How to Philosophize with a Hammer
1
THIS writing of fewer than 150 pages, cheerful and fateful in tone, a demon which laughs – the work of so few days I hesitate to reveal their number, is the exception among books: there exists nothing more rich in substance, more independent, more overthrowing – more wicked. If you want to get a quick idea of how everything was upsidedown before me, make a start with this writing. That which is called idol on the title-page is quite simply that which has hitherto been called truth. Twilight of the Idols – in plain terms: the old truth is coming to an end…
2
There is no reality, no ‘ideality’ which is not touched on in this writing (– touched on: what a cautious euphemism!…). Not merely eternal idols, also the youngest of all, consequently weakest with age. ‘Modern ideas’, for example. A great wind blows among the trees and everywhere fruits fall – truths. There is the prodigality of an all too abundant autumn in it: one trips over truths, one even treads some to death – there are too many of them… But those one gets one’s hands on are no longer anything questionable, they are decisions. Only I have the standard for ‘truths’ in my hand, only I can decide. As if in me a second consciousness had grown, as if in me ‘the will’ had turned on a light for itself over the oblique path on which it had hitherto been descending… The oblique path – it was called the ‘path to truth’… All ‘obscure impulse’ is at an end, it is precisely the good man who has known least what was the right path… And, in all seriousness, no one before me has known the right path, the ascending path: only after me are there again hopes, tasks, prescribable paths of culture – I am the bringer of the good tidings of these… Precisely therewith am I a destiny. –
3
Immediately upon completing the said work and without losing so much as a day, I attacked the tremendous task of the Revaluation in a sovereign feeling of pride beyond compare, sure of my immortality every moment and engraving sign upon sign in brass tablets with the sureness of a destiny. The foreword was written on 3 September 1888: when in the morning after this writing I stepped outside I found awaiting me the loveliest day the Ober-Engadin had ever shown me – transparent, glowing in its colours, containing in itself every antithesis, every mediant between ice and south. – Only on 20 September did I leave Sils-Maria, detained there by floods, finally by far the last guest of this wonderful place to which my gratitude would like to make the gift of an immortal name. After a journey with incidents, even being in peril of my life in the flooded Como, which I reached only deep in the night, I arrived on the afternoon of the twenty-first in Turin, my proved place, my Residenz from now on. I took again the same accommodation I had occupied in the spring, via Carlo Alberto 6, III, opposite the mighty palazzo Carignano, in which Vittorio Emanuele was born, with a view of the piazza Carlo Alberto and beyond that to the hills. Without delay and without letting myself be distracted for a moment I resumed work: only the last quarter of the book remained to be done. On 30 September a great victory; seventh day; a god takes his leisure on the banks of the Po. On the same day I went on to write the foreword to the ‘Twilight of the Idols’, correction of the proofs of which had been my recreation during September. – I have never experienced such an autumn, nor have I thought anything of the sort possible on earth – a Claude Lorrain thought on to infinity, every day of the same excessive perfection. –