets of causally distinct, individual beings existing outside of ourselves.
Sections: The Four Great Errors, ‘Improving’ Humanity, What the Germans Lack, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, What I Owe the Ancients, The Hammer Speaks
The Four Great Errors
The book by Cornaro that Nietzsche mentions in §1 is called the “Art of Living Long”, from around the year 1500. Cornaro claimed to live a long life of 102 years by eating very little food as selected from a strict diet each day and drinking wine, because he could not enjoy water. Nietszche responds that such a diet would be helpful but only for some people with bodies very much like that of Cornaro’s. He points out that modern academics who gorge too much now on nervous energy would end up suffering from the attempt of following it. A diet can only properly be examined in the context of its interactions with surrounding cultural phenomena, including newspapers and music, and to view it otherwise as purely biological leads to error.
This kind of error is a classical result of having confused cause and effect, the first of Nietzsche’s Four Great Errors. Cornaro required the diet he ended up formulating after some experimentation in order to live long. He did not live long only because of having decided to consume that particular diet and none other, let alone compounding decisions made in regard to other aspects of life altogether.
Christian morality says that accepting the rewards of undeserved luxury leads to degeneracy. For Nietzsche, to receive a gift at all is merely an indication of one’s exertion of power over other’s consideration. It is a degenerate society more than an individual becoming ill where we should expect to find a systemic, widespread incapacity to fight off an unfulfilled drive toward luxury that leads to frustration and public outbursts of violence. It is easy to see why after degeneracy has already taken place that it could lead to tension and disorder within a society, but it is not clear how for Nietzsche instincts initially become degenerate during a previously tranquil state. We may understand at least that whatever instincts entail they should not be identified distinctly as the sole underlying cause of human behavior.
In opposition to the logical ordering Western philosophy imposes onto the concepts of reason, virtue, and happiness, Nietzsche claims that those who exhibit virtue do so because it follows directly from their happiness. Happiness is not arrived at from the usual reported method of having lived up to the demand of being virtuous.
Both the second and final error involve introducing underlying motivations behind the event of every human action and additionally all other things. It appears to us we have an inner world constituted by our own thoughts we unconsciously imagine are always intentionally being produced by ourselves. This process presumably allows us to make decisions about the world in regard to how we are going to act in response to the stimulus it is feeding us. In this way, every person is responsible for both the event and the intended outcome of their actions. Furthermore, since we have developed a general understanding of causation in such a way, we attribute a similar kind of subjective ground to all other beings outside of ourselves as equally active agents in the world, no less or moreso than ourselves.
In the process of collecting empirical evidence, we have circled around and found these theoretical constructs to be exactly as empty and fictitious as they were when we failed to notice we had invented them. It is only the passing of time and the cementing of these concepts into the cultural imagination that allows them to persist as misleading mental phenomena with such great force. They were founded in a very ancient psychology and passed down to us, and we relish in the longest traditions as being those ones that are not able to be overcome.
Apollinian Dionysian Distinctions
§10 “Apollinian intoxication stimulates the eye above all, so that it gets the power of vision. Painters, sculptors, epic poets are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire system of affects is excited and intensified: so that it discharges all its modes of expression at once, releasing the force of presentation, imitation, transfiguration, transformation, and all types of mimicry and play acting, all at the same time. The essential thing is the ease of metamorphosis, the inability not to react…”
§11 “Architects do not represent a Dionysian or an Apollinian state: for them it is the great act of will, the will that moves mountains, the intoxication of the great will that demands to be art. Architects have always been inspired by the most powerful people; architects have always been under the spell of power.”
§42 ‘Where Belief is Necessary.’
Belief is a shallow imitation of an act performed in recognition entirely of the truth, so we might imagine that it could be let go. Nietzsche argues that belief is deployed by philosophers to sanctify certain truths as the only real kind of truth. The ones they choose to concern themselves with are namely those which follow immediately from the foundation of practical reason. Practical reasoning begins by being conveniently situated right in the very middle of all declared human needs, before its value as a form of reason ever gets measured. The philosophers’ stated aloud “belief” in things allows them to form up a community around the policing of these truths against other ones they declare opposition to. In this way belief, while contemptible, serves a culturally significant role demanding further analysis that is likely to persist.
§43 ‘A Word in the Conservative’s Ear.’
Nietzsche likens the conservative to a crab, an animal harangued by ancient, irrevocable instinct for millions of years. Not only do priests and other obvious moralists suffer from this problem, but Nietzsche say there are political parties, “that dream about a world of crabs, where everything walks backwards.” Though we might want to put a stop to this perceived regression, an active inhibition against it would only be the very multiplication of the problem of inhibition. It is by becoming more decadent, an inevitability, and remaining disciplined about decadence in our conscience and behavior that we may have any hope now of moving forward.
The Hammer Speaks
This passage is quoted from a section of Nietzsche’s fiction book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” titled “The Old and the New Tablets”. The section from that other book includes 30 long passages of similar length and seems to be yet another summary of Nietzsche’s thought embedded within the text, so much as what is said to be written on the Old Tablets are the very age old Christian moral prohibitions he criticizes. The New Tablets therefore represent the as yet unwritten being of his envisioned future man.
Nietzsche contrasts the hardness of diamonds against the comparative softness of coal. Coal is referred to as brothers in the plural while diamond is personified as a singular individual. The coal appeals to the diamond to become softer, to become weaker. The diamond responds that the coal has denial in its heart, that it lacks destiny in its gaze, that hardness is a precondition for the triumph of new values and any creation that would follow. Nietzsche here counters the common refrain that bliss is found through acceptance of the present moment. For the true nobility, bliss could be expected for millennia in just the same way as deeply engraved writing remains on bronze.
Questions
There is clearly a problem with identifying all of the mind, the thing-in-itself, reality, God, the human subject, the I, and so on, with an erroneous understanding of what takes place during the processes of perception, analysis, identification and conceptualization. Nietzsche wants to establish an anti-essentialism that is not only capable of criticizing through the deconstructive method each of the most powerful terms we are reckoned with in Western philosophy, but he aims to demolish them completely and all at once in a grand fell swoop. Is this a more desperate move in contrast with the lack of anxiety about the distant, remote eventuality of his ideas coming to fruition exhibited in some of his earlier prophetic writings?
Nietzsche claims that “Zarathustra” is the most profound book in humanity’s possession, given by himself. It is not clear exactly what this means, as Zarathustra is both an occasionally referred to but non-present character from his earlier fiction book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, and a character that is an indication of a completely unforeseeable future so far removed from ourselves, and lastly very clearly part of its title. In itself “Zarathustra” is not a book at all as Nietzsche explicitly calls it, except possibly in the way that it is an attempt at the very writing of the future into being. Is Nietzsche deliberately using this as a strange stylistic and rhetorical device? For those familiar with the book, is the narrator present there a version of Nietzsche’s future man speaking to us or some other figure?