Reading Nietzsche

An Analysis of "Beyond Good and Evil"

Douglas Burnham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781844650743
• eBook ISBN: 9781317493600
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

"Beyond Good and Evil" is a concise and comprehensive statement of Nietzsche's mature philosophy and is an ideal entry point into Nietzsche's work as a whole. Pithy, lyrical and densely complex, "Beyond Good and Evil" demands that its readers are already familiar with key Nietzschean concepts - such as the will-to-power, perspectivism or eternal recurrence - and are able to leap with Nietzschean agility from topic to topic, across metaphysics, psychology, religion, morality and politics. "Reading Nietzsche" explains the key concepts, the range of Nietzsche's concerns, and highlights Nietzsche's writing strategies that are the key to understanding his work and processes of thought. In its close analysis of the text, "Reading Nietzsche" reassesses this most creative of philosophers and presents a significant contribution to the study of his thought. In setting this analysis within a comprehensive survey of Nietzsche's ideas, the book is a guide both to this key work and to Nietzsche's philosophy more generally.

1 Nietzsche’s Title and Preface

The title

The full title of Nietzsche's book is Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. As with most book titles, what is being referred to will not become clear until we are into the main text, but a few brief observations are in order.

First of all, the title is deliberately provocative. There is something sinister looking about going "beyond good", even if the title also says "beyond evil". Moreover, so much of philosophy, theology and political, social and psychological thought concerned itself with the nature of Good and Evil, that to sweep it all aside with this "beyond" must have seemed a staggeringly broad and high-handed gesture. It is as if Nietzsche is saying: you have all simply been asking the wrong question. In fact, this is exactly what Nietzsche is saying. Finally, the "beyond" and "future" introduces an element of history to subjects (good and evil) about which the reader might not be accustomed, or willing, to think in historical terms.

The first part of Nietzsche's book is on the "Prejudices of the Philosophers", and above all Nietzsche is criticizing the late-eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Therefore, it is not surprising to find in Nietzsche's subtitle a subtle and joking reference to the title of a famous little book by Kant. Kant's title is Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Step Forward as a Science. Just as Kant's book was an attempt to restate in a more accessible way what he had said in the huge Critique of Pure Reason, so Nietzsche evidently saw Beyond Good and Evil as a differently expressed version of his philosophy in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Notice, though, that Kant's title seems to speak of a philosophy in the present that determines what can be "scientific" in the future, whereas Nietzsche's subtitle refers to a philosophy that is in the future, not here yet. We shall have much more to say later on the far from simply antithetical relation between Kant and Nietzsche.

Preface: the task of “we good Europeans”

Nietzsche's Preface begins with the famous sentence: "Presupposing that truth is a woman - what? Is the suspicion not without grounds that all philosophers, in so far as they were dogmatists, were amateurs about women?" We must start by considering a few things about this sentence.

First, let us think about what is often most difficult to ascertain: the tone. We need to get this problem right up front because it is so important for Nietzsche, while being so unimportant for most other philosophers. Nietzsche, here, is playful, almost vaudevillian: the what?" is the equivalent to a double take, or a sarcastic taunt. The author pretends to have just noticed (and perhaps to be shocked by), after a well-timed delay, the implications of what has just been said. In various ways, Nietzsche employs this little gimmick often; indeed, the what?" occurs often enough to be a catch-phrase (e.g. §15 or 56).

The tone is important because it is often one of our only clues as to how to "take" a certain statement: is it a joke, a seriously meant claim, gentle mockery or a vicious and spiteful provocation? Here, the playful tone is tinged with the faintest hint of venom. "Das Weib" [woman], for example, is not a perfectly neutral term but can have pejorative meanings. This hint of the pejorative introduces a misogynistic theme that becomes far from subtle, for example at the end of Part 7, although even there one must be constantly aware of Nietzsche's famous irony. There is a much more pronounced pejorative in the term "dogmatists" - one has the feeling, and quite rightly, that Nietzsche has in mind any number of philosophers who would not consider themselves dogmatists. The assumption is also that all these incompetent and unthinking dogmatists were and must be men - so in any case neither gender escapes Nietzsche's venom.

