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The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Penguin Classics)

From Penguin Classics

Author : Friedrich Nietzsche
Binding : Paperback
DeweyDecimalNumber : 190
EAN : 9780140445145
ISBN : 0140445145
Label : Penguin Classics
Manufacturer : Penguin Classics
NumberOfPages : 208
ProductTypeName : ABIS_BOOK
PublicationDate : 1990-02-15
Publisher : Penguin Classics
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Customer Reviews

Rating:
Summary: Nietzsche
Comment: Twilight of the Idols-This starts off with some almost funny (something even vaguely resembling humor is not something you expect to see in a Nietzsche book) observations from Nietzsche and goes from there into his critiques of Socrates. He later goes into critiques and observations about other philosophers, as well as critiquing Germans and Germany. This book has plenty of what I normally like and dislike about Nietzsche. Dislike, sometimes reading his work is about as exciting as watching paint dry and he comes off personality wise as way too anal retentive, dogmatic to his own worldview and humorless. He reminds me of the current wave of militant atheists. Dogmatic atheism is the trendy new system created religion in case you haven't noticed.

What I like about Nietzsche, the creed of self improvement and the anti-Christianity stuff, is here in abundance. Like in most of his work between pages of boredom you get instances of brilliance such as the following from Twilight of the Idols when talking about what Christianity did to the great "Teutonic Blonde Beast"
he say Christianity made him "sick, miserable, filled with ill-will towards himself, full of hatred for the impulses towards life, full of suspicion of all that was still strong and happy". In other words he lost his healthy Pagan Odinic worldview and became a psychological and spiritual Jew.

The Anti-Christ-Nietzsche really rips into Christianity in this one. There are other critiques of Christianity that I like better (Natures Eternal Religion by Ben Klassen and The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine are a couple off the top of my head) but for someone with the worldview that Nietzsche had this is pretty good. The main righteous point he makes is that Christianity is completely anti-nature, human and otherwise.

Rating:
Summary: Scathing Polemic Against Religious Self-Illusionism
Comment: I had a hard time trying to come up with a concise rating and review of this 2-in-1 book. On the one hand, Nietzsche sums up and elucidates some fantastic points about the general state of Christian morality and Church teaching (and thus about the human tendency to "hate thyself and one's own nature"). On the other hand, he does appear to suffer from some misunderstandings concerning some particulars of Christianity and Buddhism, worsened to say the least by rampant generalizations and a notable lack of syllogistic explication.
Nietzsche definitely broke ground with many of his other contemporaries of the Modern Era in Western Philosophy by not working in syllogisms and theoretical tabulations. Nietzsche is a man who passionately makes stabs at his opponents without worry of backlash or micrological scrutiny. And this is what makes these two works so fun to read!
Twilight of the Idols is basically a summation of many of his ideas - anyone wishing to gain an overall sense of Nietzsche's position on humanity's relation to the world and itself would do well to read this work.
The Anti-Christ is his most ferocious attack on institutional Christianity and it's many hypocrises. I believe the material still holds relevant today, not as an affront to Jesus' teachings, but on the establishment and growth of Paulism over the last two millenia.
Anyone who is looking to get a good sense of Nietzsche's philosophy and/or a dynamic view of religious law-practice would do well to read this pair of essays, bearing in mind that generalizations run rampant in his writing. I myself found this to be an enjoyable read, although I noted some inaccuracies in content.
Rating:
Summary: A good place to start
Comment: This was the first Nietzsche I read about 6 years ago at University. I only understood about 40% of it and have reread it about 3 times, each time understanding more. Anything of Nietzsche's is good. It's just a matter of rereading it if you really don't get it. The bits which at first seem like padding become the most interesting bits eventually.

This is a good place to start partly because of Michael Tanner's excellent introduction and also because it is not too long but covers the most important bits of his writing, his attack on Christianity (and the post-Christian mealymouthed morality we've inherited), the moral system which really made him puke. As Tanner says though, in many of his arguments against Christianity you can see he is arguing against it when practised by the overwhelming majority of people, not the person of Jesus or the philosophy itself which he often seems to appreciate and value.

Nietzsche is THE must read for all adults because I could have lived 1000 years and not figured so much of it out myself - that Christianity is a religion of hate, dressed up in 'love'. Sounds batty, but it's not. Because you can read Edmund Burke and others and have already thought these things yourself. Not Friedrich Nietzsche.

You won't read anything else like him anywhere.
Rating:
Summary: Mental Roller Coaster
Comment: Ours is a time not that very different from that of Nietzsche's. We too live in a kind of Victorian hell, a genteel time of right thinking professors who would make Nietzsche feel as unwelcome as did his "betters," who recognized he was a genius but didn't want him around. "Twilight of the Idols" is a lot of fun to read. It is exhilarating to read such frankness, without the American way of combining honestly with profanity. It is straight talk on the decline of German culture. I will leave it to the reader to decide if this may be applied to our once great country. Nietzsche's great insight in his time was to return to the Greeks, but to cast Plato aside, in favor of the great historian Thucydides, who immortalized the rhetoricians, such as Pericles, and sang the praises of the speaker and doer of deeds in contrast to the "armchair" thinkers such as Socrates. Nietzsche seems to be the ultimate heavy, but he is a hoot to read and seems to have had as much fun writing this work as I have had reading it.
Rating:
Summary: amazing...
Comment: This book was sooo interesting, I couldn't put it down. Despite being Christian or not, (I being in the latter category), it really shines new light on how you see the Christian faith, or any faith in general.