Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Roosevelt’s celebrated demand for “freedom from fear.” The idea that much of man’s conduct and culture can be explained in terms of fear was first explored extensively by Nietzsche in The Dawn

I am of the opinion that only experience—experience always seems to mean bad experience?—can entitle us to participate in the discussion of such higher questions of rank, lest we talk like blind men about colors—

experiment to test theories. not emotion

“Freedom from all masters!” that is what the instinct of the rabble wants in this case, too; and after science has most happily rid itself of theology whose “handmaid” it was too long, it now aims with an excess of high spirits and a lack of understanding to lay down laws for philosophy and to play the “master” herself—what am I saying? the philosopher.

science has broken free of religion but it sounds like Nietzsche thinks it needs it.

Schopenhauer was poor, unreceptive, and un-German to the point of genius.)

Nietzsche values the outsider .

how utterly our modern world lacks the whole type11 of a Heraclitus, Plato, Empedocles, and whatever other names these royal and magnificent hermits of the spirit had;

modern philosophy has gradually sunk, this rest of philosophy today, invites mistrust and displeasure, if not mockery and pity. Philosophy reduced to “theory of knowledge,”

The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous, and with this also the probability that the philosopher grows weary while still learning or allows himself to be detained somewhere to become a “specialist”—so

more true today

skepticism is the most spiritual expression of a certain complex physiological condition that in ordinary language is called nervous exhaustion and sickliness;

The time for petty politics is over: the very next century will bring the fight for the dominion of the earth—the compulsion to large-scale politics.

he called it

They will be harder (and perhaps not always only against themselves) than humane people might wish; they will not dally with “Truth” to be “pleased” or “elevated” or “inspired” by her. On the contrary, they will have little faith that truth of all things should be accompanied by such amusements for our feelings.

Critical discipline and every habit that is conducive to cleanliness and severity in matters of the spirit will be demanded by these philosophers

the philosopher, being of necessity a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself, and had to find himself, in contradiction to his today: his enemy was ever the ideal of today. So far all these extraordinary furtherers of man whom one calls philosophers, though they themselves have rarely felt like friends of wisdom but rather like disagreeable fools and dangerous question marks, have found their task, their hard, unwanted, inescapable task, but eventually also the greatness of their task, in being the bad conscience of their time.

who all the while still mouthed the ancient pompous words to which their lives no longer gave them any right, irony may have been required for greatness of soul,35 that Socratic sarcastic assurance of the old physician and plebeian who cut ruthlessly into his own flesh,

“He shall be greatest who can be loneliest, the most concealed, the most deviant, the human being beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, he that is overrich in will. Precisely this shall be called greatness: being capable of being as manifold as whole, as ample as full.” And to ask it once more: to-day—is greatness possible?

That genuinely philosophical combination, for example, of a bold and exuberant spirituality that runs presto and a dialectical severity and necessity that takes no false step is unknown to most thinkers and scholars from their own experience,

they will not be the simpleminded and four-square virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor—and

if we should have virtues we shall presumably have only virtues which have learned to get along best with our most secret and cordial inclinations, with our most ardent needs.

our better angels of our nature.

is there anything more beautiful than looking for one’s own virtues? Doesn’t this almost mean: believing in one’s own virtue? But this “believing in one’s virtue”—isn’t this at bottom the same thing that was formerly called one’s “good conscience,”

Is this the argument that man is naturally good? and the old morals are the ideals?

our “starry sky,” by different moralities; our actions shine alternately in different colors, they are rarely univocal—and there are cases enough in which we perform actions of many colors.

our culture has many moral frsmeworks.

Love one’s enemies? I think this has been learned well: it is done thousands of times today, in small ways and big ways.

must play nice with everyone .

Morality as a pose—offends our taste today. That, too, is progress—just as it was progress when religion as a pose finally offended our fathers’ taste, including hostility and Voltairian bitterness against religion

pose meaning to rigid ? Too formulaic ?

all moral homilies and old-fashioned respectability won’t go.

old school character wont die.

Beware of those who attach great value to being credited with moral tact and subtlety in making moral distinctions.

