Summary: Twilight of the Idols (page 2)

The fixed nature of Plato's Ideas—universal and eternal—is also a reaction of idiosyncrasy.

Plato, in the Symposium for example, tries to show that beyond the particular beauties found in this or that place, at this or that time—ephemeral as they are—there also exists Beauty itself, universal, from which all other beauties proceed.

For Nietzsche, this represents an escape from the tragic nature of existence, since what Platonic Ideas deny is precisely time:

Everything idiosyncratic about philosophers: for example, their lack of historical sense, their hatred of becoming, their Egypticism. They think they are honouring something by freeing it from its historical side—[...]—when they turn it into a mummy. Everything philosophers have wielded for thousands of years has been mummy ideas ¹.

The task, then, is to bring thought closer to life and to identify all the escape reactions—all the beyond worlds—concealed at the heart of philosophy.

The Kantian thing-in-itself is another example. The world of things as they truly are, distinct from the world as it appears to us—irremediably altered (the world of phenomena)—remains an afterworld.

The world that appears to our senses is the only real one, and the senses must be rehabilitated—unjustly discredited by Platonism and Kantianism, which treat them as a source of error: The senses do not lie insofar as they show becoming, disappearance, change. The world of appearances is the only real one: the "true world" is merely an addition born of lying ².

Nietzsche takes the sense of smell as an example:

And what fine instruments of observation our senses are to us! The nose, for example, which no philosopher has ever spoken of with veneration and gratitude—the nose is, even provisionally, the most delicate instrument we have at our service: this instrument is capable of registering minute differences in movement, differences that not even the spectroscope registers ³.

Philosophers therefore invert real values. They confuse last things with first things. They place at the beginning what comes at the end [...], the highest conceptions, that is, the most general and empty conceptions ⁴.

The real world of the Kantian thing-in-itself or the Platonic world of Ideas is thus fictitious—more than an error, a symptom: the symptom of nihilism: Separating the world into a real world and a world of appearances [...] this is merely a suggestion of decadence, a symptom of declining life ⁵.

To carry out the transvaluation of values that Nietzsche demands is not a matter of choosing the world of appearances over the world of truth. It is about understanding that these terms, and the opposition between them, are meaningless:

The world of truth—we have abolished it: what world is left to us? The world of appearances, perhaps? No! With the world of truth, we have also abolished the world of appearances! ⁶.

Nietzsche now turns to Christianity. Like Platonic doctrine, Christianity is fundamentally a form of nihilism: it too upholds the moral equation good = beautiful = true.

The Christian likewise takes refuge in an afterlife—paradise. Rather than seeking happiness in this world, he retreats into the illusory consolation of a future reality where he will finally be happy.

Christianity, like nihilism, thus rests on the premise that nothing (here below) has value.

This hatred of the world eventually turns into self-hatred, as certain passages of the Bible make plain—such as the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament: If your eye is an occasion for you to fall, pluck it out ⁷.

¹ p.89
² p.90
³ ibid.
⁴ p.91
⁵ p.94
⁶ p.96
⁷ p.97