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"I want to read Nietzsche, where do I start?" is a question that often comes up. Nietzsche's philosophy is notoriously difficult to interpret and Nietzsche was a prolific writer with a dozen books to his name. If one wants the best possible understanding, where does one start? In what order should you read his books? In this video, we make a few suggestions. Start with Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, or The Genealogy of Morals? What about Twilight of the Idols? Daybreak? Secondary literature? In this video we cover it all.
Of course, this is just some advice. There will be disagreement on this order, and if there should be an "order" at all. But that's okay.

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WATCH:
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Socrates: https://youtu.be/DM78nStythg
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Plato: https://youtu.be/nEhNRuPh4As
▶ Why Nietzsche Loved Thucydides: https://youtu.be/XI2dVkHoG7Q

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA

This aim, we could say the end-goal of his philosophy, was the so-called transvaluation of values. Specifically, of course, the transvaluation of Christian values.

As the title of the book The Antichrist makes clear, Nietzsche sought a complete reversal of Christian morality. In order to establish such a new moral order, he wanted to overturn, or transvaluate, all existing valuations.

In other words, if Nietzsche is against Christianity, then what is he for? Well, logically, he is for whatever runs counter to Christianity.

Which historical periods can we turn to for inspiration for such an anti-Christian world order? Well obviously the period before Christianity, specifically pre-Socratic Greece. But also the Renaissance. The period in history that positioned itself opposite of the long, Christian Middle Ages, and drew heavy inspiration from pre-Christian antiquity.

In Nietzsche’s estimation, the Renaissance was an attack on Christianity, and a successful one at that.

In the Renaissance, Nietzsche found a complete reversal of Christian values.

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WATCH the previous part here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaDxR7zOymI

This second video tackles the first essay of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Much of it will sound familiar to those who have read Beyond Good and Evil or Daybreak. Nietzsche makes a historical-genealogical (even linguistic) case for the good/bad and good/evil dichotomy.

The next part will tackle free will, the sovereign individual, guilt, and conscience. Subscribe if you want to be notified when these are released.

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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 formulati

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WATCH:
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
01:24 The psychology of the Saviour
05:48 Ernest Renan
13:42 The Kingdom of God is within you

Despite Nietzsche's final work of philosophy carrying the title of 'Antichrist', this work is remarkably positive about Christianity's central figure: Jesus Christ. Reading the book, it quickly becomes clear that the title refers to being anti-Christian rather than being anti-Jesus, because Nietzsche speaks in terms of admiration for Jesus.

He blames the early Christians (the Apostles, and Paul specifically) of distorting Christ's message for their own political and social gain, introducing elements of ressentiment and will to power that were simply absent from Jesus's life and teachings.

This video looks at a passage in the Antichrist in which Nietzsche claims that Jesus was not a hero nor a genius. It's a reaction to Ernest Renan, a historian of religion who played a central role in what theologians now call the "quest for the historical Jesus." A period in history during which scholars looked at the Gospels through the historical, not the theological, lens. It was a movement that sought to demystify the Gospels and separate fact from legend. Studying the Gospels as you would any other historical text, by critically examining its sources and internal contradictions.

Renan, in his best-selling and hugely influential biography of Jesus, ascribed heroic qualities to Jesus (while also denying his divinity and ability to perform miracles.)

Nietzsche accuses Renan of being a lackluster psychologist and furthermore that to call Jesus a hero is simply a mistake.

He then proceeds to give his own account of Jesus's psychological profile: claiming that the undistorted message of Jesus is one of asceticism, a new mode of being, free from resentment, a superabundance of love -- quite the opposite of what later Christians would make of his life when they sought to claim some sort of victory over their Roman oppressors and introduced ideas like Heaven or the claim that the Kingdom of God is some sort of other world which will come to pass in a future time in a spiritual place.

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▶ https://youtu.be/4Qv6OLWzMZo

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In case it wasn’t clear, the quote at the start of this video should be read with a great deal of sarcasm.

