Work · Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
1886 · Nine parts
An assault on every inherited certainty, and the will to power beneath our talk of truth and morals.
1886
Published
296
Aphorisms
Will to power
The drive beneath
The two moralities
Nietzsche’s most explosive distinction, offered as history not battle-cry. The strong once named themselves "good" and their opposite merely "bad." The weak, unable to act, took revenge in imagination, recoining the strong as "evil" and themselves as "good." Modern morality, he argues, is the descendant of that second move.
The shape of the argument
Part 1 — Prejudices of Philosophers
The will to truth interrogated: philosophers as unconscious memoirists, and the demand to go behind the opposition of values.
Parts 2–4 — The free spirit, religion, maxims
The new philosophers of the future, the critique of religion as a use of the will, and a run of aphorisms.
Parts 5–7 — Morals, scholars, our virtues
The natural history of morals, the rank of the genuine philosopher above the scholar, and the honesty of the free spirit.
Part 9 — What is Noble?
Master morality versus slave morality, ressentiment, and the transvaluation, the seed the Genealogy would systematize a year later.
The cast
Nietzsche — writes the "prelude to a philosophy of the future" after Zarathustra
The will to power — the basic drive he reads beneath knowledge, morality, and life: self-expansion, not mere domination
The free spirit — the thinker who can live beyond the inherited opposition of good and evil
Elisabeth and the aftermath — the sister who later cobbled the notes into "The Will to Power" and steered the legacy toward the Nazis
The famous bits
The will to truthPart 1
Why do we want truth rather than untruth? The question almost no philosopher had thought to ask.
Philosophy as confession§6
Every great philosophy is the personal confession of its author, an involuntary memoir.
The will to power§13, §259
Life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of its results.
Master and slave morality§260
Two root types of value: the noble who affirms himself, and the powerless who begins from a "No" to the strong.
Gazing into the abyss§146
He who fights monsters should see that he does not become one; gaze into the abyss and it gazes back.