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The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
In 1888, the last sane year of his life Nietzsche produced these two brief but devastating books.Twilight of the Idols, 'a grand declaration of war' on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for The Anti-Christ, a final assault on institutional Christianity. Yet although Nietzsche makes a compelling case for the 'Dionysian' artist and celebrates magnificently two of his great heroes, Goethe and Cesare Borgia, he also gives a moving, almost ecstatic portrait of his only worthy Christ. Both works show Nietsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both combine utterly unfair attacks on individuals with amazingly acute surveys of the whole contemporary cultural scene. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers.
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First published January 1, 1889
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About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche
4,331 books25.5k followersFriedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.
Nietzsche's work spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favour of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the "death of God" and the profound crisis of nihilism; the notion of Apollonian and Dionysian forces; and a characterisation of the human subject as the expression of competing wills, collectively understood as the will to power. He also developed influential concepts such as the Übermensch and his doctrine of eternal return. In his later work, he became increasingly preoccupied with the creative powers of the individual to overcome cultural and moral mores in pursuit of new values and aesthetic health. His body of work touched a wide range of topics, including art, philology, history, music, religion, tragedy, culture, and science, and drew inspiration from Greek tragedy as well as figures such as Zoroaster, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Wagner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
After his death, Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth became the curator and editor of his manuscripts. She edited his unpublished writings to fit her German ultranationalist ideology, often contradicting or obfuscating Nietzsche's stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. Through her published editions, Nietzsche's work became associated with fascism and Nazism. 20th-century scholars such as Walter Kaufmann, R.J. Hollingdale, and Georges Bataille defended Nietzsche against this interpretation, and corrected editions of his writings were soon made available. Nietzsche's thought enjoyed renewed popularity in the 1960s and his ideas have since had a profound impact on 20th- and early 21st-century thinkers across philosophy—especially in schools of continental philosophy such as existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism—as well as art, literature, music, poetry, politics, and popular culture.
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December 7, 2024
As flies to wanton boys
So we are to the gods:
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear
The gods to Friedrich Nietszche, of course, are our snooping societal masters. Nietszche wanted to supersede his sleeping self with the Overman.
Kazantzakis puts it much better: Christ is the Overman within us who must be born and reborn from the conflict between mind and matter!
Nietszche wanted to supersede himself with himself: a sleight of hand that is madness, for he had not prepared for the Leap of Faith that Kazantzakis found.
This book is one I read - or rather listened to - in a marvellous new translation on LibriVox (a great FREE audiobook app).
It’s literally devastating in its effect.
Nietzsche wrote it in the Advent of hiis own irreparable freefall into the Pit of Insanity.
It shows.
Nietzsche had become a boy/god, and here he tries to kill the middle class for his sport. It’s all grist for his mill. For this is just the sane face of his two-faced madness.
It is a rape, pillage and plunder of any and all extant Western value. As Sartre would say, it is “de trop” - a climacteric Battle to Death that leaves only “scorched earth” in its wake.
Do we really need this now, at a time when sacred values are crumbling to the ground all around us?
I don’t.
For Nietzsche, with his too-solid conception of the Void of Evil, proves to us once and for all that the true Vision of the Sinkhole of the Void leads only to disease.
His righteous white-hot anger is simply what had previously hid it from him, and us.
If, like him, we are suspended over the Void of our Fear - and, like him, we fall into it - can this Black Paranoid Hole of Fear ever expel us? I think so, but don’t try it yourself.
I think so, because with a modicum of Faith that’s what happened to me, fifty years ago.
It expelled me, but for years its magnetic pull brought me back - again and again - to its brink. The return to the scene of the crime.
Evil is that Black Hole, and I wanted to defeat it.
But there was no way I could, as long as its magnetism brought me back for more battle. For a thirst for revenge won’t defeat Evil. It’s a mere - live and thriving - Nothingness.
Only a lifetime of love and humility can defeat it.
You may relish Nietzsche’s quicksilver profundity - though that’s just a product of a manic imagination - but I, with my history of cauchemars, do not.
His insights remain nevertheless profound in spite of his detractors. He has pointed the way.
Isn’t that part and parcel of GROWING UP, though? For to grow wise we must indeed grow up!
In my own case, I grew up OVERNIGHT, and those memories will always prove enervating to me, for I found my only possible future in the Orthodoxy of concrete normalcy.
And a settled life. That has served me well, I might add...
And find it I did. Whew.
BUT I only have this particular LibriVox item on PAUSE.
I won’t delete this, but keep it as a warning of how NOT to write Responsibly - a warning I must continually heed, myself.
For to continue in that doggedly persevering bad faith is just plain bad manners!
And it’s a fashion of blogging NO one should attempt -
IF our current Débâcle is to leave any survivors.
So we are to the gods:
They kill us for their sport.
King Lear
The gods to Friedrich Nietszche, of course, are our snooping societal masters. Nietszche wanted to supersede his sleeping self with the Overman.
Kazantzakis puts it much better: Christ is the Overman within us who must be born and reborn from the conflict between mind and matter!
Nietszche wanted to supersede himself with himself: a sleight of hand that is madness, for he had not prepared for the Leap of Faith that Kazantzakis found.
This book is one I read - or rather listened to - in a marvellous new translation on LibriVox (a great FREE audiobook app).
It’s literally devastating in its effect.
Nietzsche wrote it in the Advent of hiis own irreparable freefall into the Pit of Insanity.
It shows.
Nietzsche had become a boy/god, and here he tries to kill the middle class for his sport. It’s all grist for his mill. For this is just the sane face of his two-faced madness.
It is a rape, pillage and plunder of any and all extant Western value. As Sartre would say, it is “de trop” - a climacteric Battle to Death that leaves only “scorched earth” in its wake.
Do we really need this now, at a time when sacred values are crumbling to the ground all around us?
I don’t.
For Nietzsche, with his too-solid conception of the Void of Evil, proves to us once and for all that the true Vision of the Sinkhole of the Void leads only to disease.
His righteous white-hot anger is simply what had previously hid it from him, and us.
If, like him, we are suspended over the Void of our Fear - and, like him, we fall into it - can this Black Paranoid Hole of Fear ever expel us? I think so, but don’t try it yourself.
I think so, because with a modicum of Faith that’s what happened to me, fifty years ago.
It expelled me, but for years its magnetic pull brought me back - again and again - to its brink. The return to the scene of the crime.
Evil is that Black Hole, and I wanted to defeat it.
But there was no way I could, as long as its magnetism brought me back for more battle. For a thirst for revenge won’t defeat Evil. It’s a mere - live and thriving - Nothingness.
Only a lifetime of love and humility can defeat it.
You may relish Nietzsche’s quicksilver profundity - though that’s just a product of a manic imagination - but I, with my history of cauchemars, do not.
His insights remain nevertheless profound in spite of his detractors. He has pointed the way.
Isn’t that part and parcel of GROWING UP, though? For to grow wise we must indeed grow up!
In my own case, I grew up OVERNIGHT, and those memories will always prove enervating to me, for I found my only possible future in the Orthodoxy of concrete normalcy.
And a settled life. That has served me well, I might add...
And find it I did. Whew.
BUT I only have this particular LibriVox item on PAUSE.
I won’t delete this, but keep it as a warning of how NOT to write Responsibly - a warning I must continually heed, myself.
For to continue in that doggedly persevering bad faith is just plain bad manners!
And it’s a fashion of blogging NO one should attempt -
IF our current Débâcle is to leave any survivors.
Read
June 19, 2007Twilight of the Idols is one of my favorite books of all time. My favorite quote from the book is, "To attack the passions at their roots means to attack life at its roots." Nietzsche is, as has often been said, religion for philosophers. This book is about the meaning of life, mostly, and how we should conduct ourselves in light of that meaning, or lack thereof. At the time, I was coming from a Judeo-Christian background, though I wasn't a Christian any longer, and it really opened my eyes to other opinions on life.
June 7, 2012
“Twilight of the Idols” and “The Anti-Christ” are two of the last books, both composed in 1888, that Nietzsche wrote before his final descent into syphilis-induced madness which occurred during the first week of 1889. It continues themes he had developed in his earlier work, and “The Anti-Christ” especially approaches Christianity with a particularly ferocious and critical eye.
As anyone who has thumbed through a volume of Nietzsche can tell you, his work isn’t composed of clear, well-defined propositions to be ultimately accepted or rejected; instead, his arguments have a kind of ravishing rhetorical force to them. His writing is less apothegmatic here than in other work, but is still never syllogistic or ratiocinated in such a way that we usually associate with philosophy. This isn’t a mistake; he intended his work to speak as much if not more through the force of style than anything else. In his “attack” on Socrates in the first book, he calls reason itself a “tyrant,” and wonders if Socrates enjoys his “own form of ferocity in the knife-thrust of the syllogism.”
The greatest part of “Twilight of the Idols” is the chapter called “Morality as Anti-Nature” in which he says that all moral systems up until now, and particularly Christianity, are wrong precisely because they try to deform and reshape human nature to their own image. For Nietzsche, the moral is the natural, but Christianity – and this is really an attack on all religious systems, though some more than others – stops being moral when it tries to impose concepts that are
completely foreign to human beings like the idea that “everyone is created the same” or a selfless Christian charity. Whether or not you agree with the thrust of the argument, I found the idea of moral systems as rational attempts to remold nature an interesting one. Of course, people jump on these passages to try to make him look like some kind of nihilist or immoralist, when nothing could be further from the truth. He simply wants the principles and drives of human nature to inform ethical systems, not something foreign to them. Freud may have picked up on this, admitting as he did a great debt to Nietzsche. “The Anti-Christ” goes on to attack what I would call religious psychology, and especially the moral precepts of Christianity.
If you haven’t read Nietzsche and have some sort of caricature of what he says in your head, start with this book, probably one of his most readable, which is ironic when considered in the light of his mental breakdown immediately thereafter. His attacks are never the ones you hear from atheists these days, “that the idea of God is irrational” or “we have no scientific evidence for such a being.” His criticisms are fresh and invigorating, including accusations that the apostle Paul distorted Christ’s message beyond measure and that Christianity focuses on another world essentially devaluing this one. Again, this isn’t about agreement or disagreement with his basic assertions. (Some of the people on whom he had the biggest influence fundamentally disagreed with what he said.) It’s the punch that he packs while delivering them. There was a reason why he subtitled the book “Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert” (“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”).
