Beyond Good and Evil
선악의 저편
A book Friedrich Nietzsche published at his own expense in 1886, subtitled "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future". It recasts the thought of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in polemical aphorisms rather than poetic parable, attacking the dogmatism of past philosophers who took the will to truth and the opposition of good and evil for granted, and explaining the basic drive of all life as will to power. It brands present-day European morality "herd-animal morality", calls the democratic and socialist movements the heirs of Christian morality, and contains section 260, which distinguishes master morality from slave morality.
In depth
Why "beyond good and evil"?
When Thus Spoke Zarathustra found almost no readers, Nietzsche felt he had to restate the same thoughts in sharp prose rather than parable and song. The result, Beyond Good and Evil, is the most concentrated statement of his late philosophy, his critique of morality and of modernity. The title does not mean that morality should be ignored. It means that the habit of treating good and evil as absolutely opposed values, and the philosophical systems built on it, should be put in doubt. As the English Wikipedia notes, already in section 2 Nietzsche questions the belief that "good" and "evil" are opposites, calling it the fundamental faith of the metaphysicians.
The preface, written at Sils Maria in June 1885, begins: "Supposing truth is a woman, what then?" Nietzsche mocks dogmatic philosophers for approaching truth too earnestly and clumsily to win her, and says that the worst error so far was Plato's invention of "pure spirit" and "the good in itself". He sums up the struggle against that error thus: "for Christianity is Platonism for 'the people'."
denn Christenthum ist Platonismus für’s „Volk“
In Nietzsche's view the millennia-long struggle against Plato and Christianity had created in the European spirit a tension like a taut bow, with which one could now aim at the most distant targets. Those who would aim were the philosophers of the future he called "free spirits" and "good Europeans". Hence the subtitle, "Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future".
How was it published and arranged?
According to the English Wikipedia the book first appeared in 1886 from C. G. Naumann in Leipzig at Nietzsche's own expense, since his earlier books had sold so poorly that publishers were hard to find. It consists of a short preface, 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, "From High Mountains", with the main text divided into nine parts: On the Prejudices of Philosophers; The Free Spirit; The Religious Mood; Apophthegms and Interludes; The Natural History of Morals; We Scholars; Our Virtues; Peoples and Countries; What Is Noble?
The book forms a pair with On the Genealogy of Morality of the following year. On the back of that book's title page Nietzsche stated that it was meant to supplement and clarify the recently published Beyond Good and Evil. The two are often translated together in one volume, in Korea as elsewhere.
What does it argue?
The first part charges that philosophers, while claiming to seek objective truth, have really written involuntary memoirs, justifications of their own drives and moral prejudices. Nietzsche asks why we want truth rather than untruth and says that the belief that truth is worth more than appearance is itself only a moral prejudice. The idea that all knowledge is interpretation from a particular perspective is treated in the separate entry on perspectivism.
In its place Nietzsche offers a hypothesis. If our whole life of drives could be explained as the development of one basic form, the will to power, then the world seen from inside would be "will to power and nothing else" (section 36).
sie wäre eben „Wille zur Macht“ und nichts ausserdem.
Among the short maxims of the fourth part, section 146 is one of the most quoted of all Nietzsche's sentences: "Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you."
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
In the fifth part, "The Natural History of Morals", Nietzsche says that morality in Europe today is "herd-animal morality", only one of many possible moralities, yet insists that it is morality itself (section 202). In the ninth part, "What Is Noble?", section 260 announces that a survey of the many moralities that have ruled on earth revealed two basic types: "There is master morality and slave morality."
Es giebt Herren-Moral und Sklaven-Moral
In master morality "good" is the self-description of the noble who affirm themselves, and "bad" merely denotes the low. Slave morality, conversely, starts by branding the strong "evil" and makes virtues of pity, humility and industry. The distinction is developed historically in the following year's On the Genealogy of Morality; the concept itself is explained in the separate entry on master and slave morality.
How did Nietzsche see democracy and socialism?
Beyond Good and Evil is the most openly political of Nietzsche's books. Section 202 says that with the help of the Christian religion herd-animal morality has come to be expressed even in political and social institutions: "the democratic movement is the heir of the Christian one."
die demokratische Bewegung macht die Erbschaft der christlichen.
In the same section he mocks the "anarchist dogs" howling that the movement is too slow, and in section 203 he calls the "man of the future" dreamed of by "socialist dolts and flatheads", the man of the "free society", the complete degeneration of man into a herd animal, "a dwarf animal of equal rights and claims". Section 259 goes further. Socialists talk of a future society from which "the exploitative character" will have vanished, which sounds to Nietzsche like promising to invent a life that refrains from all organic functions. "'Exploitation' does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect and primitive society: it belongs to the essence of the living."
Die „Ausbeutung“ gehört nicht einer verderbten oder unvollkommnen und primitiven Gesellschaft an: sie gehört in’s Wesen des Lebendigen
Along with this, Nietzsche ridiculed Europe's patchwork of small states and its nationalism and prophesied that "the next century will bring the struggle for dominion over the earth, the compulsion to great politics" (section 208). In the eighth part of the same book he also scorned contemporary German nationalism and antisemitic agitation, passages that those who later dressed Nietzsche up as a forerunner of the Nazis passed over.
How did Marxists respond?
This book is where the Marxist critique of Nietzsche began. According to the German Wikipedia's article on Nietzsche's reception, the socialist historian Franz Mehring called Beyond Good and Evil in 1891 "the philosophy and poetry of capitalism" and accused Nietzsche of crowning exploiting big capital with laurels. For Mehring, Nietzsche's discovery that "evil" qualities such as greed and lust for power had become levers of historical development was already in Hegel; but instead of concluding that morality is historically conditioned, Nietzsche treated the masters' oppression of the slaves as a law of nature. The theory of exploitation in section 259 stands in direct opposition to Marx's analysis of exploitation as the product of particular relations of production. For Marx exploitation is a relation that arose historically and can be abolished; for Nietzsche it is a function of life itself.
György Lukács treated the opposition more systematically in The Destruction of Reason (1954), calling Nietzsche's philosophy an "indirect apologetics" that defended, in the form of myth, the world view of the bourgeoisie of the imperialist age against socialism. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School, by contrast, took Nietzsche seriously in Dialectic of Enlightenment as a thinker who drove the consequences of enlightenment to the point where it turns over. In France from the 1970s, Jacques Derrida in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (1978) took the preface's "supposing truth is a woman" as a thread for a deconstructive reading of Nietzsche's writing.