Weltgeist

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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

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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

Welcome to part 1 in a planned series on Nietzsche’s work, The Antichrist. In this first video we will briefly introduce the work and go over some necessary context. In following parts, we will do a deep dive analysis. If you want to be notified when these parts are released, please subscribe to the channel and click the Bell button.

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.

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Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols is a short work. It was written in just over a week in 1888, one year before Nietzsche’s mental collapse.

In the collected works of Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols stands as a sort of summary of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy up until that point.

The writing style is radical. The contents are radical. There is very little nuance, and the reader gets the impression that Nietzsche is out to shock his audience. Some interpreters have even speculated that in Twilight of the Idols, we can already see the signs of Nietzsche’s coming mental breakdown.

In this series, we’ll go over the most important ideas present in the book. Because the entire book was written as a sort of summary of the late Nietzsche’s philosophy, this series will also serve as a good introduction to Nietzsche’s thought in general. Still, for a more in-depth overview, we recommend our series on Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals.

Twilight of the Idols is a play on words. Nietzsche is parodying the title of the final opera in the famous Ring-cycle by Richard Wagner: Twilight of the Gods. The pun is more obvious in German: Götterdämmerung versus Götzendämmerung.

The fourth and final part of Wagner’s Ring cycle ends with the destruction of the gods: Valhalla goes up in flames, the eponymous ring is returned to the Rhinemaidens, the banks of the Rhine river overflow and extinguish the fire. The gods are dead, but the world is born anew. Humans, from now on, are no longer playthings of the gods, but free beings ready to create their own destiny.

Similarly, Nietzsche envisions a future in which humans are free from the “philosophical gods” of the past – ideas that have come to be regarded as dogmatically true from which mankind must liberate itself.

But Nietzsche named his book Twilight of the Idols, not Twilight of the Gods. An idol, in a religious context, is a man-made object that is venerated for the deity that it represents. In Christianity, Judaism and Islam, idolatry – the worship of man-made objects – is strictly forbidden. In other words, an idol could be said to be false god.

By choosing this title, Nietzsche is saying he will set out to destroy certain false gods – mistakes philosophers before him have made.

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Schopenhauer and Hegel on Napoleon Bonaparte
▶ https://youtu.be/PYikGlrN7Co
Schopenhauer on History versus Philosophy
▶ https://youtu.be/6DEUHYj8nhY

TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Where does the hate come from?
04:05: The story of the horse
06:50 Hegel’s “science”
13:00 Hegel’s writing style
16:42 Hegel’s philosophy
23:05 Conclusion

SCHOPENHAUER'S WORKS:
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3pK6xCj
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3jJa2p0
The World as Will and Representation vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3FPGkIj
The World as Will and Representation vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3FT0nFC
Schopenhauer’s work is notoriously for constantly and repeatedly dunking on Hegel.

He said Hegel’s philosophy stupefied an entire generation, maintained that posterity would look down on Hegel as a “monument to German stupidity”, providing later generations with endless laughter. His “school of dulness”, “center of ignorance” was the greatest example of the corruption of academic philosophy.

Where does this hatred come from? Generally, it’s agreed that Schopenhauer hates Hegel for personal reasons, but also for philosophical reasons.

The two men had a bit of an altercation when Schopenhauer had to pass an exam in order to teach at the University of Berlin. Hegel asked him a question on “animal functions” but used the term wrongly. Schopenhauer corrected him, and the professor of medicine and biology concurred. This little incident proved to Schopenhauer that Hegel was a charlatan, unable to use a philosophical term in the correct manner.

Another possible source of hatred was Schopenhauer’s envy: we know he deeply desired fame but was largely ignored up until the very end of his life. Contrast this with Hegel, who was a philosophical superstar and world-famous almost immediately.