Other than Nietzsche’s writing itself, some of the most impressive things about him are the downright preposterousness of the criticisms that people levy against him, the sheer width and breadth of intellectual laziness with which people read him. Just from reading a small sampling of the reviews posted on this book alone, there are accusations of him “deriding self-control” and being “obnoxiously right-wing,” the first a willful misreading, the second a risible attempt to foist a set of anachronistic political opinions on the ideas of a man who was hugely contemptuous of the German politics of his own day, left and right alike. Those who are trying to discover their token protofascist in Nietzsche would do better to look elsewhere, especially at his contemporaries Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, all of whose ideas make Nietzsche’s supposed illiberalism look like mere child’s play (for details, see either Fritz Stern’s marvelous “The Politics of Cultural Despair” or my review of it posted on this site). That Nietzsche still serves as a lodestar around which people feel free to hang their own various political opinions can only be a testament to his continued cultural importance.
As anyone who has thumbed through a volume of Nietzsche can tell you, his work isn’t composed of clear, well-defined propositions to be ultimately accepted or rejected; instead, his arguments have a kind of ravishing rhetorical force to them. His writing is less apothegmatic here than in other work, but is still never syllogistic or ratiocinated in such a way that we usually associate with philosophy. This isn’t a mistake; he intended his work to speak as much if not more through the force of style than anything else. In his “attack” on Socrates in the first book, he calls reason itself a “tyrant,” and wonders if Socrates enjoys his “own form of ferocity in the knife-thrust of the syllogism.”
The greatest part of “Twilight of the Idols” is the chapter called “Morality as Anti-Nature” in which he says that all moral systems up until now, and particularly Christianity, are wrong precisely because they try to deform and reshape human nature to their own image. For Nietzsche, the moral is the natural, but Christianity – and this is really an attack on all religious systems, though some more than others – stops being moral when it tries to impose concepts that are
completely foreign to human beings like the idea that “everyone is created the same” or a selfless Christian charity. Whether or not you agree with the thrust of the argument, I found the idea of moral systems as rational attempts to remold nature an interesting one. Of course, people jump on these passages to try to make him look like some kind of nihilist or immoralist, when nothing could be further from the truth. He simply wants the principles and drives of human nature to inform ethical systems, not something foreign to them. Freud may have picked up on this, admitting as he did a great debt to Nietzsche. “The Anti-Christ” goes on to attack what I would call religious psychology, and especially the moral precepts of Christianity.
If you haven’t read Nietzsche and have some sort of caricature of what he says in your head, start with this book, probably one of his most readable, which is ironic when considered in the light of his mental breakdown immediately thereafter. His attacks are never the ones you hear from atheists these days, “that the idea of God is irrational” or “we have no scientific evidence for such a being.” His criticisms are fresh and invigorating, including accusations that the apostle Paul distorted Christ’s message beyond measure and that Christianity focuses on another world essentially devaluing this one. Again, this isn’t about agreement or disagreement with his basic assertions. (Some of the people on whom he had the biggest influence fundamentally disagreed with what he said.) It’s the punch that he packs while delivering them. There was a reason why he subtitled the book “Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert” (“How to Philosophize with a Hammer”).
Other than Nietzsche’s writing itself, some of the most impressive things about him are the downright preposterousness of the criticisms that people levy against him, the sheer width and breadth of intellectual laziness with which people read him. Just from reading a small sampling of the reviews posted on this book alone, there are accusations of him “deriding self-control” and being “obnoxiously right-wing,” the first a willful misreading, the second a risible attempt to foist a set of anachronistic political opinions on the ideas of a man who was hugely contemptuous of the German politics of his own day, left and right alike. Those who are trying to discover their token protofascist in Nietzsche would do better to look elsewhere, especially at his contemporaries Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, all of whose ideas make Nietzsche’s supposed illiberalism look like mere child’s play (for details, see either Fritz Stern’s marvelous “The Politics of Cultural Despair” or my review of it posted on this site). That Nietzsche still serves as a lodestar around which people feel free to hang their own various political opinions can only be a testament to his continued cultural importance.
April 10, 2008
I had to read this in my Introduction to Philosophy at uni a lifetime ago. My one memory of it that really stands out is how annoyed he made me. I mean, this guy was trashing Socrates – and I’ve always been rather fond of Socrates – and the criticism seemed quite pathetic. I mean, criticising Socrates because he was ugly! What sort of argument is that? Is this really ‘philosophy’?
This book ends with the line, “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.” And do you know what? The idea of the eternal recurrence is just about the only of his major themes that is not touched on in this book. Well, when I say that, it is a bit hard to know, because if there is one thing that Nietzsche can be that is obscure. All the same, I doubt one would feel that they have been ‘taught’ about the eternal recurrence from this book.
This is considered Nietzsche’s most accessible book – which, unfortunately, isn’t really saying all that much. I’ve said it before and will again – Nietzsche is someone that young men really enjoy. His bloody mindedness and near mock fury are very attractive to young men – particularly relatively powerless young men, frustrated young men, even.
I listened to this book last week – after downloading it from here: http://librivox.org/the-twilight-of-t...
I don’t mind librivox recordings, although some of the readers can be a bit stilted. All the same, this one was well read and if there is one thing you can say about Nietzsche, it is that he doesn’t really hold back on his contempt or anger or, well, rants.
I still find a lot of his views obnoxiously right wing – but I’ve mellowed over the years and find him more amusing now than did the younger version of myself. His criticism of Socrates and Christianity – both much for the same reasons – is sharp and in the main an attack from ‘the inside’. Nietzsche would have loved to have been allowed to remain religious, and that, I feel, is part of the reason why his attack on Christianity in particular is so devastatingly pointed.
The aphorisms at the start can be a nice read – many of them are almost poetic. Some of them are really very witty and others do make me think for ages, think while trying to untie the knot he has so skilfully twisted. I like this one, for example: “To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.” Or yet another of his truth is woman quotes (as he does in the first line of Beyond Good and Evil – “Among women: "Truth? Oh, you don't know truth! Is it not an attempt to kill our modesty?"” Yes, it is definitely obscure enough, isn’t it?
So, what’s he on about? Well, I guess the basic idea of this book is that to live an authentic life one doesn’t need to know ‘the truth’ or ‘reason’ or ‘morality’ – what one needs is to grab life by the throat and to live it. Life is like a work of art and we should engage in it as an artist might, as the creator of meaning in our own life. God is dead (although, that isn’t really an idea that is discussed in this work either – explicitly or in any length) and we have to live with the responsibility of not only killing God, but of being responsible for our own lives.
Morality is the history of an error, and the error is in treating everybody as equal. The world has much more ‘noble’ souls who ought never be compared to the herd animals that are most people. We tend to destroy what is best in humans and replace it with the blandness of mediocrity. This is the role that Christianity and Socrates and Civil Society have played.
Nietzsche sees all this – this altruism and charity and common feeling – as signs of degeneracy. It is symptomatic of the weak dominating the strong. But if we were not a degenerate society we would be quite different. We would not worry about the weak, we would act in accordance with our natures.
Like I said, I still find this guy a little hard to take – I was once told that I was taking his ‘social theory’ too much to heart, when really, he meant it as a metaphor to how one ought to live one’s own life. Yeah, maybe – but there is a smell of burning flesh about Nietzsche’s writings that I find a little too sickly and a little too sweet.
This book ends with the line, “I, the last disciple of the philosopher Dionysus — I, the teacher of the eternal recurrence.” And do you know what? The idea of the eternal recurrence is just about the only of his major themes that is not touched on in this book. Well, when I say that, it is a bit hard to know, because if there is one thing that Nietzsche can be that is obscure. All the same, I doubt one would feel that they have been ‘taught’ about the eternal recurrence from this book.
This is considered Nietzsche’s most accessible book – which, unfortunately, isn’t really saying all that much. I’ve said it before and will again – Nietzsche is someone that young men really enjoy. His bloody mindedness and near mock fury are very attractive to young men – particularly relatively powerless young men, frustrated young men, even.
I listened to this book last week – after downloading it from here: http://librivox.org/the-twilight-of-t...
I don’t mind librivox recordings, although some of the readers can be a bit stilted. All the same, this one was well read and if there is one thing you can say about Nietzsche, it is that he doesn’t really hold back on his contempt or anger or, well, rants.
I still find a lot of his views obnoxiously right wing – but I’ve mellowed over the years and find him more amusing now than did the younger version of myself. His criticism of Socrates and Christianity – both much for the same reasons – is sharp and in the main an attack from ‘the inside’. Nietzsche would have loved to have been allowed to remain religious, and that, I feel, is part of the reason why his attack on Christianity in particular is so devastatingly pointed.
The aphorisms at the start can be a nice read – many of them are almost poetic. Some of them are really very witty and others do make me think for ages, think while trying to untie the knot he has so skilfully twisted. I like this one, for example: “To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both — a philosopher.” Or yet another of his truth is woman quotes (as he does in the first line of Beyond Good and Evil – “Among women: "Truth? Oh, you don't know truth! Is it not an attempt to kill our modesty?"” Yes, it is definitely obscure enough, isn’t it?
So, what’s he on about? Well, I guess the basic idea of this book is that to live an authentic life one doesn’t need to know ‘the truth’ or ‘reason’ or ‘morality’ – what one needs is to grab life by the throat and to live it. Life is like a work of art and we should engage in it as an artist might, as the creator of meaning in our own life. God is dead (although, that isn’t really an idea that is discussed in this work either – explicitly or in any length) and we have to live with the responsibility of not only killing God, but of being responsible for our own lives.
Morality is the history of an error, and the error is in treating everybody as equal. The world has much more ‘noble’ souls who ought never be compared to the herd animals that are most people. We tend to destroy what is best in humans and replace it with the blandness of mediocrity. This is the role that Christianity and Socrates and Civil Society have played.
Nietzsche sees all this – this altruism and charity and common feeling – as signs of degeneracy. It is symptomatic of the weak dominating the strong. But if we were not a degenerate society we would be quite different. We would not worry about the weak, we would act in accordance with our natures.
Like I said, I still find this guy a little hard to take – I was once told that I was taking his ‘social theory’ too much to heart, when really, he meant it as a metaphor to how one ought to live one’s own life. Yeah, maybe – but there is a smell of burning flesh about Nietzsche’s writings that I find a little too sickly and a little too sweet.
