Beyond Good and Evil (German:
Jenseits von Gut und Böse), subtitled "Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future" (
Vorspiel einer Philosophie der
Zukunft), is a book by the German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, first published in
1886.
It takes up and expands on the ideas of his previous work,
Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, but approached from a more critical,
polemical direction.
In
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche attacks past
philosophers for their alleged lack of critical
sense and their blind acceptance of
Christian premises in their consideration of
morality. The work moves into the realm "beyond
good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind
the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive
critique in favour of what he regards as an affirmative approach
that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge and
the perilous condition of the modern individual.
Background and themes
Of the four "late-period" writings of Nietzsche,
Beyond Good
and Evil most closely resembles the aphoristic style of his
middle period. In it he exposes the deficiencies of those usually
called "philosophers" and identifies the qualities of the "new
philosophers": imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality,
and the "creation of values". He then contests some of the key
presuppositions of the old philosophic tradition like
"self-consciousness," "knowledge," "truth," and "free will",
explaining them as inventions of the moral consciousness. In their
place he offers the
will to
power as an explanation of all behavior; this ties into
his "perspective of life", which he regards as "beyond good and
evil", denying a universal morality for all human beings. Religion
and the
master and slave
moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates
deeply-held
humanistic beliefs, portraying
even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not
universally objectionable.
Structure of the work
The work consists of 296 numbered sections and an "epode" (or
"aftersong") entitled "From High Mountains". The sections are
organized into nine parts:
- Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
- Part Two: The Free Spirit
- Part Three: The Religious Essence
- Part Four: Maxims and Interludes
- Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals
- Part Six: We Scholars
- Part Seven: Our Virtues
- Part Eight: Peoples and Fatherlands
- Part Nine: What is Noble?
On philosophers, free spirits, and scholars
In the opening two parts of the book, Nietzsche discusses in turn
the philosophers of the past, whom he accuses of a blind dogmatism
plagued by moral prejudice masquerading as a search for objective
truth; and the "free spirits", like himself, who are to replace
them.
He casts doubt on the project of past philosophy by asking why we
should want the "truth" rather than recognizing untruth "as a
condition of life". He offers an entirely psychological explanation
of every past philosophy: each has been an "involuntary and
unconscious memoir" on the part of its author (§6) and exists to
justify his moral prejudices, which he solemnly baptizes as
"truths".
In a startling passage (§34), Nietzsche tells us that "from every
point of view the
erroneousness of the world in which we
believe we live is the surest and firmest thing we can get our eyes
on". Philosophers are wrong to rail violently against the risk of
being deceived. "It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is
worth more than appearance". Life is nothing without appearances;
it appears to Nietzsche that it follows from this that the
abolition of appearances would imply the abolition of "truth" as
well. In an even more extreme leap of logic, Nietzsche is led to
ask the question, "what compels us to assume there exists any
essential antithesis between 'true' and 'false'?"
Nietzsche singles out the
Stoic precept of
"living according to nature" (§9) as showing how philosophy
"creates the world in its own image" by trying to regiment nature
"according to the Stoa". But nature, as something uncontrollable
and "prodigal beyond measure", cannot be tyrannized over in the way
Stoics tyrannize over themselves. Further, there are forceful
attacks on several individual philosophers.
Descartes' cogito presupposes that there is an I,
that there is such an activity as thinking, and that I know what
thinking is (§16).
Spinoza masks his
"personal timidity and vulnerability" by hiding behind his
geometrical method (§5), and inconsistently makes self-preservation
a fundamental drive while rejecting
teleology (§13).
Kant, "the
great Chinaman of Königsberg" (§210), reverts to the prejudice of
an old moralist with his
categorical imperative, the
dialectical grounding of which is a mere smokescreen (§5). His
"faculty" to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori
judgements is likened to the explanation of the narcotic quality of
opium in terms of a "sleepy faculty" in
Molière's comedy
Le Malade imaginaire.
Schopenhauer is mistaken in thinking that the
nature of the will is self-evident (§19), which is in fact a highly
complex instrument of control over those who must obey, not
transparent to those who command.
"Free spirits", by contrast to the philosophers of the past, are
"investigators to the point of cruelty, with rash fingers for the
ungraspable, with teeth and stomach for the most indigestible"
(§44). Nietzsche warns against those who would suffer for the sake
of truth, and exhorts his readers to shun these indignant sufferers
for truth and lend their ears instead to "cynics" – those who
"speak 'badly' of man - but do not speak ill of him" (§26).
