Who Was Nietzsche’s Antichrist?

Abstract

Abstract When Nietzsche launched his program of inventing personalized and idiosyncratic values, he noticed a very large obstacle to its success: those values are most urgently needed by disunified agents, but the enterprise of inventing values seems to demand highly unified agency. Nietzsche’s never-completed Revaluation of All Values started off with The Antichrist, a work that dramatizes the problem by presenting its own implicit author as someone whose psychology was built around an internally incoherent drive; the literary models for that drive came from the political antisemitism of Nietzsche’s day. Once we see the shape of that problem clearly, we also see how the intended “revaluation of values” was not simply the substitution of one set of values for another. Rather, it was—in today’s vocabulary—metaethical.