Showing results by narrator "D. E. Wittkower" in All Categories

"The Twilight of the Idols", Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo: “If anyone should desire to obtain a rapid sketch of how everything before my time was standing on its head, he should begin reading me in this book. That which is called ‘Idols’ on the title-page is simply the old truth that has been believed in hitherto. In plain English, The Twilight of the Idols means that the old truth is on its last legs.

Anyone, as Freud tells us in "Reflections on War and Death", forced to react against his own impulses may be described as a hypocrite, whether he is conscious of it or not. One might even venture to assert - it is still Freud's argument - that our contemporary civilization favors this sort of hypocrisy and that there are more civilized hypocrites than truly cultured persons, and it is even a question whether a certain amount of hypocrisy is not indispensable to maintain civilization.