Summary: Twilight of the Idols (page 3)

The Church enjoins us to become executioners of ourselves and advocates castration as a remedy for passions: The Church combats passions by radical extirpation: its practice, its treatment, is castratism ¹. Now we no longer admire dentists who pull teeth simply to stop them from hurting ².

This radical treatment, intended to correct the excesses of the passions, has something nihilistic about it: To attack passion at its root is to attack life at its root: the practice of the Church is harmful to life.... Nietzsche proposes another approach: the spiritualisation of the passions: The spiritualisation of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity ³.

The free will is nothing more than a theological invention designed to make people responsible for their actions and thus punishable: The doctrine of the will was mainly invented for the purpose of punishment, i.e. with the intention of finding guilt. ⁴. As a result, Christianity is a metaphysics of the executioner ⁵.

Morality impoverishes the diversity of human beings by reducing them all to a single model; at the same time, it reflects the pride of the moralist, who takes himself as the standard:

Reality shows us a marvellous wealth of types, an exuberance in the variety and profusion of forms, and any pitiful crossroads moralist would come to us and say, "No! Man should be made differently"? He paints his own portrait on the walls and says: "Ecce homo!" ⁶.

The moralist presumes to judge the world and minds alike, claiming to transcend what is in order to impose what ought to be. Yet such a value judgement is impossible: We are part of the Whole, we are in the Whole—there is nothing that could judge, measure, compare, or condemn our existence, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, and condemn the Whole... But there is nothing outside the Whole! ⁷.

Morality is opposed to life: morality and the world are irreconcilable (hence the need for an afterworld): The idea of "God" has hitherto been the greatest objection against existence... We deny God, we deny responsibility in God: by this alone we save the world ⁸.

The philosopher must therefore be beyond good and evil, transcend morality, and understand that there are no moral facts at all ⁹.

Nietzsche attaches great importance to art. The intoxication of the creator—whether it arises from sexual passion, revelry, combat, cruelty, springtime, alcohol, or sheer willpower—allows him to regain the sense of increased strength and fulfilment ¹⁰.

The artist resonates, far from any morality, with the tragic nature of existence: Under the grip of this feeling, we abandon ourselves to things, we force them to take from us, we violate them ¹¹. In this state, everything becomes for us joy in itself ¹².

To live as an artist is an entirely different mode of existence from that of the moralist. The latter, on the contrary, has a way of acting that impoverishes, thins out, anaemises all things ¹³. For him, it is a necessity to seize things, to consume them, to make them leaner ¹⁴.

The artist seeks the beauty of the world. He must bear in mind that this beauty is something we project onto the world. In the same way, nothing is ugly except the human being in decline: Everything remotely reminiscent of degeneration provokes in us the judgment "ugly" ¹⁵ (every hint of exhaustion, heaviness, old age, fatigue...).

¹ p.98
² p.97
³ p.99
⁴ p.110
⁵ p.111
⁶ p.102
⁷ p.112
⁸ ibid.
⁹ p.113
¹⁰ p.132
¹¹ ibid.
¹² p.133
¹³ ibid.
¹⁴ ibid.
¹⁵ p.141
¹⁶ p.87