Briefly: Artistotle's Nicomachean Ethics

Briefly:

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

The SCM Briefly series

Anselm’s Proslogion (with the Replies of Gaunilo and Anselm)

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 1 (God, Part I)

Aquinas’ Summa Theologica 2 (God, Part II)

Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics

Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic

Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy

Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion

Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals

Kant’s Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

Mill’s On Liberty

Mill’s Utilitarianism

Moore’s Principia Ethica

Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil

Plato’s The Republic

Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy

Sartre’s Existentialism and Humanism

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© David Mills Daniel and Dafydd Mills Daniel 2007

The Authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Authors of this Work

The authors and publisher acknowledge material reproduced from Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marion Faber, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0192832638. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press.

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First published in 2007 by SCM Press

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Contents

Introduction

Context

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

What is Beyond Good and Evil?

Some Issues to Consider

Suggestions for Further Reading

Detailed Summary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Sections 1–3, 5, 6, 9: 257–70)

Preface

Section 1 On the Prejudices of Philosophers

Section 2 The Free Spirit

Section 3 The Religious Disposition

Section 5 Towards a Natural History of Morals

Section 6 We Scholars

Section 9 (257–70) What is Noble?

Overview

Glossary

Introduction

The SCM Briefly series, edited by David Mills Daniel, is designed to enable students and general readers to acquire knowledge and understanding of key texts in philosophy, philosophy of religion, theology and ethics. While the series will be especially helpful to those following university and A-level courses in philosophy, ethics and religious studies, it will in fact be of interest to anyone looking for a short guide to the ideas of a particular philosopher or theologian.

Each book in the series takes a piece of work by one philosopher and provides a summary of the original text, which adheres closely to it, and contains direct quotations from it, thus enabling the reader to follow each development in the philosopher’s argument(s). Throughout the summary, there are page references to the original philosophical writing, so that the reader has ready access to the primary text. In the Introduction to each book, you will find details of the edition of the philosophical work referred to.

In Briefly: Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, we refer to Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marion Faber, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 0192832638.

Each Briefly begins with an Introduction, followed by a chapter on the Context in which the work was written. Who was this writer? Why was this book written? With Some Issues to Consider, and some Suggestions for Further Reading, this Briefly aims to get anyone started in their philosophical investigation. The Detailed Summary of the philosophical work is followed by a concise chapter-by-chapter Overview and an extensive Glossary of terms.

Bold type is used in the Detailed Summary and Overview sections to indicate the first occurrence of words and phrases that appear in the Glossary. The Glossary also contains terms used elsewhere in this Briefly guide and other terms that readers may encounter in their study of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil.

Context

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche?

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born at Röcken bei Lutzen, near Leipzig, Germany, in 1844. His father, a Lutheran minister, died in 1849, and Nietzsche’s mother moved the family to Naumburg, where they received a strict religious upbringing. After being a scholar at Schulpforta boarding school, Nietzsche entered Bonn University in 1864, but transferred to Leipzig University a year later, remaining there (apart from a year’s military service in 1867) until 1868. At Leipzig he dropped the study of theology, but maintained his interest in philology. He developed an enthusiasm for the work of Schopenhauer and Wagner, whom he would later view as philosophical opponents.

From 1869, Nietzsche taught classical philology at Basle University, Switzerland, where he was appointed to a full professorship in 1870. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, was published in 1872, and received some negative attention. His other works include Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878), Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (1883–85), On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic (1887), Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (1889), and The Antichrist: Curse on Christianity (1895).

Nietzsche suffered a complete mental collapse in 1889 and was committed to an asylum. After his discharge in 1890, he was cared for by his mother, until her death in 1897, and then by his sister. Nietzsche died in 1900.

What is Beyond Good and Evil?

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future was first published in 1886, and is one of the most interesting and popular of Nietzsche’s works, dealing with many themes that are characteristic of his philosophy. The Sections covered in this Briefly (1–3, 5, 6, 9) take us through (among other things) Nietzsche’s theories of the will to truth and to power; the perverseness of Christianity; master and slave morality; and the ‘new’, or ‘true’, philosopher.

