''The Dawn of Day'' or ''Dawn'' or ''Daybreak'' (german: Morgenröte – Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile; historical orthography: ''Morgenröthe – Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurtheile''; English: ''The Dawn of Day/ Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality'') is an 1881 book by the German philosopher

Friedrich Nietzsche Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (; or ; 15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, prose poet, cultural critic, philologist, and composer whose work has exerted a profound influence on contemporary philosophy. He began his ca ...

. According to the Nietzsche scholar Keith Ansell-Pearson, it is the least studied of all of Nietzsche's works.

Themes

Nietzsche de-emphasizes the role of hedonism as a motivator and accentuates the role of a "feeling of power." His

relativism Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. The ...

, both

moral A moral (from Latin ''morālis'') is a message that is conveyed or a lesson to be learned from a story or event. The moral may be left to the hearer, reader, or viewer to determine for themselves, or may be explicitly encapsulated in a maxim. ...

and

cultural Culture () is an umbrella term which encompasses the social behavior, institutions, and norms found in human societies, as well as the knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, capabilities, and habits of the individuals in these groups.Tyl ...

, and his critique of Christianity also reach greater maturity. In ''Daybreak'' Nietzsche devotes a lengthy passage to his criticism of Christian biblical

exegesis Exegesis ( ; from the Greek , from , "to lead out") is a critical explanation or interpretation of a text. The term is traditionally applied to the interpretation of Biblical works. In modern usage, exegesis can involve critical interpretatio ...

, including its arbitrary interpretation of objects and images in the

Old Testament The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. T ...

as prefigurations of Christ's crucifixion. The polemical, antagonistic and informal style of this aphoristic book, when compared to Nietzsche's later treatments of morality, seems to invite a particular experience. In this text Nietzsche is not concerned with persuading his readers to accept any specific point of view, yet there are prefigurations of many of the ideas more fully developed in his later books. For example, the materialism espoused in this book might seem reducible to a naive scientific objectivism that reduces all phenomena to their natural, mechanical causes, but that is not Nietzsche's strongest perspective, which is perhaps best expressed in '' The Gay Science''. Nietzsche in (93) acknowledges that a universe does not come from God or a creator but physics and science. The aphorism (93) begins from the question in the gospel of John (18:38). This interpretation and development of his thought were to prove errors in dogmatic teaching of Christianity that power and not divinity is the psychology of belief.

Themes

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