Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

Nietzsche was suspicious of almost everything addressed in this book – whether it be knowledge, truth, philosophy, or morality and religion.

To call any of his works great would therefore amount to a categorical mistake.

He was plagued by ill health, a psychosomatic wreck, suffering from all sorts of diseases ranging from chronic nervous ailments and severe eye problems, which left him almost blind, to extremely exhausting states of prolonged migraine.

I confess that the deepest objection to the Eternal Recurrence, my real idea from the abyss, is always my mother and my sister.

When I call up the image of a perfect reader, what emerges is a monster of courage and curiosity, who is also supple, clever, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.

I know my fate. One day, my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous – a crisis the like of which the world has never seen... I am not a man. I am dynamite.

Listen to me [the emphasis is on the ‘me’]. For I am thus and thus. Do not, above all, confound me.

This integration of what he calls a psychological point of view into his general practice of casting doubts on received convictions by tracing their origins, of throwing into question our most fundamental beliefs by pointing out their shakiness, and of scrutinizing available alternatives in the light of a new vision of the value of life – this I take to be the most distinctive feature of BGE.

To create such constitutive values seems to be, according to Nietzsche, the prerogative of real philosophers (not philosophy professors), of unique artists (if there are any), of even rarer founders of religions.

There are few arguments to be found in BGE, and those which can be extracted are seldom of the most convincing kind.

This 'having to follow' and 'being compelled' I read as a reference to the procedure of establishing results via sound arguments.

It is revealed in the difference between the excitement and fun that one can have in reading Nietzsche and the boredom that one sometimes experiences when reading the literature on him.

It should be noted that the “German form of skepticism” discussed approvingly in § has nothing to do with epistemological skepticism.

In Nietzsche’s writings, as in life, randomness can turn out to be an applied method in disguise.

At the base of the most deeply habitualized normative evaluations that modern people take for granted... there ultimately lies a mixture of appalling character traits, ranging from weakness and fear to wishful thinking and self-betrayal.

Matter would then have to be conceived as “will to power” paralyzed, as “will to power” in a state of potentiality.

Without the pathos of distance ...that other more mysterious pathos could not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within the soul itself.

Knowledge thus becomes associated with the question of how much truth one can endure.

Collapses physically and mentally in Turin on 3 January; writes a few lucid notes but never recovers sanity.

These schools are best characterized in geographical terms as ‘German,’ ‘French,’ and ‘Anglo-American.’

Suppose that truth is a woman – and why not? Aren’t there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women?

But the struggle against Plato, or, to use a clear and “popular” idiom, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – since Christianity is Platonism for the “people” – has created a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known: with such atension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals.

It could even be possible that whatever gives value to those good and honorable things has an incriminating link, bond, or tie to the very things that look like their evil opposites; perhaps they are even essentially the same.

To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this clearly means resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyond good and evil.

In contrast, there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher; and in particular his morals bear decided and decisive witness to who he is.

Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the 'creation of the world,' to the causa prima.

The honeymoon of German philosophy had arrived; all the young theologians of the Tübingen seminary ran off into the bushes – they were all looking for 'faculties.'

But answers like this belong in comedy, and the time has finally come to replace the Kantian question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' with another question, 'Why is the belief in such judgments necessary?'

But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis – and concepts like the 'mortal soul' and the 'soul as subject-multiplicity' and the 'soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects' want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm of science.

But then our body, as a piece of this external world, would really be the product of our organs! But then our organs themselves would really be – the product of our organs!

I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want.

Willing strikes me as, above all, something complicated, something unified only in a word – and this single word contains the popular prejudice that has overruled whatever minimal precautions philosophers might take.

L’effet c’est moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community.

The longing for 'freedom of the will' in the superlative metaphysical sense... means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Münchhausen’s, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence.

But, as I have said, this is interpretation, not text; and somebody with an opposite intention and mode of interpretation could come along and be able to read from the same nature, and with reference to the same set of appearances, a tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims.