Schopenhauer does not believe that an individual was an absolute nothing before being born, nor does he believe that we are an absolute nothing after we die. We’ve covered his views on death and what happens after it, and the metaphysics surrounding it, in another Patreon-exclusive video on the channel.

But the quote at the beginning does illustrate one of Schopenhauer’s pet peeves, namely his dislike of rationalism and what we may call “crude materialism”, the belief that there exists nothing beyond the material and that metaphysics is useless or not quote unquote “real.”

Throughout his writings Schopenhauer harps on the physicists who look down upon metaphysics and dismiss it as philosophical fables that have no bearing on the real world. These physicists argue that physics is all one needs to explain the world, and consequently that metaphysics is useless at best or harmful at worst.

In the Parerga and Paralipomena, a collection essays that serve as a supplement to his main philosophy but which can be read on their own, Schopenhauer penned down some remarks on the starting point of philosophy.

He argues that there are two possible starting points for any philosophical investigation. Either you take an objective starting point, or a subjective one.
What does he mean by this?

A subjective starting point is any philosophy that begins with the mind, or perception, or consciousness. The philosophy of Descartes is the clearest example, epitomised by the phrase “I think, therefore I am.” But Schopenhauer names Locke and Berkeley as examples, as well as Immanuel Kant, who, in his estimation, reached the peak in this subjective way of thinking.

Kant, like Locke and Berkeley but different in some key aspects, thought that the world is essentially mental, or at any rate, that there is an essential mental quality to the world. That’s why his philosophy is idealism. It’s transcendental because it differs in some important ways from the idealism of Locke and Berkeley, but these details need not concern us here.

What matters is that Kant, Locke and Berkeley all assumed the world to be mental. If not entirely, then at least in essential part. This is why they chose, according to Schopenhauer, a subjective starting point for their philosophy.

A philosophy of this kind will tend to focus on how the mind works and how it comes to knowledge of the world through its mechanisms.

An objective standpoint then, logically, is the opposite. This starting point takes the world, or nature, or matter, or the universe as its beginning.

A philosophy of this kind will end up with a focus on the relations between objects, the laws of nature, the forces at work, the interactions between materials, et cetera.

A philosophy which regards the material world as the only thing that is absolutely given will inevitably become just a form of physics, and indeed, up until recently people used the term “natural philosophy” to refer to disciplines which we would today call biology, chemistry, physics, and so on.

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OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

This video delivers a hilarious and over-the-top analysis of Eric Carle’s children’s book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar," framing it as a profound Nietzschean masterpiece. We playfully argue that this simple tale of a caterpillar munching through foods before becoming a butterfly is steeped in philosophical symbolism, particularly echoing Friedrich Nietzsche’s themes of "self-overcoming," "growth," and the "will to power."

In this video, we propose that the caterpillar’s journey reflects Nietzsche’s philosophy, setting it against Schopenhauer’s "Will to Life" and Darwin’s survival-focused evolution. While Schopenhauer and Darwin emphasize mere existence, Nietzsche’s "Will to Power" insists life strives to thrive and expand—perfectly captured, we claim, by the caterpillar’s relentless eating and stunning metamorphosis. We highlight the caterpillar’s escalating appetite—from one apple to a lavish feast—as proof of its urge to transcend itself, ultimately transforming into a butterfly, which we liken to Nietzsche’s Übermensch (superhuman).

We also connect the book to German literary roots in this video, suggesting Carle’s time in Germany immersed us in Nietzsche’s ideas. We draw parallels with the Decadent movement, comparing the caterpillar’s food list to the sensory indulgence of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ "A rebours." Yet, we argue the caterpillar surpasses decadence through transformation, aligning with Nietzsche’s hopeful vision beyond nihilism. Symbols like the egg (potential and rebirth) and the sun (a new dawn) are spotlighted as Nietzschean motifs, reinforcing the caterpillar’s philosophical arc.

