# Notes on Twilight of the Idols by Nietzsche

=> http://www.handprint.com/SC/NIE/GotDamer.html

## Summary

As Nietzsche, it is difficult, confusing, vulgar and has some great
points. Mostly it looks to unite (or rather, show in the same place)
the mosaic of ideas that Nietzsche presents.

He points to his next project (which he has never done) - the revaluation
of
all values, a work that would attack and give perspective onto rebuilding
of the human, although we can try to give light trough this mosaic to
get somewhere conceptually.

Christianity, and any resentment/slave morality system stands here as
a misunderstanding, as a wrong conception, meanwhile life-affirmation,
and acceptance of pain (which does not need to have meaning in itself)
stand superior. Fascinatingly, with stories like Job, the  question
of sin does not occur, how would one relate this to Nietzsche. Job is
pre-Dionysus, there is only suffering and rebirth is the end of the story,
without any presence or gift.

But I think what Christianity truly stands for Nietzsche is **German** or
rather, West European, post-100 years war, religion and creed of suffering
and constant pseudo-redemption. This has still ingrained, or rather
transformed into a cultural force than a religion. True religion today
is so rare (especially Christian) that its cultural impact, back again,
in Western Europe, is so much smaller but through that much more powerful
and strong for an individual who interacts with these institutions.

Also nothing like reading Max Mueller translation of Law of Manu and
considering this to be source of truth...

The tragedy of Nietzche that he wills to return to an ancient mindset,
but as any attempt of a return, it is pathetic on some level, the harder
you attempt the more pathetic it seems. Rather than say 'I am decendant
too', he considers himself a son of Rome. Well, he has nothing to do with
Rome and he knows it. And even when he says that what I have stated,
it is still an unclear, obscured mindset from which one cannot give a
clear statement of his thought-form.

In the end, one needs to make an impression.

## Quotes + Notes on Chapters

### Foreword

> Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part.

> virescit volnere virtuus

A very short and simple introduction, with casting out idols/ideas in
the society/life.

### Maxims

Very French/Roman chapter, this is where Nietzsche goes the closest to
his ideal. In short words he does not manage to stumble...

> "All truth is simple." Is that not a double/compound lie?

> Posthumous men — I, for example — are understood worse than timely
ones, but heard better. More precisely: we are never understood —
hence our authority.

> The formula of my happiness: a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal.

### The Problem of Socrates

Here Nietzsche notices the problem of dialectic, dialectic as a response
of a decadent. Instead of an affirmation, there is discussion.

>  One must stretch out one's hands and attempt to grasp this amazing
subtlety, that the value of life cannot be estimated.

> Socrates was a misunderstanding; any improvement morality, including
Christianity, is a misunderstanding. The most blinding daylight;
rationality at any price; life, bright, cold, cautious, conscious,
without instinct, in opposition to the instincts — all this was a kind
of disease, merely a disease, and by no means a return to "virtue," to
"health," to happiness.

The strong movement towards the natural sense of being being
post-philosophy, where the dialectical statements are no longer needed. In
this sense pre-philosophy was also affirming and existed in safely.

### "Reason" in Philsoophy

 Here shows the main theme, which is an attack of
 life-denying/anti-realism in philosophy.

>  They think that they show their respect for a subject when they
dehistoricize it sub specie aeternitas — when they turn it into a
mummy. Everything that philosophers handled over the past thousands of
years turned into concept mummies; nothing real escaped their grasp alive

The ambition towards eternity is the killing blow to philosophy.

> The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added
by a lie.

Nietzsche just wants to reverse Parmenides here.

> That which is last, thinnest, and emptiest is put first, as the cause,
as ens realissimum. Why did humanity have to take seriously the brain
afflictions of these sick web-spinners? We have paid dearly for it!

optics-seeing-sensory information as negation of language as the source
of truth

>  Everywhere reason sees a doer and doing; it believes in will as
the cause; it believes in the ego, in the ego as being, in the ego as
substance, and it projects this faith in the ego-substance upon all
things — only thereby does it first create the concept of "thing."