December 4, 2007
Late Nietzsche is amazing. Finally freed from the constraints of even remotely making sense or forming coherent arguments, Nietzsche invites his readers to make up more or less anything and attribute it to these books. The best part is that, if one were inclined to feel guilty about such loose attributions, by this point in his corpus Nietzsche has already gotten you over any such compunctions.
Read
February 26, 2009Oh Friedrich, how I love a polemic... and while your flaws are glaring as all hell to even the most inane reader, you still say some shit that's just as refreshingly radical today as it was in the late 19th Century. What so many people don't realize about Nietzsche, I think, is how secretly Nietzschean they themselves are. Recommended to all snarky antitheists, die-hard materialists, and general rabble-rousers.
May 25, 2022
Super interesting book, Nietzsche uses psychology to explain why morals exist, and why they’re different in different places.
What I thought was interesting is that Nietzsche spent a lot of time attacking contemporary European morals because even though more and more people were becoming atheists, they still retained Christian morals.
Do you believe in equal rights for all people? Do you believe the strong should pity the weak? That we should protect the oppressed and try to make society more equitable? Almost everyone would say yes, atheists, Christians. It seems like common sense, that any decent, good person would believe these things, but Nietzsche says that these morals aren’t universal or common sense. So much of human history and so many civilizations have valued strength, inequality, nobility, and the domination of the strong over the weak. Our modern morals don’t come from nowhere, they come from the leftovers of Christianity, a religion that values the weak over the strong. If you dig deep enough (Nietzsche says at least) you’ll find a Christain root to most contemporary morals.
And Nietzsche is not a fan of Christianity. He calls it life-denying, or a religion that denies our natural passions and instincts. Isn’t it natural to want sex? To want money? To want power, to be better than others? Christianity takes all these natural desires and calls them sinful, and instead values things that deny these instincts, like poverty, humility, and chastity. Nietzsche was disgusted by this; Christianity was invented by society's weakest people, who couldn’t handle the suffering of life, so they invented a moral system that spiritualized our worst instincts, demonized our best instincts, and hated the world/humanity.
Instead, Nietzsche wanted to create a moral system that affirms life, that spiritualizes our best instincts, not our worst. He praises some societies (Ancient Greece, Rome, Indian caste system) for having these morals, and his outlook on art, beauty and happiness is rooted in his desire to affirm life, not deny it.
There’s a lot more to the book that I didn’t get into. He has a psychological portrait of Jesus that’s super weird and cool, he contrasts Buddhism and Christianity, he hates on secular philosophers who just end up recreating Christian morals (Kant) and he does it all with this passionate, poetic, ultra-angry tone: very cool
This book is insane lol but in a good way. I like to get my assumptions challenged, and I don’t think any book has changed the way I view morality like this one. If you read this with an open mind, you’ll have a lot of questions about public and personal morals. Will definitely read more of Nietzsche.
Quotes
“Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a ‘sinner’, he was in a cage, one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.... There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’”
“‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out – that which I call pathos of distance – characterizes every strong age.”
“Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself...Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind. – One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt”
“Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself – the Socialist does the former, the Christian for example the latter – makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers – in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.”
What I thought was interesting is that Nietzsche spent a lot of time attacking contemporary European morals because even though more and more people were becoming atheists, they still retained Christian morals.
Do you believe in equal rights for all people? Do you believe the strong should pity the weak? That we should protect the oppressed and try to make society more equitable? Almost everyone would say yes, atheists, Christians. It seems like common sense, that any decent, good person would believe these things, but Nietzsche says that these morals aren’t universal or common sense. So much of human history and so many civilizations have valued strength, inequality, nobility, and the domination of the strong over the weak. Our modern morals don’t come from nowhere, they come from the leftovers of Christianity, a religion that values the weak over the strong. If you dig deep enough (Nietzsche says at least) you’ll find a Christain root to most contemporary morals.
And Nietzsche is not a fan of Christianity. He calls it life-denying, or a religion that denies our natural passions and instincts. Isn’t it natural to want sex? To want money? To want power, to be better than others? Christianity takes all these natural desires and calls them sinful, and instead values things that deny these instincts, like poverty, humility, and chastity. Nietzsche was disgusted by this; Christianity was invented by society's weakest people, who couldn’t handle the suffering of life, so they invented a moral system that spiritualized our worst instincts, demonized our best instincts, and hated the world/humanity.
Instead, Nietzsche wanted to create a moral system that affirms life, that spiritualizes our best instincts, not our worst. He praises some societies (Ancient Greece, Rome, Indian caste system) for having these morals, and his outlook on art, beauty and happiness is rooted in his desire to affirm life, not deny it.
There’s a lot more to the book that I didn’t get into. He has a psychological portrait of Jesus that’s super weird and cool, he contrasts Buddhism and Christianity, he hates on secular philosophers who just end up recreating Christian morals (Kant) and he does it all with this passionate, poetic, ultra-angry tone: very cool
This book is insane lol but in a good way. I like to get my assumptions challenged, and I don’t think any book has changed the way I view morality like this one. If you read this with an open mind, you’ll have a lot of questions about public and personal morals. Will definitely read more of Nietzsche.
Quotes
“Like a caricature of a human being, like an abortion: he had become a ‘sinner’, he was in a cage, one had imprisoned him behind nothing but sheer terrifying concepts.... There he lay now, sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself; full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy. In short, a ‘Christian’”
“‘Equality’, a certain actual rendering similar of which the theory of ‘equal rights’ is only the expression, belongs essentially to decline: the chasm between man and man, class and class, the multiplicity of types, the will to be oneself, to stand out – that which I call pathos of distance – characterizes every strong age.”
“Reverence for oneself; love for oneself; unconditional freedom with respect to oneself...Very well! These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind. – One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul – in contempt”
“Whether one attributes one’s feeling vile to others or to oneself – the Socialist does the former, the Christian for example the latter – makes no essential difference. What is common to both, and unworthy in both, is that someone has to be to blame for the fact that one suffers – in short, that the sufferer prescribes for himself the honey of revenge as a medicine for his suffering.”
February 25, 2012
Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist are two short books combined into one. The first is a collection of ideas, opinions and conjectures and the other is his criticism of christianity. My first impression of Twilight of the Idols was that Nietzsche was a bit hysterical … (it was all those exclamation marks)., but it turns out that he was a curmudgeon. He was not impressed with how the German populace was being educated – the teachers! He thought that people now were not taught how to see, to experience or to think. And Romanticism, huh! Concentrating on feelings, emotional impulses and requiring more and more stimulation to feel, was a sign of decadence, of a civilisation in decline. I don’t think he would be very impressed with all today’s high tech gadgetry. He wasn’t a fan of Socrates – he thought that Socrates didn’t know what he was talking about. And to compound that, people who talked about Socrates didn’t know what they were talking about!! The other thing that stuck me was that he was an advocate of euthanasia. People should have the power to end their life when they no longer have power over what gives their life quality. This also means that people would then have the chance to organise to have all the people around them in order to take a full leave-taking.
When I started reading The Antichrist, I began to think that Nietzsche is not a Nihilist – in fact, he asserts that christians are Nihilists because they advocate the denial of life and focus on what they call the hereafter. I asked my husband, who is educated in philosophy, whether Nietzsche was a Nihilist and he said ‘yes and no …’ Even though the book is short, there is a fair amount of repetition. So according to Nietzsche, christianity is closer to the jewish religion than people realise – the ancient jews started to transform the religion towards a christian model with a strict priest hierarchy. Nietzsche is sympathetic towards Jesus. He states, and quite rightly I think, that Jesus was a rebel and was revolting against the priest hierarchy. He wouldn’t recognise christianity today (or at any time – a totally alien concept to him because he was jewish … said my husband on reading this) because the hierarchy that he was fighting against is still in place. Another interesting thing that Nietzsche states is that people change the god if the god is not suiting current circumstances. How often this has happened to the christian god! So, after the death, the remaining followers got revengeful and so it turned out that they ignored his raison d’etre and turned him into a martyr and had his death image made and distributed as reminder to his sentencers. It could be seen as a anti-semitic statement. And gosh, Nietzsche doesn’t pull any punches about Paul’s lust for power and how he fed Jesus’ death into concreting in the priest hierarchy. Amazing stuff.
When I started reading The Antichrist, I began to think that Nietzsche is not a Nihilist – in fact, he asserts that christians are Nihilists because they advocate the denial of life and focus on what they call the hereafter. I asked my husband, who is educated in philosophy, whether Nietzsche was a Nihilist and he said ‘yes and no …’ Even though the book is short, there is a fair amount of repetition. So according to Nietzsche, christianity is closer to the jewish religion than people realise – the ancient jews started to transform the religion towards a christian model with a strict priest hierarchy. Nietzsche is sympathetic towards Jesus. He states, and quite rightly I think, that Jesus was a rebel and was revolting against the priest hierarchy. He wouldn’t recognise christianity today (or at any time – a totally alien concept to him because he was jewish … said my husband on reading this) because the hierarchy that he was fighting against is still in place. Another interesting thing that Nietzsche states is that people change the god if the god is not suiting current circumstances. How often this has happened to the christian god! So, after the death, the remaining followers got revengeful and so it turned out that they ignored his raison d’etre and turned him into a martyr and had his death image made and distributed as reminder to his sentencers. It could be seen as a anti-semitic statement. And gosh, Nietzsche doesn’t pull any punches about Paul’s lust for power and how he fed Jesus’ death into concreting in the priest hierarchy. Amazing stuff.
October 30, 2008
Really amazing stuff. Eye-opening. My first true reading experience of Nietzsche. Even if you disagree with them, the thought that goes into this, the imagination, the excellent questions and questioning -- everybody should read this guy!
