Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche begins by questioning the value of truth. Why, he asks, do humans seek the truth? And what makes truth worth seeking? What makes us consider truth more valuable than untruth? Examining the binary opposition of truth and untruth more closely, Nietzsche comes to question the very concept of “opposite values,” which he sees as being the basis of most philosophy. To him, however, there is no reason to accept this basis. In fact, the philosophy of the future will be philosophy that explicitly rejects and moves beyond that way of thinking.

Nietzsche wonders whether misplaced faith in the value of opposites has led humans to misunderstand their own thinking, too. He suggests that instead of being opposed to each other, conscious thinking—such as philosophy—is motivated and guided by unconscious habits and drives. These drives are physiological, stemming from the will to survive. Moreover, these drives also require untruth as much as truth. Considered from this perspective, Nietzsche finds the philosophy of the past to be less of a search for truth than an unconscious expression of philosophers’ moral prejudices. Nietzsche gives the examples of Kant and Spinoza but claims that this critique indeed applies to philosophers throughout history.

Not only are philosophies directed by philosophers’ innermost drives, but these drives aim to master each other. Drawing on the examples of Plato, Epicurus, and the Stoics, Nietzsche claims that philosophy always remakes the world in its own image and is therefore an expression of what he calls the will to power, or the drive to dominate and control. Seen from this perspective, the moral and political debates of contemporary Europe are motivated not by a “will to truth” but by a struggle for or against the will to power of what Nietzsche calls “modern ideas.” While he ridicules thinkers who want to go back to a time before secularism and materialism, he commends them, too, for their desire to escape the constraints of modern thinking.

Nietzsche finds the concept of synthetic judgements a priori, one of the key pillars of Kant’s philosophy, to be strictly speaking untrue. He does not argue that philosophers should do away with such reasoning altogether, but rather that they cannot truly prove it, and the more interesting question is why humans require such unprovable truths. He applies a similar method to the question of the soul; instead of asking whether the soul exists, Nietzsche asks how understanding our drives and affects through the lens of the soul brings us closer to truth. Through this philosophical lens, Nietzsche issues equally strong condemnations of the use of biology or physics as explanations of the world which, unlike genuine philosophy, eliminate the difficulties—and pleasures—of interpreting it.

Nietzsche finds further fault in philosophy’s belief in certain kinds of “absolute knowledge,” beginning within the philosopher’s faith in the proposition “I think.” Nietzsche asks how the philosopher can be so confident that their individual ego exists, that they are the actor and the thought is acted upon, and that they have the frame of reference to compare these actions with other states or feelings? To Nietzsche, the process of thought does not provide absolute knowledge of any kind, but rather genuine and difficult questions. Perhaps it is the thought itself that acts, and “it thinks” is a more appropriate way to pose the question.

Nietzsche is cautious, however, about replacing philosophy’s faith in logic and knowledge with a faith in the will. First of all, he asks, what is the will? In this sphere as in others, he finds past philosophers to have created as much confusion as clarity, singling out Schopenhauer in particular. Nietzsche suggests a more capacious idea of the will: there are a plurality of wills expressing different drives, thoughts, and affects. These wills, moreover, are intimately connected to action, and to the commanding and executing of the actions they cause. The function is therefore the same in society as in an individual, as the ruling caste or class identifies itself with both broader society and the will itself. This, to Nietzsche, decisively places the question of the will within the sphere of morals.

Nietzsche expresses skepticism about philosophy’s capacity to discover. He argues instead that philosophers constantly rediscover and return to older ideas within the “soul,” in both individual and historical cases. Nietzsche points to the example of the similar philosophical systems developed in the very different societies of ancient India, ancient Greece, and modern Germany. He clarifies, however, that the languages of these societies—and therefore of their philosophies—all shared similar basic grammar, and wonders whether philosophers thinking in Ural-Altaic languages would come to very different conclusions. To Nietzsche, differences in language can make people as fundamentally unalike as physiology or race. 

Questioning the concept of causa sui (a thing or concept which is its own cause), Nietzsche criticizes both free will and the usage of cause and effect in philosophy. Dismissing free will, he warns the reader not to take up the opposite concept of “unfree will” in its place, which he argues misuses the very idea of cause and effect. To Nietzsche, cause and effect are mere concepts, and cannot truly explain the world. Rather, humans create the idea of cause and effect to explain the world. Likewise, there is no such thing as an unfree will, but the collision of strong wills and weak wills. Nietzsche finds that this misunderstanding of unfree will explains the pathological desires of many modern thinkers, who alternately fetishize responsibility or attempt to abolish it altogether; socialists and reformers belong to the latter category.

As a philologist, Nietzsche questions the basis of the modern scientific claim that nature has and conforms to consistent laws. Is this not mere interpretation, he asks? Could another observer not “read” out of nature very different laws, or even no laws at all? In contrast he posits a reading of nature that understands it as consistent not because it has laws but because it does not and is driven instead by the will to power. Nietzsche coyly admits that this, too, is merely an interpretation, and hopes that the materialists he criticizes would have the consistency to raise the same objection to his theory.

In concluding this chapter, Nietzsche claims that all psychology to date, too, has been prevented from making true discoveries—from descending to the depths—by moral prejudice. He proposes instead to rethink psychology as the development of the will to power, an understanding which would scandalize the morality of most philosophers. Indeed, morality will lead the philosopher to unconsciously resist their own investigations for fear of what they might find. Nietzsche finds, therefore, that one must “crush” and “destroy” one’s own morality to find the truth, the most direct route to which leads through psychology.