Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

The Antichrist Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

This work is both an unrestrained attack on Christianity and a further exposition of Nietzsche's will-to-power philosophy so dramatically presented in Zarathustra. Christianity, says Nietzsche, represents "everything weak, low, and botched; it has made an ideal out of antagonism towards all the self-preservative instincts of strong life." By contrast, Nietzsche defines good as: "All that enhances the feeling of power, the Will to Power, and power itself in man. What is bad?-All that proceeds from weakness. What is happiness?-The feeling that power is increasing, -that resistance has been overcome." In attempting to redefine the basis of Western values by demolishing what Nietzsche saw as the crippling influence of the Judeo-Christian tradition, THE ANTICHRIST has proved to be highly controversial and continuously stimulating to later generations of philosophers. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, using a distinctive rhetorical and evocative style, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and post-modernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power.