June 28, 2023
if you like this review, i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com
230430: these two short works are summation of all his previous works Twilight of the Idols from 1889, The Antichrist from 1895. I have now read 12 books on or about or using him, of which the most original for me are The Philosophy of Nietzsche (Volume 4), the most engaging are Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy and Nietzsche and Philosophy. then 5 books including these as two, by him: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra nz is intelligent, moving, comic, precise... but like? only to the extent I like Heidegger, that is, not so much. I do like him. I am not rabid fanboy because, as I mention in other reviews, I believe nz has reductionist, unsympathetic, unfair conception of human value. his conception of great, necessarily unequal, division of people into (vast majority) 'slaves' and (elite minority) hard-working, noble, leading 'masters' seems at least invention or imposition as absolute equality. aside from summarily dismissing half the human species (women) it is not clear when nz claims to be life-affirming then uses so many words, vitriolic passages, destroying others' work, and claiming he is by nature the great 'No': he refuses to 'systematise' because life must be becoming and not static pretend-perfection: he refuses 'dialogue' and offers assertions (maxims and arrows): he subtitles his work with 'how to philosophise with a hammer', and this is about how subtle he is...
yet the four is sincere...
I really like him as precursor to the existentialists I have read, I find little quotes that inspires generations of thinkers, I find his chapters concise and capacious: these are titles to encourage you to read the book: 1) forward 2) maxims and arrows 3) the problem of socrates 4) 'reason' in philosophy 5) how the 'real world' at last became a myth 6) morality as anti-nature 7) the four great errors 8) the 'improvers' of mankind 9) what the germans lack 10) expeditions of an untimely man 11) what I owe to the ancients 13) the hammer speaks...
this is followed by The Antichrist, short, powerful, and definitely lives up to his title. nz's thesis is basically christianity is everything bad, in inverting classical mores of Greece and Rome, in 'pity', in 'charity', in all kinds of 'womanly' emotional values. there is nothing worse for nz to say than 'just like a woman...'. rare, again, that philosophy text makes me laugh out loud...
yet the four is sincere...
perhaps because I am neither christian nor woman, his outrageous pronouncements are simply less threatening and more comic, with just enough truth in them to make listeners pause... kind of like contemporary, intellectual, philosophical stand-up comedy...
more
Beyond Good and Evil
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
What the Buddha Thought
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy
Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings
Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis
Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation
Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions
After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age
Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School
The Kyoto School
Nishida And Western Philosophy
Buddhism: A Philosophical Approach
What the Buddha Thought
Wisdom Beyond Words: The Buddhist Vision of Ultimate Reality
An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey
Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature
Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation
230430: these two short works are summation of all his previous works Twilight of the Idols from 1889, The Antichrist from 1895. I have now read 12 books on or about or using him, of which the most original for me are The Philosophy of Nietzsche (Volume 4), the most engaging are Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy and Nietzsche and Philosophy. then 5 books including these as two, by him: Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spoke Zarathustra nz is intelligent, moving, comic, precise... but like? only to the extent I like Heidegger, that is, not so much. I do like him. I am not rabid fanboy because, as I mention in other reviews, I believe nz has reductionist, unsympathetic, unfair conception of human value. his conception of great, necessarily unequal, division of people into (vast majority) 'slaves' and (elite minority) hard-working, noble, leading 'masters' seems at least invention or imposition as absolute equality. aside from summarily dismissing half the human species (women) it is not clear when nz claims to be life-affirming then uses so many words, vitriolic passages, destroying others' work, and claiming he is by nature the great 'No': he refuses to 'systematise' because life must be becoming and not static pretend-perfection: he refuses 'dialogue' and offers assertions (maxims and arrows): he subtitles his work with 'how to philosophise with a hammer', and this is about how subtle he is...
yet the four is sincere...
I really like him as precursor to the existentialists I have read, I find little quotes that inspires generations of thinkers, I find his chapters concise and capacious: these are titles to encourage you to read the book: 1) forward 2) maxims and arrows 3) the problem of socrates 4) 'reason' in philosophy 5) how the 'real world' at last became a myth 6) morality as anti-nature 7) the four great errors 8) the 'improvers' of mankind 9) what the germans lack 10) expeditions of an untimely man 11) what I owe to the ancients 13) the hammer speaks...
this is followed by The Antichrist, short, powerful, and definitely lives up to his title. nz's thesis is basically christianity is everything bad, in inverting classical mores of Greece and Rome, in 'pity', in 'charity', in all kinds of 'womanly' emotional values. there is nothing worse for nz to say than 'just like a woman...'. rare, again, that philosophy text makes me laugh out loud...
yet the four is sincere...
perhaps because I am neither christian nor woman, his outrageous pronouncements are simply less threatening and more comic, with just enough truth in them to make listeners pause... kind of like contemporary, intellectual, philosophical stand-up comedy...
more
Beyond Good and Evil
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
What the Buddha Thought
Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment
Nietzsche and Buddhist Philosophy
Buddhist Philosophy: Essential Readings
Buddhist Philosophy: A Historical Analysis
Empty Words: Buddhist Philosophy and Cross-Cultural Interpretation
Buddhism as Philosophy: An Introduction
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
Self, No Self?: Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions
After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age
Philosophers of Nothingness: An Essay on the Kyoto School
The Kyoto School
Nishida And Western Philosophy
Buddhism: A Philosophical Approach
What the Buddha Thought
Wisdom Beyond Words: The Buddhist Vision of Ultimate Reality
An Introduction to Buddhist Philosophy
Why I Am Not a Buddhist
Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey
Samsara, Nirvana, and Buddha Nature
Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation
May 27, 2024
Wow nietzsche absolutely destroyed christianity in this lol. Ngl i underlined so much
November 21, 2020
This a 3-star book, not because of lack of insight or stimulating ideas (there are plenty of these), but because of some apparent inconsistencies which diminish the integrity of the argument (also the blatant sexism). Even though these are Nietzsche’s last books, I think they must be read first because they synthesise his ideology pretty well.
The Twilight of the Idols
The Four Great Errors:
-Uses some neuroscientific arguments to argue that “meaning” and the meaning one attaches to objects and events is simply a result of habit and subjective motivations. This is a rigorous analysis and is consistent with modern psychology.
-The idea of guilt is Christian at its roots and has to be purged.
The Improvers of Mankind:
-There are no moral facts whatsoever.
-Socrates and Plato propagated a “slave morality” which was then adopted by Christianity. This “slave morality” has embedded itself into modernity and is leading humanity into DECADENCE (this word is repeated every second sentence in the book).
Expeditions of an Untimely Man:
-Argues against equality, describes it as subversive and attributes it to the current state of decadence.
The Anti-Christ
Main proposition: “Where the will to power is lacking, there is decline.” Consequently, Christianity is the epitome of abolishment of the will to power and thus the main cause of the decline of humanity.
-States that “Pity on the whole thwarts the Law of Evolution, which is the Law of Selection.” This is a fundamentally wrong statement. It is an incorrect interpretation of the Theory of Evolution because it adopts it almost as a social law rather than a natural law; natural laws are not open for interpretation. They cannot be manipulated to reach social conclusions. The law of gravitation cannot be interpreted so as to state that heavier people are superior because gravity “pulls harder” on them. Evolution by natural selection is natural agent which acts on randomness and chance mutation and does not require any conscious effort. It also has no goal. Therefore, it is fundamentally false to claim that any social manifestation, something such as “pity”, thwarts evolution in any way.
Usually I would have ignored this lack of scientific rigour, which is present in many philosophical works (perhaps with the exception of Russell), but here it seems that the entire argument is built on a false premise. This is relevant as Nietzsche declares himself, later in the “Anti-Christ”, a “practitioner of science”; this is not consistent with many aspects of his thesis.
The Twilight of the Idols
The Four Great Errors:
-Uses some neuroscientific arguments to argue that “meaning” and the meaning one attaches to objects and events is simply a result of habit and subjective motivations. This is a rigorous analysis and is consistent with modern psychology.
-The idea of guilt is Christian at its roots and has to be purged.
The Improvers of Mankind:
-There are no moral facts whatsoever.
-Socrates and Plato propagated a “slave morality” which was then adopted by Christianity. This “slave morality” has embedded itself into modernity and is leading humanity into DECADENCE (this word is repeated every second sentence in the book).
Expeditions of an Untimely Man:
-Argues against equality, describes it as subversive and attributes it to the current state of decadence.
The Anti-Christ
Main proposition: “Where the will to power is lacking, there is decline.” Consequently, Christianity is the epitome of abolishment of the will to power and thus the main cause of the decline of humanity.
-States that “Pity on the whole thwarts the Law of Evolution, which is the Law of Selection.” This is a fundamentally wrong statement. It is an incorrect interpretation of the Theory of Evolution because it adopts it almost as a social law rather than a natural law; natural laws are not open for interpretation. They cannot be manipulated to reach social conclusions. The law of gravitation cannot be interpreted so as to state that heavier people are superior because gravity “pulls harder” on them. Evolution by natural selection is natural agent which acts on randomness and chance mutation and does not require any conscious effort. It also has no goal. Therefore, it is fundamentally false to claim that any social manifestation, something such as “pity”, thwarts evolution in any way.
Usually I would have ignored this lack of scientific rigour, which is present in many philosophical works (perhaps with the exception of Russell), but here it seems that the entire argument is built on a false premise. This is relevant as Nietzsche declares himself, later in the “Anti-Christ”, a “practitioner of science”; this is not consistent with many aspects of his thesis.
January 6, 2019
tbh Twilight of the Idols belongs to 5/5,
and The Anti-Christ, that one, I rate 4.5/5.
Those twosome books are great enough for further reading but let me suggest to read "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" first. Because I should have to read it first but I didn't. V
and The Anti-Christ, that one, I rate 4.5/5.
Those twosome books are great enough for further reading but let me suggest to read "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" first. Because I should have to read it first but I didn't. V
January 27, 2022
I… did not like this book.
January 29, 2023
Wild ride. Bro is hilarious. Highkey speaking facts too.
December 28, 2020
I picked this book up as a 'taster' to Nietzsche and his philosophies- actually for philosophy itself too, and I have to say- this is beyond any sort of reproach or criticism! We're riding on a train, and Nietzsche is the driver; there are many crags and potholes in the rails, but he swerves and tilts the train with an astonishing force, with a brutal nerve- he doesn't fear anything in the way and by the time we've reached the destination, we're as good friends as ever.
And then, in the end, came he, came Nietzsche.
*
To return to its finer aspects, however. At times this was page-turning, at times it was enormously boring, and at others, it was merely a big "rant". The tone is often war-like and bitter and angry, but the reasons for such denunciation is not always given. Obviously, this is that type of the book which needs constant perusal- once every month, I daresay- and only after such re-reading will the meanings be more concise, and there are instances when Nietzsche seems to be quite irrational...but these can be turned into a fresh conversation point:
Man:- So, you hate Christianity, do you?
