He has a belief that he calls “faith in opposite values”, which is the belief that the world is divided into opposites, starting with the opposition of truth and false. In one passage (§34), Nietzsche writes 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." It was first published in 1886. Summary Of Martin Luther King Beyond Good And Evil. Nietzsche is a vastly too complex and influential philosopher for us to treat well or fairly in this class, but his influence on Modern (and Postmodern) thinking is worth covering briefly, especially as his theory of the "Ubermensch" pertains to Conrad's Heart Of Darkness.. It is almost distasteful to write a mere summary or description of Nietzsche's works, because doing so carries the risk of severely misrepresenting his thinking (and I am far from being an expert on Nietzsche). 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). Every "high culture" begins by recognizing "the pathos of distance"[1] (§257). 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). Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most scathing and powerful critiques of philosophy, religion, science, politics and ethics ever written. They are both very well written. Nietzsche is 10 It seems clear that something that is ontologically real – good – is inherently superior to that which has no reality – evil. 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. 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". Continue your study of Beyond Good and Evil with these useful links. Below are a few of my takeaways. Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to summarize his entire philosophy into one book. 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 by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that expands the ideas of his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a more critical and polemical approach. The antithesis for “good,” it seems, is “bad,” evil in the moral sense. This work is a kind of analysis that wills certainly to truth. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German doctor and philosopher that was born in the mid-19th century. Beyond Good and Evilbecame one of the best-known in that group and is commonly viewed as a book written by a philosopher for philosophers. View all Available
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). Of the four "late-period" writings of Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil most closely resembles the aphoristic style of his middle period. Even where agreement exists over what is good, what men consider a sufficient sign of possessing what is good differs (§194). By entering your email address you agree to receive emails from SparkNotes and verify that you are over the age of 13. Beyond Good and Evil essays are academic essays for citation. In a nutshell, in Beyond Good And Evil Nietzsche argues that: In it, Nietzsche presents a set of problems, criticisms and philosophical challenges that continue both to inspire and to trouble contemporary thought. Nietzsche discusses the complexities of the German soul (§244), praises the Jews and heavily criticizes the trend of German antisemitism (§251). Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most famous works by Friedrich Nietzsche, written in 1886. Nietzsche also touches on problems of translation and the leaden quality of the German language (§28). His book, Beyond Good and Evil was one of the last books he wrote, during the period of 1886 to 1888 - a two year period when he authored a total of seven books. 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. Summary. Nietzsche describes love as the desire to possess a woman. Nietzsche argues that more than what they value as "good" distinguishes noble and base. Master morality is an attitude of being to moral and appalling, respectively. 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. 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". 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. Friedrich Nietzsche made a magnificent work in the book ‘ Beyond Good and Evil’ to help people and show them one of the possible ways to search. Since I was reading Beyond Good and Evil on my own, I ordered both Lampert's commentary Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil and Douglas Burnham's. Beyond Good and Evil essays are academic essays for citation. Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who believed that master morality was the superior morality as opposed to slave morality. He finds the English coarse, gloomy, more brutal than the Germans, and declares that "they are no philosophical race", singling out Bacon, Hobbes, Hume and Locke as representing a "debasement and devaluation of the concept 'philosopher' for more than a century" (§252). Beyond Good and Evil: Preface, page 2 | SparkNotes Beyond Good and Evil Dogmatism, to Nietzsche, is taking any claim as an absolute truth that does not need to be justified. Philosophers are wrong to rail violently against the risk of being deceived. In Nietzsche’s approach, he attempts to back up his claims by accusing other philosophers of not being able to think critically. I don't know if I'd ever call anything Nietzsche wrote a summary, but this book does lay out his principles in black-and-white, and it did help me put some of the pieces together. übermensch / Overman: (In the days before DC Comics, usually translated as 'superman') Only aluded to in BG&E- the man who, according to Nietzsche, forgoes transient pleasure, exercises creative power, lives at a level of experience beyond standards of good and evil, and is the goal of human evolution. Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is an extended critique of Western European morality. Beyond Good and Evil: Study Guide | SparkNotes Beyond Good and Evil Beyond Good and Evil was written by Friedrich Nietzsche and published in 1886. This article is about the book by Friedrich Nietzsche. You can view our. Over the past 10,000 years, however, a morality has developed where actions are judged by their origins (their motivations) not their consequences. Further, there are forceful attacks on several individual philosophers. 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). As elsewhere, Nietzsche praises the Old Testament while disparaging the New Testament (§52). He praises France as "the seat of Europe's most spiritual and refined culture and the leading school of taste" (§254). In the "pre-moral" period of mankind, actions were judged by their consequences. It was the first published work after the monumental Thus Spake Zarathustra, which laid out central tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy in parabolic fo rm. Evil is not equal to good,10 so it is not, by definition, an antithesis, but it is also not the same as good. "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). Everything she or he has ever learned or observed must be reexamined. Read a brief overview of the work, or chapter by chapter summaries. Nietzsche also raises again the specter of "bad conscience" in Beyond Good and Evil, or the guilt that arises as a by-product of Christian morality, which goes against a person's natural inclinations. A look into the light-hearted read that is Beyond Good and Evil by the infamous and most meme'd philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. 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 also subjects physics to critique. From Nihilism to Perspectivism in 'On the Genealogy of Morals' and 'Beyond Good and Evil' Nietzsche’s critique of morality as a critique of Christian morality. Beyond Good and Evil was written by Friedrich Nietzsche and published in 1886. The work consists of a short preface dated to 1885, 296 numbered sections, and an "epode" (or "aftersong") entitled "From High Mountains". He isolates individuals as indicated by their sexual orientations and explains why he settles on a particular decision. It was first published in 1886. Study Guides. Descartes' cogito presupposes that there is an I, that there is such an activity as thinking, and that I know what thinking is (§16). 