"BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL"

p7 - Please read this book (although it says the same things as Zarathustra, but differently

p8 - A critique of modernity

p9 - the courage to recognize the fundamentally terrible nature of existence and yet still affirm it … contrivved the suicide of tragic drama through their purveying of optimistic rationalism … deprived their culture of its greatest insight, that the more we know about reality the more frightful we realize it is.

p11 - values that we hold so deeply that we are not aware of having them as values at all. What really is it in us that wants “the truth”? … as ’lovers of wisdom’, how could we want anything other than the truth? We could hardly go out consciously looking for untruth. … a series of questions that we are made to feel geniunely uneasy. To want truth and begin searching for it we need to have confidence in our capacity to find it; to recognize it when we encounter it. What gives us this confidence? It is, Nietzsche claims … ‘the faith in antithetical values’ that is the ‘fundamental faith of the metaphysicians’

p12 - His real anxieties have to do with our readiness to take as truths things that for him manifestly aren’t, thereby displaying the lack of refinement in our sense of truth. … irritated by the dogmatism that insists that between the poles of truth-falsity, good-bad, and so on, there can be no fruitful connections. … to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life …

p13 - We should … be very careful about where our philosophers are leading us. … It may well be the case that it is more important that a judgement be ’life-advancing, life-preserving’, etc., than that it be true. … one can’t decide to believe. … the secrets of nature seem to be safe from philosophers.

p14 - For although we think of Christianity as primarily a religion, it is, like all systems of religious belief, based on a set of views about the way things are, in other words a metaphysic. … Having called into question the value of the urge to knowledge

p15 - The search for truth is a dubious enterprise, it seems, both because it isn’t clear that it’s a good idea for us to try to live with it, and because the very notion of finding truth is in itself suspect.

p16 - praising lightheartedness; urging us not to borrow but to remain at the surfaces of things … the juxtaposition … of life.

p16 - what he accuses philosophers of is cheapness and over-simplification.

p16 - think of indifference itself as a power

p17 - living as choosing … Zarathustra is the ’eternal recurrence’ of all things

p19 - both the Stoic and Superman assume an attitude of acceptance towards life. But the grounds on which they found their attitudes are fundamentally different … The Stoic … examines the world and realizes that it is futile to attempt to interfere with its predetermined course. … values are imposed on him by the world … only one possible attitude to take and in this respect he is no different from other philosophers … there can’t be, any value-free scrutinizing of the world … perspectivism. … we create values … values do not exist in the fabric of the world, are not out there to be discovered by us. … there can be no facts, only interpretations. … we should relize the extent to which our drives and desires colour all our dealings with what we like to think of as a reality existing entirely independently of us

p20 - fact-value distinction … There had been plenty of subjectivists before him … But they have nearly all been at pains to insist that locating the source of value in the valuer rather than in the valued

p20 - value is not something that we discover, but something that we invent. … valuers are liable to derive their values from the culture of which each of them is a member

p21 - going against the grain of one’s culture is the source of his deepest anguish … providing a recipe for the overcoming of decadence he would have to envisage a kind of man, or Superman, who carried self-sufficiency to a degree which virtually meant total exile from society. … seeing whether there was any chance for great men to emerge from within society, though to qualify they would have to transcend and violate the values of their society

p21 - master morality … role as creators of the value

p22 - we ourselves are slave or herd moralists … morality is self-glorification … We are so permeated by the idea that morality is not a matter of self-glorification

p23 - The strange narrowness of human evolution, its hesitations, its delays, its frequent retrogressions and rotations, are due to the fact that the herd instinct of obedience has been inherited best and at the expense of the art of commanding.

p24 - They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands.

p26 - without God, the only possibility of greatness is in its creation … he must either deny it or create it. Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s major attempt to indicate how it might be created; BGE (Beyond Good and Evil) is in large part an exploration of how greatness is rendered impossible if we continue in the habits of thought instilled by two millenia of Christianity.

p35 - The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement … without measuring reality against the purely invented world … mankind could not live

p36 - to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognize untruth as a condition of life … means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion

p39 - You want to live ‘according to nature’? O you noble Stoics, what fradulent words! … indifference itself as a power … Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? … ’live according to life’ — how could you not do that?

p39 - as a philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise

p40 - there may even exist puritanical fanatics of conscience who would rather lie down and die on a sure nothing than on an uncertain something.

p42 - one was not yet able to distinguish between ‘finding’ and ‘inventing’!

p44 - physics too is only an interpretation and arrangement of the world (according to our own requirements) … and not an explanation of the world … it has ocular evidence and palpability on its side.

p48 - ‘freedom of will’ … we at the same time command and obey … under which the phenomenon ’life’ arises

p49 - synthetic concept ‘I’

p49 - ‘Freedom of will’ — is the expression for that complex condition of pleasure of the person who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the command — who as such also enjoys the triumph over resistances involved but who thinks it was his will itself which overcame these resistances.

p51 - free will doesn’t exist; to believe it does denies so much more

p51 - this symbol-world

p54 - Keep your eyes open!

p55 - What strange simplification and falsification mankind lives in … retain our ignorance so as to … enjoy life!

p60 - Few are made for independence — it is a privilege of the strong.

