Download beyond good and evil nietzsche

What deserves the title of knowledge has to be intimately connected with the special and unique situation a knowing subject is in. The extent to which a subject can do this depends on personal constitution, character traits, and intellectual robustness.

Knowledge thus becomes as- sociated with the question of how much truth one can endure cf. What is it that makes reading BGE and other writings of Nietzsche such an attractive and stimulating experience? The main reason, I believe, has little to do with the plausibility, let alone the correctness, of his views.

On the contrary, we like many of his ideas precisely because of their pointed one-sidedness, their extravagance, and their eccentricity.

Nor, I suspect, are we now especially preoccupied with the topics which he obviously took to be decisive for an evaluation of our way of living under modern conditions. The fascination his works still have must therefore originate from somewhere else. If one wants to account for the appeal of his writings, it is perhaps advisable not to look too closely at his actual teachings, but to think of his texts as a kind of mental tonic designed to encourage his readers to continue to confront their doubts and suspicions about the well-foundedness of many of their most fundamental ideas about themselves and their world.

They address our uncomfortable feeling that our awareness of ourselves and of the world depends on conceptions that we ultimately do not understand.

It is up to each of us to decide whether to be grateful for this reminder or to loathe it. I and II, and Daybreak. It can be found in vols. Also very useful is vol. This ma- terial is not yet available in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe. The literature on Nietzsche is immense, though there are almost no books and very few articles dealing directly and exclusively with BGE.

Titles worth mentioning would be: A. Yovel, ed. There are quite a number of interesting and well-researched German biographies, of which the best known are C. Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche. Safranski, Nietzsche. All of these works discuss aspects of BGE as well. Nietzsche, his themes, and his topics have been subject to some very dif- ferent interpretations, depending on the philosophical tradition in which the interpreter is located.

Convincing examples of this approach are A. The glossary of names on pp. The notes and the glossary make use of information supplied by vols. The translator would like to thank all the people whose advice and sug- gestions have helped with the project.

Their contribution to the project is gratefully acknowledged. That the grotesque seriousness of their approach towards the truth and the clumsy advances they have made so far are unsuitable ways of pressing their suit with a woman? What is certain is that she has spurned them — leaving dogmatism of all types standing sad and discouraged. If it is even left standing! But seriously, there are good reasons for hoping that all dogmatizing in philos- ophy was just noble though childish ambling and preambling, however solemn, settled and decisive it might have seemed.

But now that it has been overcome, and Europe breathes a sigh of relief after this nightmare, and at least can enjoy a healthier — well — sleep, we, whose task is wakefulness itself, are the heirs to all the force cultivated through the struggle against this error.

Of course: talking about spirit and the Good like Plato did meant standing truth on its head and disowning even perspectivism, which is the fundamental condition of all life. Did the evil Socrates corrupt him after all?

Germans invented gunpowder — all honors due! But they made up for it — they invented the press. But we, who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits — we still have it, the whole need of spirit and the whole tension of its bow! And perhaps the arrow too, the task, and — who knows? What strange, terrible, questionable questions!

That is already a long story — and yet it seems to have hardly begun? That we ourselves are also learning from this Sphinx to pose questions? Who is it really that questions us here? What in us really wills the truth? We asked about the value of this will. Granted, we will truth: why not untruth instead?

And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth came before us, — or was it we who came before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus? Which one is the Sphinx? It seems we have a rendezvous of questions and question-marks. Because this involves risk and perhaps no risk has ever been greater. Truth from error, for instance? Or the will to truth from the will to deception? Or the pure, sun-bright gaze of wisdom from a covetous leer?

Things of the highest value must have another, separate origin of their own, — they cannot be derived from this ephemeral, seductive, deceptive, lowly world, from this mad chaos of con- fusion and desire. Perhaps they are merely provisional perspectives, perhaps they are not even viewed head-on; perhaps they are even viewed from below, like a frog-perspective, to borrow an expression that painters will recognize. 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.

For this we must await the arrival of a new breed of philosophers, ones whose taste and inclination are somehow the reverse of those we have seen so far — philosophers of the dangerous Per- haps in every sense.

Even behind all logic and its au- tocratic posturings stand valuations or, stated more clearly, physiological requirements for the preservation of a particular type of life. The question is how far the judgment promotes and preserves life, how well it preserves, and perhaps even cultivates, the type.