> "Reason" in language — oh, what an old deceptive female she is! I
am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.

> That the artist esteems appearance higher than reality is no objection
to this proposition. For "appearance" in this case means reality once
more, only by way of selection, reinforcement, and correction. The
tragic artist is no pessimist: he is precisely the one who says Yes to
everything questionable, even to the terrible — he is Dionysian

The right thing here to do would be to just quote the entire book,
but this is extreme affirmation.

###  HOW THE "TRUE WORLD" FINALLY BECAME A FABLE. The History of an Error

An extension of previous chapter, similar way, just put into a very
short demonstration.

> Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.

> . The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The
apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished
the apparent one.

Pretty much a repetition of rejection of the realm of ideas, and towards
a materialism, but there is still energy of Ding-an-sich despite a
rejection. It is so fundamental part of my personal experience, that I
am incapable of ignoring it.

###  MORALITY AS ANTI-NATURE



> Destroying the passions and cravings, merely as a preventive
measure against their stupidity and the unpleasant consequences of this
stupidity — today this itself strikes us as merely another acute form
of stupidity.

> But an attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of
life: the practice of the church is hostile to life.

Here he very much joins the church as he enjoyed it, the Lutheran one,
the most moralistic with regards to sin. The life is much more of a vibe
when sometimes you need to dumb shit to get smarter. We are all grugs
at the end.

> We do not easily negate; we make it a point of honor to be
affirmers. More and more, our eyes have opened to that economy which needs
and knows how to utilize everything that the holy witlessness of the
priest, the diseased reason in the priest, rejects — that economy in
the law of
life which finds an advantage even in the disgusting species
of the prigs, the priests, the virtuous

> One should survey the whole history of the priests and philosophers,
> including the artists: the most poisonous things against the senses
have been
> said not by the impotent, nor by ascetics, but by the impossible
ascetics, by
> those who really were in dire need of being ascetics.

>	In many cases, to be sure, "peace of soul" is merely a
misunderstanding —
>	something else, which lacks only a more honest name.

He shows here that a result of morality is very often a secondary,
and it is
acts which sould determine true morality and their truthfulness.

> Every naturalism in morality — that is, every healthy morality —
is dominated
> by an instinct of life, some commandment of life is fulfilled by a
> determinate canon of "shalt" and "shalt not"; some inhibition and
hostile
> element on the path of life is thus removed.

### THE FOUR GREAT ERRORS

(cause and effect, false causality, imaginary causes, free will)

This chapter is primarily attack on building meaning from the past
or future,
meanwhile meaning occurs in the now and is mostly what we want it to
be rather
than some rational sense. World is chaos and that's a thing.

I love that good digestion was seen as a goal of good life, like today
having
good brain chemistry, as if the basics of one behavioral system could be
affected by chemicals and other things in a profound way. Fascinating
that now,
good digestion trackers are a product category.

> A scholar in our time, with his rapid consumption of nervous energy,
would
> simply destroy himself on Cornaro's diet.

> . Every mistake (in every sense of the word) is the result of a
degeneration
> of instinct, a disintegration of the will: one could almost equate
what is
> bad with whatever is a mistake. All that is good is instinctive —
and hence
> easy, necessary, uninhibited. Effort is a failing: the god is typically
> different from the hero. (In my language: light feet are the first
attribute
> of divinity.)

> The "inner world" is full of phantoms and illusions: the will being
one of
> them.

> They are produced as punishments, as payment for something we should
not have
> done, for something we should not have desired (impudently generalized
by
> Schopenhauer into a principle in which morality appears as what it
really is
> — as the very poisoner and slanderer of life: "Every great pain,
whether
> physical or spiritual, declares what we deserve; for it could not come
to us
> if we did not deserve it." World as Will and Representation II,
666). They
> are the effects of ill-considered actions that turn out badly.

