Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche's War on Inherited Certainties

Friedrich Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, at his own expense, after no publisher would take it. It sold poorly. It is now one of the most widely read works of philosophy in any language. The book's subtitle, "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future," is not a boast. Nietzsche was laying groundwork, and he knew it.

What the Book Argues

Beyond Good and Evil is organized into nine parts plus an afterword of verse. Nietzsche opens with an attack on the entire tradition of Western philosophy, from Plato through Kant, arguing that every philosophical system is a form of unconscious autobiography: the philosopher's personal temperament disguised as universal truth. He then pivots to psychology, which he considers the real "queen of the sciences," and introduces the concept of the will to power as the fundamental drive underlying all human behavior.

The most provocative sections deal with morality. Nietzsche distinguishes between "master morality," which values strength, nobility, and self-assertion, and "slave morality," which values pity, humility, and resentment of the powerful. He argues that modern European morality is slave morality in secular clothing: Christianity without God, democratic egalitarianism as the political expression of a priestly instinct. The book does not offer a replacement system. It clears the ground and leaves you standing in the rubble.

About This Edition

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780140449235
Translation: R.J. Hollingdale, with introduction by Michael Tanner