Blessed are the forgetful: for they get over their stupidities, too.

The psychologists of France—and where else are any psychologists left today?—still have not exhausted their bitter and manifold delight in the bêtise bourgeoise,1 just as if—enough, this betrays something.

example of buying TP

the unconscious craftiness with which all good, fat, solid, mediocre spirits react to higher spirits and their tasks—that subtle, involved, Jesuitical craftiness which is a thousand times more subtle than not only the understanding and taste of this middle class is at its best moments, but even the understanding of its victims—which proves once again that “instinct” is of all the kinds of intelligence that have been discovered so far—the most intelligent. In short, my dear psychologists, study the philosophy of the “norm” in its fight against the “exception”: there you have a spectacle that is good enough for gods and godlike malice!

Moral judgments and condemnations constitute the favorite revenge of the spiritually limited against those less limited—also a sort of compensation for having been ill-favored by nature—finally

I completely agree with this and seen it first hand. People who have almost nothing going on in their life fine judgement in others. They tear others down for minor things. or find trivial things to build an ego around.

the fact emerges that the vast majority of the things that interest and attract choosier and more refined tastes and every higher nature seem to the average man totally “uninteresting”;

even now truth finds it necessary to stifle her yawns when she is expected to give answers. In the end she is a woman: she should not be violated.

Moralities must be forced to bow first of all before the order of rank; their presumption must be brought home to their conscience—until they finally reach agreement that it is immoral to say: “what is right for one is fair for the other.”

Where pity is preached today—and, if you listen closely, this is the only religion preached

there needs to be a mix of humble and arrogance. culture pushes one towards being humble. this can be dangerous for the individual .

(and whose first symptoms were registered in a thoughtful letter Galiani wrote to Madame d’Epinay)

the “historical spirit,” finds its advantage even in this despair: again and again a new piece of prehistory or a foreign country is tried on, put on, taken off, packed away, and above all studied: we are the first age that has truly studied “costumes”—I mean those of moralities, articles of faith, tastes in the arts, and religions—prepared

we have the freedom to try on different ideas. from the tone is Nietzsche mocking this ?

even if nothing else today has any future, our laughter may yet have a future.

we Europeans lay claim as our specialty has come to us in the wake of that enchanting and mad semi-barbarism into which Europe had been plunged by the democratic mingling of classes and races:

“modern souls,” thanks to this mixture; our instincts now run back everywhere;

freeedom!!

We enjoy Homer again, for example: perhaps it is our most fortunate advantage that we know how to relish Homer whom the men of a noble culture

sounds like they couldn't before the enlightenment .

men of the “historical sense” we also have our virtues; that cannot be denied: we are unpretentious, selfless, modest, courageous, full of self-overcoming, full of devotion, very grateful, very patient, very accommodating; but for all that we are perhaps not paragons of good taste.

are these the principals of Nietzsche ?

thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary,

think first order principals for the long term gains .

its sick and unfortunate members, with those addicted to vice and maimed from the start, though the ground around us is littered with them; it is even less pity with grumbling, sorely pressed, rebellious slave strata who long for dominion, calling it “freedom.”

The discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?

if we're happy why grow?

it not granted to it through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?

can a rich be fully self actualized ?

But to say it once more: there are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, pain, and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is a naïveté.—

We immoralists!—This

let us work on it with all our malice and love and not weary of “perfecting” ourselves in our virtue,

Our honesty, we free spirits—let us see to it that it does not become our vanity, our finery and pomp, our limit, our stupidity.

(Isn’t a moral philosopher the opposite of a Puritan? Namely, insofar as he is a thinker who considers morality questionable, as calling for question marks, in short as a problem? Should moralizing not be—immoral?)

I get why moralizing should immoral. But I don’t get why a moral philosopher should be immoral. to know both sides? I know there's research saying that moral philosophers are less moral. I had a podcast talk bout that research.

that the demand of one morality for all is detrimental for the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between man and man, hence also between morality and morality.

he keeps bringing this up.

Almost everything we call “higher culture” is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound: this is my proposition. That “savage animal” has not really been “mortified”; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.

seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart—by