Beyond Good and Evil

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This etext was produced by John Mamoun (mamounjo@umdnj.edu),
Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

BY FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

(HELEN ZIMMERN TRANSLATION)

INFORMATION ABOUT THIS E-TEXT EDITION

The following is a reprint of the Helen Zimmern translation from
German into English of "Beyond Good and Evil," as published in
The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche (1909-1913). Some
adaptations from the original text were made to format it into
an e-text. Italics in the original book are capitalized in this
e-text, except for most foreign language phrases that were
italicized. Original footnotes are put in brackets "[]" at the
points where they are cited in the text. Some spellings were
altered. "To-day" and "To-morrow" are spelled "today" and
"tomorrow." Some words containing the letters "ise" in the original
text, such as "idealise," had these letters changed to "ize," such
as "idealize." "Sceptic" was changed to "skeptic."

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

CHAPTER I: PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
CHAPTER II: THE FREE SPIRIT
CHAPTER III: THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
CHAPTER IV: APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES
CHAPTER V: THE NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
CHAPTER VI: WE SCHOLARS
CHAPTER VII: OUR VIRTUES
CHAPTER VIII: PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES
CHAPTER IX: WHAT IS NOBLE?

FROM THE HEIGHTS (POEM TRANSLATED BY L.A. MAGNUS)

PREFACE

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then? Is there not ground
for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been
dogmatists, have failed to understand women--that the terrible
seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually
paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly
methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed
herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with
sad and discouraged mien--IF, indeed, it stands at all! For there
are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies
on the ground--nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to
speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all
dogmatizing in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive
and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble
puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it
will be once and again understood WHAT has actually sufficed for
the basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as
the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular
superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition,
which, in the form of subject- and ego-superstition, has not yet
ceased doing mischief): perhaps some play upon words, a deception
on the part of grammar, or an audacious generalization of very
restricted, very personal, very human--all-too-human facts. The
philosophy of the dogmatists, it is to be hoped, was only a
promise for thousands of years afterwards, as was astrology in
still earlier times, in the service of which probably more
labour, gold, acuteness, and patience have been spent than on any
actual science hitherto: we owe to it, and to its "super-
terrestrial" pretensions in Asia and Egypt, the grand style of
architecture. It seems that in order to inscribe themselves upon
the heart of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things
have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-
inspiring caricatures: dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature
of this kind--for instance, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia, and
Platonism in Europe. Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it
must certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome,
and the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist
error--namely, Plato's invention of Pure Spirit and the Good in
Itself. But now when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid of
this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at least enjoy a
healthier--sleep, we, WHOSE DUTY IS WAKEFULNESS ITSELF, are the
heirs of all the strength which the struggle against this error
has fostered. It amounted to the very inversion of truth, and the
denial of the PERSPECTIVE--the fundamental condition--of life, to
speak of Spirit and the Good as Plato spoke of them; indeed one
might ask, as a physician: "How did such a malady attack that
finest product of antiquity, Plato? Had the wicked Socrates
really corrupted him? Was Socrates after all a corrupter of
youths, and deserved his hemlock?" But the struggle against
Plato, or--to speak plainer, and for the "people"--the struggle
against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of
Christianity (FOR CHRISTIANITY IS PLATONISM FOR THE "PEOPLE"),
produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not
existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely strained bow one
can now aim at the furthest goals. As a matter of fact, the
European feels this tension as a state of distress, and twice
attempts have been made in grand style to unbend the bow: once by
means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of democratic
enlightenment--which, with the aid of liberty of the press and
newspaper-reading, might, in fact, bring it about that the spirit
would not so easily find itself in "distress"! (The Germans
invented gunpowder--all credit to them! but they again made things
square--they invented printing.) But we, who are neither Jesuits,
nor democrats, nor even sufficiently Germans, we GOOD EUROPEANS,
and free, VERY free spirits--we have it still, all the distress
of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the
arrow, the duty, and, who knows? THE GOAL TO AIM AT. . . .

Sils Maria Upper Engadine, JUNE, 1885.

CHAPTER I

PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS

1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous
enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers
have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will
to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing,
questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems
as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last
grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That
this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is
it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this
"Will to Truth" in us? In fact we made a long halt at the
question as to the origin of this Will--until at last we came to
an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We
inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the
truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance?
The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us--or
was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us
is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a
rendezvous of questions and notes of interrogation. And could it
be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had
never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern
it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in
raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.