Nietzsche:- Hate it? Hate it?! Oh, my ass, if you only knew how much I hate it, what a parasitic curse it is on life; oh, it's the greatest, worst thing ever on Earth, oh damn...
Man:- Okay, okay, I get the general drift...now, is there any reason why you hate it?
Nietzsche:- Reason?! Christianity itself is a spider on the walls of reason! My curse against it, the condemnation against it is so damn...
Man:- Forgive me, but I asked for the reason, not the criticism...
Nietzsche:- Reason?- You again ask me! The highest critic against reason- that is Christianity, you need not dwell on the why's of it. It just is!
Man:- Alright, alright, take it cool. What do you think of Socrates, then?
Nietzsche:- Socrates! Socrates the ugly Greek,- he was born in a rabble, he's the typical decadent, the interbred monster, you ought to tell that right to his face! Is this understood?!
.......-What sets us apart is not that we recognise no God, either in history or in nature or behind nature- but that we find that which has been reverenced as God not 'godlike' but pitiable absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life.......
Moreover, Nietzsche's preoccupation with various subtle, everyday issues is startlingly fresh and relevant. "Art"- a consequence of bodily or mental intoxication! I know I'm repeating myself, but that line really got to me. Then there's the contempt for Germany- for German universities, for its education, for its scholarly abyss...('Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I might venture to address a few words to them'), for its obsessions, and oh, how can I forget this?- Goethe was the only German writer whom he admired ('Goethe- the only German event!'). I'm almost thinking we should have had a modern-day Nietzsche to blast all unnecessary and useless institutions here...
What more is there to say? I loved the book. It took me on a journey, the kind that you think will never end, and which you never want to end, either, but then, Nietzsche had only a few months to live sanely. In early 1889 he collapsed,- but not before giving the ultimate blow to what he felt was the 'the one immortal blemish on mankind'.
Mainly, I think, my praise for Nietzsche lies in the fact that he debunked the long-standing European (or Western, you can say) myth of supremacy, of its damn superiority. Well into the nineteenth century can be found these "seeds" of self-confidence in all those nations, where that tattoo of Christianity beat ever higher, as came time.
And then, in the end, came he, came Nietzsche.
-Our age is proud of its historical sense: how was it able to make itself believe in the nonsensical notion that the crude miracle-worker and redeemer fable comes at the commencement of Christianity- and that everything spiritual and symbolic is only a subsequent development? The main thing is, Nietzsche not only slams every such nation for its unruly attachment to that religion, but he also investigates other such beliefs and religions over the world. There is a detailed dissertation on the boons of Buddhism, there is an affirmation of the Indian caste system over the thenEuropean society, there is eulogium for Islamism, and for Greeks there is only contempt, for Romans there is pity, for Germans there is disgust, for the French he has the highest loathing...Here is one philosopher who knew how to state a point, who knew how to convince his audiences, and who, finally, knew a great deal about research. No empty thinking has any space here.
*
To return to its finer aspects, however. At times this was page-turning, at times it was enormously boring, and at others, it was merely a big "rant". The tone is often war-like and bitter and angry, but the reasons for such denunciation is not always given. Obviously, this is that type of the book which needs constant perusal- once every month, I daresay- and only after such re-reading will the meanings be more concise, and there are instances when Nietzsche seems to be quite irrational...but these can be turned into a fresh conversation point:
Man:- So, you hate Christianity, do you?
Nietzsche:- Hate it? Hate it?! Oh, my ass, if you only knew how much I hate it, what a parasitic curse it is on life; oh, it's the greatest, worst thing ever on Earth, oh damn...
Man:- Okay, okay, I get the general drift...now, is there any reason why you hate it?
Nietzsche:- Reason?! Christianity itself is a spider on the walls of reason! My curse against it, the condemnation against it is so damn...
Man:- Forgive me, but I asked for the reason, not the criticism...
Nietzsche:- Reason?- You again ask me! The highest critic against reason- that is Christianity, you need not dwell on the why's of it. It just is!
Man:- Alright, alright, take it cool. What do you think of Socrates, then?
Nietzsche:- Socrates! Socrates the ugly Greek,- he was born in a rabble, he's the typical decadent, the interbred monster, you ought to tell that right to his face! Is this understood?!
.......-What sets us apart is not that we recognise no God, either in history or in nature or behind nature- but that we find that which has been reverenced as God not 'godlike' but pitiable absurd, harmful, not merely an error but a crime against life.......
And it could go on forever like this. But there are several paragraphs that sparkle and bristle with heavy content, with insightful thoughts, that are by no means irrational. His propositions on the birth of art, on the needs and stimuli to art,- they are true, thought-provoking, rational and original. Will I forget them? Most likely not. 'All art stems from intoxication!'- ha, that looks correct, I'll wager.
Moreover, Nietzsche's preoccupation with various subtle, everyday issues is startlingly fresh and relevant. "Art"- a consequence of bodily or mental intoxication! I know I'm repeating myself, but that line really got to me. Then there's the contempt for Germany- for German universities, for its education, for its scholarly abyss...('Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I might venture to address a few words to them'), for its obsessions, and oh, how can I forget this?- Goethe was the only German writer whom he admired ('Goethe- the only German event!'). I'm almost thinking we should have had a modern-day Nietzsche to blast all unnecessary and useless institutions here...
The point is, Nietzsche is obviously more relevant today than he was a century ago. You've heard of Twitter beefs, online ranting,- but if you haven't, in that sense, ever heard of Nietzsche, you're missing something big-time. When the sub-title says 'How to Philosophize with a Hammer', you've got to take it literally. There is also devoted a short section to what I hold to be the very essence of existentialism, ('No one is accountable for existing at all, or for being constituted as he is, or for living in the circumstances and surroundings in which he lives), and even though I wondered what he had to say on Kierkegaard, this was more than delightful.
What more is there to say? I loved the book. It took me on a journey, the kind that you think will never end, and which you never want to end, either, but then, Nietzsche had only a few months to live sanely. In early 1889 he collapsed,- but not before giving the ultimate blow to what he felt was the 'the one immortal blemish on mankind'.
July 3, 2014
Two brilliant, scorching works of pyrophilosphy produced as Nietzsche, that bright burning sun, went supernova. As delightful as all his writing is, he never wrote so wonderfully, so beautifully, in such an enrapturing, searing polemical style as he did in 1888, when he produced Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. These works, alongside Zarathustra, represent a sort of summation of Nietzsche's passion - and this is what Nietzsche was: not a sober-minded empiricist building a body of knowledge through superficial observation, but an apostle of passion; a messenger from the world beyond the conscious intellect. He was, indeed, a religious figure of sorts. The Apostle of Dionysus. In these works, he dives deep and nearly touches the bottom.
The two works are rightly published together. In Twilight, Nietzsche shreds every happy dogma of Pan-European civilization: equality, "liberty", "progress". The new German Empire is singled out for heavy punishment. The Germans, he says, were at the forefront of the European intellectual scene before they channeled their creative energies into creating their state. They expressed contempt for the German spirit by giving it form in a state - just as one shows contempt for ideas by putting them into words. Culture and government are antithetical to one another; as one expands, the other contracts.
Nietzsche reacts furiously against "modernity", of which the new German state is just a symptom. Everywhere, the aristocratic virtues are being muddied by "equality", which Nietzsche essentially takes to be the pious enforcement of mediocrity. The Great Men whom history produces periodically are no longer leading armies or occupying thrones - indeed, one is more likely to find them in prison, banished from the social order if they try to act on their higher morality (Nietzsche was interested in Dostoyevsky's observation that the prison laborers of Siberia were often exceptional people, rather than the rabble he anticipated).
Nietzsche's assault on the depravity of contemporary European culture leads him to a final confrontation with what he believes to be the very origin, the birth-event, of depravity in Western Civilization - that is, Judeo-Christian religion - and this is his project in Anti-Christ. Judeo-Christianity, with its ultimate expression in Christianity itself, is to Nietzsche the ultimate life-denying doctrine. It is acetic where Nietzsche is aesthetic; it postulates another world, more important that this one, while Nietzsche believes in affirming life in this world. It teaches pity; Nietzsche values strength. The Jews elevated the priestly class due to their misfortunes; since they were so brutalized in the "natural" world, they placed "truth" in "unnaturalness".
We shouldn't misunderstand Nietzsche's attack on the "otherworldlyness" of Christians. Nietzsche is, himself, a rather otherworldly figure. He isn't a Richard Dawkins trying to point out the illogicality of the virgin birth or teach us about the "Magic of Reality". He understands the Christian message as one which offers a new way of being, a brotherhood of man bound by love. He is not merely being sardonic when he says that the only true Christian died on the cross. He speaks of the corruption of the Christian message in the same tones in which one would expect a devout Christian theologian to do so. The distinction is, Nietzsche doesn't like the Christian message, either as taught by Jesus or systematized by the church fathers. He is an aristocratic spiritualist taking on the exoteric, egalitarian spiritualism of Platonic-Judeo-Christianity.
One must regard Nietzsche as a great theologian.
The two works are rightly published together. In Twilight, Nietzsche shreds every happy dogma of Pan-European civilization: equality, "liberty", "progress". The new German Empire is singled out for heavy punishment. The Germans, he says, were at the forefront of the European intellectual scene before they channeled their creative energies into creating their state. They expressed contempt for the German spirit by giving it form in a state - just as one shows contempt for ideas by putting them into words. Culture and government are antithetical to one another; as one expands, the other contracts.
Nietzsche reacts furiously against "modernity", of which the new German state is just a symptom. Everywhere, the aristocratic virtues are being muddied by "equality", which Nietzsche essentially takes to be the pious enforcement of mediocrity. The Great Men whom history produces periodically are no longer leading armies or occupying thrones - indeed, one is more likely to find them in prison, banished from the social order if they try to act on their higher morality (Nietzsche was interested in Dostoyevsky's observation that the prison laborers of Siberia were often exceptional people, rather than the rabble he anticipated).
