The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ: or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Penguin Classics) Paperback – February 15, 1990

Common doesn't get overly fancy, conveying in plain sophistication. Not Kaufman's often over-verbiated technicalism; sapping the lightness and soul of Nietzsche's work. I practically carry this small book around like a portable bible. Some of N's best stuff, easily.

Nietzche, it has been said, is a character in Dostoevsky's world. With this, I agree. Nietzche is an energetic and times insightful writer, who ultimately lacks the self awareness he so desperately needs. By choosing to be so flagrantly disrespectful of Gd, Nietzche, unlike Dostoevsky (who he greatly admired), alienates himself from the clear solution to his dilemma. It's as if Nietzche forcibly, or involuntarily, stops short just before the finish line of true self-actualization, and I don't know if it's spite (Think Underground Man from Notes from Underground), fear, or madness. Be that as it may, Nietzche is a great writer and, if we apply his own view of exercising an acquired taste for ideas that we find wrong, we can see past this tragic lapse of Nietzche's and in so doing, derive pleasure and insight from his offerings.

There were meant to be two separate booksThe first is just Nietzsche being fervently Nietzsche, which just a pleasure to beholdThe second is a very concentrated dose of Nietzsche against Christianity and should encourage all but the most offended to read his more scholarly rebuke in ‘The Genealogy of Morality’5/5 Stars

“Have I been understood? Dionysos against the Crucified…” ~ Ecce HomoNietzsche’s The Anti-Christ (1888) is the philosopher’s final and perhaps most powerful, detailed, and sustained psychological attack against systematic, institutionalized Christianity – the final assault on what Nietzsche dubbed a decadent form of life-negating beliefs, the ultimate exercise in décadence and ressentiment that robs the superior individual of his strength and creativity. This book offers Nietzsche’s view of the troubled and dangerous psychology of Christianity, develops a unique portrait of Nietzsche’s (or Dionysos’) worthy adversary, Jesus, the Nazarene, the “redeemer,” the “Crucified,” the "bringer of glad tidings," in a manner similar to the portraits of Jesus and his ethical philosophy found in the writings of Jaspers, Tolstoy, Jefferson, and most recently, Mailer. Readers are familiar with many of Nietzsche’s other infamous opponents: Schopenhauer, Wagner, Strauss, and of course, through the protracted engagement or critical confrontation (Auseinandersetzung), Socrates. The values that Christianity embraces and thrusts upon its devotees and believers, through the strict mediation of the cunningly sinister activities of what Nietzsche dubs the priestly caste, stands antithetic to the values Nietzsche embraces – as the “Revaluation of all values!” – linked to the efficacious discharge of the will to power (§62). What is good, bad, and what counts as happiness is defined by Nietzsche, good is: “All that heightens the feeling of power, the will to power,” and happiness lies in the “feeling that power increases that a resistance is overcome,” and all that is bad and of no value, is all that “proceeds from weakness” (§2), all that hinders the efficacious discharge of one’s will to power.Dr. James M. MagriniFormer: Philosophy/ College of DupageNCIS

Twilight of The Idols is an unpleasant, though necessary text, especially in light of recent events. I highly recommend anyone questioning the increasingly ideologically conformist society we are a part of to read and question. Regardless of whether the reader accepts or rejects Nietzsche's claims, one is better for having been exposed to his thought (or madness as the case may be). Examples- "Freedom is the will to be responsible for ourselves," or when "...the mouthpiece of the decaying strata of society, raises his voice in splendid indignation for "right", "justice", "equal rights", he is only groaning under the burden of his ignorance, which cannot understand why he actually suffers..." Highly recommend for anyone trying to understand Nietzsche, life, independent thought, and how fascism perverted Nietzsche's ideas.