# Beyond Good and Evil *Nietzsche's 1886 "prelude to a philosophy of the future". In 296 aphorisms and short essays he argues that philosophers have dressed up their moral prejudices as truths, offers "will to power" as a better explanation of life, and contrasts a noble "master morality" with a "slave morality" that he says Judaism and Christianity brought to victory. He calls for new philosophers who will create values rather than inherit them.* > **What I read.** The full Project Gutenberg text of Helen Zimmern's translation (#4363): the preface, all 296 sections and the closing poem. I read the sections quoted below in full and skimmed the rest. Quotations are Zimmern's wording. Section numbers (§) are the same in every edition, so I cite those rather than page numbers. Related in this vault: - [[Book Summaries/Nietzsche, Friedrich/The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche|The Antichrist]], Nietzsche's 1888 polemic, cited in the same video. It turns the religious argument of Part Three and §195 into a full indictment. - [[Book Summaries/Holland, Tom/Dominion - Tom Holland|Dominion]] by Tom Holland, also cited in the video. It accepts Nietzsche's account of a Christian "transvaluation" but judges it the other way. ## 1. Book facts | | | |---|---| | Title | *Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft* | | Author | Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) | | First published | 1886, by C. G. Naumann, Leipzig, at Nietzsche's own expense (Wikipedia, citing Kaufmann's *Basic Writings*) | | Place in his work | Comes after *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883–85) and before *On the Genealogy of Morality* (1887), which Nietzsche wrote as a supplement to it | | Structure | Preface, 296 numbered sections in nine parts, and a closing poem. The parts: I Prejudices of Philosophers (§§1–23); II The Free Spirit (§§24–44); III The Religious Mood (§§45–62); IV Apophthegms and Interludes (§§63–185); V The Natural History of Morals (§§186–203); VI We Scholars (§§204–213); VII Our Virtues (§§214–239); VIII Peoples and Countries (§§240–256); IX What Is Noble? (§§257–296); poem "From the Heights" (Kaufmann: "From High Mountains") | | English translations | **Helen Zimmern** (1907; public domain; Dover 1997, ISBN 0-486-29868-X, 150 pp.). Zimmern knew Nietzsche personally. **Walter Kaufmann** (Vintage 1966; 1989 printing ISBN 0-679-72465-6, 256 pp.; also in *Basic Writings of Nietzsche*). **R. J. Hollingdale** (Penguin Classics 1973, introduction by Michael Tanner). **Marion Faber** (Oxford World's Classics 1998, ISBN 0-19-283263-8, introduction by Robert C. Holub). **Judith Norman**, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann (Cambridge 2002, ISBN 0-521-77913-8) | | Cover | [Open Library cover](https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/8245356-L.jpg) | **Where it came up.** - Video: Nils Glenn, ["Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs). - At [28:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs&t=1716s) Glenn quotes the line that "God on the Cross" "promised a transvaluation of all ancient values". The words are from §46 of this book, though he doesn't name it aloud. - Requested by Video Summaries on 2026-11-07. - Vault note: [[Video Summaries/Nils Glenn/Our Understanding of Jesus Just Changed]]. ## 2. Book resources **Reference and catalog pages** - Open Library: work [OL98174W](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL98174W) (415 editions); Kaufmann/Vintage [OL2212714M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2212714M); Zimmern/Dover [OL666723M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL666723M); Faber/Oxford [OL355244M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL355244M); Cambridge [OL7753418M](https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7753418M). - Google Books: [search](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=Nietzsche+Beyond+Good+and+Evil). - WorldCat: [search](https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=ti%3A%22beyond+good+and+evil%22+au%3Anietzsche). - Publisher pages: [Penguin Random House (Kaufmann/Vintage)](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/search/site?q=beyond%20good%20and%20evil%20kaufmann); [Cambridge](https://www.cambridge.org/9780521779135); [Oxford World's Classics](https://global.oup.com/search?q=beyond+good+and+evil+faber). - [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil). **Free (legal; the book and the Zimmern translation are in the public domain)** - Project Gutenberg: [Zimmern translation #4363](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4363) (the text used here). - German critical text: [Nietzsche Source, eKGWB](http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB) (Colli–Montinari, free online). - Internet Archive, free to read (pre-1929 printings): [Macmillan, New York 1907](https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevilpr00nie); [T. N. Foulis, Edinburgh 1909](https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevilpr1909niet); [Modern Library 