Nietzsche's assault on the depravity of contemporary European culture leads him to a final confrontation with what he believes to be the very origin, the birth-event, of depravity in Western Civilization - that is, Judeo-Christian religion - and this is his project in Anti-Christ. Judeo-Christianity, with its ultimate expression in Christianity itself, is to Nietzsche the ultimate life-denying doctrine. It is acetic where Nietzsche is aesthetic; it postulates another world, more important that this one, while Nietzsche believes in affirming life in this world. It teaches pity; Nietzsche values strength. The Jews elevated the priestly class due to their misfortunes; since they were so brutalized in the "natural" world, they placed "truth" in "unnaturalness".
We shouldn't misunderstand Nietzsche's attack on the "otherworldlyness" of Christians. Nietzsche is, himself, a rather otherworldly figure. He isn't a Richard Dawkins trying to point out the illogicality of the virgin birth or teach us about the "Magic of Reality". He understands the Christian message as one which offers a new way of being, a brotherhood of man bound by love. He is not merely being sardonic when he says that the only true Christian died on the cross. He speaks of the corruption of the Christian message in the same tones in which one would expect a devout Christian theologian to do so. The distinction is, Nietzsche doesn't like the Christian message, either as taught by Jesus or systematized by the church fathers. He is an aristocratic spiritualist taking on the exoteric, egalitarian spiritualism of Platonic-Judeo-Christianity.
One must regard Nietzsche as a great theologian.
July 6, 2014
I've read a lot of different books in my lifetime. Greek tragedies, Shakespearean plays, Modern Sci-Fi, Even Tolstoy, But none of them were full of hate. Nietzsche may have had a difficult life because of his illness. He may even have been an incredibly intelligent man. A Genius even. But he was also an ass. And I mean a Huge ass. He spews hate. I think he revels in it. He also is an ego maniac. I knew going into this book that the man had an inflated ego and was strongly anti-christian. But he is also against the uneducated (which to him is anyone that didn't go to collage), has a low opinion of women, and is basically hateful of anyone who disagrees with him.
I had a hard time reading this all the way through. Not because his writing style is challenging, although it can be at times, but because I felt the need for a shower. I'm not a christian. I don't like most organized religions. I'm not an atheist though. I have a strong belief in God. I'm agnostic. And although I do blame the church (whichever one is around) for bringing a lot of pain and suffering to people, I also know that the churches of the world do some pretty fantastic things. And although it's not my cup of tea, I respect the desire for millions to go to church and show their faith. Nietzsche seems to think these people are the ones that have caused all the worlds problems and are the biggest idiots. It's insulting, degrading, and even abusive.
If your class at collage asks you to read this, then I feel sorry for you. If you choose to, then I hope it makes you feel as I did if not worse, And if you like it....I pity you.
I had a hard time reading this all the way through. Not because his writing style is challenging, although it can be at times, but because I felt the need for a shower. I'm not a christian. I don't like most organized religions. I'm not an atheist though. I have a strong belief in God. I'm agnostic. And although I do blame the church (whichever one is around) for bringing a lot of pain and suffering to people, I also know that the churches of the world do some pretty fantastic things. And although it's not my cup of tea, I respect the desire for millions to go to church and show their faith. Nietzsche seems to think these people are the ones that have caused all the worlds problems and are the biggest idiots. It's insulting, degrading, and even abusive.
If your class at collage asks you to read this, then I feel sorry for you. If you choose to, then I hope it makes you feel as I did if not worse, And if you like it....I pity you.
May 17, 2012
Misinterpreted and abused, the infamy of Nietzsche needs no further comment. Even Nietzsche himself has foreseen what might become of his theories when he dedicated the book to all and none. Yet his mysterious aphorisms completely altered the course of intellectual current, and the thoughts that he provoked are still radical and surprising, not to mention relevant.
Although known best by many to have authored the Will to Power, the sagacity that Nietzsche possessed culminates in its fullest grandeur in this volume, as he teases out the truth with ironic tone and paradoxical phrases. In fact, one of the things which makes Nietzsche so enigmatic is that he seems to have been in full grasp of the muddy contours of the unconscious mind – an entity of instincts that pits the individual will against the society, and him/herself – even before the advent of psychology.
As has been done many times before (or exactly because of it), the temptation remains to cast him as a mad man (which is in fact often times done as fragments of his arguments get misappropriated by vile historical figures). But his core message here is textually unambiguous: in celebration of life and all its contradictions, he opposed any self-professed-divine, parochial doctrines and sought the way of the supreme iconoclast — the Übermensch.
Although known best by many to have authored the Will to Power, the sagacity that Nietzsche possessed culminates in its fullest grandeur in this volume, as he teases out the truth with ironic tone and paradoxical phrases. In fact, one of the things which makes Nietzsche so enigmatic is that he seems to have been in full grasp of the muddy contours of the unconscious mind – an entity of instincts that pits the individual will against the society, and him/herself – even before the advent of psychology.
As has been done many times before (or exactly because of it), the temptation remains to cast him as a mad man (which is in fact often times done as fragments of his arguments get misappropriated by vile historical figures). But his core message here is textually unambiguous: in celebration of life and all its contradictions, he opposed any self-professed-divine, parochial doctrines and sought the way of the supreme iconoclast — the Übermensch.
November 3, 2023
Nietzsche ought to be read with a notebook at hand, and slowly. Everything I read feels world changing but I somehow can't remember it when I'm finished.
November 26, 2022
The familiar pleasures of Nietzsche: electric writing, dazzling hubris, keen psychological insight, aphoristic brilliance, a profound sense of humor and indeed of the joy of life, plus perhaps the fiercest critique of Christianity ever written. I have to say, though, that the potentially proto-fascist elements of his work are more apparent in these two texts than in any of the others I’ve yet read. To be clear, I don’t think Nietzsche is a fascist or would have supported the Nazis in any respect (the acidic critique of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, as well as his respect and admiration for many non-“Western” cultures, more or less foreclose that possibility), but it is hard to imagine his ideal of aristocracy being realized in a state that doesn’t resemble a fascist one, and there are many passages that have more than a whiff of eugenics about them. I’m not particularly fond of his seething illiberalism/anti-socialism/anti-feminism, either, although that’s par for the course. But of course one doesn’t go to philosophers in the banal search for viewpoints to “agree” with. You go for the activity of the intellect and the sparkle of the style: fronts on which Nietzsche more than satisfies, as always.
April 15, 2024
Nietzsche wrote these two books in 1888 as brief asides from a longer book, his ultimate statement, he was trying to write around the time, which was going to be called some variant on "The Re-Evaluation of All Values" and ended up as, I think, "The Will To Power" that we have. He speaks of them as immediate overcharges of energy, inspired by the delight he takes in agon against his favorite foes -- Christianity, other philosophers, conventional foolishness ... to me it seems as though much of what made possible this new vigor is the natural extension of The Genealogy Of Morals, where he had finally been able to put his philosophy into a sort of cyclical coherence (after such attempts as Zarathustra). There he had conceived the follies of man as like blooming plants, quite distinct from their own declared content but rather blindly unfurling, self-unaware processes of generation. That had been two years prior, and by this book he had developed this into a vastly more radical conception of the world, to which he alludes a little in Twilight but which he principally left for the upcoming masterpiece he never saw attained.
The idea of Twilight of the Idols is to philosophize with a hammer, to destroy idols not for any particular end but rather as energizing sport, for the fun of hearing the ringing of their hollow interiors. While his favorite targets are again destroyed here -- Plato and Socrates recast as fools, contemporary social movements reduced to mere neuroses, certain French philosophers revealed as incoherent delusionals -- as they had been in every book since All Too Human, Nietzsche now has in mind a positive philosophy against which to contrast them. The quasi-organic world of conventional thought (likened to plants, or better diseases, in the Genealogy) is contrasted against Nietzsche's new vitalist perspective, where one strives for good health and digestion and frees oneself of the scrupulous distractions of the logical quibbles of the world. He has become so hostile to the constant narcissisms and insecurities riddling all supposedly rational thought that he launches into denunciations against the possibility of objectivity and the existence of casuality as commonly understood; the climax is a frightening, almost Baudelairean (in spite of what accusations Nietzsche might have levelled against many aspects of Baudelaire) reverie in which Nietzsche denounces language as a mere cataloguing of signifiers, a thin web only of interest to those obsessed with the purely symbological / connotative panacaeae, behind which nothing remains.
How to reconcile Nietzsche's own espousal of opinions is a topic he does not treat here, nor do I care to treat it here -- in Pierre Klossowski's study of Nietzsche efforts are made at explaining, but it is a sticky and messy question to ask, not least of all because it is precisely contrary to the attitude espoused here. As an aside, I had delved into some other French attempts at extending the Nietzschean logic into the metaphysical and been impressed by their presentation of these similar denunciations of causality, language, symbology, and was greatly disappointed to find that these francaises' attempts were absolutely eclipsed by hearing Nietzsche's own explanations thereof (I was in the path of the recent solar eclipse, and was reading the great polemic against symbology as the sun faded -- what a moment!); I can only offer that it's probably likely that any attempts to justify these great claims should defer to what Nietzsche himself presumably wrote about it in the Will To Power or elsewhere.
One thing that had bothered me for a long time about Nietzsche was the baffling extent to which his philosophical ideas were appropriated for (admittedly irrelevant) political ideologies; most of the earlier works are so consistently antipolitical that any extrapolations seemed absurd to me. However, it is in this book that Nietzsche begins extending his new health based attitude towards political discussions -- some of the more obvious inferences are made, such as denunciation of the sinewy german scholars of his day and the disgusting (to Nietzsche) habits of the beer drinking normies, as well as some fascinating analyses of liberalism and socialism, denouncing both for the crime of attempting to institutionalize the fulfillment of their desires, which means their ideal utopia is the absolute opposite of the ardent energy for which they spread their cause, an energy in which all their virtues consist & which therefore dissipates immediately upon their success. What might Nietzschean annotations on a John Rawls book have looked like!
