My last book, Crusade against the Cross, contains a passage in which I refer to Hollywood contributing to the prolefeed with films that end with the drama being resolved (unlike in real life, where much ends in tragedy, as the Greek tragedians Nietzsche spoke of saw). An example of this American mentality that there are no tragedies, only dramas, can be seen in a YouTube interview of anti-racist Lex Fridman with scientist Richard Haier about The Bell Curve, ‘the most controversial book ever published in science’.
Within a minute from this moment, the interviewer gives away that he has malware installed in his mind: ‘It’s just, it is difficult in a way that… we are limited by our own biology. It’s difficult, and it is, ahem, at least from the American perspective you like to believe that everything is possible in this world’.
Because Fridman is accustomed to the American ideology that the individual of any race or gender who sets out to succeed can make it in the US—the malware precisely!—, he is pained, almost panicked one might say, that there are genetic differences in intelligence. Such science, I would add, would strike a hard blow to the accepted wisdom of the human mind. This is because the psychological mythology of the US is based on Calvinist ethics that the ‘human soul’ is ‘free’ to choose.
‘Common grace’ is a theological concept in Protestant Christianity that refers to the grace of ‘God’ (the mythical god of the Judeo-Christians) that is supposedly common to all humanity, and is limited only by unnecessary cultural factors. It is ‘common’ because its benefits are experienced by or intended for the entire human race, without distinction between one person and another; and it is ‘grace’ because, according to this Reformed thinking of 19th and 20th century Calvinists, it is unmerited and sovereignly bestowed by their god.
Fridman’s interview evokes once again what in my most recent book I called ‘neotheology’: his rationalisations and fears about IQ studies are expressed at a purely secular level. Those fears remind me of an older interview, between David Rubin and Stefan Molyneux, in which the latter was hurt by the IQ difference between the races (though at least Molyneux accepts the data).
What neither Molyneux nor Fridman ask is why, once we move out of countries that emerged from Christianity in general and Protestantism in particular, people no longer suffer from this ‘ogre of the superego’ as far as racial studies are concerned. In Crusade against the Cross I also mentioned that I exchanged emails with Robert Sheaffer last year, a Nietzsche scholar, but I omitted that he told me that race and IQ studies are the most controversial and radioactive subjects in science.
This is true if one only looks at one’s cultural navel. Go to countries that never were, or continue to be, Christian, and neochristianity disappears completely. The Chinese, for example, not only expel Muslims and discriminate against blacks, but they can study eugenics freely in their universities without any guilt whatsoever.
Whites were like the Chinese, and even more racist. I first read The Antichrist forty-eight years ago, and I remember then coming across the passage in which Nietzsche speaks of Manu’s laws in the Indo-Aryan religion (which resemble the Nuremberg laws): a time when no white man was tearing his hair out over this racism simply because the Aryan collective unconscious hadn’t yet been infected with this ogre of the superego.
The PDF that brings together the last twenty-one entries on Nietzsche’s tragic life (and two appendices) is now available, here.
In the PDF, I have corrected as many syntax errors in the entries as I could detect.
If a sponsor were to come along who would allow us to have a small publishing house (or alternatively that there was a publisher willing to publish our books), the first thing we would do would be to print books like Crusade against the Cross so that visitors who wanted to have hard copies on their bookshelves could do so.
In the series of the previous weeks, I omitted the image of Franz Overbeck (1837-1905), who is seen here with his wife. Had it not been for this theologian friend of Nietzsche, who made a handwritten copy and sent it to Peter Gast, the manuscript of The Antichrist might have been lost to posterity.
Thank you, Franz, for not allowing what, in my opinion, is the tragic philosopher’s masterpiece to be lost!
Tomorrow they’ll be upgrading the account of this site by moving it to a newer server equipped with an updated operating system. This upgrade necessitates a change in the IP address for this site. Consequently, while I’ll be updating this new IP on Cloudflare, before the migration has been successfully completed, The West’s Darkest Hour will probably be for some time invisible.
Sometime before he sent his mad letters, when Nietzsche was charring in Turin, he wrote Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, which no longer contains any new ideas. Ecce homo was only the presentation of his books under the delirium that he was soon to split history in twain. A few months later, when the martyr of the spirit was interned in the psychiatric hospital in Jena, Adolf Hitler was born. Nietzsche would later be taken by his mother to Naumburg. When her mother died, Elisabeth took her brother to Weimar, where he lived until 1900. The interior of that house, the Nietzsche Archive, can be seen in the video linked in my post this morning.