1917](https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodandevi00nietuoft). - Internet Archive lending (borrow; later printings): [Regnery 1949](https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevil00niet). - LibriVox, free audio: [version 1, 8 h 2 min](https://librivox.org/beyond-good-and-evil-by-friedrich-nietzsche/); [version 2, 8 h 25 min](https://librivox.org/beyond-good-and-evil-by-friedrich-nietzsche-2/). - Libby/OverDrive (checked in the Los Angeles Public Library catalog; your library may differ): - Penguin ebook, Hollingdale translation: [OverDrive 275272](https://www.overdrive.com/media/275272) - Penguin audiobook, read by Leighton Pugh: [5167395](https://www.overdrive.com/media/5167395) - Naxos audiobook, read by Alex Jennings: [179966](https://www.overdrive.com/media/179966) - Blackstone audiobook, Zimmern translation, read by Stephen Van Doren: [256877](https://www.overdrive.com/media/256877) - Tantor audiobook, read by Steven Crossley: [542414](https://www.overdrive.com/media/542414) - Hoopla: not checked; [search Hoopla](https://www.hoopladigital.com/search?q=beyond%20good%20and%20evil). **Paid** - Amazon print: [Vintage/Kaufmann 0679724656](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0679724656); [Oxford/Faber 0192832638](https://www.amazon.com/dp/0192832638); [Dover/Zimmern 048629868X](https://www.amazon.com/dp/048629868X). - Kindle: many free or cheap public-domain Zimmern editions; [Kindle search](https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nietzsche+beyond+good+and+evil&i=digital-text). - Audible: [search](https://www.audible.com/search?keywords=nietzsche+beyond+good+and+evil). The Naxos, Penguin, Blackstone and Tantor recordings listed above are commercial ones. ## 3. Author biography Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, Prussian Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor who died when he was four. He studied classical philology at Bonn and Leipzig. In 1869, at 24, he was appointed professor at Basel. After *The Birth of Tragedy* (1872) and his break with Richard Wagner, ill health forced him to resign in 1879. For the next decade he lived on a small pension in Swiss and Italian lodgings, chiefly Sils-Maria, Genoa, Nice and Turin, writing *The Gay Science*, *Zarathustra*, this book and the *Genealogy*. *Beyond Good and Evil* belongs to this period. *Zarathustra* had found almost no readers, and he paid Naumann to print this book. He collapsed in Turin in January 1889 and died in Weimar on 25 August 1900, never having recovered. His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche then controlled his papers, cut and arranged them, and later courted the Nazis. Kaufmann and the Colli–Montinari edition did much to undo that legacy. This book is part of the evidence: §251 mocks "the anti-Semitic folly" of the Germans along with their other political fevers, though the book also traffics in national and ethnic generalizations (Parts Five and Eight). Sources: [Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Friedrich Nietzsche"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/); [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche); Gutenberg #4363 for §251. A fuller sketch is in [[Book Summaries/Nietzsche, Friedrich/The Antichrist - Friedrich Nietzsche|The Antichrist]] dossier. ## 4. Author interviews and talks Nietzsche gave no recorded interviews and left no recordings. The nearest substitutes: - **His own account of the book in *Ecce Homo*** (1888), under the chapter on *Beyond Good and Evil*: [Gutenberg #52190](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52190) (Ludovici translation); German [#7202](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7202). - **Kaufmann's preface and commentary** in the Vintage edition. The standard English framing, which argues that the book is the best introduction to Nietzsche's mature thought (as Kaufmann presents it; not checked against the edition here). - **Walter Kaufmann, *Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist*** (Princeton, 1950; 4th ed. 1974). The classic study. Ebook on OverDrive: [506690](https://www.overdrive.com/media/506690). - **Michael Tanner's introduction** to the Penguin edition, also read on the Penguin audiobook listed above. ## 5. Summary ### Thesis Philosophers have sought truth while assuming that truth, goodness and selflessness must have pure origins, opposite to error, evil and selfishness. Nietzsche argues that this "BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES" (§2) is a moral prejudice, and that every great philosophy is "the confession of its originator… a species of involuntary and unconscious auto-biography" (§6). The deeper explanation of life, he proposes, is will to power: "A living thing seeks above all to DISCHARGE its strength--life itself is WILL TO POWER" (§13). Applied to morality, the same psychology yields his history of values. There are two root types: **master morality**, in which the noble man is a "CREATOR OF VALUES" and "good" means noble, and **slave morality**, born of the ruled, in which "good" and "evil" replace "good" and "bad" (§260). Judaism and then Christianity carried out the "inversion of valuations" (§195). Europe's democratic and herd morality is its modern heir (§§202–203). The book's hope is for "NEW PHILOSOPHERS… strong and original enough to… transvalue and invert 'eternal valuations'" (§203). ### Outline **Preface (dated June 1885).