The central political passage in this book, however, is the "Improvers of Mankind" section, where Nietzsche pre-empts the criticism Spengler makes of him in Decline of the West -- that the so-called Slave Morals have always been invented by those in relative power, eg, as the Law of the Jews originated & disseminated actually by priests during periods of Israeli strength. By taking the Hindu caste system as a paradigm, Nietzsche laments the relative weakness & dishonesty of western religions in enforcing social orders through more nuanced means, as opposed to the brute heirarchy resulting from the Law of Manu in India; but, in pontificating on these issues, Nietzsche gyrates around to recognizing that the general effect of the abrahamic religions has been to generally maintain social order, concocted by the priests for that functional end, intentional or no ... the result is a rather excited rumination on the idea of 'selective breeding', of the 'taming' of mankind, with vague overtures that Christianity has gone wrong in having lost control of their breeding programme, and that perhaps some new system may be in order. While I think one can try to make a nuanced argument that Nietzsche is not necessarily advocating for a eugenic conspiracy, one can easily see how Hitler & Goering might have received this passage. For reasons as those above, I'm not so sure I'm interested in apologizing for this, or else for analyzing the political ideas of Nietzsche in depth at present, if only because this book is meant as a demonstration than as a genuine prophesy of a new mindset.
If I were to be asked what I really thought of this perspective, though, I think I would answer that Nietzsche at this period was likely beginning to undergo the brain disease that rendered his last ten years totally senile -- the egomania of Zarathustra is returning, but without the subtle considerations in arranging that book and with increasingly incautious zeal. Indeed, Nietzsche declares near the end of Twilight that Zarathustra was the most important book ever written, and it's difficult to find any sort of irony behind the statement. The second book in this collection, fundamentally of the same time & period, seems to show the decline of Nietzsche's brain more clearly than the rather sharp writing in Twilight.
The idea of this book is to show, for similar reasons as in Twilight, the real story of Christianity as a degenerative disease. The basic idea is that the Christ, in the context of the cumbersome logic of Pharisaic Judaism, was a genuine & honest figure, who truly believed in his absolute negation of the world & his singular celebration of divine love; and that the story of Christianity is that of Christ's image, further & further distorted into mere worldly symbolism by Saint Paul and subsequent ecclesiastical writers. The main move is from the complete rejection of the immanent by the Christ into the legislative & salvation-based mentality of the church, which in this book is presented as a drama of two characters, Christ as the ultimate holy fool, indeed the most fundamentally innocent man of all, and Saint Paul as the ultimate world-resenting, inferiority complex decadent, the type whom Nietzsche spent his entire mature period trying to destroy.
Why I say this book is a sign of decay, despite its hypnotic new characterization of the Christ and its absolutely excellent polemic style (indeed, perhaps some of Nietzsche's best writing of all, to my eyes) is that its argument hinges entirely on what seems to me to be an illusory image of Saint Paul; while the idea that Saint Paul re-centered the shift away from concerns that Christ espoused in the Gospel (or that, if you are so inclined, the historical Christ may have preached, as Nietzsche believes the Gospels are tainted by apostolic interference) towards a more rationalized and socially minded perspective, and indeed that his epistles are at the beginning of a causal chain that led to such world-obsessed variants of Christianity as, say, the Catholic church, it really does not seem to me to be a fair characterization of Saint Paul's writings that they contradict this eschatological cathexis of the Christ, or that they recontextualize the 'gnosis' of Christ as immanent attitudes ... indeed, writings like Ephesians and especially Romans seem those most closely aligned with Christ's transcendental messages in contradistinction to worldly concerns, and books like Galatians and Corinthians tend to treat social concerns with due triviality in the exact opposite way that Nietzsche seems to insinuate here. Much could be made of Saint Paul's struggles with the other apostles in favor of Nietzsche's theses, but he does not touch on that; indeed, he writes so abstractly and without reference about Paul that it seems he may as well be inventing a character from scratch.
Now I had read the Anti Christ first, indeed and was absolutely convinced that errors like this were as sure a sign as anything that Nietzsche was starting to get sleepy; but, after reading Twilight, I'm starting to wonder if this can be explained in more charitable terms, such as, for example, that Nietzsche was being honest when he said that reading the New Testament sickened him, and that his characterization of Saint Paul was based off memories from his Lutheran-inculcated youth, which indeed would have given him an image of Saint Paul as the lawman of Luther's more fickle image of God. Moreover, the excitement of his sudden outpouring of new ideas based off his new health-based paradigm would likely inspire in Nietzsche the (perhaps inflated) self-confidence to write with less care and more emphasis on style -- indeed, this whole book tends to rush through the common Nietzschean criticisms of Christianity, expecting that the reader already knows them, and that the ultimate goal here is a more aesthetically perfect realization of these already-presupposed ideas.
In all events, I would probably give the Anti Christ 3 or 4 stars, and the Twilight of the Idols 5, so I will give this entire book a 5, since it is a very fun book to read; both are short, and both are good. It's the sort of book I've had sat around for years and, upon reading it, felt like a fool for not having read sooner.
The idea of Twilight of the Idols is to philosophize with a hammer, to destroy idols not for any particular end but rather as energizing sport, for the fun of hearing the ringing of their hollow interiors. While his favorite targets are again destroyed here -- Plato and Socrates recast as fools, contemporary social movements reduced to mere neuroses, certain French philosophers revealed as incoherent delusionals -- as they had been in every book since All Too Human, Nietzsche now has in mind a positive philosophy against which to contrast them. The quasi-organic world of conventional thought (likened to plants, or better diseases, in the Genealogy) is contrasted against Nietzsche's new vitalist perspective, where one strives for good health and digestion and frees oneself of the scrupulous distractions of the logical quibbles of the world. He has become so hostile to the constant narcissisms and insecurities riddling all supposedly rational thought that he launches into denunciations against the possibility of objectivity and the existence of casuality as commonly understood; the climax is a frightening, almost Baudelairean (in spite of what accusations Nietzsche might have levelled against many aspects of Baudelaire) reverie in which Nietzsche denounces language as a mere cataloguing of signifiers, a thin web only of interest to those obsessed with the purely symbological / connotative panacaeae, behind which nothing remains.
How to reconcile Nietzsche's own espousal of opinions is a topic he does not treat here, nor do I care to treat it here -- in Pierre Klossowski's study of Nietzsche efforts are made at explaining, but it is a sticky and messy question to ask, not least of all because it is precisely contrary to the attitude espoused here. As an aside, I had delved into some other French attempts at extending the Nietzschean logic into the metaphysical and been impressed by their presentation of these similar denunciations of causality, language, symbology, and was greatly disappointed to find that these francaises' attempts were absolutely eclipsed by hearing Nietzsche's own explanations thereof (I was in the path of the recent solar eclipse, and was reading the great polemic against symbology as the sun faded -- what a moment!); I can only offer that it's probably likely that any attempts to justify these great claims should defer to what Nietzsche himself presumably wrote about it in the Will To Power or elsewhere.
One thing that had bothered me for a long time about Nietzsche was the baffling extent to which his philosophical ideas were appropriated for (admittedly irrelevant) political ideologies; most of the earlier works are so consistently antipolitical that any extrapolations seemed absurd to me. However, it is in this book that Nietzsche begins extending his new health based attitude towards political discussions -- some of the more obvious inferences are made, such as denunciation of the sinewy german scholars of his day and the disgusting (to Nietzsche) habits of the beer drinking normies, as well as some fascinating analyses of liberalism and socialism, denouncing both for the crime of attempting to institutionalize the fulfillment of their desires, which means their ideal utopia is the absolute opposite of the ardent energy for which they spread their cause, an energy in which all their virtues consist & which therefore dissipates immediately upon their success. What might Nietzschean annotations on a John Rawls book have looked like!
The central political passage in this book, however, is the "Improvers of Mankind" section, where Nietzsche pre-empts the criticism Spengler makes of him in Decline of the West -- that the so-called Slave Morals have always been invented by those in relative power, eg, as the Law of the Jews originated & disseminated actually by priests during periods of Israeli strength. By taking the Hindu caste system as a paradigm, Nietzsche laments the relative weakness & dishonesty of western religions in enforcing social orders through more nuanced means, as opposed to the brute heirarchy resulting from the Law of Manu in India; but, in pontificating on these issues, Nietzsche gyrates around to recognizing that the general effect of the abrahamic religions has been to generally maintain social order, concocted by the priests for that functional end, intentional or no ... the result is a rather excited rumination on the idea of 'selective breeding', of the 'taming' of mankind, with vague overtures that Christianity has gone wrong in having lost control of their breeding programme, and that perhaps some new system may be in order. While I think one can try to make a nuanced argument that Nietzsche is not necessarily advocating for a eugenic conspiracy, one can easily see how Hitler & Goering might have received this passage. For reasons as those above, I'm not so sure I'm interested in apologizing for this, or else for analyzing the political ideas of Nietzsche in depth at present, if only because this book is meant as a demonstration than as a genuine prophesy of a new mindset.
If I were to be asked what I really thought of this perspective, though, I think I would answer that Nietzsche at this period was likely beginning to undergo the brain disease that rendered his last ten years totally senile -- the egomania of Zarathustra is returning, but without the subtle considerations in arranging that book and with increasingly incautious zeal. Indeed, Nietzsche declares near the end of Twilight that Zarathustra was the most important book ever written, and it's difficult to find any sort of irony behind the statement. The second book in this collection, fundamentally of the same time & period, seems to show the decline of Nietzsche's brain more clearly than the rather sharp writing in Twilight.
The idea of this book is to show, for similar reasons as in Twilight, the real story of Christianity as a degenerative disease. The basic idea is that the Christ, in the context of the cumbersome logic of Pharisaic Judaism, was a genuine & honest figure, who truly believed in his absolute negation of the world & his singular celebration of divine love; and that the story of Christianity is that of Christ's image, further & further distorted into mere worldly symbolism by Saint Paul and subsequent ecclesiastical writers. The main move is from the complete rejection of the immanent by the Christ into the legislative & salvation-based mentality of the church, which in this book is presented as a drama of two characters, Christ as the ultimate holy fool, indeed the most fundamentally innocent man of all, and Saint Paul as the ultimate world-resenting, inferiority complex decadent, the type whom Nietzsche spent his entire mature period trying to destroy.