On the other hand, if you are ever cast loose here with your ship, well now! come on! clench your teeth! open your eyes! and grab hold of the helm! – we are sailing straight over and away from morality.

And, until now, science could arise only on this solidified, granite foundation of ignorance, the will to know rising up on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will to not know, to uncertainty, to untruth!

Choose the good solitude, the free, high-spirited, light-hearted solitude that, in some sense, gives you the right to stay good yourself!

Cynicism is the only form in which base souls touch upon that thing which is genuine honesty.

How would even a Plato have endured life – a Greek life that he said No to – without an Aristophanes!

He enters a labyrinth, he multiplies by a thousand the dangers already inherent in the very act of living, not the least of which is the fact that no one with eyes will see how and where he gets lost and lonely and is torn limb from limb by some cave-Minotaur of conscience.

How furious it is with itself now, how impatiently it tears itself apart, what revenge it exacts for having blinded itself for so long, as if its blindness had been voluntary!

The overcoming of morality – even the self-overcoming of morality, in a certain sense: let this be the name for that long and secret labor which is reserved for the most subtle, genuinely honest, and also the most malicious consciences of the day.

It is no more than a moral prejudice that the truth is worth more than appearance; in fact, it is the world’s most poorly proven assumption.

Something could be true even if it is harmful and dangerous to the highest degree.

Every profound spirit needs a mask: what’s more, a mask is constantly growing around every profound spirit, thanks to the consistently false (which is to say shallow) interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he displays.

“Good” is no longer good when it comes from your neighbor’s mouth. And how could there ever be a “common good”! The term is self-contradictory: whatever can be common will never have much value.

We think that the danger of the human condition has first had to grow to terrible heights, its power to invent and dissimulate (its “spirit” –) has had to develop under prolonged pressure and compulsion into something refined and daring.

But how often does he have to turn to himself in despair and say: 'Only one! only a single one! and this huge forest, this primeval forest!'

It is much closer to Pascal’s faith, which has the gruesome appearance of a protracted suicide of reason – a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason that cannot be killed all at once and with a single stroke.

What? So “miracles” are just errors of interpretation? A lack of philology?

It is so elegant, so distinguished, to have your own antipodes!

In front of the saint, the powerful of the world learned a new fear, they sensed a new power, an alien, still unconquered enemy: – it was the 'will to power' that made them stop in front of the saint.

To sacrifice God for nothingness – that paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for the race that is now approaching: by now we all know something about this.

Perhaps the day will come when the concepts of “God” and “sin,” which are the most solemn concepts of all and have caused the most fighting and suffering, will seem no more important to us than a child’s toy and a child’s pain seem to an old man.

Every age has its own, divine type of naiveté that other ages may envy; and how much naiveté – admirable, childish, boundlessly foolish naiveté – lies in the scholar’s belief in his own superiority.

Perhaps there is even an order of rank for these wounded children, the born artists, who find pleasure in life only by intending to falsify its image, in a sort of prolonged revenge against life –.

Religion, and the meaning religion gives to life, spreads sunshine over such eternally tormented people and makes them bearable even to themselves.

Doesn’t it seem as if, for eighteen centuries, Europe was dominated by the single will to turn humanity into a sublime abortion?

“I did that” says my memory. I couldn’t have done that – says my pride, and stands its ground. Finally, memory gives in.

Human maturity: this means rediscovering the seriousness we had towards play when we were children.

Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

Madness is rare in the individual – but with groups, parties, peoples, and ages it is the rule.

As strange as it may sound, the problem of morality itself has been missing from every “science of morals” so far: there was no suspicion that anything was really a problem.

In short, even morality is just a sign language of the affects!

Slavery, in both the crude and refined senses of the term, seems to be the indispensable means of disciplining and breeding even the spirit.

Plato at the front, Plato at the back, Chimaera in the middle.

What all this amounts to is: we are, from the bottom up and across the ages, used to lying. Or, to put the point more virtuously, more hypocritically and, in short, more pleasantly: people are much more artistic than they think.