But philosophically, there are disagreements too. Hegel’s philosophy hinges too much upon history. For Schopenhauer, history was the polar opposite of philosophy: it focuses on the particular instead of on the general. For Schopenhauer, all of history is simply a manifestation through time of one underlying Will, with the Will itself being unchanging. Philosophy is the study of this Will. History is the study of the appearance, or manifestation. In this framework, Hegel makes an unforgivable category-error: he thinks he’s doing philosophy, but he’s actually a historian.
He also disagreed with Hegel’s general outlook. That history is the progressive realization of a fundamentally good ideal; history being the march of the Geist as it unfolds itself and comes to know itself, ultimately resulting in total human freedom. Schopenhauer disagreed that the world is going in a particular direction (being only a manifestation of something unchanging) but also he disagreed with the implied optimism of this philosophy of history. We’re not marching towards some ideal, we’re just here to suffer, forever and ever. Existence has no goal beyond this, let alone some rational Geist permeating everything.

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WATCH:
Part 1: https://youtu.be/0TbxTGwge-4
Part 2: https://youtu.be/S2keARUVGJM

In this third and final part of our series on Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Will to Power, we look at a modern interpretation (Bernard Reginster's The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism from 2006) to finally settle the question of whether or not the Will to power is a metaphysical concept or not -- turns out we have to take a middle road and figure out what exactly Nietzsche means by "power"...

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Please subscribe if you enjoyed this video! TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Introduction
03:29 Decadence & Socrates
12:31 Morality Against Nature
18:04 The Weak Against the Strong

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols is a short work. It was written in just over a week in 1888, one year before Nietzsche’s mental collapse.

In the collected works of Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols stands as a sort of summary of Nietzsche’s entire philosophy up until that point.

The writing style is radical. The contents are radical. There is very little nuance, and the reader gets the impression that Nietzsche is out to shock his audience. Some interpreters have even speculated that in Twilight of the Idols, we can already see the signs of Nietzsche’s coming mental breakdown.

In this series, we’ll go over the most important ideas present in the book. Because the entire book was written as a sort of summary of the late Nietzsche’s philosophy, this series will also serve as a good introduction to Nietzsche’s thought in general. Still, for a more in-depth overview, we recommend our series on Beyond Good and Evil and the Genealogy of Morals.

Twilight of the Idols is a play on words. Nietzsche is parodying the title of the final opera in the famous Ring-cycle by Richard Wagner: Twilight of the Gods. The pun is more obvious in German: Götterdämmerung versus Götzendämmerung.

The fourth and final part of Wagner’s Ring cycle ends with the destruction of the gods: Valhalla goes up in flames, the eponymous ring is returned to the Rhinemaidens, the banks of the Rhine river overflow and extinguish the fire. The gods are dead, but the world is born anew. Humans, from now on, are no longer playthings of the gods, but free beings ready to create their own destiny.

Similarly, Nietzsche envisions a future in which humans are free from the “philosophical gods” of the past – ideas that have come to be regarded as dogmatically true from which mankind must liberate itself.

But Nietzsche named his book Twilight of the Idols, not Twilight of the Gods. An idol, in a religious context, is a man-made object that is venerated for the deity that it represents. In Christianity, Judaism and Islam, idolatry – the worship of man-made objects – is strictly forbidden. In other words, an idol could be said to be false god.

By choosing this title, Nietzsche is saying he will set out to destroy certain false gods – mistakes philosophers before him have made.

One of the most elusive yet most frequently used words in Twilight of the Idols, is the word “décadence.” Interestingly, Nietzsche prefers to use the French term even though he sometimes uses German words like Verfall, Niedergang, or Entartung. In English, we can keep the French term, or use words like Degeneration or even Corruption.

Nietzsche uses the term to denote the process by which individuals, or even entire societies or time periods become worse, or, degenerate. Much of Twilight of the Idols is devoted to the description of how this process and works and what that means.

However, in true Nietzschean fashion, we never find a real definition or sustained analysis of what degeneration is exactly. It’s up to us, the readers, to piece things together and make a coherent picture out of disparate parts and fragments.

Nietzsche will argue that a morality is defined by how it teaches us to deal with these passions. Nietzsche notes that nearly every morality thus far formulated, advocates the quelling of passion.

