Twilight of the Idols

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1. keiferskiMay 2020
   Unfortunately for M., the adjectival form of his name (Machiavellian) has come to mean something rather different from his actual ideas. His political philosophy would be best described as realpolitik.

   Today, we often view the word realpolitik in a somewhat negative sense, because the underlying assumption is that a ruler should be 'good' first and effective second. This is a modern assumption.

   What this article doesn't delve into is the idea of virtù itself, and specifically how (someone like Nietzsche) sees this value and the Renaissance in general as a return to pre-Christian, pre-Platonic ideals of excellence, ones that precede modern ideas of good and evil. It is an idea intimately tied up with aesthetic concerns of self-mastery, clarity, and the dispelling of Platonic (subsequently Christian) idealism. Machiavelli himself was quite interested in the ancients, so this is not surprising.

   https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/machiavelli/#PoweVirtFort

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtù

   This excerpt from Twilight of the Idols (Nietzsche) is maybe the best brief description of the idea. Sorry for the length, the part about Machiavelli specifically is in the third paragraph.

   --

   I am not indebted to the Greeks for anything like such strong impressions; and, to speak frankly, they cannot be to us what the Romans are. One cannot learn from the Greeks—their style is too strange, it is also too fluid, to be imperative or to have the effect of a classic. Who would ever have learnt writing from a Greek! Who would ever have learned it without the Romans!... Do not let anyone suggest Plato to me. In regard to Plato I am a thorough sceptic, and have never been able to agree to the admiration of Plato the artist, which is traditional among scholars. And after all, in this matter, the most refined judges of taste in antiquity are on my side. In my opinion Plato bundles all the forms of style pell-mell together, in this respect he is one[Pg 114] of the first decadents of style: he has something similar on his conscience to that which the Cynics had who invented the satura Menippea. For the Platonic dialogue—this revoltingly self-complacent and childish kind of dialectics—to exercise any charm over you, you must never have read any good French authors,—Fontenelle for instance. Plato is boring.

   In reality my distrust of Plato is fundamental. I find him so very much astray from all the deepest instincts of the Hellenes, so steeped in moral prejudices, so pre-existently Christian—the concept "good" is already the highest value with him,—that rather than use any other expression I would prefer to designate the whole phenomenon Plato with the hard word "superior bunkum," or, if you would like it better, "idealism." Humanity has had to pay dearly for this Athenian having gone to school among the Egyptians (—or among the Jews in Egypt?...) In the great fatality of Christianity, Plato is that double-faced fascination called the "ideal," which made it possible for the more noble natures of antiquity to misunderstand themselves and to tread the bridge which led to the "cross."

   And what an amount of Plato is still to be found in the concept "church," and in the construction, the system and the practice of the church!—My recreation, my predilection, my cure, after all Platonism, has always been Thucydides. Thucydides and perhaps Machiavelli's principe are most closely related to me owing to the absolute determination which they show of refusing to deceive themselves and of seeing reason in reality,—not in "rationality," and still less in "morality." There is no more radical cure than Thucydides for the lamentably rose-coloured idealisation of the Greeks which the "classically-cultured" stripling bears with him into life, as a reward for his public school training. His writings must be carefully studied line by line, and his unuttered thoughts must be read as distinctly as what he actually says. There are few thinkers so rich in unuttered thoughts. In him the culture "of the Sophists"—that is to say, the culture of realism, receives its most perfect expression: this inestimable movement in the midst of the moral and idealistic knavery of the Socratic Schools which was then breaking out in all directions.

   Greek philosophy is the decadence of the Greek instinct: Thucydides is the great summing up, the final manifestation of that strong, severe positivism which lay in the instincts of the ancient Hellene. After all, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes such natures as Thucydides from Plato: Plato is a coward in the face of reality—consequently he takes refuge in the ideal: Thucydides is master of himself,—consequently he is able to master life.

   http://www.gutenberg.org/files/52263/52263-h/52263-h.htm#THI...

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2. andreilysApr 2019
   Reading Nietzsche is like breathing in cold mountain air. Some people can handle the cold, others can't. He's not for everyone, as he makes it intentionally clear.

   He was a stark individualist that put into question a lot of the building blocks of liberal democracy, such as the notion that all men are equal. I don't agree with all of what he puts forth but he is without a doubt one of the most dynamic and influential thinkers of the 19th century and still relevant to read even today.

   If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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3. HNLurker2Apr 2019
   >If you're interested in reading him, start with Twilight of the Idols and Beyond Good and Evil. If you like those two then you can delve into some of his other work such as the Antichrist, On the Geneaology of Morals, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra

   What edition should I read? So I stayed true to the early thinkers that interpreted him (to not be fooled by thinkers like Steven Pinker who trash him).

   Off topic: for a moment I considered learning German just to really understand this man.

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4. upquarkMar 2017
   Strange not to see Nietzsche here. Twilight of the Idols was his first book I read, then I ended up reading all the others without taking a break. Can't agree with everything he says, but it definitely resulted in making a 180 degree in my views on religion and morality.
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5. alnayyirMay 2011
   I don't really care why people believe in their many gods. From one god to the next, the premise is still invalid for the same reasons. I don't take them any more seriously than I would a person suffering from a schizophrenic episode.

   It's not like you seek out worshipers of Thor to find out why they believe that. Your hypocrisy in expecting people to listen to you would be comical if it weren't annoying.

   Rewind a bit.

   Do you know what epistemology is? If you do, then you know why the answer to the question doesn't change from one religion/holy book to the next and you're just trolling.

   If you don't, you're just wasting both our time when you should be reading. MIT OCW isn't a bad place to start. Nietzsche's various works (Beyond Good & Evil, Twilight of the Idols, Antichrist, etc) are also good.

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6. diversityhireDec 2007
   Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience

   William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying & The Sound and the Fury

   Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

   Peter Medawar's The Art of the Soluable

   Designed by Peter Saville

   Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols

   Bloom County Babylon

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