Adolf Hitler grew up, matured and, when he was already at the height of power, visited the house of the Nietzsche Archive. As a reward for the visit, Elisabeth gave him a relic: her brother’s walking stick!
Unfortunately Hitler didn’t win the war, so the West is now ruled by an anti-Hitlerian, anti-Nazi, anti-national, anti-White, anti-Gentile, anti-male and anti-heterosexual ideology. Because the Anglo-Americans ‘won’ the war, and told—and tell—the story that rules the West, I have to reiterate what I have so often said about the other side of the Wall.
Many among the racialist folk are actively deluding themselves by not recognising the Christian problem. The old saying ‘You can’t solve a problem if you can’t first define it precisely’ applies to those who believe that there is only the Jewish problem and not a Christian problem. Most racialists ignore the history of Constantine and his successors not only explained in some PDFs of our featured post, but even available in books still in print, such as The Darkening Age.
But the problem are all Westerners. From the mighty Woke liberals to the comparatively small racialist reaction, via traditionalist Christians, liberal Christians, agnostics and atheists, all find themselves bending the knee before the cross. Just look at the news these days: kids on the campuses fanatically worshipping the cross, imagining there the recently crucified Palestinian! At the opposite pole, those who belong to the anti-Semitic racial right also worship it, as can be seen in the number of articles in The Unz Review: both authors and commenters pity the same crucified Palestinian! Not to mention the traditional Christians who, literally every day, kneel in their churches in front of an image of the crucified rabbi.
While it is a breakthrough that one aspect of the Jewish Problem is finally beginning to be discussed—the state of Israel—what these people, Christians, atheists, liberals and white nationalists are unable to see is that it is impossible to win the battle by having the cross as the sign in the sky through which they will win. It is impossible to win with Christian ethics because it is a suicidal path that practises the most aggressive dysgenesis.
Unlike all of them, the National Socialists at the top of the Third Reich repudiated not only anti-racism but the very essence of what it means to kneel before the Cross: that a crucified victim is, by definition, morally more worthy than the crucifying Romans. That is why Himmler gave texts about Genghis Khan to the SS: to prepare them psychologically about what, once values are transvalued, we have to do.
Nietzsche was dazzled when he saw how Christians inverted Greco-Roman values through precisely the symbol of the cross:
This reminds me again of the invaluable words of Paul. ‘The weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, hath God chosen’: this was the formula; decadence was victorious in hoc signo – God on the cross –. Have people still not grasped the gruesome ulterior motive behind this symbol? – Everything that suffers, everything nailed to the cross is divine… Christianity won, and with this, a nobler sensibility was destroyed, – Christianity has been the worst thing to happen to humanity so far. – – [The Antichrist, §51]
The Christianity of Nick Fuentes and the rest of the white nationalists who fantasise about a new religious awakening in their country won’t save the Aryan man from extinction. We already saw what happened when the Iberian Christians conquered the Americas: they immediately became mongrelised despite their Jew-wise Inquisition. Fuentes and company will never save us because the one nailed to the cross was the rebel who raised his hand against Rome; more recently the slave that the English liberated, last century the holocausted Jew, the black American; this century the deranged transexual, etc., and the bad Aryan is supposed to have crucified him.
I would like to end this series with the plea that Nietzsche’s self-immolation after running towards the sun was not in vain.
Let us begin a movement parallel to American white nationalism: a movement in which, though minuscule for the moment—The West’s Darkest Hour—we have already taken up the crusade against the cross!
It’s time to show the nationalists that there is a higher idea than the dumb and stubborn monocausalism they preach. What does it matter if so few people visit this blog, or that hardly anyone comments on the discussion threads of my posts? What matters is to plant the insignificant—microscopic I dare say!—mustard seed in the hope that it will eventually grow and compete with the plant planted two millennia ago by Saul of Tarsus—the worst thing to happen to humanity so far!
I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come to plant the seed of his highest hope. —Thus Spake Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s guesthouse in Via Carlo Alberto, Turin.
In the first entry of this series, I said that the article by Robert Sheaffer that I first read in 1993 had motivated me to reopen the Nietzsche case, insofar as I consider it central to the point of view of The West’s Darkest Hour. And as I said at the end of the previous entry, once one discovers the primary cause of Aryan decline, everyone else seems idiotic to us, just as the boy who saw the naked king found the adults around him incredibly idiotic.
