Phenomenological Reviews

Book | Chapter

186695

Twilight of the icons

David B. Allison

pp. 179-185

Abstract

In a way that strikingly anticipates the recent work of Jean Baudrillard, Nietzsche seems continually preoccupied with the questions of error, distortion, falsification, and how the conceptual system results in a world which is hardly represented, so much as fundamentally constructed, by virtue of our discourse about it.1 In short, Nietzsche attributes the hyperreality of our traditional world to the simulation ingredient in rationality itself — specifically, to the vehicle of rationality, the signifying medium of language. Nietzsche's account is perhaps more historically comprehensive than Baudrillard's four-staged evolution of the hyperreal, since Nietzsche discusses at length how the relation of reference, or conceptual representation, gets elaborated in the first place — such that the concept or the idea can be asserted, to stand for, the real.2 Nietzsche analyzes this derivation in the section entitled "Reason in Philosophy," in his work of 1888, The Twilight of the Idols.3 Then, in the following section of the same work, he sketches out what he calls "The History of an Error," namely, a genealogy of reversion — a devolution, as it were — of the very pretense of such a simulation as the real, the true. He subtitles the account, "How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable." This devolution closely anticipates Baudrillard's own account, and for all purposes, it is from Nietzsche's analysis that Baudrillard devised his own. Nietzsche goes on, however, to show the specific content of what such a hyperreal world entails, and in doing so, directs his critique against Christianity — a frequent target for Nietzsche. More importantly, the critique is directed against the foundational terms of Western thought itself, which terms, or ideals, or "idols" traditionally served to explain and lend meaning to the human condition, thence to address that condition, and ostensibly, would help enable us to improve it.4 Finally, in The Antichrist,5 Nietzsche proposes to explain what he sees as an entire set of motivations which subtend the terms and the initial construction of this hyperreal world.

Publication details

Published in:

Babich Babette (1999) Nietzsche, epistemology, and philosophy of science II: Nietzsche and the sciences. Dordrecht, Springer.

Pages: 179-185

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2428-9_15

Full citation:

Allison David B. (1999) „Twilight of the icons“, In: B. Babich (ed.), Nietzsche, epistemology, and philosophy of science II, Dordrecht, Springer, 179–185.