Here also Nietzsche critcises God as an opium, but as shown in
Kieslowski's
Decalogue 1, this works both ways. Atheism can also become 'an opiate'
as world
without punishment is as just as world with unknown divine punishment.

>  No one is responsible for a man's being here at all, for his being
>  such-and-such, or for his being in these circumstances or in this
>  environment.

>	A man is necessary, a man is a piece of fatefulness, a man
belongs to the
>	whole, a man is in the whole; there is nothing that could judge,
measure,
>	compare, or sentence his being, for that would mean judging,
measuring,
>	comparing, or sentencing the whole. But there is nothing besides
the whole.

Extreme proto-existentialism where the statements are what formas a man
and man
is down to self-definition through their existence and acts. Once
again, the
metaphysical is gone and done with.

### THE "IMPROVERS" OF MANKIND

Further attempt by Nietzsche to show how humanity is just wrong and
autodestructive, as we are unable to go past our limitations and behave
in the same stupid ways as always.

> **there are no moral facts whatsoever**

>	To call the taming of an animal its "improvement" sounds almost
like a joke to our ears. Whoever knows what goes on in kennels doubts
that dogs are "improved" there.

Here also is the cursed Law of Manu part, wherein a system of rules as
described by Max Mueller sounds superior because it shows a superior
race. Oh Nietzsche, how estranged would you have been if you learned
what real India and real 'aryans' look like. Well, the price of having
no skin in the game.

> The morality of breeding, and the morality of taming, are, in the means
they use, entirely worthy of each other: we may proclaim it as a supreme
principle that to make men moral one must have the unconditional resolve
to act immorally.

Still unsure regarding this chappter though...

Something regard appearing and prescription being correlated and picking
the limitations over power forcing

###  WHAT THE GERMANS LACK

>  There is nothing of which our culture suffers more than of the
superabundance of pretentious jobbers and fragments of humanity; our
universities are, against their will, the real hothouses for this kind
of withering of the instincts of the spirit. And the whole of Europe
already has some idea of this — power politics deceives nobody. Germany
is considered more and more as Europe's flatland.

It seems that we have all become Germans by accident.

> All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great
culturally has always been unpolitical, even anti-political. Goethe's
heart opened at the phenomenon of Napoleon — it closed at the "Wars of
Liberation." At the same moment when Germany comes up as a great power,
France gains a new importance as a cultural power.

> The entire system of higher education in Germany has lost what matters
most: the end as well as the means to the end.

> All great, all beautiful things can never be common property: pulchrum
est paucorum hominum

The crisis of vulgar education can be shortened to this - people should
not be educated globally as then nobody truly gets educated...

> 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

Once again, the setup is to assume that to be put in into your 'passion'
within the academic system is a failure of social order, it is hilarious
that in 19th century we were aware of this and decided to ignore it fully.

LEARN TO SEE / LEARN TO WRITE / LEARN TO SPEAK

> Learning to see — accustoming the eye to calmness, to patience,
to letting things come up to it; postponing judgment, learning to go
around and grasp each individual case from all sides

> Who among Germans still knows from experience the delicate shudder
which light feet in spiritual matters send into every muscle? The

Wonderful chapter that does not apply to Germans only.

### SKIRMISHES OF AN UNTIMELY MAN

Chaotic and huge chapter which is more of a columnade than easily put
as the work in the book. Untimeliness as a strength of being above the
current moment, I mean the word timeless has a meaning it has.

> Nature, estimated artistically, is no model. It exaggerates, it
distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance. To study "from nature"
seems to me to be a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism;
this lying in the dust before petit faits [little facts] is unworthy of
a whole artist. To see what is — that is the mark of another kind of
spirit, the anti-artistic, the factual. One must know who one is.

We are constantly in watching the survivors of the survivors of chances.

