Friedrich Nietzsche:


"Twilight of the Idols" (1888)

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"Twilight of the Idols" (whose German title, "Gotzen-Dammerung" is actually a pun on Richard Wagner's opera "Gotterdammerung", with "gotzen" meaning "false idols" and not "idols") is, compared with his previous books, a masterpiece: you can actually understand what he is writing. Nonetheless, the book is full of contradictions and weak statements that can easily be disproven by any philosopher using elementary logic (that is, any philosopher who has time to waste). His first target is Socrates (and his follower Plato) whom he accuses of introducing the horrible practice of dialectics, which in his opinion caused the decline of Greek civilization. Reason helped the mob conquer Greece and replace the great leaders with mediocre leaders. Next he attacks Kant and metaphysical reasoning in general, the idea that there is truth and there is appearance, i.e. the fairy tale of truth.
Nietzsche's reconstruction of the history of human civilization goes like this. First Plato invented the "true world", that only the sage can attain. Then Christianity turns this into a belief that the true world will be the reward for living a Christian life. Then Kant's version of the "true world" (the noumenal world) becomes something that humans just can never ever know. But if it cannot be known, then what is the point of positing its existence? And it makes no sense to shape our morality on the basis of a world that cannot be known. Our world is the only one that we can deal with, and it is what it is.
Then he attacks morality, which is the most unnatural of states. He attacks Plato and all philosophers after him as having tried to define morality when in fact such a thing does not exist and it is just an excuse for the weak to exert power on the strong. He thinks that religion has turned cause and effect upside down, pretending that the cause is an effect. Hence the person who is derelict is viewed as a sinner, the sin having caused his problems, when in fact he is sinning because he is derelict. Vice and luxury are a consequence of a race's decadence, not the cause of it. This misunderstanding of causes and effects eventually becomes a habit and prevents us from correctly diagnosing the causes. The wrong way to diagnose causes eventually becomes the established norm. Religion and morality in general become the realm of imaginary causes. Then he also attacks the notion of "free will", that in his opinion has been invented to make the individual feel responsible for his actions. A man is viewed as free for the simple purpose of finding him guilty and then punishing him. "Christianity is the metaphysics of the hangman". There is no purpose: one is what one is, and one is part of a whole that is what it is. Nietzsche seems to imply that we can't help being what we are and that this should not be viewed as good or bad. "There are no such things as moral facts".
He mocks the "improvers" of humanity, the people who tame our instincts to turn us into domesticated animals. Taming an animal is not "improving" it: it is, instead, a demeaning of the animal's nature. When we "educate" men, we create caricatures of men. The "sin" is nothing but a strategy to make men sick so that they become weak and can be "improved", i.e. manipulated.
Mostly, as usual, he is ranting against this and against that. He laments the decline of German culture, criticizes Darwin for drawing the wrong conclusions from the "struggle for survival" (in his opinion it is the weakest who survive, not the strongest), advises doctors to let sick people die because they are parasites of society, criticizes a society created on the false notion that we are all born equal, characterizes democracy as a sign of decadence, hails czarist Russia as the last great nation on Earth, depicts socialism as the ultimate degenerate ideology because it wants to defend the working class which, instead, deserves to be exploited, and praises only two writers, Dostoevsky and Goethe (having previously hailed Cesare Borgia as his hero).
I see him as a precursor of Freud: someone who psychoanalyzes the human being when, in reality, he is the one who needs a psychologist.