Twilight of the Idols, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense

Though Twilight of the Idols (written in a week in 1888 and subtitled How to Philosophise with a Hammer) came near the end of Nietzsche’s creative life, he actually recommended it as a starting point for the study of his work. This was because from the beginning he viewed it as an introduction to his wide-ranging views.  After an opening chapter of aphorisms - ‘Maxims and Arrows’ – he takes a challenging look at ‘The Problem of Socrates’, continues to buck the trend with ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’, and ‘The Four Great Errors’ (starting with ‘The Error of Confusing Cause and Effect’). He makes a scathing attack on conventional morality in ‘The Improvers of Mankind’ and finishes with a critical look at his own nation in ‘What Germans Lack’.  He roams freely over icons of European culture, dispensing judgment without favour on writers, philosophers, composers and the like in a lively and characteristically Nietzschean torrent: Caryle, Emerson, Rousseau, George Eliot, Dante, Saint