Friedrich Nietzsche
Beyond Good and Evil
[This document, which
has been prepared by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC, has certain copyright
restrictions. For information, please consult Copyright.
Editorial comments and translations in square brackets and italics are by Ian
Johnston; comments in normal brackets are from Nietzsche's text. Last
revised in January 2009]
Beyond Good and Evil
Prologue
Suppose truth
is a woman, what then? Wouldn’t we have good reason to suspect that all
philosophers, insofar as they were dogmatists, had a poor understanding of women,
that the dreadful seriousness and the awkward pushiness with which they so far
have habitually approached truth were clumsy and inappropriate ways to win over
a woman? It’s clear that truth did not allow herself to be won over. And every
form of dogmatism nowadays is standing there dismayed and disheartened— if
it’s still standing at all! For there are mockers who assert that they’ve
collapsed, that all dogmatisms are lying on the floor, even worse, that they’re
at death’s door. Speaking seriously, there are good reasons to hope that every
dogmatism in philosophy—no matter how solemnly, conclusively, and decisively it
has conducted itself—may have been merely a noble and rudimentary childish
game, and the time is perhaps very close at hand, when people will again and
again understand just how little has sufficed to provide the foundation
stones for such lofty and unconditional philosophical constructions of the sort
dogmatists have erected up to now—any popular superstition from unimaginably
long ago (like the superstition of the soul, which today, in the form of the
superstition about the subject and the ego, has still not stopped stirring up
mischief), perhaps some game with words, a seduction by some grammatical
construction, or a daring generalization from very narrow, very personal, very
human, all-too-human facts. The philosophies of the dogmatists were, one hopes,
only a promise which lasted for thousands of years, as the astrologers were in
even earlier times. In their service, people perhaps expended more work, gold,
and astute thinking than for any true scientific knowledge up to that point. We
owe to them and their “super-terrestrial” claims the grand style of
architecture in Asia and Egypt. It seems that in order for all great things to
register their eternal demands on the human heart, they first have to wander
over the earth as monstrously and frighteningly distorted faces. Dogmatic
philosophy has been such a grimace, for example, the Vedanta doctrine in Asia
and Platonism in Europe. We should not be ungrateful for it, even though we
must also certainly concede that the worst, most protracted, and most dangerous
of all errors up to now has been the error of a dogmatist, namely, Plato’s
invention of the purely spiritual and of the good as such. But now that has
been overcome, and, as Europe breathes a sigh of relief after this nightmare
and at least can enjoy a more healthy sleep, those of us whose task it is to
stay awake are the inheritors of all the forces which the fight against
this error has fostered. To speak of the spirit and the good in this way, as
Plato did, was, of course, a matter of standing truth on its head and even of
denying the fundamental condition of all life, perspective. Indeed, one
could, as a doctor, ask, “How did such a disease get to Plato, the most
beautiful plant of antiquity? Did the evil Socrates really corrupt him? Could
Socrates have been a corruptor of youth, after all? Did he deserve his
hemlock?” But the fight against Plato, or, to put the matter in a way more intelligible
to “the people,” the fight against the thousands of years of pressure from the
Christian church—for Christianity is Platonism for “the people”—created in
Europe a splendid tension in the spirit, something unlike anything existing
before on earth before. With such a tensely arched bow, from now on we can
shoot for the most distant targets. Naturally, European man experiences this
tension as a state of emergency. Already there have been two attempts in the
grand style to ease the tension in the bow—the first time with Jesuitism, the
second time with the democratic Enlightenment, through which, with the help of
the freedom of the press and reading newspapers, a state might, in fact, be
attained in which the spirit itself is not so easily experienced as “need”!
(Germans invented gunpowder— all honour to them!—but they made up for that when
they invented the printing press). But those of us who are neither Jesuits, nor
Democrats, nor even German enough, we good Europeans and free, very
free spirits—we still have the need, the entire spiritual need and the total
tension of its bow! And perhaps we also have the arrow, the work to do, and—who
knows?—the target . . .
Sils-Maria,
Oberengadin, June 1885.
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