> Frenzy must first have enhanced the excitability of the whole machine;
else there is no art. All kinds of frenzy, however diversely conditioned,
have the strength to accomplish this: above all, the frenzy of sexual
excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy.

DIONYSUS DIONYSUS DIONYSUS

Here Nietzsche also repeats the Birth of Tragedy which... cool I guess,
less books to read and more time to read other stuff.

>	The most spiritual human beings, if we assume that they are
the most courageous, also experience by far the most painful tragedies:
but just for that reason they honor life because it pits its greatest
opposition against them.

All is boundries, all is lines of disaffect and all is
liminality. Liminality is the source of truth and sense of reality

> Nothing is less Greek than the conceptual web-spinning of a hermit
— amor intellectualis dei [intellectual love of God] after the fashion
of Spinoza.

>  Courage and freedom of feeling before a powerful enemy, before a
sublime calamity, before a problem that arouses dread — this triumphant
state is what the tragic artist chooses, what he glorifies. Before
tragedy, what is warlike in our soul celebrates its Saturnalia; whoever
is used to suffering, whoever seeks out suffering, the heroic man praises
his own being through tragedy — to him alone the tragedian presents
this drink of sweetest cruelty.

Nietzsche does love a good tragedy, really this chapter is hell to
summarise, it is more of a chaotic set of ideas than actual line through
thought.

> No other way of self-overcoming is left to us any more: this is our
asceticism, our penance." Developing personal traits: the virtue of the
"impersonal."

>	Another problem of diet. — The means by which Julius Caesar
defended himself against sickliness and headaches: tremendous marches,
the most frugal way of life, uninterrupted sojourn in the open air,
continuous exertion — these are, in general, the universal rules of
preservation and protection against the extreme vulnerability of that
subtle machine, working under the highest pressure, which we call genius.

To continue, I cannot really find anything here to comment upon, Nietzsche
is his own commentarian.

>	The history of his desirabilities has so far been the partie
honteuse of man: one should beware of reading in it too long. What
justifies man is his reality — it will eternally justify him. How much
greater is the worth of the real man, compared with any merely desired,
dreamed-up, foully fabricated man? with any ideal man? And it is only
the ideal man who offends the philosopher's taste.

A man is as great or as lowly as he wills himself to be, and the only
right way to go is to will greatness at ones own being, within that what
was given to us in the world.

>  The "last judgment" is the sweet comfort of revenge — the revolution,
which the socialist worker also awaits, but conceived as a little farther
off. The "beyond" — why a beyond, if not as a means for besmirching
this world?

How would this point (that being 35 of this chapter) would not attack the
way we think about environment, as most of modern environmentalists live
in a day in which all crises do happen, and of course, the question is -
will they happen? And what action can be done, now, today to prepare,
and how would we do it? Very difficult to agree with Nietzsche here,
as we live in a crisis of the now which is delayed into the future. But
of course, im that system - everyone gets punished (very Calvinist to
be sure).

Further criticism of utilitarians, again, his anti-Calvinism is not easy
for me to swallow. What if I am simply a Calvinist, growing up in deep
18th century Catholcisim, and these pagan ideas, just are not for me.

And also criticism madness of life-preservation when that life is without
meaning, oh, such an issue way to morality, but here it is more of a
technological question of circumscribing the issues we can have (36).

> Were we to think away our frailty and lateness, our physiological
senescence, then our morality of "humanization" would immediately lose
its value too (in itself, no morality has any value) — it would even
arouse disdain. On the other hand, let us not doubt that we moderns, with
our thickly padded humanity, which at all costs wants to avoid bumping
into a stone, would have provided Cesare Borgia's contemporaries with a
comedy at which they could have laughed themselves to death. Indeed, we
are unwittingly funny beyond all measure with our modern "virtues." (37)

> That movement which tried to introduce itself scientifically with
Schopenhauer's morality of pity — a very unfortunate attempt! — is the
real movement of decadence in morality; as such, it is profoundly related
to Christian morality. Strong ages, noble cultures, all consider pity,
"neighbor-love," and the lack of self and self-assurance as something
contemptible.  (37)

Nothing to comment upon here.