Becoming like the child of the story represents a huge problem for the adult visionary. ‘Running towards the sun’—Nietzsche’s poetic words to describe himself—in search of ultimate truth results in the visionary being charred, moth-like, as he approaches the primary source of light. No one has described Nietzsche’s dazzling charring better than Stefan Zweig, excerpts from whose book The Struggle with the Daimon I posted more than a decade ago, here.
While I was harsh on Nietzsche in criticising what I call in my autobiography ‘idiotic defence mechanisms’, albeit in his case referring to the eternal return of the identical, I am happy to point out that with The Antichrist this mechanism disappears. Nietzsche himself, in a letter to Franz Overbeck, had acknowledged in April 1884 that his Zarathustra was an ‘anteroom’ and that he was going to spend the next years of his life on ‘the development of my philosophy’.
In The Antichrist, both Zarathustra and the eternal return disappear. Zarathustra would only reappear in his poem Dionysian Dithyrambs, but it is very significant that by this time in December 1888, Nietzsche had already lost his self, and the very title of the first poem of that collection of nine poems to Dionysus is entitled ‘Only Mad! Only Poet!’
That the cause of Nietzsche’s madness was unknown to the doctors who treated him is clear from a letter to Peter Gast of 29 September 1904 written by Otto Binswanger, the director of the Psychiatric Clinic in Jena, where Nietzsche was interned for some months: ‘No one will be able to write an exact medical history of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Binswanger asserted, ‘since the beginnings of the illness have not been fully established’.
Why, then, the mania of the last decades to see the aetiology of Nietzsche’s disorder as a somatic disease? Tip: it is part of Big Pharma’s propaganda to sell us their damned drugs from the 1950s onwards. And the same can be said of those who have written about Vincent van Gogh, who would also be temporarily committed to a psychiatric ward. A better approach to the tragedy of both simultaneous cases can be found in the last words of the third volume of Curt Paul Janz’s extensive biographical study of Nietzsche:
The indulgent veil of mental derangement meant that he no longer had to be aware of it. It gave him something else: the tremendum of the genius chord. Without this ending, the fascination that his entire philosophy exerts on the history of philosophy, which places him close to the heroic-tragic end of Socrates—that Socrates whose rival (at least as much) he wanted to be—would certainly be lacking. But, in Nietzsche, it is not only about the end. His whole existence was a martyrdom. And this opens up for him the connection… with a great community. It means the way from the loneliness so badly endured to belonging to the community of the martyrs of the spirit that is far greater than one is usually willing to admit.
This last sentence has been with me for a long time since a Spanish girlfriend gave me Janz’s book as a present in March 1992, when I was living in Barcelona.
Already in January 1889, Nietzsche sent his incredible missives to several characters, including Franz Overbeck. When Overbeck arrived at the Via Carlo Alberto guesthouse in Turin on 8 January 1889 to rescue his friend, he found him completely mad and ‘surrounded by papers’. After returning Nietzsche to his native Germany, Overbeck took the papers back to Basel and among them, he found the manuscript of The Antichrist, carefully wrapped in a folio. By saving this book, Overbeck saved the key to Nietzsche’s thought. Overbeck wrote to Peter Gast, asking him which works Nietzsche had left unfinished; Gast wrote back and, by return of post, Overbeck replied as follows in February 1889:
Of the Transvaluation of All Values, in particular, there is only the first book, also wrapped in a white folio, with the title:
The Antichrist
Transvaluation of All Values
The second line is crossed out and replaced by the words ‘Curse on Christianity’.
Five weeks later, after reading the work, Overbeck sent Gast another letter, in which he says: ‘In particular, Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity seems to me to be too political, so to speak’. Overbeck wrote that line in criticism, but that is exactly what, 130 years later, David Skrbina would conclude in The Jesus Hoax: that Christianity was originally a political manoeuvre of the Jews against Rome!
It is clear from the correspondence between Overbeck, the first reader of The Antichrist and Gast that, as Nietzsche neared his end, his ideas about his work changed completely. The Transvaluation of All Values had been intended as a four-volume work, of which The Antichrist would have been the first. But Nietzsche himself wrote to George Brandes at the beginning of December 1888: ‘In three weeks I shall give orders for the printing of The Antichrist: Transvaluation of All Values’. In other words, once he had finished The Antichrist Nietzsche decided to burn the midnight oil, and what had been the first part of the work was transformed in its entirety.