A second thing to notice about this sentence is that it involves a pun. The last phrase reads ". . . sich schlecht auf Weiber verstanden?" [which I have translated as "were amateurs about women?"]. The verb means "to be expert or proficient concerning" and this is not simply negated but modified by "schlecht" [bad]. The suggestion is of bumbling or cack-handed. However, the core of the verb is "verstehen" which means, simply, "to understand". Significantly, this is a philosophical term (as in the faculty of understanding, in Kant). So, it would be difficult for a German reader of philosophy not to read this as also meaning "had an insufficient understanding of women", and thus "of truth". Accordingly, this is also a jibe at the way philosophers think about understanding and truth. Now, this is not a particularly sophisticated or clever pun (there are better ones to come), but it contains a double meaning that carries significance. That is, the doubleness of the meaning itself means something, suggesting something complex, subtle or hidden in the midst of the apparently straightforward. In brief, it is not just the case that dogmatists are sexually inept, in some way, and that they had an inadequate philosophy of truth, but that these two claims are intrinsically linked. Nietzsche's puns are frequently charged with meaning in this way. We will return to this particular double meaning, and what light if any it sheds on Nietzsche's notorious writings on women, in our discussion of §§231-9. For it turns out that here in the first sentence, in what looks for all the world like a light-hearted and mildly offensive joke, Nietzsche is introducing one of his most central philosophical ideas.

Significantly, the sentence is also impossible to translate in such a way as to capture all its nuances. There are many translations of Nietzsche's book, all are fine, intelligent, professional; and they all translate this sentence slightly differently, putting a different spin on the idea. So then, if the idea turns out to be so central, we already have proof that Nietzsche cannot be as straightforward to read as, to many, he appears.

Thirdly, this trope of truth as a woman is already a complex internal and external reference. A variation shows up in §220, first of all. Also, to an educated German reader, it would likely be reminiscent of the last lines of Goethe's Faust II, which Nietzsche quotes much later in §236. But, it is certainly an echo of the trope of woman as wisdom in Zarathustra, Part 1, "On Reading and Writing" ("Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent - thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior"); and that very passage is used, slightly revised, as an aphorism to start off the third Treatise in Genealogy of Morality. In this book it would be quite impossible for us to track all of Nietzsche's allusions and cross-references; in any case the translations generally list many in footnotes or endnotes. However, we should certainly be aware of how Nietzsche's book, from its opening sentence (to the closing stanza of the final poem), is self-knowingly immersed in a pre-existing fabric of texts, thoughts, histories and beliefs, both personal and global.

A fourth observation is that the sentence begins as a hypothesis: if we make a certain claim, what then follows? Nietzsche frequently constructs his thoughts in this form. Later in the Preface, for example, he will make plentiful use of suggestive questions, "mights", "maybes" and "perhaps". This "hypothetical" way of working has a distinguished history in philosophy and science. For example, in philosophy we encounter it in the idea of a thought experiment that helps us to analyse the content of our concepts. John Locke (1 have in mind especially the discussion of personal identity in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding) was particularly adept at such thought experiments. What, we might ask, are the consequences for our concept of a person's identity if he or she loses all memory, swaps bodies with another person, or whatever? In modern science, a different hypothetical form of working has become dominant. One hypothesizes some X in order first to analyse what empirical consequences it would have, and then to devise and perform an experiment to test for the presence of just these consequences. The presence of consequences does not prove X, but the absence of the consequences proves not-X. Finally, in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he describes a set of "ideas" that cannot constitute knowledge but only "regulate" it. That is, interesting insights might be had if we think of the observable world "as if " such ideas have objective reality.

Nietzsche's hypothetical method has something in common with all three of these, and especially the first and third form, but there are important differences. First, as here, the tone is often playful or mocking. And this suggests that the hypothesis might have a different purpose from Locke's serious attempt to explore particular abstract concepts. Secondly, Nietzsche's hypotheses typically do not target a specific concept but rather a particular way of understanding something. That is, they seem to be interested in opening up or calling into question a "world-view". So, here, Nietzsche is targeting a way of thinking about philosophy and the methods it employs to discover the truth. (Moreover, less directly, the targets here include the way in which philosophers think about gender in an ethical, biological or social way, as well as the general capacity to understand.) In respect to the implicit reference to Kant's notion of regulative ideas, we will have much to say later about notions in Nietzsche that seem to function not so much as straightforward truth-claims, but rather as provocations to thought or initiations of long-term projects (the famous idea of eternal recurrence might be one of these).

