Beyond Good and Evil Study Guide

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most important philosophers of the 19th century, and one of the most divisive. Born to a Lutheran pastor’s family belonging to the Bildungsbürgertum, or the most highly educated layer of the emerging bourgeoisie, Nietzsche was steeped in the study of both classical languages and Christian theology from a young age. Nietzsche very quickly found academic success researching and writing on a diverse array of topics, such as poetry and music, and by the time he was 24 had been appointed as a chair of philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. As his mental and physical health began to trouble him, however, Nietzsche withdrew from teaching and concentrated on his writing. He broke with his early idol, the German composer Richard Wagner, over their disagreements about nascent German nationalism. Nietzsche’s distaste for nationalism also led him to cut off many other friends and relatives, including his sister Elisabeth, who was married to one of the leaders of the German anti-Semitic movement, Bernhard Förster. He also suffered a series of romantic disappointments, most notably the rejection of his marriage proposal to Lou Salomé, and began to frequently visit brothels and use opium. In 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, allegedly due to syphilis, and remained largely uncommunicative until he died 11 years later. His work did not reach a mass audience until after his breakdown and death, contributing to the vast array of interpretations of his ideas. Moreover, some have argued that his sister Elisabeth, who edited his unpublished writing, deliberately exaggerated his apparent nationalism or anti-Semitism for her own political agenda, leading to Nietzsche’s celebration by the Nazis.

Nietzsche lived and wrote during a period in European history which was full of contradictions. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the formation of nation-states, and the Industrial Revolution in the beginning of the 19th century, many believed that “progress” was both desired and assured. This progress, however, contained its own dark side, with growing inequality, unrest, and the development of new tensions that would lead to explosive conflicts. Writing very much against the spirit of the times, Nietzsche argued that the idea of progress championed by the Enlightenment was neither real nor necessarily desirable, fiercely questioning the allegedly universal principles that justified it. Nietzsche was equally critical, however, of the Romantic nationalist projects of the time, including the unification of Germany and founding of the German Empire, which he saw as a different expression of the same historical trend as universalist humanism. Nietzsche’s work would prove greatly influential across the political spectrum in the years after his death, as the World Wars and the rise of mass movements like communism and fascism seemed to validate many of his diagnoses of social ills. While many philosophers and social critics on the left would come to draw on his work to argue for a revolutionary transformation of society, such as the theorists of the Frankfurt School, Nietzsche also found enthusiastic readers in the early Zionist movement and, most controversially, the Nazi party.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche returned to the themes of Thus Spoke Zarathustra with a more polemical style, arguing his points directly rather than allegorically. In the book, Nietzsche engages with and harshly critiques practically the entire canon of Western philosophy, but some authors and works stand out to him. Of particular importance is Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, which was a great influence on the young Nietzsche. While Nietzsche enthusiastically adapts many of Schopenhauer’s ideas, especially his theory of perception, he is strongly opposed to what he sees as both moral confusion and the denial of life itself in Schopenhauer’s philosophy. Like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche also draws on Immanuel Kant’s work, the Critique of Pure Reason in particular. Nietzsche engages with the classics, too, tracing the lineage of moral philosophy back to Plato and Socrates. The arguments Nietzsche advances in Beyond Good and Evil would be massively influential. Novelists like Knut Hamsun and Andrei Bely, the authors of Hunger and Petersburg, respectively, praised Nietzsche and sometimes discussed him in their fiction, and the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer drew on his skepticism of humanist morality and “civilization” for their Marxist critique Dialectic of Enlightenment.