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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