Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil A new translation by Marion Faber OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS --�- --�'-- ' OXFORD WORLD S CLASSICS BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) was born in Rocken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamph­ lets (The Birth o.fTragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influ­ enced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more indepen­ dently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Seima, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Go()d and Evil, On the Genealogy ofJl,forals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the dosing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietz­ sche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later. MARION FABER is Professor of German at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her earlier translations include Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human (1994) and Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Afozal't (1983), a nominee for the American Book Award in trans­ lation. ROBERT C. HOLUB teaches German intellectual, cultural, and literary history in the German department at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his numerous publications on these topics are Reflections of Realism (1991); Jurgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (1991); Crossing Borders: Reception Them)!, Poststruauralism, Deconstruction (1992); and Friedrich Nietzsche (1995)· He is the editor of Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany (1993), Resp()nsibiliZy and Commitment (1996), and Hein­ rich Heine '5 Contested Identities (1998). ' OXFORD WORLD S CLASSICS For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics have brought readers closer 10 the world's great literature. Now with over 700 titles�from the 4,000�year�old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century's greatest novels··the series makes available lesser�known as well as celebrated writing. The p(lcket�sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions ky Virginia Wool./: T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. OXFORD WORLD'S CLASSICS FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Beyond Good and Evil Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future Translated and Edited by MARION FABER With an Introduction by ROBERT C. HOLUB OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OUORD UNIVERSITY PRESS (ire"! 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Enquirie .. cllneernin� rqmltillctllln outside tilt.: scope of the .lhovc should he scnt to the Rights Ikpanrnellt. (hford Lni\ LTsit� Pre,,"s, at the autin's" ,lhol t' rOlL mllq not circula1t: rhis hllok in any other hilldlllh or rO\'l'r ;llHI \llll must imposc thIS �ame condition (Ill ,Ill\" <It..:quin:l Briti"�h Lihnlr) Cat;lI()guin� in Publicatiun Data Data available r .illfar) 1)( (:on�rL�",," (:,It,li4)ging in Pulliicltil11l I hta '\Jiet7}.;('he, Fril'drich Wilhelm, I S44 I !JO() IJcllscits \ on (iut und Hiise, FIlg-li�hI Bc)ollli g-ood and eviL prelude to a philnsophy oj thc future I translated and Ldircd hy Marion Faher with.m introduction b) Robert C. Iloluh (Oxford world's da��i('s) Indudes hihliographical referellLcs mel inde\ FIhies. 2. Philosophy. 1. Faber, I\larioT1. II. Title. III Series: Oxford world's classics (Oxford University Press). PRllIJj42ES I'I'IS 19l-de21 'IS 151116 ISB'\i97il--j)-I'I-Y5.l7117-5 Typt:sctby Intype London I.td Printed ill Cift�at Uritain \n Cla)s Ltd, St Ives ph: CONTENTS Introduction Vl1 Tr anslator's lVote xxv Select Bibliography XXVl1 A Chronology of Friedrich Nietzsche XXIX BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL Preface 3 I. On the Prejudices of Philosophers S II. The Free Spirit 25 III. The Religious Disposition 43 IV. Epigrams and Interludes 58 v. Towards a Natural History of Morals 74 VI. We Scholars 93 VII. Our Virtues J09 VIII. Peoples and Fatherlands 131 IX. What is Noble? lSI Explanatory Notes Index 193 INTRODUCTION THERE is no better introduction to the mature philosophy of Fried­ rich Nietzsche than Beyond Good and Evil. Written during the summer of 1885 and the winter of 1886, this work assumes a pivotal position in his oeuvre. It was the first published work after the monumental Thus Sp ake Zarathustra, which laid out central tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy in parabolic fo rm. Conceived as a parody of the Bible, the fo ur books of Zarathustra presented the reader with the activities and speeches of the eponymous hero, who is surely Nietzsche's spokesperson. Beyond Good and EC'il covers some of the same ground, but in this \vork Nietzsche does not offe r us a narrative and parables that require interpretation, but rather a series of aphorisms. Nietzsche himself was conscious of the affinities in content between Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Writing to his colleague Jacob Burckhardt, the celebrated art historian at Basle, he claimed that his new book 'says the same things as my Zarathustra, but diffe rently, very differently'. But he was also aware that Beyond Good and Evil represents a return to earlier efforts from the 1870S and early 1880s, in which he did not communicate with his reader through a persona. In his correspon­ dence Nietzsche called his new work a fifth Untimely Meditation, referring to writings of the early 1870S in which he fo cused on a central theme or person. And he told a prospective publisher that he was ready to publish a second volume of Daybreak, a collection of aphorisms that had originally appeared in 1881. Nietzsche himself thus obviously saw Beyond Good and Evil in a variety of contexts that related to prior endeavours, from his essayistic works written while he was still a professor of classical philology in Basle to the more monumental undertakings from his years of travel in Switzerland and Italy. While we may agree that Beyond Good and Evil has affinities with several of Nietzsche's previous writings, we should be a bit wary of taking Nietzsche too literally when he makes claims about it as a continuation of earlier books. We should note, fo r example, that concepts central to Zarathustra are absent fr om Beyond Good and Evil. The 'superman' or 'overman', which was Nietzsche's \11l Introduction catchy expression for an evolutionary overcoming of the current state of the human species, or the quasi-scientific notion of 'eternal recurrence of the same', a hypothesis that all events have already occurred and "ill inevitably recur again and again, are nowhere to be fo und in the new volume. There arc ways in which Nietzsche did indeed return to criticisms of German society fo und in the [jntimel) ' Meditations, but Bevond Good ({nd Evil is not as limited in scope as these earlier essays were, and certainly more philosoph­ ically mature. While Nietzsche returns to an aphoristic style, such as we find in writings fr om Humiln, All 7ilO Human (IR78-q) to '['he Ga)' 5,'ciellcl' (IR8z), his new work represented a major step away fr om his so-called positivistic phase with its reliance on a scientific model, and towards a more sceptical, more intricate, and more synthetic vision. Thus although philosophical arguments fu n­ damental to Larathuslrll are repeated in Beyond Goot! {/nd Evil in a less enigmatic fo rm, and although many of the aphorisms that find their way into the final text were sketched out in notebooks com­ posed prior to or during the period of Zarathustra's composition, Be}/lmd Cood and Evil represented a new and a final stage of 1\ietzsche's philosophy, a culmination of his thought and insight into the human condition.