Beyond Good and Evil by Frederich Nietzsche. A user’s guide.

Part 2 of 10 : Index and Preface

Teacher’s notes and Evaluation notes taken from https://hxtarth.medium.com

Teachers’s notes:
An understanding of Nietzsche’s work as a whole relies on a solid grasp of his views on truth and language, and his metaphysics and conception of the will to power. At the very bottom of Nietzsche’s philosophy lies the conviction that the universe is in a constant state of change, and his hatred and disparagement of almost any position can be traced back to that position’s temptation to look at the universe as fixed in one place.

Nietzsche is skeptical of both language and “truth” because they are liable to adopt a fixed perspective toward things.

Words, unlike thoughts, are fixed. Our thoughts can flow and change just as things in the universe flow and change, but a word, once uttered, cannot be changed. Because language has this tendency toward fixity, it expresses the world in terms of facts and things, which has led philosophers to think of the world as fixed rather than fluid.

A world of rigid facts can be spoken about definitively, which is the source of our conception of truth and other absolutes, such as God and morality.

Nietzsche sees the facts and things of traditional philosophy as far from rigid, and subject to all sorts of shifts and changes. He is particularly brilliant in analyzing morality, showing how our concept of “good,” for instance, has had opposite meanings at different times.

The underlying force driving all change is will, according to Nietzsche. In specific, all drives boil down to a will to power, a drive for freedom and domination over other things. The concept of “good” has had different meanings over time because different wills have come to appropriate the concept.

Meaning and interpretation are merely signs that a will is operating on a concept.

Because facts and things depend for their meaning on ever-shifting and struggling wills, there is no such thing as one correct or absolute viewpoint. Every viewpoint is the expression of some will or other. Rather than try to talk about the “truth,” we should try to remain as flexible as possible, looking at matters from as many different perspectives as possible.

Nietzsche’s ideal “philosophy of the future” is one that is free enough to shift perspectives and overturn the “truths” and other dogmas of rigid thinking.

Such philosophy would see moral concepts such as “good” and “evil” as merely surfaces that have no inherent meaning; such philosophy would thus move “beyond good and evil.” Nietzsche’s ideal philosophers would also turn their will to power inward, struggling constantly against themselves to overcome their own prejudices and assumptions.

Nietzsche’s unorthodox views on truth can help to explain his unusual style. Though we can follow trains of thought and make connections along the way, there is no single, linear argument that runs through the book. Because Nietzsche does not see the truth as a simple, two-dimensional picture, he cannot represent it accurately with a simple linear sketch. Nietzsche sees the world as complex and three-dimensional: more like a hologram than a two-dimensional picture.

And just as a hologram is a three-dimensional image made up of infinitesimal two- dimensional fragments, each approximating the whole, Nietzsche presents his worldview in a series of two-dimensional aphorisms, each approximating a more complex worldview.

Beyond Good and Evil is Nietzsche’s perspectivism in practice: we can read every aphorism as one different perspective from which to look at Nietzsche’s philosophy. There is some sort of line we can trace, moving from perspective to perspective, but essentially we end up with Nietzsche’s philosophy in 9 big pieces and 296 smaller fragments. In this way, Nietzsche attempts to find the expression of his thoughts in language that best preserves their fluidity and three-dimensionality.

INDEX

• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1 : PREJUDICES OF PHILOSOPHERS
• CHAPTER 2 : THE FREE SPIRIT
• CHAPTER 3: THE RELIGIOUS MOOD
• CHAPTER 4: APOPHTHEGMS AND INTERLUDES [excluded]
• CHAPTER 5: NATURAL HISTORY OF MORALS
• CHAPTER 6: WE SCHOLARS
• CHAPTER 7: OUR VIRTUES
• CHAPTER 9: WHAT IS NOBLE
• CHAPTER 8: PEOPLES AND COUNTRIES

Teacher’s notes

Nietzsche opens with the provocative question: “Supposing truth is a woman — what then?” The dogmatism of most philosophers, Nietzsche suggests, is a very clumsy way of trying to win a woman’s heart. At this time, no dogmatism seems wholly satisfactory and philosophy has yet to conquer the truth.

While dogmatism bumbles along in all seriousness, earnest of its purpose, Nietzsche suggests that the foundations of all dogmatism are based on childish superstitions or prejudices. He cites as examples the “soul superstition” which remains even in atheistic philosophy as the “subject and ego superstition” as well as seductions of grammar, or gross generalisations based on a narrow set of facts.

