The Antichrist - 9781573928328

Friedrich Nietzche (1844-1900) wrote The Antichrist (1888) after Thus Spake Zarathustra and shortly before the mental collapse that incapacitated him for the rest of his life. This work is both an unrestrained attack on Christianity and a further exposition of Nietzche's will-to-power philosophy so dramatically presented in Zarathustra. Christianity, says Nietzche, 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, Nietzche 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 Nietzche 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.