Beyond Good and Evil is written in an aphoristic style, and Nietzsche guides us, in a disjointed way, through a history of human ideas and emotions, and their expression in philosophy, religion and society. However, definite themes run through each section of aphorisms, and these connect and build through the work as a whole, leading the reader, if not to a definite and clearly expressed conclusion, then to an inexpressible feeling of uncertainty. Throughout our reading of the book, we have the impression of beginning to understand his arguments, yet, in some sense, not fully grasping his philosophy. Nietzsche seems to want us to trust his view of the world, but also to be uncertain and wary of it. For Nietzsche, this tension in his reader between certainty and uncertainty would mean that the force of his truth has been felt as something that is difficult to accept, but impossible to ignore, once revealed. Also, a tension between scepticism and acceptance is the effect Nietzsche wants his philosophy to have on our conceptual understandings of such ideological constructs as ‘humanity’ and ‘world’, and the way we have formularized and responded to them in various philosophical systems and religions. He encourages us to doubt, and then to doubt even the validity of our doubting, before we move ‘beyond’ with him.

In Sections 2 and 3, Nietzsche argues against philosophical and religious dogmatism. He refers to sceptical free spirits, and the way that France demonstrated cultural dominance over Europe, in his time, by teaching and displaying the ‘glamour of scepticism’; thus, he appears to endorse the need for it. However, he often regards scepticism as being as undesirable as dogmatism, particularly religious dogmatism. Scepticism demonstrates an animosity towards the spirit and the human will, analogous to that in, for example, Christianity and Buddhism (see also Section 5). In his view, Christianity counteracts the spirit by seeking to confine it, making it seek its own denial, as though that which contradicts the spirit is its essential meaning. Christianity makes desire, in accordance with the true, active vitality of the spirit, sinful, and instead promotes isolation, asceticism and restraint. Similarly, scepticism, with its emphasis on being non-committal and using intellect to contain impulse, contradicts and perverts what should be the spirit’s essential, instinctual vitality and dynamism.

Thus, as we might expect, there are certain ironies and paradoxes in Nietzsche’s thought. For example, the ‘new’ philosophers (Section 6) must be capable of a view ‘downwards’. This is a panoramic vision of the whole of life and human existence, in which, and through which, the philosopher goes beyond good and evil and the timid norms of received social and religious morality. But the true philosopher, as well as being ‘above’, must also be involved. The new philosophers cannot, and will not, conform to the ‘rabble’s’ stereotypical view of the philosophical life, as a means of escaping the world’s puzzles and trials: the ‘wicked game’. They are not detached, or set apart from life, but live unphilosophically and unwisely, enduring the burdensome duty of a hundred of life’s tests and temptations.

Again, Nietzsche’s understanding of ‘spirit’ and ‘spirituality’ (Section 3) gives us pause for thought. His view that Christian doctrine amounts to a perversion of the will and spirit does not mean that the Christian saint has no will, but that it is a perverse one: it is the will to denial. The saint’s recognition that his will to power is satisfied in the repression of spirit, which shows his strength in self-containment, is a shocking display of a religious neurosis that is obsessive and gratuitous; and, in the way that it resists and condemns desires that are natural to human beings, criminal. So, if it is not to be found in the saintly and hermit-like existence of contemplative ascetics, who have disengaged from worldliness, what is ‘spirituality’ or the spiritual life for Nietzsche? It is the true, raw strength to live life as life, in a way that embodies the complex and frightening truths and absurdities of existence, from which we often try to escape, as they are too much for us. Spirituality is living with life always in sight, and coming to terms with, and freely living out, its unpredictability, unfairness and vibrancy. The attempt to conceal life’s absurdities and inequalities, by imposing such artificial contrivances as the neat distinction between good and evil on to it, is to hide from life, and to diminish its value and variety, cheapening it and making it into what it is not. By the use of paradox and irony, he aims to deconstruct certain aspects of human existence. In doing so, he implicitly, and sometimes (in a dramatic way) explicitly, constructs the means by which human beings might begin to recognize what, for him, lies at the heart of an authentic human existence: release into the freedom to exist truly and magnificently as a collection of individuals, who are honest with themselves and the world. Obviously, such a complex process has a number of stages and elements.

To start with (Section 1), we must examine critically our obsession with truth. Philosophers and theologians all want to find and reveal the truth, and we all want to hear them, because we want to know what it is. The problem is that we should actually be questioning the value of our will to truth and what philosophers and theologians proclaim to us as truth. One of Nietzsche’s greatest insights is that most conscious thinking has to be considered as an ‘instinctual’ activity. There is nothing dry, detached, or truly objective about any argument, no matter how much it is dressed up in dispassionate rationality or complex philosophical logic. Value judgements lie behind everything, and these are biases that lead thinkers, in their will to truth, to will one that confirms their particular prejudices. They have become instinctive, because they are seen as undeniable, and are automatically and unthinkingly affirmed. Nietzsche wants us to question the validity of