p62 - One should not go into churches if one want to breathe pure air

p62 - In our youthful years we respect and despise without the art of nuance … the best thing we gain from life … the unconditional, is cruelly misused and made a fool of until a man learns to introduce a little art into his feelings … artists of life … Later, when the youthful soul, tormented by disappointments, finally turns suspiciously on itself … one punishes oneself by distrusting one’s feelings … above all one takes sides, takes sides on principle, against ‘youth’. — A decade later: and one grasps that all this too — was still youth!

p64 - erroneousness of the world in which we believe we live … a deceptive principle in the ’nature of things’ … mistrust thinking itself … The belief in ‘immediate certainties’ is a piece of moral naivety … we ought not to be ‘merely moral’

p64 - In civil life an ever-ready mistrustfulness may count as a sign of ‘bad character’ … beyond the civil world and its Yes and No … the duty to be distrustful, to squint wickedly up out of every abyss of suspicion

p65 - there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective evaluations

p66 - nothing is ‘given’ as real except our world of desires and passions

p67 - ‘Will’ can of course operate only on ‘will’

p68 - No one is likely to consider a doctrine true merely because it makes happy or make virtuous

p69 - wants a mask of him to roam the heads and hearts of his friends … and supposing he does not want it, he will one day come to see that a mask is there in spite of that – and that that is a good thing. Every profound spirit needs a mask; more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he give.

p70 - One must test oneself … One should not avoid one’s tests, although they are perhaps the most dangerous game one could play

p70 - every person is a prison, also a nook and corner. Not to cleave to a fatherland … Not to cleave to one’s own detachement … take the virtue of liberality to the point where it becomes a vice. One must know how to conserve oneself: the sertnest test of independence.

p71 - One has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many. ‘Good’ is no longer good when your neighbor takes it into his mouth. And how could there exist a ‘common good’

p72 - suffering itself they take for something to be abolished

p75 - a protracted suicide of reason … The Christian faith is from the beginning sacrifice: sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit, at the same tiem enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation.

p82 - illusion of morality

p87 - when they themselves want to be final ends and not means beside other means.

p92 - Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.

p94 - reputation is forever. life is temporary

p96 - There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena…

• Religion is good until it tries to be the religion.

p98 - The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or several others.

p98 - Sensuality often makes love grow too quickly, so that the root remains weak and is easy to pull out.

p100 - behind a remarkable scholar one not infrequently finds a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist often — a remarkable man.

• “Scholar” and “artist” here can be thought of abstractly to mean “accepted” and “not accepted” persons.

p105 - To talk about oneself a great deal can also be a means of concealing oneself.

p109 - the real problems of morality … come into view only if we compare many moralities.

p110 - There are moralities which are intended to justify their authors before others

p110 - The essential and invaluable element in every morality is that it is a protracted constraint … protracted obedience in one direction

p113 - No one wants to do injury to himself, therefore all badness is involuntary. For the bad man does injury to himself: this he would not do if he knew badness is bad.

p114 - morality is necessarily define by a group. It can’t be defined by an individual. Thus, morality is invented and not discovered.

p120 - there have been human beings there have also been human herds … very many who obey compared with the very small number of those who command … hitherto nothing has been practised and cultivated among men better and longer than obedience … ’thou shalt’

p120 - the moral hypocrisy of the commanders. They know no way of defending themselves against their bad conscience other than to pose as executors of more ancient or higher commands

p123 - fear is the mother of morality … herd timidity

p125 - that which here believes it know, that which here glorifies itself with its praising and blaming and calls itself good, is the instinct of the herd-animal man

p129 - experience always means bad experience, does it not?

p135 - For he is genuine only when he can be objective … he is an instrument, something of a slave … The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily damaged and tarnished measuring instrument and reflecting apparatus which ought to be respected and taken good care of; but he is not an end

p142 - former assessments of value, creations of value which have become dominant and are for a while called ’truths’

p143 - their will to truth is — will to power.

p143 - the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow … his enemy has always been the ideal of today.

p144 - the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues

p151 - fear more leaders who try to appear unselfish as then their selfishness is hidden

p153 - an admiration for what is foreign

p155 - Our pity is a more elevated, more farsighted pity – we see how man is diminishing himself, how you are diminishing him! … ‘if possible’ – to abolish suffering; and we? – it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been! Wellbeing as you understand it – that is no goal, that seems to us an end! … The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength … In man, creature and creator … your pity is for the ‘creature in man’, for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined — that which has to suffer and should suffer?

p156 - there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity

p161 - ‘digestive power’ … ’the spirit’ is more like a stomach than anything else.

p163 - only – my truths

p166 - (sad) equal rights … is typical sign of shallow-mindedness

p196 - one has duties only towards one’s equals; that towards beings of a lower rank, towards everything alien, one may act as one wishes or ‘as the heart dictates’ and in any case ‘beyond good and evil’ –: it is herethat pity and the like can have a place.

p201 - the individual dares to be individual and stand out.

p206 - Tremendous counter-forces … into the common

p209 - Profound suffering ennobles; it separates.

p212 - Men of profound sorrow give themselves away when they are happy: they have a way of grasping happiness as if they wanted to crush and smother it, from jealousy – alas, they know too well that it will flee away.

p214 - it is a refined and at the same time noble piece of self-control to praise only where one does not agree — for in the other case one would be praising onself, which is contrary to good taste

p214 - four virtues, courage, insight, sympathy, solitude

p217 - Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood. The latter may perhaps wound his vanity; but the former will wound his heart.