Nietzsche the antichrist pdf

The fundamental laws of self-preservation and growth demand the opposite-that everyone invent his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. A people perishes when it confuses its duty with duty in general. An action demanded by the instinct of life is proved to be right by the pleasure that accompanies it; yet this nihilist with his Christian dogmatic entrails considered pleasure an objection.

This is the very recipe for decadence even for idiocy, Kant became an idiot. When we consider that among almost all peoples the philosopher is merely the next development- of the priestly type, then this legacy of the priest, this self deceiving-counterfeit,ceases to be surprising.

Having sacred tasks, such as improving, saving, or redeeming mankind-carrying the deity in his bosom and being the mouthpiece of imperatives from the beyond-with such a mission a man naturally stands outside all merely intellectual valuations: he himself is sanctified by such a task, he himself is a type of a higher order! What is science to the priest?

He is above that! And until now the priest has ruled! This practice is his legacy to mankind: his behavior before the judges, before the catch-poles, before the accusers and all kinds of slander and scorn-his behavior on the cross. He does not resist, he does not defend his right, he takes no step which might ward off the worst; on contrary, he provokes it.

Not to resist, not to be angry, not to hold responsible-but to resist not even the evil one-to love him. Zarathustra is a skeptic. Strength, freedom which is born of the strength and over strength of the spirit, proves itself by skepticism. Men of conviction are not worthy of the least consideration in fundamental questions of value and disvalue. Convictions are prisons. Such men do not look far enough, they do not look beneath themselves: but to be permitted to join in the discussion of value and disvalue, one must see five hundred convictions beneath oneself-behind oneself.

A spirit who wants great things, who also wants the means to them, is necessarily a skeptic. Freedom from all kinds of convictions, to be able to see freely, is part of strength. Great passion, the ground and the power of his existence, even more enlightened,even more despotic than he is himself, employs his whole intellect; it makes him unhesitating; it gives him courage even for unholy means; under certain circumstances it does not begrudge him convictions.

Conviction as a means: many things are attained only by means of a conviction. Great passion uses and uses up convictions it does not succumb to them - it knows itself sovereign. Related Papers complexity theory and the world's material manifestations, Ethics. Nietzsche Biography By Huda Bhurgri. The first sketches for "The Will to Power" were made in , soon after the publication of the first three parts of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up notes.

Several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by "Beyond Good and Evil," then by "The Genealogy of Morals" written in twenty days , then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost as often he changed his plan. In September, , he began actual work upon the first volume, and before the end of the month it was completed.

The Summer had been one of almost hysterical creative activity. Since the middle of June he had written two other small books, "The Case of Wagner" and "The Twilight of the Idols," and before the end of the year he was destined to write "Ecce Homo. Thereafter he wrote no more. The Wagner diatribe and "The Twilight of the Idols" were published immediately, but "The Antichrist" did not get into type until One notes, in her biography of him—a useful but not always accurate work—an evident desire to purge him of the accusation of mocking at sacred things.

He had, she says, great admiration for "the elevating effect of Christianity … upon the weak and ailing," and "a real liking for sincere, pious Christians," and "a tender love for the Founder of Christianity. Paul and his like," who perverted the Beatitudes, which Christ intended for the lowly only, into a universal religion which made war upon aristocratic values. Here, obviously, one is addressed by an interpreter who cannot forget that she is the daughter of a Lutheran pastor and the grand—daughter of two others; a touch of conscience gets into her reading of "The Antichrist.

There is not the slightest reason to believe that any such garbling ever took place, nor is there any evidence that their common heritage of piety rested upon the brother as heavily as it rested upon the sister. On the contrary, it must be manifest that Nietzsche, in this book, intended to attack Christianity headlong and with all arms, that for all his rapid writing he put the utmost care into it, and that he wanted it to be printed exactly as it stands. The ideas in it were anything but new to him when he set them down.

He had been developing them since the days of his beginning. You will find some of them, clearly recognizable, in the first book he ever wrote, "The Birth of Tragedy. And the rest are scattered through the whole vast mass of his notes, sometimes as mere questionings but often worked out very carefully. Moreover, let it not be forgotten that it was Wagner's yielding to Christian sentimentality in "Parsifal" that transformed Nietzsche from the first among his literary advocates into the most bitter of his opponents.

He could forgive every other sort of mountebankery, but not that. In me the stern intellectual conscience that Christianity fosters and makes paramount turns against Christianity. In me Christianity … devours itself. In truth, the present philippic is as necessary to the completeness of the whole of Nietzsche's system as the keystone is to the arch.

All the curves of his speculation lead up to it. What he flung himself against, from beginning to end of his days of writing, was always, in the last analysis, Christianity in some form or other—Christianity as a system of practical ethics, Christianity as a political code, Christianity as metaphysics, Christianity as a gauge of the truth.