Suppose someone frequently dreams that he is flying... how could his demands for happiness not be different?

The significance of the Jewish people lies in this inversion of values (which includes using the word for “poor” as a synonym for “holy” and “friend”): the slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews.

They are all baroque in form and unreasonable (because they are directed at “everyone,” because they generalize what should not be generalized); they all speak unconditionally, consider themselves unconditional.

This need tries to satisfy itself and give its form a content, so, like a crude appetite, it indiscriminately grabs hold and accepts whatever gets screamed into its ear by some commander or another.

A man like this, of late cultures and refracted lights, will typically be a weaker person: his most basic desire is for an end to the war that he is.

Everything that raises the individual over the herd and frightens the neighbor will henceforth be called evil; the proper, modest, unobtrusive, equalizing attitude and the mediocrity of desires acquire moral names and honors.

Morality in Europe these days is the morality of herd animals: – and therefore, as we understand things, it is only one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other (and especially higher) moralities are or should be possible.

Anyone who has ever thought this possibility through to the end knows one more disgust than other men, – and perhaps a new task as well!

The scientific man’s declaration of independence, his emancipation from philosophy, is one of the more subtle effects of the democratic way of life (and death).

A philosophy reduced to 'epistemology,' which is really no more than a timid epochism and doctrine of abstinence; a philosophy that does not even get over the threshold and scrupulously denies itself the right of entry – that is a philosophy in its last gasps, an end, an agony, something to be pitied.

But the real philosopher lives 'unphilosophically,' 'unwisely,' in a manner which is above all not clever, and feels the weight and duty of a hundred experiments and temptations of life: – he constantly puts himself at risk, he plays the rough game ...

The worst and most dangerous thing that a scholar is capable of doing comes from his type’s instinct for mediocrity: from that Jesuitism of mediocrity that instinctively works towards the annihilation of the exceptional man and tries to break every taut bow.

The objective person is a tool, an expensive measuring instrument and piece of mirror art that is easily injured and spoiled and should be honored and protected; but he is not a goal, not a departure or a fresh start.

Paralysis of the will: where won’t you find this cripple today? And often how nicely dressed! How seductively dressed!

The time for petty politics is over: the next century will bring the struggle for the domination of the earth – the compulsion to great politics.

He saw that enormous bloodsucker, the spider of skepticism, in the background, and he suspected the incurable misery of a heart that was no longer hard enough for evil or for good.

In fact, these philosophers admit to taking pleasure in saying no, in dissecting, and in a certain level-headed cruelty that knows how to guide a knife with assurance and subtlety, even when the heart is bleeding.

True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them.

Greatest of all is the one who can be the most solitary, the most hidden, the most different, the person beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the one with an abundance of will.

Not in their wildest dreams would they think of it as light, divine, and closely related to dance and high spirits!

Just as in the celestial realm, the track of one planet will sometimes be determined by two suns; just as, in certain cases, suns of different colors will shine on a single planet with red light one moment and green light the next.

But anyone who has really made sacrifices knows that he wanted and got something in return, – perhaps something of himself in return for something of himself – that he gave up here in order to have more there.

The man of 'modern ideas,' this proud ape, is exceedingly unhappy with himself: this is clear. He suffers: and his vanity would have it that he only pities...

Because of the half-barbarism in our bodies and desires, we have secret entrances everywhere, like no noble age has ever had, and, above all, access to the labyrinths of unfinished cultures.

Like the rider on a steed snorting to go further onward, we let the reins drop before the infinite, we modern men, we half-barbarians – and we feel supremely happy only when we are in the most – danger.

In human beings, creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day.

Isn’t a moralist the opposite of a Puritan? A thinker, that is, who treats morality as something questionable, question-mark-able, in short, as a problem? Shouldn’t moralists be – immoral?

This is my claim: almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization and deepening of cruelty.

Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, – there is a drop of cruelty even in every wanting-to-know.

To translate humanity back into nature; to gain control of the many vain and fanciful interpretations and incidental meanings that have been scribbled and drawn over that eternal basic text of homo natura so far.