A month after his letter to the Jew Brandes, Nietzsche had already carbonised himself internally, writing letters such as ‘to shoot the German emperor and all anti-Semites’. Andrés Sánchez Pascual says that despite the psychotic breakdown, ‘at that moment Nietzsche makes a totally lucid and consistent decision: he crossed out the subtitle “Transvaluation of all values” and under it, he writes the following: “Curse on Christianity”.’
Alas, because Nietzsche lost his mind he didn’t send the manuscript to his publisher, as planned. When, not long afterwards, the manuscript of The Antichrist fell into Elisabeth’s hands, she mutilated not only the subtitle but the climax of the book—the final page—when she published it in 1895! Had her brother not become disturbed, the original version that Overbeck found ready for the press would have been published as early as 1889, after Twilight of the Idols. It was not until Elisabeth died well into the 20th century that all the manuscripts of the Nietzsche Archive were made freely available to researchers.
In 1961, seventy-three years after the work was written, Erich Podach published a landmark book on Nietzschean editions. He showed that The Antichrist had undergone mutilations in addition to those already known, and made known for the first time the ‘Law against Christianity’.
By 1964, what appears to be the definitive edition of Nietzsche’s entire works was underway. Directed by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, it was published simultaneously in German, Italian and French. The following decade I was to benefit from the Spanish translation of The Antichrist as Nietzsche had left the manuscript carefully wrapped in a white folio, translated by Andrés Sánchez Pascual.
Sánchez Pascual tells us that this work ‘is the most coherent conclusion, the necessary conclusion, of his entire mental path. If Nietzsche’s thought does not lead to The Antichrist, it leads nowhere’. And he adds that to remain in his previous texts and ‘not to advance to The Antichrist is, quite simply, not to dare to look Nietzsche in the eye’.
There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 7, “On Reading and Writing”.
Yesterday I said a few harsh words about the founding cucks in the neighbouring country to the north, but here things were even worse: Hernán Cortés himself married an Indian woman and had a mestizo child with her! At least the northern Protestants would take a little longer to repudiate their anti-miscegenation laws but Catholic Cortés did it from the start!
On the other side of the Atlantic, things were never much better, as the Europeans had already betrayed themselves with Christianity for many centuries. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche told some home truths to his compatriots. In §4 of ‘The Improvers of Mankind’ Nietzsche wrote:
These regulations [the Laws of Manu] are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan ‘humaneness’ has has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become genius — primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.
Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity — the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.
In §5 he adds a sentence: ‘all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral’.
Nietzsche starts the next chapter, ‘What the Germans lack’ with these words: ‘Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths’. They have ‘more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show, much cheerfulness and self-respect…’
But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely…
How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown — how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation — and drink beer?… the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!
And in §5 of that chapter Nietzsche adds: ‘In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims’. In §7 he adds: ‘Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this… That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace’.
Countless times I have cited my favourite Nietzsche quote, which I put as an epigraph in the seminal text of this site, ‘The Red Giant’ (German translation here) which we published in 2009 on Blogspot, even before the incarnation of The West’ Darkest Hour on WordPress (I was deplatformed from both!).
Now I will put that quote in context, by citing the preceding pages of ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ of Twilight of the Idols. It is here that can be seen that it’s very difficult to follow Nietzsche without considerable European culture, which is why I read Andrés Sánchez Pascual’s heavily annotated German-Spanish translation of Twilight of the Idols. Without Sánchez Pascual’s explanatory endnotes I couldn’t have followed the philosopher in his finesses.[1]
The German-English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale of Twilight of the Idols can be read here, but the translators removed a good amount of italics from the original German (italics that I add back below). Reddish colour added on my favourite Nietzsche quote:
§ 1My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth]. Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character. Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school of smoothness — with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas — in translation, the milk cow with ‘a beautiful style.’ Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Les frères de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer — music by Offenbach. Zola: or ‘the delight in stinking.’
§ 2Renan. — Theology: or the corruption of reason by ‘original sin’ (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile des humbles — and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic — in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile — like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.
§ 3Sainte Beuve. — Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping — a female at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge and a female’s sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of médisance [slander], inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic — for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau’s instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye — hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of ‘objectivity.’ It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself — there he is a master. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.
§ 4De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen — or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: ‘the religion of the heart.’
§ 5G. Eliot. — They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. — We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.
If there is something I really love about Nietzsche it is that, once you realise that Christianity and its bastard son neochristianity are the cause of all Western evil, everyone in today’s West seems incredibly idiotic to you: something similar to the child with zero superego—the vindication of the Id!—who sees the king naked.
