Friedrich Nietzsche "The Will to Power" and "The Antichrist"

Thesis: In The Will to Power, Nietzsche describes the basic animalistic drive for power that all men have. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche criticizes Christianity as a baseless religion that taught false morality and religion.

I. The Will to Power

a. Drive for power = freedom

b. Ethics – aimed at holding the desire for power in check

c. Society that gives up war and conquest = in decline

d. Democracy hates the will to power

e. Democracy – release of laziness, of weariness, of weakness

f. Order of rank is needed in “age of suffrage universal”

g. Order of rank determined by quantum of power

II. The Antichrist

a. Good – all that heightens power

b. Bad = all weakness

c. Happiness – feeling that power increases

d. Sympathy for weak is worse than any vice

e. Christianity – the religion of pity

f. In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point

g. Equal rights for all is a “poison of the doctrine”