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A deep dive into The Antichrist by Friedrich Nietzsche. Taken from episodes 22 & 23 of The Nietzsche Podcast.
The Antichrist (1888) is one of the last books Nietzsche wrote before losing his sanity the next year. It serves as the culmination of a decade or more of Nietzsche's thoughts on morality, Christianity, and the need for a revaluation of values. This project - of finding or defining a new set of values by which man could live - was something about which Nietzsche was deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, some sort of moral direction is required for ascending life. It is essential that the philosophers of the future find some means of pushing their way through the stage of relativism, or "active nihilism". But such a project would be to ignore the contingency of all our moral beliefs; worse yet, by outlining a new values-structure, Nietzsche will have to think and work systematically. But Nietzsche's thinking is by its nature anti-systematic. As a result, numerous contradictions come to the forefront in his philosophical outlook, not all of which are neatly resolved.
However, what we find as key to understanding the work is the opposition we discussed in the previous episode: of Dionysus v/s The Crucified One. The opposition is between the Dionysian morality of which gives a rough sketch, based on life, overcoming and will to power, and the Christian morality which is defined negatively and as the decline of all of these things. He uses this opposition to illuminate the true nature of the Christian religion and to argue for the values that he finds to be badly needed by the modern man. In the course of this moral revaluation, Nietzsche gives a theory of decadence: how empires behave during their decline and collapse. His various considerations lead him to the conclusion that all of the most cherished productions of our society, our highest values, our human ideals, art, philosophy, music, education, and our whole morality - are products of decadence, and thus of weakness. He thus calls into question the value of abstract thinking, and indeed the value of our faculty for conscious thought.
Unlike most critics of the Christian religion, Nietzsche devotes very little time to the refutation of the arguments for Christianity's truth, or the supposed evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Instead, Nietzsche is laser-focused on the effect of the Christian doctrine of pity, and its character as a totally life-denying force. Jesus, for Nietzsche, is the ultimate life-denying figure: the apotheosis of pity. Through his torture and death at teh hands of the Romans, which he does not resist, he became a mimetic example for the spread of this moral contagion. "Resist not evil" is, in Nietzsche's argument, the entire key to the doctrine of the gospels, and the explanation Jesus' profound difference from other gods - even from the God of the Old Testament. Because he was so extraordinary, even the later Christians never measured up to Jesus' complete defiance of the natural world.
"An instinctual hatred of reality" is how Nietzsche describes Jesus. Rather than a "hero", Jesus does not fight, resist, or oppose. He lives in the immanent knowledge of his salvation. "The kingdom of heaven is within you". The later message that was spread was a corruption of this way of life only ever attained to by Jesus. The effect that this religion of pity had on the hearts of the cruel, European barbarians, meanwhile, was to harness their cruelty and turn it inward. With the rejection of all value in the external world, only the internal has meaning. With no external fights, the only fight of any importance becomes the fight against one's own sin. This fight endlessly multiplies the suffering of the world and makes it ever more questionable and worthy of denial: the follower of Christ yearns for some release to this tension, some relief from the endless suffering he lives within. As bleak as all of this sounds, contained in this message, Nietzsche's own "gospel" as it were, or good news, is that if pity is only added on to life, ersatz - that means it is possible that it can be removed. Through this revaluation, maybe we can finally be free of the weakness that has crippled the once strong and beautiful psyche of humanity.
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