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 Title page of the first edition. | |
| Author | Friedrich Nietzsche |
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| Original title | Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft |
| Language | German |
| Subject | Morality,metaphysics |
| Published | 1886 |
| Publication place | Germany |
| Media type | |
| Preceded by | Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) |
| Followed by | On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) |
| Text | Beyond Good and Evil atWikisource |
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (German:Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft) is a book byphilosopherFriedrich Nietzsche that covers ideas in his previous workThus Spoke Zarathustra but with a morepolemical approach. It was first published in 1886 under the publishing house C. G. Naumann of Leipzig at the author's own expense and first translated into English by Helen Zimmern, who was two years younger than Nietzsche and knew the author.[1][2]
According to translatorWalter Kaufman, the title refers to the need for moral philosophy to go beyond simplistic black and white moralizing, as contained in statements such as "X is good" or "X is evil".[1] At the beginning of the book (§ 2), Nietzsche attacks the very idea of using strictly opposite terms such as "Good versus Evil".[1]
InBeyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves into the realm "beyondgood 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 theperspectivalnature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual.
The book is well-known for the often-quoted line:"He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee."[3][4][5]
Of the four "late-period" writings of Nietzsche,Beyond Good and Evil most closely resembles theaphoristic 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 keypresuppositions 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 themaster and slave moralities feature prominently as Nietzsche re-evaluates deeply heldhumanistic beliefs, portraying even domination, appropriation and injury to the weak as not universally objectionable.
In several places of the book, Nietzsche drops hints, and even explicit statements as to what the philosophies of the future must deal with.
The work consists of a short preface dated to 1885, 296 numbered sections, and an "epode" (or "aftersong") entitled "From High Mountains". Not counting the preface or epode, the main sections are organized into nine parts:
In the opening two parts of the book, Nietzsche discusses, in turn, the philosophers of the past, whom he accuses of a blinddogmatism plagued by moral prejudice masquerading as a search forobjective 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 one passage (§ 34), Nietzsche writes that "from every point of view theerroneousness 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. Nietzsche asks the question, "what compels us to assume there exists any essentialantithesis between 'true' and 'false'?"
Nietzsche singles out theStoic 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 fundamentaldrive while rejectingteleology (§ 13).Kant, "the greatChinaman ofKönigsberg" (§ 210), reverts to the prejudice of an oldmoralist with hiscategorical imperative, thedialectical grounding of which is a mere smokescreen (§ 5). His "faculty" to explain the possibility ofsynthetica priori judgements is pejoratively compared to a passage fromMolière's comedyLe Malade imaginaire in which thenarcotic quality ofopium is described in terms of a "sleepy faculty" – according to Nietzsche, both Kant's explanation of synthetica priori judgments and Moliére's comedic description of opium are examples of redundantself-referring statements which do not explain anything.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 are kinds 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 subjectsphysics to critique. "Nature's conformity to law" is merely one interpretation of the phenomena whichnatural 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 scientificanti-realism when he asserts that "It iswe alone who have fabricatedcauses, succession, reciprocity, relativity, compulsion, number, law, freedom, motive, purpose" (§ 21).
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 beforeorder of rank" (§ 221). Every "high culture" begins by recognizing "thepathos of distance"[6] (§ 257).
Nietzsche contrasts southern (Catholic) and northern (Protestant)Christianity;northern Europeans have much less "talent for religion" (§ 48) and lack "southerndelicatezza" (§ 50). As elsewhere, Nietzsche praises theOld Testament while disparaging theNew Testament (§ 52).
Religion has always been connected to "three dangerous dietary prescriptions: solitude,fasting andsexual 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 andautocratic out of man and turned him into a "sublime abortion" (§ 62). If, unlike past philosophers such asSchopenhauer, we really want to tackle the problems of morality, we must "comparemany moralities" and "prepare atypology of morals" (§ 186). In a discussion that anticipatesOn the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche claims that "Morality is in Europe today herd-animal morality" (§ 202)—i.e., it emanates from theressentiment of the slave for the master (see also § 260, which leads into the discussion inGenealogy, I).
Nietzsche argues that more than what they value as "good" distinguishes noble and base. Even where agreement exists over what is good, what men consider a sufficient sign of possessing what is good differs (§ 194). Nietzsche describeslove as the desire to possess a woman. The most unrefined form of the desire is also the most readily identifiable as a desire to possess another: control over the woman's body. A subtler desire to possess her also wants her soul, and thus wants her to be willing to sacrifice herself for her lover. Nietzsche describes this as a more complete possession. A still more refined desire to possess her prompts a concern that she might be willing to sacrifice what she desires for a mistaken image of her lover. This leads some lovers to want their women to know them deep down so that their sacrifice really is a sacrifice forthem. A similar rank-ordering applies tostatesmen, the less refined not caring whether they attain power by fraud, the more refined not taking pleasure in the people's love unless they love the statesman for who he really is. In both cases, the more spiritualized form of the desire to possess also demands one possess what is good more completely.
In § 259, Nietzsche states that to not injure, exploit or be violent to others as a general principle of society is "a Will to thedenial of life, a principle of dissolution and decay." He goes on to argue that life is "essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak."
Nietzsche discusses the complexities of the German soul (§ 244), praises theJews and heavily criticizes the trend of Germanantisemitism (§ 251). He praises France as "the seat of Europe's most spiritual and refined culture and the leading school of taste" (§ 254). He finds theEnglish coarse, gloomy, more brutal than the Germans, and declares that "they are no philosophical race", singling outBacon,Hobbes,Hume andLocke 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).
Between § 62 and § 186 Nietzsche inserts a collection of mostly single-sentence aphorisms, modelled onFrench aphorists such asLa 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 theeternal 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 inThe Gay Science andThus Spoke Zarathustra).
Beyond Good and Evil public domain audiobook atLibriVox| International | |
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