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). 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 by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that expands the ideas of his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a more critical and polemical approach. 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." The culminating part of Beyond Good and Evil parses Nietzsche's ideas about order and rank in human society. Nietzsche (1844-1900): Beyond Good And Evil (1886). In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Get ready to write your essay on Beyond Good and Evil. 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). 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). 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. 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). In the author's view, philosophy has been tainted by Christian and Platonic (referring to the Greek philosopher Plato) ideas since the Roman Empire first embraced Christianity. His "faculty" to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements is pejoratively compared to a passage from Molière's comedy Le Malade imaginaire in which the narcotic quality of opium is described in terms of a "sleepy faculty" – according to Nietzsche, both Kant's explanation of synthetic a priori judgments and Moliére's comedic description of opium are examples of redundant self-referring statements which do not explain anything. "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). A subtler desire to possess her also wants her soul, and thus wants her to be willing to sacrifice herself for her lover. It is important for the reader to remember that Nietzsche is not making value judgments in a conventional way—after all, the title of this book is Beyond Good and Evil. In both cases, the more spiritualized form of the desire to possess also demands one possess what is good more completely. Written during the summer of 1885 and the winter of 1886, this work assumes a pivotal position in his oeuvre. His ideas are “beyond good and evil”; they are much deeper, and this is why they are so attractive and correct to lots of readers. For other uses, see, On philosophers, free spirits, and scholars, Learn how and when to remove these template messages, Learn how and when to remove this template message, A searchable, self-referential edition with concordance, "On the Significance of Genealogy in Nietzsche's Critique of Morality", Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Beyond_Good_and_Evil&oldid=1015702327, Articles that may contain original research from November 2015, All articles that may contain original research, Articles needing additional references from November 2015, All articles needing additional references, Articles lacking reliable references from December 2007, Articles with multiple maintenance issues, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz work identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WorldCat-VIAF identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, Part Five: On the Natural History of Morals, This page was last edited on 3 April 2021, at 00:48. At this point in Nietzsche's life, he viewed certain types of philosophy as counterproductive, such as universalis… Under the guise of moral discussion, he relates everything that seems to … Nietzsche describes this as a more complete possession. SURNAME 1 Name Professor Course Date Dogmatic philosophies in “ Beyond Good and Evil." This morality of intentions is, according to Nietzsche, a "prejudice" and "something provisional [...] that must be overcome" (§32). "It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance." A similar rank-ordering applies to statesmen, 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. Nietzsche asks the question, "what compels us to assume there exists any essential antithesis between 'true' and 'false'?". Between §62 and §186 Nietzsche inserts a collection of mostly single-sentence aphorisms, modelled on French aphorists such as La Rochefoucauld. He does not believe that the good man is the opposite of the evil man like previous philosophers believed. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. 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. While philosophers claim to base everything in reason and to take nothing on faith, Nietzsche argues ultimately that all philosophy is grounded on some leap of faith. In several places of the book, Nietzsche drops hints, and even explicit statements as to what the philosophies of the future must deal with. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. 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. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) (BGE) arguably occupies a privileged position in the economy of Nietzsche's works.Certainly, it is the best place to look if one is interested in his views on thosetopics which traditionally come under the heading of "first philosophy". Analysis In Part 6 Nietzsche discourses on the differences between philosophers and scholars and faults the latter for attempting to reduce philosophy to a mere theory of knowledge (epistemology). 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). Beyond Good and Evil is an investigation of the ways in which this burden manifests itself, and an attempt to explain the nature of the “free spirit” – man unfettered by the chains of morality. This leads some lovers to want their women to know them deep down so that their sacrifice really is a sacrifice for them. Go to BN.com to get your copy of these helpful resources. Nietzsche contrasts southern (Catholic) and northern (Protestant) Christianity; northern Europeans have much less "talent for religion" (§48) and lack "southern delicatezza" (§50). In Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, he questions our curiosity, saying that we rarely question the value of truth. Essays for Beyond Good and Evil. 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. 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, who 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. Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is his take on morality, religion, motivation, and more. Twelve of these (§§ 84, 85, 86, 114, 115, 127, 131, 139, 144, 145, 147, 148) concern women or the distinction between men and women. 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). Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select. Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most important works in Western philosophy. From Lampert I learned the importance of Darwinian theories for Nietzsche (which led me to Richardson's book Nietzsche's New Darwinism). rich Nietzsche than Beyond Good and Evil. 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." Slave morality is an attitude which holds to the standard of that which is beneficial to the weak or powerless. 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). Beyond Good and Evil by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche discusses the theory of the “will to truth.” At the heart of Nietzsche’s argument is the idea that to learn the truth, a human being must question everything. Master and slave morality is a prominent theme in Nietzsche’s work Beyond Good and Evil. Such a human being is "beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will." Nietzsche criticizes "unegoistic morality" and demands that "Moralities must first of all be forced to bow before order of rank" (§221). 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. But nature, as something uncontrollable and "prodigal beyond measure," cannot be tyrannized over in the way Stoics tyrannize over themselves. Teachers, check out our ideas for how you can creatively incorporate SparkNotes materials into your classroom instruction. Thus, he calls the Utilitarians hypocritical for trying to provide a scientific underpinning to …