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BEYOND GOOD and EVIL of the Second Edition Of HAROLD Ij. Lit l!Hi;/Ii;Y DRibHAM YOUr'6 UMvppspv. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Brigham Young University http://www.archive.org/details/beyondgoodevilpr1909niet -< ^. t- T^ "7 ^ // VUL^ THE COMPLETE WORKS OF FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE The First Qomplete and Authorised English Translation EDITED BY Dr OSCAR LEVY "i.Triv VOLUME FIVE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL Of the Second Edition of Tv90 Thousand Copies this is No. 239 F ^-^ FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL TRELUDE TO ^ THILOSOPHT OF THE FUTh'RE TRANSLATED BY HELEN ZIMMERN T. N. FOULIS 13 6- 15 FREDERICK STREET EDINBURGH: and LONDON 1909 Y ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Printed at The Daribn Press, E(imt>ur«^k BRiCi H/'. - i O U N 1 VERSIT CONTENTS. PAGE Preface -.--•. i CHAP. - . I. Prejudices of Philosophers 5 II. The Free Spirit - - - - 35 III. The Religious Mood - - - 63 IV. Apophthegms and Interludes - - 85 V. The Natural History of Morals - 103 VI. We Scholars - - - - - 133 VII. Our Virtues - - - - - 159 VIII. Peoples and Countries - - - 191 IX. What is Noble? - - . - 223 Epode: From Lofty Mountains • - 265 INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSLATION. Here, in spite of its name, is one of the most serious, profound, and original philosophical works. It offers a feast of good things to the morally and intellectually fastidious, which will take long to exhaust. There is really something new in the book—much that is new ! Burke says, in his " " Reflections on the Revolution in France (p. 128), " We [Englishmen] know that we have made no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries are to be made in morality." The latter statement, which still represents the general views of Englishmen, is now proved to be entirely mistaken. Discoveries have now been made in the realm of morals, which are perhaps even more practically important than all the discoveries in physical science ; and it is to Nietzsche especially that we are indebted for those discoveries, which are set forth, in part at least, in this volume—the very discoveries, in fact, which Burke himself required, in order to give a satis- factory answer to the French Revolutionists. As, however, many who might otherwise ap- preciate the book, may stumble over its name at the threshold, it should perhaps be explained that the astounding and portentous designation, " Beyond Good and Evil," applies to it properly " viii INTRODUCTION. only from the false point of view of its pseudo- moral opponents ; as, however, it is a very striking expression, such as is always wanted for the title of a book, it has been appropriated for the purpose, notwithstanding the fact that to ordinary minds, and in ordinary language, it implies the very reverse of what the book teaches. Of course, there is a certain amount of truth in the designation, and therefore a justification for it : Nietzsche's position " is beyond the spurious " good and the spurious " evil " of the prevalent slave-morality, which deteriorates humanity ; but he takes a firm stand on the genuine " good " and the genuine " bad " of master-morality, which promotes the advancement of the human race. This is so obvious from a glance at the book that it is scarcely necessary to refer to Nietzsche's express statement of the fact in " the Genealogy of Morals," i. 17. He there says expressly, with reference to " the dangerous watch- word inscribed on the outside of his last book : '" * Beyond Good and Evil —" at any rate, it does not mean, * Beyond Good and Bad.' (When so many reproaches have been unjustly heaped upon Nietzsche and his disciples, under the false pretence that they repudiate true morality, it is difficult to resist the opportunity to turn round upon those maligners parenthetically, and point out who it is that is really beyond good and bad from the true moral standpoint— is it perhaps those very maligners themselves, whom Nietzsche with his acuteness has touched on the quick? The Kirkcaldyan gospel of " The Wealth of Nations," under which we all live more or less, and which in — INTRODUCTION. IX puerile fashion the political economists still repeat almost by rote, not only implicitly disregards morals, but on many occasions boldly and explicitly professes to have nothing to do with them, in fact, professes to be altogether beyond good and bad in the ordinary sense of these words. [See, for example. Walker's works on " Political Economy," and many other writers on the subject] And is not this " Political Economy " the unquestioned creed of almost all the non-Socialists who condemn Nietzsche ? Even the Konigsbergian gospel, with its "Sublime Moral Law," and its "Categorical Imperative," has allied and adjusted itself to the Kirkcaldyan gospel of universal, insatiable, ex- clusivelyindividualistic, and absolutelyunscrupulous Mammonism. The Benthamites, the Spencerites, and the Neo-Hegelianites or Greenites, have had still less difficulty in forming an alliance with Mammonism, even in its worst aspects. All those " good people," therefore, who