Beyond Good and Evil

Overview

Two hundred and forty pages, nine chapters, two hundred and ninety-six numbered sections that run from a line to several pages, plus a closing poem. Nietzsche published it himself in 1886 after the commercial failure of Zarathustra, and it sold badly too. He described it as saying the same things as Zarathustra without the prophet costume.

Do not read it looking for a thesis defended in order. Nietzsche writes in aphorisms deliberately, because he thinks systematic philosophy is a performance of a rigour nobody has, and because he wants you to do some of the work. Sections in the same chapter will approach a subject from incompatible angles.

He was fifteen years into chronic illness, had left his professorship, and was writing in boarding houses in Nice and Sils-Maria. The subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, is meant seriously: he thought he was clearing ground for people not yet born.

The argument

Part One goes after philosophers. Their systems are not the result of following an argument; they are advocacy for conclusions already held, dressed as logic. The will to truth is itself a strange thing to want unexamined: why truth rather than untruth, and what if falsehood were more useful to life? He treats Kant’s answer to how synthetic a priori judgements are possible as a piece of comedy, a faculty explaining itself by naming a faculty.

Part Two, on the free spirit, sketches a type of thinker who can hold a view without needing it to be permanent, and who has enough strength to do without consolation.

Part Three, on the religious nature, is more respectful than its reputation. Nietzsche takes Christianity seriously as a sustained work on the human animal, an attempt to breed a certain kind of person. His objection is not that it is false but that it has made Europeans smaller, and that saints and ascetics represent a will turned against itself.

Part Four is a hundred and twenty-three epigrams on everything, and contains most of the lines people quote.

Parts Five to Seven treat the natural history of morals, scholarship and what he calls our virtues. The key claim is that morality has never been studied, only preached: there are many moralities, they arose from particular conditions, and the pretence that there is one morality is itself a moral position.

Part Eight, on peoples and fatherlands, is where he attacks German nationalism and antisemitism directly and where he also produces generalisations about nations that are simply prejudices in a smarter voice.

Part Nine, What is Noble, gives the distinction the next book, the Genealogy, will develop. In master morality the strong call themselves good, and bad means contemptible. In slave morality the powerless call the strong evil and themselves good by contrast, which is a creative act born of resentment and, Nietzsche concedes, the source of psychological depth. Modern Europe is a mixture, and the danger he names is not cruelty but the last man: comfortable, herd-like, with nothing left to overcome.

How to read it

Read the Preface and Part One first, then Part Nine, then go back. Those two ends frame everything between.

Read slowly and in small amounts. Twenty aphorisms an evening is a reasonable pace. Reading it like a treatise produces a blur.

When something offends you, write down the argument before dismissing it. Nietzsche is trying to provoke, and the productive question is which of your commitments the provocation is aimed at. Distinguish where he has an argument from where he simply asserts something aristocratic and expects you to be impressed.

On the passages about women, in Part Seven especially: they are not defensible, they are not ironic, and no serious editor claims otherwise. Norman’s edition is useful precisely because it does not apologise for them.

On the politics: Nietzsche despised German nationalism and antisemitism, broke with Wagner partly over it, and this book says so. It is also true that his sister edited his unpublished notes after his collapse and handed the result to people who used it. Both facts matter, and neither settles what to do with the master and slave morality argument.

The common misreading is that beyond good and evil means anything is permitted. Nietzsche’s target is a specific moral vocabulary, evil as opposed to good, which he thinks is a historical product of resentment. He is not recommending that you do as you like; he thinks doing as you like is what the herd already does.

Questions it raises

• If every philosophy is its author’s confession, what is this book a confession of, and does the claim survive being turned on itself?
• Nietzsche asks why we want truth. Is there an answer that is not itself a moral commitment?
• Master and slave morality is offered as history. What evidence would count for or against it?
• If values are created rather than discovered, what stops one creation being as good as another?
• He fears the last man, comfortable and unstriving, more than cruelty. Is that a diagnosis or a taste?
• Can you accept the genealogy of morals while rejecting the aristocratic conclusions Nietzsche draws from it?