by Friedrich Nietzsche
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Product Description
"Twilight of the Idols", an attack on all the prevalent ideas of his time, offers a lightning tour of his whole philosophy. It also prepares the way for "The Anti-Christ", a final assault on institutional Christianity. Both works show Nietzsche lashing out at self-deception, astounded at how often morality is based on vengefulness and resentment. Both reveal a profound understanding of human mean-spiritedness which still cannot destroy the underlying optimism of Nietzsche, the supreme affirmer among the great philosophers.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Scathing Polemic Against Religious Self-Illusionism, 2008-10-25
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.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
 A good place to start, 2007-11-14
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.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Mental Roller Coaster, 2007-10-17
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.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
amazing... , 2007-05-07
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.
2 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
 bastardized, trite, dogmatic, vulgar thinking relieved ocassionaly by a flash of wit, 2006-10-21
So much for the most "lucid" of German prose writers, doesn't anyone think it peculiar his style resembles that of a conspiracy theorist warning us of the perils of the illumati and the freemasons. It is dogmatic to the point of shrill, and surprisingly lacking in real self-confidence. (perhaps he using his rhetoric as a way to convince himself of things not even he can believe.) It is full of vulgar unnatural and irational opinions meant mainly to shock lacking true conviction in the end. There is a constant confusion of thought and feeling, a endless muddying of the waters of interesting thought by a kind of upside down stoicism that could only be the product of a thorougly dacadent romanticism. There is also a kind of disturbing right wing athuritarianism,that is obviously the product of (M. Andre Gide's words )Nietschze's insane jealousy of Christ. He distorts history into a recreation of his own amusing and rather twisted pysche. His rants against christianity, while amusing, are often a attack on liberal christianity, which Nietschze being the ultra right winger he is patently despises. They confirm always a midn that worships strength as a confession of weakness.
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