Beyond Good and Evil
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~68,600 words · 326 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Beyond Good and Evil. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil
- MLANietzsche. "Beyond Good and Evil." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/beyond-good-and-evil.
What it is about
Beyond Good and Evil (1886): the book he himself presented as the reverse of Zarathustra, written for those who want arguments.
Context and history
It opens by asking why we want truth, and why not untruth. The answer is that behind every philosophy lies a biography and a will, and that philosophers have taken their prejudices for demonstrations. The distinction between master and slave morality is here, and is the most distorted part of his whole work. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The following is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from German into English of "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913). Some adaptations from the original text were made to format it into an e-text. Italics in the original book are capitalized in this e-text, except for most foreign language phrases that were italicized. Original footnotes are put in brackets "[]" at the points where they are cited in the text. Some spellings were altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and "tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such as "idealize." "Sceptic" was changed to "skeptic." TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL CHAPTER I: PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS CHAPTER II: THE FREE SPIRIT CHAPTER III: THE RELIGIOUS MOOD CHAPTER IV: APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES CHAPTER V: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS CHAPTER VI: WE SCHOLARS CHAPTER VII: OUR VIRTUES CHAPTER VIII: PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES CHAPTER IX: WHAT IS NOBLE? FROM THE HEIGHTS (POEM TRANSLATED BY L.A. MAGNUS) PREFACE SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discouraged mien--IF, indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground--nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, t