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Summary: Twilight of the Idols (page 2)

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The fixed character - because universal and eternal - of Plato's Ideas is also a reaction of idiosyncrasy.


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

Here, for Nietzsche, is an escape from the tragic nature of existence, since what is precisely denied in the Platonic Idea is 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.


It is therefore a question of bringing thought closer to life, and identifying all the escape reactions, all the beyond worlds, hidden at the heart of philosophy.


The Kantian thing-in-itself is another example. The world of things as they would be in reality, distinguished from the world of things as they appear to us, irremediably modified (that of phenomena), is still an afterworld.


The world that appears to our senses is the only real one, and we must rehabilitate the senses, unjustly discredited by Platonism or Kantianism, which see in them 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 "truth-world" is only added by lying 2.

Nietzsche uses 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.


The philosophers therefore invert the 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 therefore fictitious. It is, more than an error, a symptom (that of the disease 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.

Proceeding with the transmutation of values as Nietzsche wishes, is not choosing the world of appearances against the world-truth. It is to understand that these terms, as well as their opposition, have no meaning:

The truth-world we have abolished: 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 his attention to Christianity. Like the Platonic doctrine, Christianity is fundamentally a nihilism. Indeed, we also find in it the moral equation good=beautiful=good.

On the other hand, the Christian also takes refuge in an afterlife: paradise. Instead of seeking happiness in this world, he takes refuge in the illusory consolation of another reality to come in which he will be happy.

Christianity, like nihilism, therefore takes as its starting point that nothing (here below) has value.


This hatred of the world eventually turns into self-hatred, as can be seen in certain passages of the Bible, 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