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

Actually, to explain how the strangest metaphysical claims of a philosopher really come about, it is always good and wise to begin by asking: what morality is it is he — getting at? Because every drive craves mastery, and this leads it to try philosophizing.

In contrast, there is absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher; and in particular his morals bear de- cided and decisive witness to who he is — which means, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand with respect to each other. I do not know anything more ven- omous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes.

Why make a principle out of what you yourselves are and must be? But this is an old, eternal story: what happened back then with the Stoics still happens today, just as soon as a philosophy begins believing in itself.

There might even be puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie dying on an assured nothing than an uncertain something. But this is nihilism, and symptomatic of a desperate soul in a state of deadly exhaustion, however brave such virtuous posturing may appear. With stronger, livelier thinkers, however, thinkers who still have a thirst for life, things look different. Here, I think, we should give these skeptical anti-realists and epistemo-microscopists their just due: the instinct that drives them away from modern reality is unassailable, — what do we care for their retrograde shortcut!

He was proud of having discovered a new faculty in humans, the faculty of synthetic judgments a priori. How are synthetic judgments a priori possible? Kant asked himself, — and what really was his answer?

We can do no greater in- justice to this whole high-spirited and enthusiastic movement which was just youthfulness, however boldly it might have clothed itself in gray and hoary concepts than to take it seriously or especially to treat it with moral indignation. Enough, we grew up, — the dream faded away. There came a time when people scratched their heads: some still scratch them to- day. But is that really — an answer? An explanation? Or instead just a repetition of the question? So how does opium cause sleep?

It is only the belief in their truth that is necessary as a foreground belief and piece of visual evidence, belonging to the perspectival optics of life. For this, we can thank that Pole, Boscovich, who, together with the Pole, Copernicus, was the greatest, most successful opponent of the visual evidence. First of all, we must also put an end to that other and more disastrous atomism, the one Christianity has taught best and longest, the atomism of the soul.

Let this expression signify the belief that the soul is something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, that it is a monad, an atomon: this belief must be thrown out of science! By putting an end to the superstition that until now has grown around the idea of the soul with an almost tropical luxuriance, the new psychologist clearly thrusts himself into a new wasteland and a new suspicion. Above all, a living thing wants to discharge its strength — life itself is will to power —: self- preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent consequences of this.

This is demanded by method, which must essentially be the economy of principles. But to the extent that physics rests on belief in the senses, it passes for more, and will continue to pass for more, namely for an explanation, for a long time to come. This helped it to enchant, persuade, convince an age with a basically plebeian taste — indeed, it instinctively follows the canon of truth of the eternally popular sensualism. Only what can be seen and felt, — this is as far as any problem has to be pursued.

Conversely: the strong attraction of the Platonic way of thinking consisted in its opposition to precisely this empiricism. And they did this by throwing drab, cold, gray nets of concepts over the brightly colored whirlwind of the senses — the rabble of the senses, as Plato said. Sensualism, therefore, at least as a regulative principle, if not as a heuristic principle.

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 prod- uct of our organs! So does it follow that the external world is not the product of our organs —? Why do I believe in causes and effects? In fact, Schopenhauer would have us believe that the will is the only thing that is really familiar, familiar through and through, familiar without pluses or minuses.

But I have always thought that, here too, Schopenhauer was only doing what philosophers always tend to do: adopting and exaggerating a popular prejudice. Just as feeling — and indeed many feelings — must be recognized as ingredients of the will, thought must be as well. A person who wills —, commands something inside himself that obeys, or that he believes to obey. But now we notice the strangest thing about the will — about this multifarious thing that people have only one word for.

On the one hand, we are, under the circumstances, both the one who commands and the one who obeys, and as the obedient one we are familiar with the feelings of compulsion, force, pressure, resistance, and motion that generally start right after the act of willing. Since it is almost always the case that there is will only where the effect of command, and therefore obedience, and therefore action, may be expected, the appearance translates into the feeling, as if there were a necessity of effect.

In short, the one who wills believes with a reasonable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he attributes the success, the performance of the willing to the will itself, and consequently enjoys an increase in the feeling of power that accompanies all success.

As such, he enjoys the triumph over resistances, but thinks to himself that it was his will alone that truly overcame the resistance. Under an invisible spell, they will each start out anew, only to end up revolving in the same orbit once again. However independent of each other they might feel themselves to be, with their critical or systematic wills, something inside of them drives them on, something leads them into a particular order, one after the other, and this something is precisely the innate systematicity and relationship of concepts.