"Speaking seriously", Nietzsche continues. This confirms the jokey status of the first sentences, certainly But there is also a kind of contradiction here. The "seriously" [ernstlich] echoes the "horrible seriousness" [schauerliche Ernst] earlier. The idea of seriousness becomes important later in the book. Already, though, we have a suggestive contrast. A contrast between, on the one hand, a seriousness linked to horror, and associated with dogmatists who may be nearing their "last breaths" and, on the other, a seriousness to be found in jokes and puns, associated (as we will soon see) with all that is living. Nietzsche wants to be taken seriously, on these latter terms.

"Speaking seriously", then, philosophical dogmatizing should be seen as childishness, no matter how "elevated" it may seem. For it is based upon superstitions or word play, the "seduction by grammar", or even upon a generalization of some particular human fact (e.g. a foible of the philosopher). Two things are to be noticed here. First, briefly, we have yet another inversion of the contrast discussed above: here, Nietzsche is being "serious" about childishness and play. How is such play to be distinguished from the jokiness characteristic of much of Nietzsche's writing? The obvious answer, and one we will see Nietzsche returning to, is that the play of the dogmatic philosophers is self-deceptive, not recognized for what it is.

A second thing worth noticing is the parenthetical comment on the "soul superstition" and associated concepts. This is an important theme for Nietzsche. He is here referring to the idea that the location of human identity is in an immortal and independent soul; that the soul is the seat also of consciousness and will, and thus (ideally at least) in control of the body, action as well as thought. These are indeed historically important ideas within the history of Christianity and philosophy (especially moral philosophy). What we need to notice is that, uncritically assumed, these certainly may be dogma or superstitions. However, they are also topics within philosophical metaphysics. That is, the truth or falsehood of the claim that the soul exists, and has such and such properties, is not always just assumed by philosophy, but argued for. If Nietzsche's claim that these are just superstitions is to be upheld, then he will have to demonstrate that all such metaphysical arguments are not neutral attempts to establish truth, but partisan attempts to give to prejudice the appearance of reason. So, at stake in Nietzsche's book are not just the particular claims philosophy has made (about the soul, for example), but the methods (such as rational argumentation) that philosophy has used to try to establish these claims.

We will skip quickly over the next couple of sentences, only making two quick observations: first of all, we have the "monstrous and terrifying grotesques [Fratzen]" as which "great things" must first stride the earth in order to "inscribe eternal demands into the heart". The image puts one in mind of primordial mythic beings (for example, the Titans in Greek myth). The next sentence makes clear, though, that Nietzsche is referring not to mythic figures so much as ideas, grossly and grotesquely distorted, that gradually become accepted as something like common sense. This introduces the theme of the historical origins of basic principles and laws - often, for Nietzsche, a historical origin that appears to be quite different to the character of these laws. If a basic principle is historical, in this sense, then it is also not "basic" in a traditional philosophical sense: it is not a priori, for example, nor an "eternal truth". And yet, just such a principle might be taken to be basic for some broad and comprehensive world-view (not just a philosophy, but a religion, a culture, a science, a way of life). Secondly, notice that this history and its contemporary effects is not something to be simply despised and abandoned (even were that possible), but is to be met "not without gratitude". But why gratitude? That is the topic of the rest of the Preface.

The last topic of the Preface begins by asking us to recognize that the most fearful and indeed dangerous "grotesque" was precisely an error of a dogmatic philosopher: Plato's "fabrication" [Erfindung] of the pure spirit and the Good as such. Nietzsche means the ideas of a spirit or mind that is able to purify itself of any engagement with the world of appearances and of human desires, and of an absolutely universal Good, that exists in itself independently of human affairs. Nietzsche explains that such fabrication meant "standing truth on its head" and "denying perspective, the basic condition of all life". We will return to these ideas later.