Nothing is so utterly foreign, unfavorable, hostile for women from the very start than truth, – their great art is in lying, their highest concern is appearance and beauty.

So far, men have been treating women like birds that have lost their way and flown down to them from some height or another: like something finer, more vulnerable, wilder, stranger, sweeter, more soulful, – but also like something that has to be locked up to keep it from flying away.

Ever since the French Revolution, the influence of women in Europe has decreased proportionately as they have gained rights and entitlements.

What inspires respect and, often enough, fear of women is their nature, their truly predatory and cunning agility, their tiger’s claws inside their glove, the naiveté of their egoism, their inner wildness and inability to be trained.

This type of music best expresses what I think about the Germans: they are from the day before yesterday and the day after tomorrow, – they still have no today.

Suppose that a statesman puts his people in the position of needing to do ‘great politics’ in the future, although they are ill equipped and ill prepared by nature for this task, so that they need to sacrifice their old and reliable virtues for the sake of a new and dubious mediocrity.

What I’m trying to say is: the democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary exercise in the breeding of tyrants – understanding that word in every sense, including the most spiritual.

The German soul has passages going this way and that, it has caves, hiding places and dungeons; its disorder has much of the charm of the mysterious; the German is an expert on the secret paths to chaos.

The German lets himself go, looks out with true, blue, empty German eyes, – and foreigners immediately mistake him for his nightshirt!

How reluctantly he stands by the slowly revolving quagmire of toneless tones and rhythms without dance that the Germans call a 'book'!

We have no real right to the great period, we who are modern, we who are short-winded in every sense!

What Europe owes to the Jews? Many things both good and bad, but mainly one thing that is both best and worst: the grand style in morality, the horror and majesty of infinite demands, infinite meanings, the whole romanticism and sublimity of the morally questionable.

To subtler nostrils, even this English Christianity bears the genuinely English odor of the very spleen and alcoholic dissipation against which it is rightly used as a remedy , – the subtler poison treating the cruder.

The chasm between knowing something and being able to do it is perhaps even greater and more uncanny than it is generally thought to be: people who can do things in the grand style, the creators, might need to be ignorant.

Anyone calling the Germans “naive” on this account is dressing up a deficiency as a compliment.

I could imagine a music whose rarest magic consisted in no longer knowing anything of good and evil.

They were all fanatics of expression “at any cost” (I emphasize Delacroix, Wagner’s next of kin), all of them great discoverers in the realm of the sublime as well as the repugnant and repulsive.

The noble caste always started out as the barbarian caste. Their supremacy was in psychic, not physical strength, – they were more complete people (which at any level amounts to saying “more complete beasts” –).

Its fundamental belief must always be that society cannot exist for the sake of society, but only as the substructure and framework for raising an exceptional type of being up to its higher duty and to a higher state of being.

It will have to be the embodiment of will to power, it will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, – not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power.

The noble type of person feels that he determines value, he does not need anyone’s approval, he judges that 'what is harmful to me is harmful in itself,' he knows that he is the one who gives honor to things in the first place, he creates values.

Wherever slave morality holds sway, language shows a tendency for the words “good” and “stupid” to come closer together.

The vain take pleasure in every good opinion they hear about themselves (abstracted entirely from the point of view of utility, and just as much removed from truth or falsity), just as they suffer from every bad opinion.

The species needs itself to be a species, to be something that, by virtue of its very hardness, uniformity, and simplicity of form, can succeed and make itself persevere in constant struggle with its neighbors.

The dangerous and uncanny point has been reached when the greatest, most diverse, most comprehensive life lives past the old morality.

It is utterly impossible that a person might fail to have the qualities and propensities of his elders and ancestors in his body: however much appearances might speak against it.

As soon as it is clear about this question of rank, it will move among these equals and “equally righted” with an assured modesty and a gentle reverence equal to how it treats itself, in accordance with an inborn, celestial mechanics that all stars know so well.