In fact, their thinking is not nearly as much a discovery as it is a recognition, remembrance, a returning and homecoming into a distant, primordial, total economy of the soul, from which each concept once grew: — to this extent, philosophizing is a type of atavism of the highest order.

The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and German philosophizing speaks for itself clearly enough. Those in the other party, on the contrary, do not want to be responsible for anything or to be guilty of anything; driven by an inner self-contempt, they long to be able to shift the blame for themselves to something else. When they write books these days, this latter group tends to side with the criminal; a type of socialist pity is their most attractive disguise. 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.

Granted, this is only an interpretation too — and you will be eager enough to make this objection? To grasp psychology as morphology and the doctrine of the development of the will to power, which is what I have done — nobody has ever come close to this, not even in thought: this, of course, to the extent that we are permitted to regard what has been written so far as a symptom of what has not been said until now.

The power of moral prejudice has deeply affected the most spiritual world, which seems like the coldest world, the one most likely to be devoid of any presuppositions — and the effect has been manifestly harmful, hindering, dazzling, and distorting. But suppose somebody considers even the affects of hatred, envy, greed, and power-lust as the conditioning affects of life, as elements that fundamentally and essentially need to be present in the total economy of life, and consequently need to be enhanced where life is enhanced, — this person will suffer from such a train of thought as if from sea-sickness.

And yet even this hypothesis is far from being the most uncomfortable and unfamiliar in this enormous, practically untouched realm of dangerous knowledge: — and there are hundreds of good reasons for people to keep out of it, if they — can!

On the other hand, if you are ever cast loose here with your ship, well now! Because, from now on, psychology is again the path to the fundamental problems. The wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! However, Geist is a broader term than spirit, meaning mind or intellect as well. Stand tall, you philoso- phers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!

Even of defending yourselves! In the end, you know very well that it does not matter whether you, of all people, are proved right, and fur- thermore, that no philosopher so far has ever been proved right. You also know that every little question-mark you put after your special slogans and favorite doctrines and occasionally after yourselves might contain more truth than all the solemn gestures and trump cards laid before ac- cusers and courts of law!

So step aside instead! Run away and hide! And do not forget the garden, the garden with golden trelliswork! And have people around you who are like a garden, — or like music over the waters when evening sets and the day is just a memory. Choose the good solitude, the free, high-spirited, light-hearted solitude that, in some sense, gives you the right to stay good yourself!

How poisonous, how cunning, how bad you become in every long war that cannot be waged out in the open! How personal you become when you have been afraid for a long time, keeping your eye on enemies, on possible enemies! Not to mention the absurd spectacle of moral indignation, which is an unmistakable sign that a philosopher has lost his philosophical sense of humor.

The only exception is when he is driven straight towards this norm by an even stronger instinct, in search of knowledge in the great and exceptional sense. Anybody who, in dealing with people, does not occasionally glisten in all the shades of distress, green and gray with disgust, weariness, pity, gloominess, and loneliness — he is certainly not a person of higher taste.

But if he does not freely take on all this effort and pain, if he keeps avoiding it and remains, as I said, placid and proud and hidden in his citadel, well then one thing is certain: he is not made for knowledge, not predestined for it.

The norm is more interesting than the exception — than me, the exception! Cynicism is the only form in which base souls touch upon that thing which is genuine honesty. He was much more profound than Voltaire, and consequently a lot quieter. This is not a rare phenomenon, particularly among physicians and phys- iologists of morals. He should keep his ears open wherever people are speaking without anger. But considered in any other way, he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, less instructive case.

And nobody lies as much as the angry man. So it is best to grant them some leeway from the very start, and leave some latitude for misunderstandings: — and then you can even laugh. Or, alternatively, get rid of them altogether, these good friends, — and then laugh some more! Germans are almost incapable of a presto in their language: and so it is easy to see that they are incapable of many of the most delightful and daring nuances of free, free-spirited thought.

Since the buffo and the satyr are alien to the German in body and in conscience, Aristophanes and Petronius are as good as untranslatable. Everything ponderous, lumbering, solemnly awkward, every long-winded and boring type of style is developed by the Germans in over-abundant diversity.