2. "HOW COULD anything originate out of its opposite? For
example, truth out of error? or the Will to Truth out of the will
to deception? or the generous deed out of selfishness? or the
pure sun-bright vision of the wise man out of covetousness? Such
genesis is impossible; whoever dreams of it is a fool, nay, worse
than a fool; things of the highest value must have a different
origin, an origin of THEIR own--in this transitory, seductive,
illusory, paltry world, in this turmoil of delusion and cupidity,
they cannot have their source. But rather in the lap of Being, in
the intransitory, in the concealed God, in the 'Thing-in-itself--
THERE must be their source, and nowhere else!"--This mode of
reasoning discloses the typical prejudice by which metaphysicians
of all times can be recognized, this mode of valuation is at the
back of all their logical procedure; through this "belief" of
theirs, they exert themselves for their "knowledge," for
something that is in the end solemnly christened "the Truth." The
fundamental belief of metaphysicians is THE BELIEF IN ANTITHESES
OF VALUES. It never occurred even to the wariest of them to doubt
here on the very threshold (where doubt, however, was most
necessary); though they had made a solemn vow, "DE OMNIBUS
DUBITANDUM." For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses
exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and
antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their
seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely
provisional perspectives, besides being probably made from some
corner, perhaps from below--"frog perspectives," as it were, to
borrow an expression current among painters. In spite of all the
value which may belong to the true, the positive, and the
unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more
fundamental value for life generally should be assigned to
pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness, and cupidity.
It might even be possible that WHAT constitutes the value of
those good and respected things, consists precisely in their
being insidiously related, knotted, and crocheted to these evil
and apparently opposed things--perhaps even in being essentially
identical with them. Perhaps! But who wishes to concern himself
with such dangerous "Perhapses"! For that investigation one must
await the advent of a new order of philosophers, such as will
have other tastes and inclinations, the reverse of those hitherto
prevalent--philosophers of the dangerous "Perhaps" in every sense
of the term. And to speak in all seriousness, I see such new
philosophers beginning to appear.

3. Having kept a sharp eye on philosophers, and having read
between their lines long enough, I now say to myself that the
greater part of conscious thinking must be counted among the
instinctive functions, and it is so even in the case of
philosophical thinking; one has here to learn anew, as one
learned anew about heredity and "innateness." As little as the
act of birth comes into consideration in the whole process and
procedure of heredity, just as little is "being-conscious"
OPPOSED to the instinctive in any decisive sense; the greater
part of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly
influenced by his instincts, and forced into definite channels.
And behind all logic and its seeming sovereignty of movement,
there are valuations, or to speak more plainly, physiological
demands, for the maintenance of a definite mode of life For
example, that the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that
illusion is less valuable than "truth" such valuations, in spite
of their regulative importance for US, might notwithstanding be
only superficial valuations, special kinds of maiserie, such as
may be necessary for the maintenance of beings such as ourselves.
Supposing, in effect, that man is not just the "measure of
things."

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it:
it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely.
The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-
preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we
are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions
(to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most
indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical
fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely
IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant
counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not
live--that the renunciation of false opinions would be a
renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS
A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional
ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which
ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good
and evil.

5. That which causes philosophers to be regarded half-
distrustfully and half-mockingly, is not the oft-repeated
discovery how innocent they are--how often and easily they make
mistakes and lose their way, in short, how childish and childlike
they are,--but that there is not enough honest dealing with them,
whereas they all raise a loud and virtuous outcry when the
problem of truthfulness is even hinted at in the remotest manner.
They all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered
and attained through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely
indifferent dialectic (in contrast to all sorts of mystics, who,
fairer and foolisher, talk of "inspiration"), whereas, in fact, a
prejudiced proposition, idea, or "suggestion," which is generally
their heart's desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them
with arguments sought out after the event. They are all advocates
who do not wish to be regarded as such, generally astute
defenders, also, of their prejudices, which they dub "truths,"--
and VERY far from having the conscience which bravely admits this
to itself, very far from having the good taste of the courage
which goes so far as to let this be understood, perhaps to warn
friend or foe, or in cheerful confidence and self-ridicule. The
spectacle of the Tartuffery of old Kant, equally stiff and
decent, with which he entices us into the dialectic by-ways that
lead (more correctly mislead) to his "categorical imperative"--
makes us fastidious ones smile, we who find no small amusement in
spying out the subtle tricks of old moralists and ethical
preachers. Or, still more so, the hocus-pocus in mathematical
form, by means of which Spinoza has, as it were, clad his
philosophy in mail and mask--in fact, the "love of HIS wisdom,"
to translate the term fairly and squarely--in order thereby to
strike terror at once into the heart of the assailant who should
dare to cast a glance on that invincible maiden, that Pallas
Athene:--how much of personal timidity and vulnerability does
this masquerade of a sickly recluse betray!

