NIETZSCHE Explained: The Antichrist (all parts)

WATCH:
Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk

This is our full series on Friedrich Nietzsche's The Antichrist. In this first part we will briefly introduce the work and go over some necessary context. In following parts, we will do a deep dive analysis.

As always, we begin with the title. The original German, Der Antichrist, actually has two meanings in English. It can literally mean “the Antichrist”, referring to the character in the Bible that is predicted to come to Earth in the end times.

But it can also simply mean “Anti-christian”.

Nietzsche is obviously being provocative by engaging in this double entendre, which is also why most English translations decide on “The Antichrist” as the title. Although, it must be noted, Nietzsche never uses the term “Antichrist” in the book to refer to the biblical character. He only ever uses the term to mean “Anti-Christian.”

The title of this work is also less mysterious than, let’s say, Daybreak, Twilight of the Idols, and of course, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s obvious what Nietzsche will attempt in this work: a sustained critique of the Christian worldview and morality.

The Antichrist was actually the first instalment in a planned four-volume work, which Nietzsche could never complete due to his mental collapse. The work was to be entitled:

The Will to Power: A Transvaluation of All Values

And the four volumes making up the work would be:

1. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity.
2. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement
3. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal Form of Ignorance
4. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence.

As it stands, however, only the first volume, the Antichrist, was released as intended by Nietzsche. There have been attempts to reconstruct Nietzsche’s original vision of this great work but this is controversial. This reconstruction is known as The Will to Power and was heavily edited by Nietzsche’s sister. Because of this, and because Nietzsche never intended these notes for publication in the first place, this reconstruction is not generally considered to be canonical.

But back to the Antichrist. This work was written in 1888, which makes this book, together with the autobiography Ecce Homo, Nietzsche’s final publication before his descent into madness. Just like with Twilight of the Idols, this means that the book is of a very radical nature. The late Nietzsche pulls no punches in his philosophical writings. He wants to hit hard and provoke his audience. We will see exactly how as this series continues.

Much of what we will cover in this series, will sound familiar to long-time viewers of the channel. We will talk about décadence, the Will to Power, master and slave morality, and other Nietzschean concepts that were covered in other videos.

In the next part, we will go over the notion of pity and why Nietzsche thought that pity was one of the most harmful elements of Christianity.

In earlier works, Nietzsche already spoke out against pity, or compassion. For example, in a paragraph of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche laments how pity leads us away from our own path and our individuality: pity as a distraction.

Nietzsche’s demonization of pity or compassion is an obvious attack on Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which held that compassion is the root of all morality. In fact, he is probably directly alluding to Schopenhauer in the above passage. And it is true, that for Schopenhauer, supreme goodness consists in complete compassion for other people and animals, so much so, that the perfectly good person should forget his own individuality altogether!

This is absolutely appalling to Nietzsche. In this formulation of pity, Nietzsche sees a denial of life, a resignation, a saying of No. A degeneration of man’s primal instinct: the will to power.

Pity, driven to its ethical conclusion, will make you a part of the herd by stamping out your individuality. Pity is the primary virtue of slave morality.

But this is not the whole story. There is another problem with pity.

The reaction to pity, Nietzsche argues, is always disproportional to the cause. This makes pity extra insidious. Pity is the ultimate emotion of corruption, of degeneracy, because when we are being compassionate, we take the side of the weak and grant them a kind of power which they do not deserve.

But what is Nietzsche’s endgoal in writing this scathing critique of the Christian faith? Nietzsche wanted a transvaluation of all values – a new system of ethics, of philosophy, a new system of life, completely opposed to the decadent values that he saw were dominating the culture; decadent values that found their source and justification in Christianity.

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