The video wraps up with a cheeky nudge to re-read the book through this Nietzschean lens, only to reveal it’s an April Fool’s prank. Still, amidst the humor, we pack in an educational rundown of Nietzsche’s ideas—contrasting them with Schopenhauer and Darwin—while celebrating the caterpillar’s tale as a metaphor for growth and self-overcoming. Watchers are left with both a laugh and a lesson from this cleverly crafted video.

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In this work, Schopenhauer lays out his eudaimonology, or theory on how to lead a happy existence. This theory will be subject of this video series.

This first part will serve as an introduction to the work as a whole, while subsequent parts will each tackle a particular section or chapter of the work. If you want to be notified when these subsequent parts are released, please consider subscribing to the channel and clicking the Bell-button.

The first thing to be said about this work is how contradictory it is to Schopenhauer’s main philosophy.

The grand conclusion of The World as Will and Representation is that life is generally not worth living – the world is a hell, and life is full of suffering. Schopenhauer’s highest ethical ideal in this work, is the life of the ascetic: someone who withdraws from the world and turns his back on ordinary life. If you are interested in the philosophy behind all of this, you can check out our big video dedicated to this major work.

However, Schopenhauer always maintained that this saintly hermit life is a path only a few individuals can take. The vast majority of people simply don’t have it in them to live their life in this way.

Schopenhauer’s aim with the Wisdom of Life, is to write for the common man, not for the holy saint. In order to do so, he must cast aside the conclusion of his main work, and proceed with pragmatism and realism. We are not concerned with philosophy or the search for truth, we are writing a practical manual on the happy life.

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WHERE TO START WITH NIETZSCHE?
▶ https://youtu.be/1Hk-Y89oL24

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I
▶ Ecce Homo: https://youtu.be/kR176vUnk40

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Introduction
02:19 The Birth of Tragedy
04:51 Untimely Meditations
07:25 Human, All Too Human
08:20 Daybreak
09:31 The Joyful Science
11:16 Thus Spoke Zarathustra
12:27 Beyond Good and Evil
14:03 The Genealogy of Morals
15:27 The Case of Wagner
17:53 Twilight of the Idols
19:50 The Antichrist
21:28 Ecce Homo
23:35 The Will to Power
25:23 Conclusion and thank you

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SUPPORT US ON PATREON:
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WATCH:
▶ Nietzsche's Warning to Scientists: https://youtu.be/Qy8Xof92OYQ
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Socrates: https://youtu.be/DM78nStythg
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Plato: https://youtu.be/nEhNRuPh4As
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Kant: https://youtu.be/9E_RLvcZ8jI

OUR ANALYSES:
▶ Beyond Good and Evil: https://youtu.be/WIHXZUltfqk
▶ The Antichrist: https://youtu.be/qej1Z8Qzq_c
▶ Genealogy of Morals: https://youtu.be/6PUx4cOfFcI
▶ Twilight of the Idols: https://youtu.be/YpVr_NEvWYA
▶ The Will to Power: https://youtu.be/He6ZC7ZFBt8
▶ Daybreak: https://youtu.be/cOL2z7nuXdA
▶ The Joyful Science: https://youtu.be/U0fTBOJ-C_I

TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 Intro
03:34 Agreement of the wise
09:55 Why the wise are wrong
15:12 Metaphysical suffering
20:20 Asceticism
23:47 Compassion and pity
29:44 Nihilism
33:42 Conclusion

In order to answer this question, we need to dig deep into the very core of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Not only that, we must ask ourselves one of the most fundamental questions of all:

What is the value of life?

Nietzsche’s fundamental disagreement with Schopenhauer lies in the answer to this question. More than just a theoretical question, the question ultimately determines our attitude towards life. Your answer to this question determines whether you’re an optimist or a pessimist. Whether you affirm life, or deny life.

If you know just a little bit about Nietzsche, you know where he stands on this question, and where Schopenhauer stands on this question. But what is more insightful, is figuring out exactly why these two great philosophers answered this fundamental question differently, and why Nietzsche changed his mind on it.

This video was sponsored by Brilliant. Thank you for supporting the channel!

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