It’s not hard to come up with examples. The idea that impulsive emotion is bad, that unbridled lust or greed are problematic, that violent anger is rarely justified – these are all ideas that have become so commonplace they are barely questioned. Every single system of morality, from Stoicism to Buddhism to Kantian ethics – preaches either the control or even the annihilation of emotions.


This is the proto

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Keep exploring at https://brilliant.org/Weltgeist/. Get started for free, and hurry—the first 200 people get 20% off an annual premium subscription.

Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

WATCH:
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Socrates: https://youtu.be/DM78nStythg

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
03:14 A bookshop in France
06:22 Know thyself - or don't
11:16 Ressentiment
16:54 Conclusion

Nietzsche first discovered the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1887. This is relatively late in his intellectual career, yet the Russian writer still had a profound influence on him.

He called Dostoevsky “the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn” and read a few of his novels in French translation. The very first novel he read was Notes from the Underground, although in a botched, low-quality French translation.
Still, it’s highly likely that Nietzsche got the idea (maybe even the word) of ressentiment from Dostoevsky. This French term appears 4 times in the book that Nietzsche read, and while inklings of the idea were present in earlier works, it was not until the Genealogy of Morals (written in 1887, so the same year as his discovery of Dostoevsky) that the word would take centre stage in his philosophy.

Dostoevsky describes the inner psychology of the Underground Man, touching upon themes of isolation, cognitive dissonance, struggles with nihilism, and most importantly (for Nietzsche) resentment. He describes the man of “heightened consciousness” who does not immediately strike back upon being hit, but plots and thinks and analyses his revenge instead. Out of weakness, perhaps, or simply because he thinks too much about the question of justice.

In any case, this lingering has nasty psychological side effects. Dostoevsky describes this man as a mouse, who hides in his mouse-hole and feasts on his own eternal spite. Over time he might even start to enjoy this wallowing in self-pity.

This describes almost to a T, Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment. The condition of the slave, who cannot win from his masters (the strong) in the real world and therefore takes recourse in an imaginary revenge. This slave morality would ultimately give birth to Christianity and other so-called Hinterwelt philosophies.

But what Nietzsche admired most was Dostoevsky’s psychological insight into what makes us human. The portrait of the Underground Man is dark and deep, the type of psychology that Nietzsche first envisions in Beyond Good and Evil, the new “crown of the sciences”, a psychology that dares to leave morality behind and venture beyond good and evil.

This video was sponsored by Brilliant.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SUPPORT US ON PATREON:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

Schopenhauer and Hegel on Napoleon Bonaparte
▶ https://youtu.be/PYikGlrN7Co
Schopenhauer on History versus Philosophy
▶ https://youtu.be/6DEUHYj8nhY

▶ SCHOPENHAUER'S WORKS:
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3pK6xCj
Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3jJa2p0
The World as Will and Representation vol. 1: https://amzn.to/3FPGkIj
The World as Will and Representation vol. 2: https://amzn.to/3FT0nFC

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The full video is about Nietzsche's problem with his contemporary culture and is up on Patreon only.
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

WATCH:
▶ Why Nietzsche Hated Kant: https://youtu.be/9E_RLvcZ8jI

ALSO:
▶ 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

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

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Support us on Patreon, get access to exclusive videos:
▶ https://www.patreon.com/WeltgeistYT

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

Sigmund Freud, in works such as The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and Its Discontents, was extremely critical of religion. Calling religions illusions, he maintained that they arise out of a child's need for comfort as it grows up in an increasingly hostile world as it leaves the parental bubble.

The desire for the safety of the father ultimately leads to what we would call religions today, often with god(s) as a father figure on central stage.

Moving on from the individual to the societal level, religions are illusions that help maintain civilization by encouraging adherents to repress their most violent, primal instincts.

Freud believed however, that religions would come to be discarded as their function is fulfilled by other mechanisms, by the advent of science and the further development of reason.

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