Why I say this book is a sign of decay, despite its hypnotic new characterization of the Christ and its absolutely excellent polemic style (indeed, perhaps some of Nietzsche's best writing of all, to my eyes) is that its argument hinges entirely on what seems to me to be an illusory image of Saint Paul; while the idea that Saint Paul re-centered the shift away from concerns that Christ espoused in the Gospel (or that, if you are so inclined, the historical Christ may have preached, as Nietzsche believes the Gospels are tainted by apostolic interference) towards a more rationalized and socially minded perspective, and indeed that his epistles are at the beginning of a causal chain that led to such world-obsessed variants of Christianity as, say, the Catholic church, it really does not seem to me to be a fair characterization of Saint Paul's writings that they contradict this eschatological cathexis of the Christ, or that they recontextualize the 'gnosis' of Christ as immanent attitudes ... indeed, writings like Ephesians and especially Romans seem those most closely aligned with Christ's transcendental messages in contradistinction to worldly concerns, and books like Galatians and Corinthians tend to treat social concerns with due triviality in the exact opposite way that Nietzsche seems to insinuate here. Much could be made of Saint Paul's struggles with the other apostles in favor of Nietzsche's theses, but he does not touch on that; indeed, he writes so abstractly and without reference about Paul that it seems he may as well be inventing a character from scratch.
Now I had read the Anti Christ first, indeed and was absolutely convinced that errors like this were as sure a sign as anything that Nietzsche was starting to get sleepy; but, after reading Twilight, I'm starting to wonder if this can be explained in more charitable terms, such as, for example, that Nietzsche was being honest when he said that reading the New Testament sickened him, and that his characterization of Saint Paul was based off memories from his Lutheran-inculcated youth, which indeed would have given him an image of Saint Paul as the lawman of Luther's more fickle image of God. Moreover, the excitement of his sudden outpouring of new ideas based off his new health-based paradigm would likely inspire in Nietzsche the (perhaps inflated) self-confidence to write with less care and more emphasis on style -- indeed, this whole book tends to rush through the common Nietzschean criticisms of Christianity, expecting that the reader already knows them, and that the ultimate goal here is a more aesthetically perfect realization of these already-presupposed ideas.
In all events, I would probably give the Anti Christ 3 or 4 stars, and the Twilight of the Idols 5, so I will give this entire book a 5, since it is a very fun book to read; both are short, and both are good. It's the sort of book I've had sat around for years and, upon reading it, felt like a fool for not having read sooner.
March 13, 2016
More Disjointed Thoughts of an Angry Philosopher
20 October 2010
I found this book in the bible college library and as such decided that I had to read it (who would expect to find Nietzsche, a man who hated Christianty, in the library of a Bible College – the again this wasn't a fundamentalist, can't have any books that aren't written by approved authors in the library type of Bible College). However he was there, and I decided to read him. It also help that in my Church History lecture we looked at the 19th Century German Critics, of which he was one.
If I had one thing to say about Frederick Nietzsche and that is that he is a nutter. It might sound harsh, but it is true. He went insane in about 1888, and died not only a lonely pauper, but an unread philosopher. It was not until after his death that interest in his writing soured (no doubt with some help from a certain insane dictator).
That is not surprising since it can be really hard to follow Nietzsche because his writings tend to be all over the place. Okay, he says that he says in a paragraph what is said in a book, but he does constantly jump all over the place, and his writings tend to be more a collection of disjointed thoughts and a flowing argument. My recommendation would be to skip his books and read a commentary or overview of Nietzsche's philosophy.
However there was one interesting thing he did say in this book: God became the perfect judge, and thus they gained the authority to judge themselves, and in glorifying God they glorified themselves. Something to think about, but, to be honest, I doubt there was anything anybody could have done to make Nieztsche think differently. He believes Christians to be weak and fools, something which I heartedly disagree with.
20 October 2010
I found this book in the bible college library and as such decided that I had to read it (who would expect to find Nietzsche, a man who hated Christianty, in the library of a Bible College – the again this wasn't a fundamentalist, can't have any books that aren't written by approved authors in the library type of Bible College). However he was there, and I decided to read him. It also help that in my Church History lecture we looked at the 19th Century German Critics, of which he was one.
If I had one thing to say about Frederick Nietzsche and that is that he is a nutter. It might sound harsh, but it is true. He went insane in about 1888, and died not only a lonely pauper, but an unread philosopher. It was not until after his death that interest in his writing soured (no doubt with some help from a certain insane dictator).
That is not surprising since it can be really hard to follow Nietzsche because his writings tend to be all over the place. Okay, he says that he says in a paragraph what is said in a book, but he does constantly jump all over the place, and his writings tend to be more a collection of disjointed thoughts and a flowing argument. My recommendation would be to skip his books and read a commentary or overview of Nietzsche's philosophy.
However there was one interesting thing he did say in this book: God became the perfect judge, and thus they gained the authority to judge themselves, and in glorifying God they glorified themselves. Something to think about, but, to be honest, I doubt there was anything anybody could have done to make Nieztsche think differently. He believes Christians to be weak and fools, something which I heartedly disagree with.
Read
January 30, 2021Wow what a read ... Twilight of the Idols is so fascinating because you can really trace Foucault's and Deleuze's ideas; biopolitics, questions on criminality, hating on liberalism and Christian morality (rightly so). Also, Nietzsche's sardonic lines of thought are quite fun to read, I didn't expect that (less so in the Antichrist). I appreciated his critique of Kant (i.e. saying 'thing-in-itself' is bs). His few straight-forward observations on 'truth' are also compelling, especially for someone like me who hasn't studied philosophy.
The misogyny is so blatant it's almost funny; the masculine (white) uber-mensch with total control over his will, the glorification of struggle... and his obsession with physical/ intellectual fitness makes you somewhat understand why fascists picked up his work. I didn't know he was so staunchly opposed to socialism, saying it is founded on the Christian illusion of 'equality for all' that elevates the masses (he loves the aristocracy, I see him as a plutocrat of some sorts). Foucault's indebtedness to Nietzsche partially explains the former's very complicated relationship to Marx.
I'd recommend Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist was a bit more of a drag. I'm eager for any other recommendations on Nietzche.
The misogyny is so blatant it's almost funny; the masculine (white) uber-mensch with total control over his will, the glorification of struggle... and his obsession with physical/ intellectual fitness makes you somewhat understand why fascists picked up his work. I didn't know he was so staunchly opposed to socialism, saying it is founded on the Christian illusion of 'equality for all' that elevates the masses (he loves the aristocracy, I see him as a plutocrat of some sorts). Foucault's indebtedness to Nietzsche partially explains the former's very complicated relationship to Marx.
I'd recommend Twilight of the Idols; The Antichrist was a bit more of a drag. I'm eager for any other recommendations on Nietzche.
January 1, 2020
“The harshest daylight, rationality at any cost, life bright, cold, circumspect, conscious, without instinct, in opposition to the instincts, has itself been no more than a form of sickness, another form of sickness – and by no means a way back to ‘virtue’, to ‘health’, to happiness…. To have to combat one’s instincts – that is the formula for décadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one.”
This book is made from the stuff of lightning. Each aphorism begs to be underlined. I had never read rhetoric this godlike.
Teeming with contradictions and dionysian in spirit. Polemic against the other worlds. Life affirming, joyful, spirit elevating -an explosion of creativity. A war against everything that is held dear: plastic happiness, equality, pity, decadence.
This book is made from the stuff of lightning. Each aphorism begs to be underlined. I had never read rhetoric this godlike.
Teeming with contradictions and dionysian in spirit. Polemic against the other worlds. Life affirming, joyful, spirit elevating -an explosion of creativity. A war against everything that is held dear: plastic happiness, equality, pity, decadence.
July 8, 2019
Twilight of the Idols : 5 stars
The Anti-Christ : 3 stars
Wittgenstein once said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Incisive, provoking and hilarious, Twilight of the Idols is perhaps the closest a book has ever gotten to that.
The Anti-Christ : 3 stars
Wittgenstein once said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”
Incisive, provoking and hilarious, Twilight of the Idols is perhaps the closest a book has ever gotten to that.
June 11, 2018
What are the idols facing Nietzsche's imminent wrath? Socrates, Christianity, Christian concepts (sin, grace, redemption, etc) and their imaginary causal circuitry, and in general every ideal of decadence that promotes the Beyond to the detriment and the denigration of the here and now, the actuality. The Real World at last became a myth...
Even if you don't completely buy into Nietzsche's vitalist assumptions, and his"unmasking" of [Christianity] morality as a surface appearance assumed by the more subterrean phenomenon of "instinct" (even life denying instincts are, in the last instance, instincts that flow from the declining type of life, e.g Socrates), he effects a scathing critique of Christianity that few thinkers have been able to pull off. In my understanding, this is because he goes not after the veracity of this or that doctrinal belief but after the very type and the psychology of the individual (say, Jesus) who might harbor these beliefs.
Here one of the more provocative and for that reason all the more thought provoking suggestion offered by Nietzsche is that Christianity, the Gospels, the Church and Paul is a monumental misunderstanding, falsification even, of the original practice, meaning and symbol of Jesus, the bringer of 'glad tidings'. Jesus is not a redeemer, nor a hero nor a genius, nor did he sacrifice himself for our sins. The 'glad tidings' is precisely that there is no more animosity between God and man, or the Kingdom of God and the here and now.
Even if you don't completely buy into Nietzsche's vitalist assumptions, and his"unmasking" of [Christianity] morality as a surface appearance assumed by the more subterrean phenomenon of "instinct" (even life denying instincts are, in the last instance, instincts that flow from the declining type of life, e.g Socrates), he effects a scathing critique of Christianity that few thinkers have been able to pull off. In my understanding, this is because he goes not after the veracity of this or that doctrinal belief but after the very type and the psychology of the individual (say, Jesus) who might harbor these beliefs.
Here one of the more provocative and for that reason all the more thought provoking suggestion offered by Nietzsche is that Christianity, the Gospels, the Church and Paul is a monumental misunderstanding, falsification even, of the original practice, meaning and symbol of Jesus, the bringer of 'glad tidings'. Jesus is not a redeemer, nor a hero nor a genius, nor did he sacrifice himself for our sins. The 'glad tidings' is precisely that there is no more animosity between God and man, or the Kingdom of God and the here and now.
August 24, 2025
By far the most clear Nietzche and some may say him at his least schizophrenic, despite this being the last thing he wrote before being locked up and thrown away into the asylum. Curious. Another win for the bell curve of schizophrenia!
December 26, 2025
i can’t tell if my boy is spitting bars or legitimately clinically insane. did he just argue for committing suicide as a will to power?
January 10, 2026
this has to be the best entry in the entire twilight saga.
It's a bit hard to follow, but once you let it bite you it is sensational.
It's a bit hard to follow, but once you let it bite you it is sensational.
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