6. It has gradually become clear to me what every great
philosophy up till now has consisted of--namely, the confession
of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious
auto-biography; and moreover that the moral (or immoral) purpose
in every philosophy has constituted the true vital germ out of
which the entire plant has always grown. Indeed, to understand
how the abstrusest metaphysical assertions of a philosopher have
been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to first ask
oneself: "What morality do they (or does he) aim at?"
Accordingly, I do not believe that an "impulse to knowledge" is
the father of philosophy; but that another impulse, here as
elsewhere, has only made use of knowledge (and mistaken
knowledge!) as an instrument. But whoever considers the
fundamental impulses of man with a view to determining how far
they may have here acted as INSPIRING GENII (or as demons and
cobolds), will find that they have all practiced philosophy at
one time or another, and that each one of them would have been
only too glad to look upon itself as the ultimate end of
existence and the legitimate LORD over all the other impulses.
For every impulse is imperious, and as SUCH, attempts to
philosophize. To be sure, in the case of scholars, in the case of
really scientific men, it may be otherwise--"better," if you
will; there there may really be such a thing as an "impulse to
knowledge," some kind of small, independent clock-work, which,
when well wound up, works away industriously to that end, WITHOUT
the rest of the scholarly impulses taking any material part
therein. The actual "interests" of the scholar, therefore, are
generally in quite another direction--in the family, perhaps, or
in money-making, or in politics; it is, in fact, almost
indifferent at what point of research his little machine is
placed, and whether the hopeful young worker becomes a good
philologist, a mushroom specialist, or a chemist; he is not
CHARACTERISED by becoming this or that. In the philosopher, on
the contrary, there is absolutely nothing impersonal; and above
all, his morality furnishes a decided and decisive testimony as
to WHO HE IS,--that is to say, in what order the deepest impulses
of his nature stand to each other.

7. How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more
stinging than the joke Epicurus took the liberty of making on
Plato and the Platonists; he called them Dionysiokolakes. In its
original sense, and on the face of it, the word signifies
"Flatterers of Dionysius"--consequently, tyrants' accessories and
lick-spittles; besides this, however, it is as much as to say,
"They are all ACTORS, there is nothing genuine about them" (for
Dionysiokolax was a popular name for an actor). And the latter is
really the malignant reproach that Epicurus cast upon Plato: he
was annoyed by the grandiose manner, the mise en scene style of
which Plato and his scholars were masters--of which Epicurus was
not a master! He, the old school-teacher of Samos, who sat
concealed in his little garden at Athens, and wrote three hundred
books, perhaps out of rage and ambitious envy of Plato, who
knows! Greece took a hundred years to find out who the garden-god
Epicurus really was. Did she ever find out?

8. There is a point in every philosophy at which the "conviction"
of the philosopher appears on the scene; or, to put it in the
words of an ancient mystery:

Adventavit asinus, Pulcher et fortissimus.

9. You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble
Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like
Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without
purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once
fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves
INDIFFERENCE as a power--how COULD you live in accordance with
such indifference? To live--is not that just endeavouring to be
otherwise than this Nature? Is not living valuing, preferring,
being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And
granted that your imperative, "living according to Nature," means
actually the same as "living according to life"--how could you do
DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you
yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite
otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the
canon of your law in Nature, you want something quite the
contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self-deluders! In
your pride you wish to dictate your morals and ideals to Nature,
to Nature herself, and to incorporate them therein; you insist
that it shall be Nature "according to the Stoa," and would like
everything to be made after your own image, as a vast, eternal
glorification and generalism of Stoicism! With all your love for
truth, you have forced yourselves so long, so persistently, and
with such hypnotic rigidity to see Nature FALSELY, that is to
say, Stoically, that you are no longer able to see it otherwise--
and to crown all, some unfathomable superciliousness gives you
the Bedlamite hope that BECAUSE you are able to tyrannize over
yourselves--Stoicism is self-tyranny--Nature will also allow
herself to be tyrannized over: is not the Stoic a PART of
Nature? . . . But this is an old and everlasting story: what
happened in old times with the Stoics still happens today, as
soon as ever a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always
creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise;
philosophy is this tyrannical impulse itself, the most spiritual
Will to Power, the will to "creation of the world," the will to
the causa prima.

