Twilight of the Idols & The Anti-christ
Both works were toward the later stage of Nietzsche’s writing - they’re linked by their animosity toward Christian morality, and how it had poisoned western society. After the Greco-Roman culture that celebrated strength and virility came the Christian era that pitied the weak and inverted those old, stronger values: now being weak was being meek, being celibate was being chaste. Twilight of the Idols explores the idea of moral decay, or decadence, in a society where weakness became revalued into something good: Nietzsche purports it creates a culture that denies life or life instincts, it denies life of its natural will to power, or the drive to overcome obstacles and resistance as a means to fulfillment. The Anti-christ is more targeted to attack Christianity, from its poisoning of the late Roman Empire to the evils and hypocrisies of organized religion in general. I found both works to be provocative since the Judeo-Christian moral values are so deeply ingrained in society that it often doesn’t get much thought (case in point, our numbering system for years), and Nietzsche presents his polemics with such passion and force that it’s hard to ignore.
Nietzsche writes how a society whose morality values and pities the weak will make its people degenerate and stunt their ability to assert their will on the world - there is some merit in it. Yet, in a post-God capitalist world like modern day, I wonder if the lack of the Christian moral code also tends toward some similar degeneracy. Living automatically without thinking too much in the 21st century means being addicted to apps on phones instead of reading, eating fast food instead of healthy but less tasty food, spending money frivolously instead of investing, watching Netflix instead of working out - degeneracy. It seems more to me that degeneracy is just a common trait among all people from all times, and it’s up to the strong and willful to defy the urge to degenerate. Instead of Christianity being a sole cause, Christianity simply rode this law of human nature to power. In a world without Christianity, the ordinary people would continue their automatic, easy degeneracy, this time with more varied and relative moral values: this is the debauched time of the late Roman Republic, for example, when corruption and greed and lust ran amok in a pre-Christian, developed society, and ultimately caused a cataclysm that gave birth to the new Roman Empire. But one part of his thesis is absolutely right: what Nietzsche calls the overman, or a person who overcomes and asserts their will to power, is eternally an individualist who fights alone against the automatic degeneracy regardless of what the prevailing moral fashions of their day are.
% grep -i "twilight of the idols & the anti-christ" quotes.txt13 matches
on inexpressibility
“Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to: they lack words”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on boldness
“The nations which were worth something, which became worth something, never became so under liberal institutions: it was great danger which made of them something deserving reverence, danger which first teaches us to know our resources, our virtues, our shield and spear, our spirit - which compels us to be strong”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on power
“The Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which, placed in impossible circumstances, voluntarily, from the profoundest shrewdness in self-preservation, took the side of all decadence instincts - not as being dominated by them but because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against ‘the world’”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
on mortality
”’Natural’ death is death for the most contemptible of reasons, an unfree death, a death at the wrong time, a coward’s death. From love of life one ought to desire to die differently from this: freely, consciously, not accidentally, not suddenly overtaken”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on work
”An action compelled by the instinct of life has in the joy of performing it the proof it is a right action: and that nihilist with Christian-dogmatic bowels understands joy as an objection… What destroys more quickly than to work, to think, to feel without inner necessity, without a deep personal choice, without joy? As an automaton of ‘duty’?”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
on instinct
“To have to combat one’s instincts - that is the formula for decadence: as long as life is ascending, happiness and instinct are one”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on virtue
“A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defense and necessity: in any other sense it is a danger”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
on bitterness
”Even complaining and wailing can give life a charm for the sake of which one endures it: there is a small dose of revenge in every complaint, one reproaches those who are different for one’s feeling vile, sometimes even with one’s being vile, as if they had perpetrated an injustice or possessed an impermissible privilege”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on free will
“The doctrine of will has been invented essentially for the purpose of punishment, that is of finding guilty… Men were thought of as ‘free’ so that they could become guilty: consequently, every action had to be thought of as willed, the origin of every action as lying in the consciousness… Christianity is a hangman’s metaphysics”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on existence
”[A human] is not the result of a special design, a will, a purpose… We invented the concept ‘purpose’: in reality purpose is lacking… One is necessary, one is a piece of fate, one belongs to the whole, one is in the whole - there exists nothing which could judge, measure, compare, condemn our being, for that would be to judge, measure, compare, condemn the whole… But nothing exists apart from the whole!”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on sexuality
“It was only Christianity, with ressentiment against life in its foundations, which made of sexuality something impure: it threw filth on the beginning, on the prerequisite of our life”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
on religion
“‘Sins’ are indispensable in any society organized by priests: they are the actual levers of power, the priest lives on sins, he needs ‘the commission of sins’… Supreme law: ‘God forgives him who repents’ - in plain language: who subjects himself to the priest”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
on religion
“Man himself had become God’s greatest blunder; God had created for himself a rival, science makes equal to God - it is all over with priests and gods if man becomes scientific! - Moral; science is the forbidden in itself - it alone is forbidden”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