He was not the translator of Bayle for nothing; he gladly took refuge in the company of Diderot and Voltaire, and still more gladly among the Roman writers of comedy. How would even a Plato have endured life — a Greek life that he said No to — without an Aristophanes!

And even when somebody has every right to be independent, if he attempts such a thing without having to do so, he proves that he is probably not only strong, but brave to the point of madness. 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.

And assuming a man like this is destroyed, it is an event so far from human comprehension that people do not feel it or feel for him: — and he cannot go back again! He cannot go back to their pity again! The distinc- tion between the exoteric and the esoteric, once made by philosophers, was found among the Indians as well as among Greeks, Persians, and Muslims. Basically, it was found everywhere that people believed in an order of rank and not in equality and equal rights.

The difference be- tween these terms is not that the exoteric stands outside and sees, values, measures, and judges from this external position rather than from some internal one. What is more essential is that the exoteric sees things up from below — while the esoteric sees them down from above! What helps feed or nourish the higher type of man must be almost poisonous to a very different and lesser type.

The virtues of a base man could indicate vices and weaknesses in a philosopher. There are books that have inverse values for soul and for health, depending on whether they are used by the lower souls and lowlier life-forces, or by the higher and more powerful ones.

Books for the general public always smell foul: the stench of petty people clings to them. It usually stinks in places where the people eat and drink, even where they worship. You should not go to church if you want to breath clean air. The term geartet is related to the German word Art type , which appears frequently in this section as well as throughout the text. Youth is itself intrinsically falsifying and deceitful.

Later, after the young soul has been tortured by constant disappointments, it ends up turning suspiciously on itself, still raging and wild, even in the force of its suspicion and the pangs of its 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! In this transitional state, we punish ourselves by distrusting our feelings, we torture our enthusiasm with doubts, we experience even a good conscience as a danger, as if it were a veil wrapped around us, something marking the depletion of a more subtle, genuine honesty.

In the same way, it was the retroactive force of success or failure that showed peo- ple whether to think of an action as good or bad. We can call this pe- riod the pre-moral period of humanity. By contrast, over the course of the last ten millennia, people across a large part of the earth have gradually come far enough to see the origin, not the consequence, as decisive for the value of an action.

Origin rather than consequence: what a reversal of perspective! The origin of the action was interpreted in the most determinate sense possible, as origin out of an intention. People were united in the be- lief that the value of an action was exhausted by the value of its intention.

Intention as the entire origin and prehistory of an action: under this pre- judice people have issued moral praise, censure, judgment, and philoso- phy almost to this day. We believe that morality in the sense it has had up to now the morality of intentions was a prejudice, a precipitousness, perhaps a preliminary, a thing on about the same level as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome.

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, who are living touchstones of the soul.

So let us be cautious! Aside from morality, the belief in immediate certainties is a stupidity that does us little credit! Why not? O humanity! O nonsense! We would be able to understand the mecha- nistic world as a kind of life of the drives, where all the organic functions self-regulation, assimilation, nutrition, excretion, and metabolism are still synthetically bound together — as a pre-form of life?

Multiple varieties of causation should not be postulated until the attempt to make do with a single one has been taken as far as it will go — ad absurdum, if you will. If we do and this belief is really just our belief in causality itself — , then we must make the attempt to hypothetically posit the causality of the will as the only type of causality there is.

On the contrary, my friends! And who the devil is forcing you to use popular idioms! In the same way, a noble posterity could again misunderstand the entire past, and in so doing, perhaps, begin to make it tolerable to look at. Happiness and virtue are not arguments. But we like to forget even thoughtful spirits like to forget that being made unhappy and evil are not counter-arguments either. Something could be true even if it is harmful and dangerous to the highest degree.

There are events that are so delicate that it is best to cover them up with some coarseness and make them unrecognizable. There are acts of love and extravagant generosity in whose aftermath nothing is more advisable than to take a stick and give the eye-witnesses a good beating: this will obscure any memory traces.

Many people are excellent at obscuring and abusing their own memory, so they can take revenge on at least this one accessory: — shame is highly resourceful. It is not the worst things that we are the most ashamed of. Malicious cunning is not the only thing behind a mask — there is so much goodness in cunning.

