From Fable to Force: Nietzsche’s Abolition of the True World and the Birth of Post-Metaphysics

The Twilight of Metaphysics. AI art

Introduction

In a single, sharp blow delivered in Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche declares the “true world” finally abolished. This culmination, found in section six of “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable,” is not a mere stylistic gesture but the endpoint of a long philosophical lineage. In tracing the historical construction—and eventual deconstruction—of the transcendent domain beyond appearances, Nietzsche dissolves both poles of the dualism: the transcendent ideal and its worldly shadow. In doing so, he prepares the ground for a philosophy grounded not in being, but in becoming. The phrase that concludes the parable—“Incipit Zarathustra”—announces the beginning of an alternative mode of thought: affirmative, dynamic, and liberated from the metaphysical scaffolding of Platonism and Christianity.

The History of an Error

Nietzsche’s six-part sketch in Twilight of the Idols offers a concise genealogy of the concept of the “true world.” At first, it is attainable by the wise; then, deferred for the pious; next, imagined as an abstract moral imperative; then doubted; then deemed useless; and finally—abolished. The final section reads:

“The ‘true world’—we have abolished. What world remained? The apparent one perhaps?… But no! with the true world we have also abolished the apparent one! Incipit Zarathustra” (Nietzsche, 2005, p. 170).

With this gesture, Nietzsche brings to a close the metaphysical edifice built upon a binary of reality and illusion. The “error” is not the invention of truth per se, but its location in an unreachable world beyond experience. By tracking this lineage, Nietzsche exposes the progressive emptying of the concept of truth, turning what was once a guiding ideal into a sterile fiction.

His philosophical hammer smashes both the heavenly and the earthly orders constructed by this dichotomy. In abolishing the “true world,” he simultaneously dissolves the “apparent” one, for the latter had only ever existed in opposition to the former. This double negation doesn’t leave a void, but rather clears the space for Zarathustra’s entrance—Nietzsche’s poetic vehicle for rethinking existence beyond metaphysics.

Will to Power and Eternal Return: Forces over Essences

The collapse of the metaphysical divide demands a new ontological framework. Nietzsche responds with his twin doctrines of will to power and eternal return. These ideas, while distinct, work in tandem to unseat the notion of static substances.

The will to power proposes that at the core of all life is not a thing, but a striving—a drive to grow, dominate, transform. It is not a metaphysical principle but an interpretive lens through which reality can be understood as the interplay of dynamic forces. Nietzsche writes:

“This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And even you yourselves are this will to power—and nothing besides!” (Will to Power, §1067, Nietzsche, 1968).

Complementing this is the idea of the eternal return, introduced in The Gay Science. It challenges us to imagine living our lives again and again, identically, in an infinite loop. This repetition without progression or redemption obliterates any teleological hope for transcendence. It is a thought experiment designed to test one’s ability to affirm existence entirely, without recourse to higher justification:

“What if a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it… you will have to live once more…’” (The Gay Science, §341, Nietzsche, 1974).

Together, these concepts offer an anti-essentialist vision of the world as flux, where values are not discovered but created, not fixed but evolving.

Incipit Zarathustra: The Beginning of Affirmation

The phrase “Incipit Zarathustra” signals not just the end of an error, but the start of a new mode of thinking. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s prophet descends from the mountains not with commandments, but with challenges—to overcome man, to embrace becoming, to affirm life even in its darkest corners.

The death of God—Nietzsche’s name for the collapse of transcendent sources of meaning—makes possible the revaluation of all values. Without metaphysical guarantees, values become matters of interpretation, struggle, and creativity. In Nietzsche’s words:

“Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it¹?” (The Gay Science, §125, Nietzsche, 1974).

Zarathustra’s entrance marks a new beginning: not the replacement of one doctrine with another, but a rupture from the very logic of metaphysical opposition.

¹ “It” refers to the death of God, the central theme of the preceding passage in which Nietzsche declares, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”

From Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida

Nietzsche’s gesture reverberates deeply in 20th-century philosophy. Martin Heidegger, while seeing Nietzsche as the “last metaphysician,” also understood him as the thinker who brings metaphysics to a close by completing its inner logic. For Heidegger:

“Nietzsche's philosophy is the consummation of Western metaphysics” (Nietzsche, Vol. I, Heidegger, 1979, p. 208).

Yet it is precisely this consummation that opens a path beyond—toward the question of Being itself.

Jacques Derrida, inheriting both Heidegger and Nietzsche, reads the history of Western thought as a “metaphysics of presence.” Nietzsche’s abolition of the true world exposes this structure and allows Derrida to develop his notion of différance—the endless deferral and differentiation of meaning that resists closure.

“There is no outside-text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte)” (Derrida, 1976, p. 158), Derrida writes, echoing Nietzsche’s own suspicion of metaphysical origins. This assertion—that there is no meaning outside the play of signs—closely parallels Nietzsche’s claim in Twilight of the Idols that “there is nothing outside the whole” (es gibt nichts außer dem Ganzen), which likewise denies any metaphysical origin or external foundation. Both thinkers insist that meaning, whether existential or textual, arises only within an immanent, interconnected system and cannot appeal to a transcendent outside. Nietzsche’s hammering critique thus becomes the precondition for deconstruction: an invitation to think otherwise, without the crutch of ultimate grounds.

Conclusion

By narrating the death of the “true world,” Nietzsche dismantles the architecture of metaphysics built on the scaffolding of binary oppositions. In abolishing both the ideal and its supposed counterfeit, he offers a path not toward nihilism, but affirmation. His doctrines of force and return clear the ruins of transcendence, making room for new valuations rooted in life itself. The resonance of this gesture is profound, rippling through the work of Heidegger and Derrida, who, each in their own way, continue the task of thinking beyond the metaphysical tradition Nietzsche so elegantly declared a fable.

References

Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and Difference (A. Bass, Trans.). University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. (1979). Nietzsche (Vol. I). Harper & Row.
Nietzsche, F. (1968). The Will to Power (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Eds.). Vintage.
Nietzsche, F. (1974). The Gay Science (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Vintage.
Nietzsche, F. (2005). Twilight of the Idols (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Penguin.