The greater the danger, the greater the need to agree quickly and easily about necessities.

Success has always been the greatest liar, – and the “work” itself is a success.

There are 'cheerful people' who use cheerfulness because it lets them be misunderstood: – they want to be misunderstood.

And every once in a while, the alarm call will come too late, the chance event that gives them “permission” to act, – just when the prime of youth and strength for action has already been depleted by sitting still.

Thrown into a noisy, vulgar age and not wanting to eat out of a single one of its bowls, he can easily die of hunger and thirst, or, if he finally 'digs in' anyway, he can be destroyed – by sudden nausea.

The hermit does not believe that a philosopher – given that a philosopher was always a hermit first – has ever expressed his actual and final opinions in books: don’t people write books precisely to keep what they hide to themselves?

Every philosophy conceals a philosophy too: every opinion is also a hiding place, every word is also a mask.

Even the fact that Dionysus is a philosopher and that, consequently, even gods philosophize, seems to me like something new and not without its dangers, something that might arouse suspicion.

“I think humans are pleasant, brave, inventive animals that have no equal on earth, they find their way around any labyrinth.”

A wrestler beaten by himself alone, And wounded by a victory of his own?

Mephistopheles devil in Goethe’s Faust

Sand, Karl Ludwig (  – ) murderer of Kotzebue

command/commanders, –,,–, ,,, , , , , , ; see also government, rule

herd, ,–,–,, , ,

“perhapses,” dangerous, xix, 

will to power, xiv , xv , xxiv–xxvi, ,,,,, ,,,, , , ,

truth/truths/truthfulness, vii, xi, xiii, xiv , xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv , xxvii, xxviii, ,,,,, ,,,,,,,,,,, , , , , , , , ,

Nietzsche The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs)

Nietzsche was suspicious of almost everything addressed in this book – whether it be knowledge, truth, philosophy, or morality and religion.

But the struggle against Plato, or, to use a clear and “popular” idiom, the struggle against the Christian-ecclesiastical pressure of millennia – since Christianity is Platonism for the “people” – has created a magnificent tension of spirit in Europe, the likes of which the earth has never known: with such atension in our bow we can now shoot at the furthest goals.

To acknowledge untruth as a condition of life: this clearly means resisting the usual value feelings in a dangerous manner; and a philosophy that risks such a thing would by that gesture alone place itself beyond good and evil.

But the path lies open for new versions and sophistications of the soul hypothesis – and concepts like the 'mortal soul' and the 'soul as subject-multiplicity' and the 'soul as a society constructed out of drives and affects' want henceforth to have civil rights in the realm of science.

I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact that these superstitious men are loath to admit: that a thought comes when “it” wants, and not when “I” want.

But, as I have said, this is interpretation, not text; and somebody with an opposite intention and mode of interpretation could come along and be able to read from the same nature, and with reference to the same set of appearances, a tyrannically ruthless and pitiless execution of power claims.

On the other hand, if you are ever cast loose here with your ship, well now! come on! clench your teeth! open your eyes! and grab hold of the helm! – we are sailing straight over and away from morality.

How furious it is with itself now, how impatiently it tears itself apart, what revenge it exacts for having blinded itself for so long, as if its blindness had been voluntary!

We think that the danger of the human condition has first had to grow to terrible heights, its power to invent and dissimulate (its “spirit” –) has had to develop under prolonged pressure and compulsion into something refined and daring.

This need tries to satisfy itself and give its form a content, so, like a crude appetite, it indiscriminately grabs hold and accepts whatever gets screamed into its ear by some commander or another.

Morality in Europe these days is the morality of herd animals: – and therefore, as we understand things, it is only one type of human morality beside which, before which, and after which many other (and especially higher) moralities are or should be possible.

True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them.

In human beings, creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day.

It will have to be the embodiment of will to power, it will want to grow, spread, grab, win dominance, – not out of any morality or immorality, but because it is alive, and because life is precisely will to power.

Wherever slave morality holds sway, language shows a tendency for the words “good” and “stupid” to come closer together.