Nietzsche’s association of philosophy with dogmatism was more apt in his day than in ours, but to his credit, he is in part responsible for philosophy’s renunciation of dogmatism. Nineteenth-century German philosophy was particularly rife with “system” philosophers — the greatest of which was ##Hegel## — who developed from a few basic principles vast, complex systems that were supposed to provide complete and thorough explanations of the human experience.

Because this was the philosophical mood of his day, we should not be surprised that Nietzsche was inclined to see the entire history of philosophy in the systematic terms in which his contemporaries interpreted it.

Dogmatism has been responsible for Plato’s ideals of pure spirit and the Form of the Good which Nietzsche calls “the worst, most durable, and most dangerous of errors so far,” and he also indicts Christianity as “Platonism for ‘the people.’”

However, the struggle against this dogmatism has created a tension in the spirit of modern Europe, and, Nietzsche suggests, “with so tense a bow we can now shoot for the most distant goals.” He accuses Jesuits and democrats of trying to ease this tension rather than feeling it as a need, a means to a goal.

This “magnificent tension” is valued by the kind of people Nietzsche values: “good Europeans and free, very free spirits.”

Evaluation

In particular, Plato is far from being a dogmatist in many senses, though many persistently try to read him as such. As a result, Plato’s influence has largely been propagated according to dogmatic readings. The reading of Plato that Nietzsche associates with dogmatism interprets Plato as saying that the world of the senses is illusory, and that truth and reality reside in invisible, eternal, and unchanging Forms that underlie and animate the less real material objects that we perceive.

This Plato, who had a tremendous influence on Christianity, suggests that our bodies are only temporary, physical things, but that we have a pure spirit, or soul, that is immortal and which animates us. Plato also posits the Form of the Good as being the highest of all Forms, that which is the ultimate ground for all reality. As a result, our task as human beings is to pursue and approximate the Form of the Good, and this task is essentially what all morality is based upon.

Nietzsche identifies dogmatism in this belief in the “pure spirit” and the Form of the Good. These beliefs are dogmatic to Nietzsche because they serve as foundations that do not themselves admit of criticism. According to the popular reading of Plato, the Form of the Good is the anchor for the rest of the Platonic “system” of philosophy. If we can believe in the Form of the Good as an absolute, everything else follows from it. Similarly, belief in the absoluteness and eternality of the pure spirit within us allows for a number of inferences about human nature, human society, and human morality.

Dogmatism, to Nietzsche, is taking any claim as an absolute truth that does not need to be justified. While philosophers claim to base everything in reason and to take nothing on faith, Nietzsche argues ultimately that all philosophy is grounded on some leap of faith. It is logically impossible to create a system where every claim in the system is justified by another part of the system. If we see a system as a building, where every block has to rest upon another block, we ultimately must arrive at the foundation blocks upon which all the other blocks rest. Philosophers generally take the foundations of their systems to be very simple and indubitable truths. Nietzsche, on the other hand, takes these foundations to be childish superstitions and prejudices. Nietzsche operates on the maxim that a claim taken as obviously true is really just based in assumptions so deep that we no longer recognize them as assumptions.

Nietzsche is often difficult to understand because he argues against anything that parades itself as an absolute truth, and our thinking is so influenced by a belief in absolutes that it is often difficult to take Nietzsche at face value.

His position, which has been called “perspectivism,” insists that there are not absolute truths, but only different and equally valid perspectives with which we can look at the truth — “provisional perspectives” — he calls them.

We might think of truth as of a sculpture: by looking at it from only one side, we don’t understand or appreciate the whole sculpture. Only by walking around it and looking at it from all different angles can we properly appreciate it.

Nietzsche’s main objection to Platonism is that it fixes our perspective, saying “there is only one truth and it must be looked at in this way.” Such an insistence paralyzes our understanding and makes it impossible for us to reason freely. Nietzsche’s ideal of “free spirits” is of people who do not allow themselves to be tied down to any one perspective, dogmatism, or faith.

The themes outlined in this preface serve to introduce the frame of mind with which the rest of the book must be approached.Nietzsche is essentially saying: “check all your assumptions at the door. I will not accept any objections that are based on any kind of dogmatism.”

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.