There is a kind of fearless scholars who are truly independent of
prejudice (§6), but these "philosophical labourers and men of
science in general" should not be confused with philosophers, who
are "
commanders and law-givers" (§211).
Nietzsche also subjects physics to critique. "Nature's conformity
to law" is merely one interpretation of the phenomena which natural
science observes; Nietzsche suggests that the same phenomena could
equally be interpreted as demonstrating "the tyrannically ruthless
and inexorable enforcement of power-demands" (§22). Nietzsche
appears to espouse a strong brand of scientific anti-realism when
he asserts that "It is
we alone who have fabricated
causes, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number,
law, freedom, motive, purpose" (§21).
On morality and religion
In the "
pre-moral period of mankind", actions were judged
by their consequences. Over the past 10,000 years, however, a
morality has developed where actions are judged by their origins
(their motivations) not their consequences. This morality of
intentions is, according to Nietzsche, a "prejudice" and "something
provisional [...] that must be overcome" (§32).
Nietzsche criticizes "unegoistic morality" and demands that
"Moralities must first of all be forced to bow before
order of rank" (§221). Every
"
high culture" begins by recognizing
"the
pathos of distance"
(§257).
Nietzsche contrasts southern (Catholic) and northern (Protestant)
Christianity; northern Europeans have much less "talent for
religion" (§48) and lack "southern
delicatezza" (§50). As
elsewhere, Nietzsche praises the
Old
Testament while disparaging the
New (§52).
Religion has always been connected to "three dangerous dietary
prescriptions: solitude, fasting and sexual abstinence" (§47), and
has exerted cruelty through demanding sacrifice according to a
"ladder" with different rungs of cruelty, which has ultimately
caused God Himself to be sacrificed (§55). Christianity, "the most
fatal kind of self-presumption ever", has beaten everything joyful,
assertive and autocratic out of man and turned him into a
"
sublime abortion" (§62). If, unlike past philosophers
such as Schopenhauer, we really want to tackle the problems of
morality, we must "compare
many moralities" and "prepare a
typology of morals" (§186). In a discussion that
anticipates
On the
Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche claims that "
Morality
is in Europe today herd-animal morality" (§202)—i.e., it
emanates from the
ressentiment of the slave for the master
(see also §260, which leads into the discussion in
Genealogy, I).
On nations, peoples and cultures
Nietzsche discusses the complexities of the German soul (§244),
praises the Jews and heavily criticizes the trend of German
anti-Semitism (§251). He praises
France as "the seat of Europe's most spiritual and refined culture
and the leading school of taste" (§254). He finds the English
coarse, gloomy, more brutal than the Germans, and declares that
"they are no philosophical race", singling out
Bacon,
Hobbes,
David Hume and
John Locke as representing a "debasement
and devaluation of the concept 'philosopher' for more than a
century" (§252). Nietzsche also touches on problems of translation
and the leaden quality of the German language (§28).
In a prophetic statement, Nietzsche proclaims that "The time for
petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it
the struggle for mastery over the whole earth" (§208).
Aphorisms and poetry
Between §62 and §186 Nietzsche inserts a collection of mostly
single-sentence aphorisms, modelled on French aphorists such as
La
Rochefoucauld. Twelve of these (§§ 84, 85, 86, 114, 115, 127,
131, 139, 144, 145, 147, 148) concern women or the distinction
between men and women. Other subjects touched on include his
doctrine of the
eternal
recurrence (§70), music (§106) and utilitarianism (§174), among
more general attempts at trenchant observations about human
nature.
The work concludes with a short ode to friendship in verse form
(continuing Nietzsche's use of poetry in
The Gay Science and
Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
Editions
- Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der
Moral, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, Munich:
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002 (study edition of the standard
German Nietzsche edition)
- Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann, New York:
Random House, 1966; reprinted in Vintage Books, and as part of
Basic Writings of Nietzsche, New York: Modern Library,
2000
- Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R. J.
Hollingdale, Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1973; revised reprint 1990 with introduction by
Michael Tanner
- Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Helen Zimmern, 1906, reprinted in Courier
Dover Publications, New York, 1997, ISBN 048629868X
- Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marion Faber,
Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 1998
- Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Judith Norman and
edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002
Notes
- Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals, summary by Meg
Wallace
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