Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Beyond Good and Evil, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Good and Evil
Knowledge, Truth, and Untruth
The Individual and the Crowd
The Dark Side of Modernity
Women and Men
Summary
Analysis
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.
In questioning truth, Nietzsche is not rejecting its ultimate value so much as problematizing its place within the modern system of morality, in which truth corresponds to “good” and untruth corresponds to “evil.” Nietzsche finds this binary opposition, like many others, to be both limiting and baseless. He believes this binary ignores how and why humans think and act and instead attempts to force a link between rationality and morality. The philosophy of the future, to Nietzsche, is not a philosophy disinterested in truth, but a philosophy that takes account of the full breadth of human life.
Themes
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.
Nietzsche uses his idea of drives, which presupposed and heavily influenced psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious in the 20th century, to account for how much of human cognition is unconscious. This is closely connected, for Nietzsche, with the animality of humankind, which is still more driven by instinct than moral philosophers may be willing to admit. Understanding that humans are not perfectly rational and virtuous creatures, Nietzsche then argues to that our conscious and unconscious mind requires certain fictions—“untruths”—in order to keep its logical coherence. The error of dogmatic philosophers is not their belief in untruths—it’s their presenting these untruths as both truths and “the good.”
Themes
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’s notion of the will to power is one of the most important concepts in his work; heavily influenced by Darwin and other evolutionary theories, Nietzsche’s theory nevertheless sharply disagrees with them on many points and draws just as much from other areas of philosophy and from ancient history. The will to power, for Nietzsche, can be both a conscious and an unconscious drive. Nietzsche’s comment on conservative critics of modernity indicates his unorthodox position; despite his opposition to “progress,” he also rejects any particular idealized vision of a past society.
Themes
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.
Synthetic judgements a priori, or judgments which can be known to be true without experience despite not being provable on their own terms, are one of Kant’s greatest discoveries. Nietzsche’s curious, contradictory response suggests both that such judgments cannot be true, and that this does not matter, as truth does not correspond to good, and neither truth nor good correspond to human reason. Here as elsewhere Nietzsche affirms the importance of perspective, as he does not believe in the possibility of discovering truths which can be separated from the philosopher’s own point of view; it is with this in mind that Nietzsche condemns attempts to understand the world through science, which mechanically eliminates human perspective.
Themes
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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’s comments here also indicate how much his work has in common with psychoanalytic theory, as he questions the very idea of the stable and self-contained individual, a concept that is foundational to humanistic philosophy. Perhaps, for Nietzsche, the very notion of the self is another necessary untruth, a false interpretation of the world that humans cling to in order to make sense of it.
Themes
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 makes an important distinction between the will and the drive. Compared to the drive, the will is a greater and more powerful force, one that is intimately connected to its ability to change the world around it. This explains Nietzsche’s assertion that the most primary, powerful will in all life is the will to power. Nietzsche’s comparison of the individual and society introduces the social questions he will explore later in the book, hinting at his affinity for a noble ruling elite. In developing his idea of the will, Nietzsche stills draws heavily on Schopenhauer, even as he harshly criticizes what he views as Schopenhauer’s mystifying mistakes.
Themes
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.
Here Nietzsche touches upon another key idea of his, albeit one that has much less pronounced of a role in this book: the eternal return. To Nietzsche, humankind is always recreating older modes of existence on both individual and social scales as it rediscovers animalistic truths within itself. Nietzsche’s anti-humanist view is also closely connected to his belief in inherited characteristics of race, which he suggests correspond to differences in language and the way they shape the thinking of different peoples.
Themes
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.
In his counterintuitive invective against both cause and effect and free will, Nietzsche continues to advocate an understanding of philosophy as not necessarily expressing the highest truths, but making the world comprehensible to people through a combination of truth and untruth. Nietzsche’s argument regarding strong and weak wills presupposes the concepts of master and slave moralities he will develop later in the book, sketching out his idea of social domination as being not a matter of good and evil but the natural distribution of power according to strength.
Themes
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.
Nietzsche ironic comment here indicates his awareness of the fact that in arguing for perspective he precludes himself from asserting that his claims are universal “truths”; this is, however, an unavoidable problem, as all human knowledge is conditioned by perspective. The solution, therefore, is to “read” the world like a book and offer the most convincing interpretation possible from one’s own perspective; while Nietzsche concedes this cannot be proven, any perspectival knowledge that claims to be objective—including science— reveals its limitations.
Themes
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.
Building on the framework of wills and drives he’s established thus far, Nietzsche argues that the truth of morality is not found out in the world or in the word of God, but within the depths of the human soul—that is, within human psychology. Understood this way, Nietzsche’s dismissal of the notion that morality is universal becomes more understandable. He is not rejecting morality for the sake of transgressing but in order to gain a clearer picture of human thoughts and desires without morality’s distorting effects.
Themes