> The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains
by it, but in what one pays for it -- what it costs us.  (38)

>  For what is freedom? That one has the will to assume responsibility
for oneself. That one maintains the distance which separates us. That
one becomes more indifferent to difficulties, hardships, privation,
even to life itself. That one is prepared to sacrifice human beings for
one's cause, not excluding oneself. (38)

This point is extremely rings of Eumeswil here, that a true freedom,
only exists under authority or under a need to assert oneself. Without,
such assertion, freedom is just a simulation, a mirage.

Here one can also make a commentary about GrOb, who, by becoming part
of the establishment over the 90s, lost everything with regards to its
meaning. And Letov simply died, not even a suicide, because the world
in which he could be great and a symbol of freedom has disappeared on
their US tour.

Further points on assertiveness... would just pad out this section to
quote them. Probably would be strongest in some other book, here it is
just too much for a single moment.

> Great men are necessary, the age in which they appear is accidental;
that they almost always become masters over their age is only because
they are stronger, because they are older, because for a longer time
much was gathered for them (44)

Again, Nietzsche here becomes Carlyle in a pathetic move, the tragedy of
great man is that they not exist outside of circumscription of technology,
and once technology is great enough, greatness itself disappears.

> Yet, because much is owed to such explosives, much has also been given
them in return: for example, a kind of higher morality. After all, that
is the way of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors. (44)


>  Supreme rule of conduct: before oneself too, one must not "let oneself
go." The good things are immeasurably costly; and the law always holds
that those who have them are different from those who acquire them. All
that is good is inherited: whatever is not inherited is imperfect,
is a mere beginning. (47)

I mean all knowledge is that. What did Newton said? We all stand on arms
of giants, we all stand on things that were done. A bit of a bullshit
ending this point on le christiantiy evil, just because you move away
form the body, does not mean you are incapable of greatness. Truly,
antichristianity of Nietzsche is a strange mix of variety of views and
reaction to his own universe, rather than completeness of Christian
ethics.

> The doctrine of equality! There is no more poisonous poison anywhere:
for it seems to be preached by justice itself, whereas it really is the
termination of justice.  (48)

>	Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a
joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is
loathesome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole — he
does not negate anymore. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all
possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus. (49)

Very well explained around in Berserk commentary of Jonas Ceika, nothing
to add here.

I really cannot state much about this chapter besides, this could be
couple books, these were couple books, and getting through this even
slowly, is painful.

##  WHAT I OWE TO THE ANCIENTS

Nietzsche was highly inspired by Greeks and Romans, but not by
philosophers, but by historians such as Sallust or Thucydides.

> What was it that the Hellene guaranteed himself by means of these
mysteries? Eternal life, the eternal return of life, the future promised
and hallowed in the past; the triumphant Yes to life beyond all death
and change; true life as the continuation of life through procreation,
through the mysteries of sex. F

It feels, like Nietzsche very much cherrypicked what greeks were to him,
meanwhile such things as a hellene, does not seem to have existed. Instead
various society, meanings etc.

>  Saying Yes to life even in its strangest and most painful episodes,
the will to life rejoicing in its own inexhaustible vitality even as it
witnesses the destruction of its greatest heros — that is what I called
Dionysian, that is what I guessed to be the bridge to the psychology of
the tragic poet.

Yes, Nietzsche, you do love tragedies and life affirming stuff. But who
are the life deniers you are pointing to?

## THE HAMMER SPEAKS

For all creators are hard. And it must seem blessedness to you to impress
your hand on millennia as on wax.
	Blessedness to write on the will of millennia as on bronze —
	harder than bronze, nobler than bronze. Only the noblest is
	altogether hard.
	This new tablet, O my brothers, I place over you: Become hard!