Summary: Twilight of the Idols (page 4)

Nihilists, the sick ones, often disappear quickly. But the agony of some is slow, and they have time to create doctrines—Christianity, Platonism, and so on—with which they poison the world: Socrates was just long sick ¹⁶.

Nietzsche suggests a radical solution for them:

Here is a piece of advice for the pessimists. We do not have in our hands a means to prevent ourselves from being born—but we can remedy this fault. The act of suppressing ourselves is among the most estimable of all […] we have delivered life from an objection ¹.

Yet degeneration remains our horizon: There is nothing we can do about it; we must move forward—I mean step by step further into decadence (that is my definition of modern progress) ².

The great men, the geniuses, are those who, unlike nihilists, overflow with strength, health, and energy: Great men are like great epochs, explosive materials, enormous accumulations of strength ³. This superabundance, which mirrors that of nature, is inseparable from waste:

Genius is necessarily wasteful: that it wastes itself is its greatness... The instinct of self-preservation is, as it were, suspended; the supreme pressure of radiant forces forbids them any kind of precaution or prudence. It overflows, it spills out, it wastes itself ⁴.

In breaking the table of moral laws, Nietzsche replaces it with new values. For example: Everything good is light, everything divine runs on delicate feet ⁵.

Nietzsche cites Bizet's music as an example, contrasting it with that of Wagner.

Nihilism is not a doctrine to be refuted with arguments—there is no attempt to expose errors in reasoning. The point is to treat it as a symptom. As Nietzsche says in The Case of Wagner: You don't refute Christianity, you don't refute an eye disease ⁶. Or: the notions of error and truth have, as far as it seems to me, no meaning in optics ⁷.

It is easy to see why the book is subtitled "How to Philosophise with a Hammer".

The hammer in question is that of the doctor, who gently taps a patient's knee with a mallet to test for a healthy reflex. Metaphorically, it expresses the idea of examining philosophical doctrines to determine whether they stem from a healthy or diseased mind.

To philosophise with a hammer means testing idols—false gods, moral values—in order to unmask them as such. One might also say it is a matter of probing a wall by tapping it gently to hear whether it rings hollow.

¹ p.152
² p.161
³ p.162
⁴ p.163
⁵ p.190
⁶ The Case of Wagner, epilogue
⁷ ibid.