10. The eagerness and subtlety, I should even say craftiness,
with which the problem of "the real and the apparent world" is
dealt with at present throughout Europe, furnishes food for
thought and attention; and he who hears only a "Will to Truth" in
the background, and nothing else, cannot certainly boast of the
sharpest ears. In rare and isolated cases, it may really have
happened that such a Will to Truth--a certain extravagant and
adventurous pluck, a metaphysician's ambition of the forlorn
hope--has participated therein: that which in the end always
prefers a handful of "certainty" to a whole cartload of beautiful
possibilities; there may even be puritanical fanatics of
conscience, who prefer to put their last trust in a sure nothing,
rather than in an uncertain something. But that is Nihilism, and
the sign of a despairing, mortally wearied soul, notwithstanding
the courageous bearing such a virtue may display. It seems,
however, to be otherwise with stronger and livelier thinkers who
are still eager for life. In that they side AGAINST appearance,
and speak superciliously of "perspective," in that they rank the
credibility of their own bodies about as low as the credibility
of the ocular evidence that "the earth stands still," and thus,
apparently, allowing with complacency their securest possession
to escape (for what does one at present believe in more firmly
than in one's body?),--who knows if they are not really trying to
win back something which was formerly an even securer possession,
something of the old domain of the faith of former times, perhaps
the "immortal soul," perhaps "the old God," in short, ideas by
which they could live better, that is to say, more vigorously and
more joyously, than by "modern ideas"? There is DISTRUST of these
modern ideas in this mode of looking at things, a disbelief in
all that has been constructed yesterday and today; there is
perhaps some slight admixture of satiety and scorn, which can no
longer endure the BRIC-A-BRAC of ideas of the most varied origin,
such as so-called Positivism at present throws on the market; a
disgust of the more refined taste at the village-fair motleyness
and patchiness of all these reality-philosophasters, in whom
there is nothing either new or true, except this motleyness.
Therein it seems to me that we should agree with those skeptical
anti-realists and knowledge-microscopists of the present day;
their instinct, which repels them from MODERN reality, is
unrefuted . . . what do their retrograde by-paths concern us!
The main thing about them is NOT that they wish to go "back,"
but that they wish to get AWAY therefrom. A little MORE strength,
swing, courage, and artistic power, and they would be OFF--and
not back!

11. It seems to me that there is everywhere an attempt at present
to divert attention from the actual influence which Kant
exercised on German philosophy, and especially to ignore
prudently the value which he set upon himself. Kant was first and
foremost proud of his Table of Categories; with it in his hand he
said: "This is the most difficult thing that could ever be
undertaken on behalf of metaphysics." Let us only understand this
"could be"! He was proud of having DISCOVERED a new faculty in
man, the faculty of synthetic judgment a priori. Granting that he
deceived himself in this matter; the development and rapid
flourishing of German philosophy depended nevertheless on his
pride, and on the eager rivalry of the younger generation to
discover if possible something--at all events "new faculties"--of
which to be still prouder!--But let us reflect for a moment--it
is high time to do so. "How are synthetic judgments a priori
POSSIBLE?" Kant asks himself--and what is really his answer? "BY
MEANS OF A MEANS (faculty)"--but unfortunately not in five words,
but so circumstantially, imposingly, and with such display of
German profundity and verbal flourishes, that one altogether
loses sight of the comical niaiserie allemande involved in such
an answer. People were beside themselves with delight over this
new faculty, and the jubilation reached its climax when Kant
further discovered a moral faculty in man--for at that time
Germans were still moral, not yet dabbling in the "Politics of
hard fact." Then came the honeymoon of German philosophy. All the
young theologians of the Tubingen institution went immediately
into the groves--all seeking for "faculties." And what did they
not find--in that innocent, rich, and still youthful period of
the German spirit, to which Romanticism, the malicious fairy,
piped and sang, when one could not yet distinguish between
"finding" and "inventing"! Above all a faculty for the
"transcendental"; Schelling christened it, intellectual
intuition, and thereby gratified the most earnest longings of the
naturally pious-inclined Germans. One can do no greater wrong to
the whole of this exuberant and eccentric movement (which was
really youthfulness, notwithstanding that it disguised itself so
boldly, in hoary and senile conceptions), than to take it
seriously, or even treat it with moral indignation. Enough,
however--the world grew older, and the dream vanished. A time
came when people rubbed their foreheads, and they still rub them
today. People had been dreaming, and first and foremost--old
Kant. "By means of a means (faculty)"--he had said, or at least
meant to say. But, is that--an answer? An explanation? Or is it
not rather merely a repetition of the question? How does opium
induce sleep? "By means of a means (faculty)," namely the virtus
dormitiva, replies the doctor in Moliere,

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