I could imagine that a man with something precious and vulnerable to hide would roll through life, rough and round like an old, green, heavy-hooped wine cask; the subtlety of his shame will want it this way. A man with something profound in his shame encounters even his fate and delicate decisions along paths that few people have ever found, paths whose existence must be concealed from his closest and most trusted friends. Somebody hidden in this way — who instinctively needs speech in order to be silent and concealed, and is tireless in evading communication — wants and encourages a mask of himself to wander around, in his place, through the hearts and heads of his friends.

And even if this is not what he wants, he will eventually realize that a mask of him has been there all the same, — and that this is for the best. A banker who has made a fortune has to a certain degree the right sort of character for making philosophical discoveries, i. We should not sidestep our tests, even though they may well be the most dangerous game we can play, and, in the last analysis, can be witnessed by no judge other than ourselves.

Not to be stuck to any person, not even somebody we love best — every person is a prison and a corner. Not to be stuck in any homeland, even the neediest and most oppressed — it is not as hard to tear your heart away from a victorious homeland. Not to be stuck in some pity: even for higher men, whose rare torture and helplessness we ourselves have accidentally glimpsed. We must know to conserve ourselves: the greatest test of independence. I will risk christening them with a name not lacking in dangers.

From what I can guess about them, from what they allow to be guessed since it is typical of them to want to remain riddles in some respect , these philosophers of the future might have the right and perhaps also the wrong to be described as those who attempt. Nietzsche frequently uses the terms Versuch attempt or experiment and Versuchung temptation , and plays on their similarity. Probably, since all philosophers so far have loved their truths.

But they certainly will not be dogmatists. It would offend their pride, as well as their taste, if their truth were a truth for everyone which has been the secret wish and hidden meaning of all dogmatic aspirations so far. We must do away with the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with the majority. The term is self-contradictory: whatever can be common will never have much value. In the end, it has to be as it is and has always been: great things are left for the great, abysses for the profound, delicacy and trembling for the subtle, and, all in all, everything rare for those who are rare themselves.

But, in saying this, I feel — towards them almost as much as towards ourselves who are their heralds and precursors, we free spirits! In all the countries of Europe, and in America as well, there is now something that abuses this name: a very narrow, restricted, chained- up type of spirit whose inclinations are pretty much the opposite of our own intentions and instincts not to mention the fact that this restricted type will be a fully shut window and bolted door with respect to these approaching new philosophers.

What they want to strive for with all their might is the universal, green pasture happiness of the herd, with security, safety, contentment, and an easier life for all. That we do not want to fully reveal what a spirit might free himself from and what he will then perhaps be driven towards?

This is the type of people we are, we free spirits! And, even then, such a person would still need that vaulting sky of bright, malicious spirituality from whose heights this throng of dangerous and painful experiences could be surveyed, ordered, and forced into formulas.

But who would have the time to wait for such servants! In the end, you have to do everything yourself if you want to know anything: which means you have a lot to do! There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is expected of a worn-down, many-sided, badly spoiled conscience.

It promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity. And what infuriated the slaves about and against their masters was never faith itself, but rather the freedom from faith, that half-stoic and smiling nonchalance when it came to the serious- ness of faith.

Enlightenment is infuriating. They love as they hate, without nuance, into the depths, to the point of pain and sickness — their copious, hidden suffering makes them furious at the noble taste that seems to deny suffering. Skepticism about suffering which is basically just an affectation of aristocratic morality played no small role in the genesis of the last great slave revolt, which began with the French Revolution.

But here is where interpretation must be resisted the most: no type to date has been surrounded by such an overgrowth of inanity and superstition; and none so far has seemed to hold more interest for people, or even for philosophers.

It might be time to calm down a bit, as far as this topic goes, to learn some caution, or even better: to look away, to go away. How is negation of the will possible? How is the saint possible? This really seems to have been the question that started Schopenhauer off and made him into a philosopher. A lack of philology?

Consequently, a lack of belief means something very different in Catholic countries than in Protestant ones. In Catholic countries it is a sort of anger against the spirit of the race, while with us it is more like a return to the spirit or un-spirit — of the race.

There is no doubt that we northerners are descended from barbarian races, even as far as our talent for religion goes — it is a meager talent.

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Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to philosophy, non fiction lovers. Your Rating:. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense. Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche's mature masterpiece, Beyond Good and Evil considers the origins and nature of Judeo-Christian morality; the end of philosophical dogmatism and beginning of perspectivism; the questionable virtues of science and scholarship; liberal democracy, nationalism, and women's emancipation.