are so ready to condemn others, have actually themselves taken up a position beyond good and bad in the disreputable sense of these terms, unlike Nietzsche, who occupies the only justifiable position from the true moral standpoint.) One or two of the leading points in Nietzsche's philosophy should perhaps be mentioned—but we cannot touch on the numerous details, which may, however, often be deduced from the leading principles here indicated : I. Nietzsche especially makes the highest ex- cellence of society the ethical end ; whereas almost all other moralists adopt "ends" which lead directly X INTRODUCTION. or indirectly, to the degeneration of society. As a necessary consequence, he favours a true aristocracy as the best means for elevating the human race to supermen. " 2. Instead of advocating equal and inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," for which there is at present such an outcry (a regime which necessarily elevates fools and knaves, and lowers the honest and intelligent), Nietzsche advocates simple Justice—to individuals and families according to their merits, according to their worth rights, therefore, but unequal to society ; not equal rights, and inequality in advantages generally, approximately proportionate to deserts : con- sequently therefore, a genuinely superior ruling class at one end of the social scale, and an actually inferior ruled class, with slaves at its basis, at the opposite social extreme. 3. Unlike social evolutionists generally, who either stop short in their quest, or neglect Newton's rule of philosophising, which prohibits the assigning of superfluous, unknown, or imaginary causes, Nietzsche explains social phenomena by familiar, natural causes, assigning to them a human, all-too- human origin, and accounting for them especially, like Larochefoucauld, as a result of the self-interest and self-preservative instinct of individuals and classes —that is to say, practically, in conformity to the true principles of evolution, which recognise in everything a conscious or sub-conscious will to persist and evolve—a matter which Darwin certainly overlooked too much in his imperfect attempts to explain moral and social evolution. ; INTRODUCTION. XI 4. One of Nietzsche's most important services has been to furnish a true philosophy of the more modern period of history, during the last 2,000 years. As " the first psychologist of Christianity," he has successfully accounted for the anomalous phenomenon of the Christian religion—the special embodiment of slave-morality—by showing that it is an artful device, consciously and sub-consciously evolved for the self-preservation and advantage of the inferior classes of society, who have thus, to the detriment of the race, gained an abnormal and temporary ascendency over the better class of men, to whom the mastership belongs, under the sway of the normally prevailing pagan or master-morality which favours the advance of mankind. Nietzsche, therefore, differs radically from most of the leaders of English thought with regard to the great questions of ethics and religion. Spencer, Huxley, Alfred R. Wallace, Leslie Stephen, A. J. Balfour, Benjamin Kidd, Frederic Harrison, Grant Allen, T. H. Green, Andrew Lang, and their followers, though differing in many points among themselves, seem all to have a strong instinctive aversion to recognise self-interest as a leading factor in the evolution of morals and religion indeed, some of the mystifiers among them, es- pecially Green's time-serving followers, with their fixed idea of a dotard Deity (or God-aping devil ?) devolving himself as fast as possible into constitu- tionalism, democracy, and anarchy, would almost sooner gaze on the Gorgon's head than contemplate the possibility of such an illuminating, ready, and natural explanation. Most of those leaders of ! xil INTRODUCTION. English thought are also equally averse to recognise that the true ethical end must be the highest ex- cellence of society. It would involve in many people such an upsetting of their intellectual furni- ture to admit Nietzsche's new ideas—it would also involve ultimately the upsetting of cherished in- stitutions which are profitable to them, or to which they have become satisfactorily adjusted : many responsible people, therefore, prefer to barricade their intellects against such new and danger- threatening ideas, which are far more revolutionary, or rather counter-revolutionary, than Socialism The great mass even of cultured people in England seem unable to cross the pontes asinorum of morals : they cannot grasp the related facts that what is good for one is not necessarily good for society at large, and that many people, in spite of Socrates, instinctively choose the bad^ when it is most profit- able to themselves. All popular and superficial writers, however, and all demagogues, take for granted the opposite doctrines—namely, that what- ever is advantageous to any person, be he the most wicked and worthless creature on the face of the earth, is therefore necessarily for the good of the whole community ; and that every one instinctively chooses the right course as soon as he knows it.
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