But now, Nietzsche says, "Europe breathes a sigh of relief from this nightmare and at least can enjoy a healthier - sleep". Again, this is a common form of joke in Nietzsche: the unexpected completion of a sentence with the long dividing dash to indicate comic timing. (We get another joke structured in this manner in the parenthetical comment about gunpowder and the printing press towards the end of the preface.) The overcoming of Plato's thought has not led to wakefulness, awareness, clear-sightedness, but just to deeper sleep. (See also Zarathustra, Part 1, "On the Teachers of Virtue".) Notice also that the sigh of relief echoes the "last gasps" of dogmatism. It is as if one way of thinking or living (dogmatism) has been suffocated so that now another (whatever is characteristic of recent, sleeping, Europe) can breathe while sleeping.

But, Nietzsche continues, this process of overcoming this error has also "cultivated" an enormous reserve of strength [Kraft]. And, "we whose task [Aufgabe] is wakefulness itself" are "heirs" to this strength. This idea of a reserve of strength is elaborated a few lines later with the "magnificent tension [Spannung] of the spirit". Attempts have been made to hide or remove this tension, this built-up strength - Nietzsche names Jesuitism and democracy as two. The latter might even be working, the spirit might no longer experience itself as "need". But "we" still feel, the "whole need of the spirit and the whole tension of its bow".

At the moment, it is impossible for us to investigate what Nietzsche might mean by this strength or tension; by the "task of wakefulness"; what it might mean to attempt to remove the tension through Jesuitism or democracy and a free press; or even what is the "need of the spirit". All these themes we will return to in the course of our discussion. It remains for us to notice the pronoun "we". We "free spirits", or "we good Europeans". (Certainly not "we Germans"; here, briefly and jokingly and later in a much more sustained manner, Nietzsche is always critical of the cultural and political state of his native country.) Nietzsche is addressing his readership as partners or potential partners in a future philosophical (and ultimately also moral and political) enterprise. His book, then, is not meant for just anyone, but for those who already feel this need of the spirit. This, in itself, is a curious idea. We tend to think of philosophical texts (and others too, such as scientific writings) as essentially open in the sense that given a certain degree of background knowledge (which is again openly available) anyone can read and understand them. Nietzsche's "we" suggests that his book is not open; there will be some people who are not meant to read it.

The Preface has introduced many of the major themes of Beyond Good and Evil, such as the nature of truth and appropriate strategies for "winning" it; the problem of establishing historically how ideas and, more importantly, ways of living arise; considering what might now arise to replace them; and the idea of perspective. It has also shown us several of Nietzsche's typical ways of working: the hypothetical mode of writing, for example, and the jokes and puns that are intended to be serious but not "clumsy". We have also observed how Nietzsche's writings participate in a pre-existing web of textual references. It is important to add that this is not just a fact about, or a strategy of, writing, but is also a philosophical theme. Again and again Nietzsche will tell us how the philosopher cannot separate herself from or even fully come to understand the conditions within which she works. This idea is part of the meaning of concepts like "going down", "entanglement" or the "untimely" (see §§ 26, 56 and 212 respectively). It appears in Nietzsche's Preface also in a subtle joke. The first syllable of the book is "Vor" me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Nietzsche's Title and Preface
• 2. "On the Prejudices of the Philosophers": A Critique of Metaphysical Ground (Part 1 §§1-23)
• 3. "The Free Spirit": The Philosopher Realigned to Will to Power (Part 2 §§24-44)
• 4. The Nature of Religion: Beyond Nihilism, Towards the Immanent Ideal (Part 3 §§45-62)
• 5. "Epigrams and Entr'actes" (Part 4 §§63-185)
• 6. The Natural History of Morality: The Development of Affects and Reactions (Part 5 §§186-203)
• 7. We Scholars: Science as the "Hammer" of Philosophy (Part 6 §§204-13)
• 8. Our Virtues: Honesty and the "Democratic Mixing" of Peoples, Classes, Genders (Part 7 §§214-39)
• 9. Peoples and Fatherlands: Towards the Political Task of Philosophy in Europe (Part 8 §§240-56)
• 10. What is Noble? Past and Future Aristocracies (Part 9 §§257-96)
• 11. From High Mountains: Aftersong
• Glossary
• Selected Further Reading
• Index