_______________
[1]Friedrich Nietzsche: Crepúsculo de los ídolos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, fourteenth edition: 1996 (I originally read the 1973 or 1976 edition, a copy now lost).
Nietzsche had very little time left with a lucid mind, something he was well aware of, as we saw from Paul Deussen’s testimony about his visit to Sils-Maria. Therefore, working frantically in Turin in 1888, Nietzsche left no less than six works ready for printing: The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce homo, Dithyrambs to Dionysus and Nietzsche contra Wagner! The frenzy of his writing, which as I said reminds me of Van Gogh’s frenzy those very same months under the splendid sun of Arles—which brought out the colours like few other places in the French countryside!—brings to mind Stefan Zweig’s metaphor: the daimon wanted to get out of those bodies using maximum artistic works before they were both burnt by their inner fires (one committed suicide, the other ended up mad).
When the frenzy of writing about everything he had in mind began, Nietzsche was forty-three years old, and in his letters, he admits that his new invective against Wagner was only ‘a distraction’, and that the main work was The Will to Power. But before his magnum opus, now that the muse was visiting him every day without mercy or respite, he wanted to publish a ‘compendium’ of his philosophy: so he rips up the material accumulated for his projected capital work, tears out pages here and there, and shortly sends the compendium to the publisher.
It is essential to know the letters Nietzsche wrote at that time to find out exactly what was going on in his frenetic mind. On 12 September 1888, he told Peter Gast about the compendium: ‘The writing can serve as a kind of initiation, as an appetizer for my Transvaluation of Values’. By this time Nietzsche had already changed the title of his main work, The Will to Power, to Transvaluation of Values. To George Brandes, his discoverer in Copenhagen, he wrote the next day; and to Deussen, the day after that:
Dear friend…
There is already in the hands of my publisher another manuscript, containing a very rigorous and subtle expression of all my philosophical heterodoxy—hidden under much grace and malignity. It is called: A Psychologist’s Idleness. —Ultimately, these two writings [i.e., The Case of Wagner and A Psychologist’s Idleness] are but mere recreations amid an inordinately grave and decisive task, which, if understood, will split the history of mankind into two halves. The meaning of it is stated in five words: Transvaluation of all values.
Around this time he also writes to his old and very understanding friend, the theologian Overbeck:
Dear friend…
To my surprise, the first book of The Transvaluation of All Values is now ready, in its final form, up to the middle. Its energy and transparency are such that perhaps no philosopher has ever achieved them before. It seems to me as if I had suddenly learned to write.
As far as the content or the passion of the problem is concerned, this work splits the millennia—the first book is called, let it be clear between us, The Antichrist, and I would swear that all that has hitherto been thought and said to criticise Christianity is futile childishness in comparison with it. —Such an enterprise makes necessary, even from a hygienic point of view, deep pauses and distractions. One of them will reach you in about ten days: it is called The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem. It’s an all-out declaration of war…
Also, a second manuscript, completely ready for printing, is already in the hands of Mr G.G. Naumann. However, we shall wait a little longer. It is entitled A Psychologist’s Idleness and is very dear to me because it expresses my essential philosophical heterodoxy in a very brief (perhaps also witty) way. Otherwise, it is very ‘tempting’: I say my ‘finesses’ about countless thinkers and artists of today.
Next post I will give some amusing examples of the latter.
Peter Gast’s letter to Nietzsche contained a sentence that led to the title being changed from A Psychologist’s Idleness to Twilight of the Idols. Gast wrote: ‘Ah, I beg you if it is unlawful for an unfit man to beg: a more brilliant, more splendid title!’ Nietzsche replied on 27 September:
Dear friend…
As far as the title was concerned, my own reservations had anticipated your very human objection: I finally found in the words of the prologue the formula which will perhaps also satisfy the need felt by you.
What you write about ‘heavy artillery’ I simply have to accept, being as I am about to finish the first book of the Transvaluation. It really ends with horrible detonations: I don’t think that in all literature you will find anything parallel to this first book as far as orchestral sonority (including cannon fire) is concerned. —The new title (which brings with it very minor modifications in three or four passages) will be:
Twilight of the Idols
or
How to Philosophise with the Hammer
by
F.N.
Proofreading was completed at the beginning of November, and on the 25th of the same month, Nietzsche received the first copies of the work. It would be the last of his writings to reach his hands while he was still lucid (Twilight of the Idols would go on sale at the beginning of the following year).