** "SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman--what then?" Dogmatic philosophers have courted her clumsily. Plato's "Pure Spirit and the Good in Itself" was the worst of dogmatic errors, and "CHRISTIANITY IS PLATONISM FOR THE 'PEOPLE'". The long struggle against it has left Europe's spirit strung like a bow, ready to aim at distant goals. **Part One: Prejudices of Philosophers (§§1–23).** - §1–2: Why do we want truth at all? The metaphysicians' "BELIEF IN ANTITHESES OF VALUES". - §4: "The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it". The question is whether it is life-furthering. - §5–6: Philosophies as disguised confessions. Spinoza's geometric method and Kant's categorical imperative are masks. - §9: The Stoics' "live according to Nature" is a fraud. Nature is "boundlessly indifferent", and philosophy "creates the world in its own image". - §11: Kant's faculty for synthetic a priori judgments is like Molière's doctor who explains opium by its "dormitive virtue". - §13: Self-preservation is only a side effect of will to power. - §16–19: Against "immediate certainties". Descartes' "I think" and Schopenhauer's "I will" both hide complex assumptions; willing is "something COMPLICATED". - §21: Free will and unfree will alike are mythology. - §22: Natural "conformity to law" is an interpretation, not a text. - §23: Psychology should become "the Morphology and DEVELOPMENT-DOCTRINE OF THE WILL TO POWER". **Part Two: The Free Spirit (§§24–44).** - Simplification and ignorance as the ground of knowledge (§24). - Don't become a martyr for truth (§25). Value the honest cynic (§26). - §34: The falseness of the world we think we live in is the surest thing we can see (Kaufmann's "erroneousness", as quoted on Wikipedia). Perspectivism. - §36: A thought-experiment: if our drives are the only "given", the world might be understood as will to power "and nothing else". - §39: "Happiness and virtue are no arguments". - §40: "Everything that is profound loves the mask". - §44: The philosophers of the future will be free spirits, "but something more". They are not the levellers who now borrow the name. **Part Three: The Religious Mood (§§45–62).** - §46: Early Christian faith as "a continuous suicide of reason" and the sacrifice of all freedom and pride. The paradox of "God on the Cross" "promised a transvaluation of all ancient values". It was the slave's revenge on Rome's noble toleration, and the French Revolution was "the last great slave-insurrection". (This is the passage the video quotes.) - §47–52: The saint, asceticism and the will to power behind self-denial (§51). Praise for the Old Testament's grandeur, and a jab at the New (§52). - §53–55: Why modern atheism. The "ladder of religious cruelty": sacrificing humans, then one's instincts, and at last God himself, for nothingness (§55). - §56: The opposite ideal to world-denial: the man who wants everything again "AS IT WAS AND IS, for all eternity", calling out *da capo* (eternal recurrence, not named as such). - §58–61: Religion as a tool the philosopher can use for discipline and rank. - §62: The cost when religion rules instead. Christianity preserved the failures and "sick", working toward "a gregarious animal… the European of the present day". **Part Four: Apophthegms and Interludes (§§63–185).** About 120 one- and two-line epigrams. The best known is §146: "He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee." Others concern love, vanity, women, morality and knowledge. **Part Five: The Natural History of Morals (§§186–203).** - §186: Moral philosophers have never seen morality itself as a problem. Needed instead: a typology of morals. - §188: Every morality is "a long constraint" against nature, and this discipline is what has bred spirit. - §191: Reason against instinct, from Socrates to Descartes. - §195: The Jews "performed the miracle of the inversion of valuations". With them "the SLAVE-INSURRECTION IN MORALS commences". - §197–201: Fear as the mother of morals. The herd instinct of obedience, a "FORMAL CONSCIENCE" (§199). Morality as "timidity". - §202: "MORALITY IN EUROPE AT PRESENT IS HERDING-ANIMAL MORALITY", and the democratic movement is its heir. - §203: The hope for new philosophers and commanders to "compel millenniums to take NEW paths". **Part Six: We Scholars (§§204–213).** - The scholar and the scientist are tools, "objective" mirrors, not philosophers (§207). - Skepticism as a nervous weakness (§208). Kant and Hegel as "philosophical labourers" (§211). - "THE REAL PHILOSOPHERS, HOWEVER, ARE COMMANDERS AND LAW-GIVERS". Their "knowing" is "CREATING" (§211). - The philosopher has always been at odds with his own age (§212). **Part Seven: Our Virtues (§§214–239).** - The "historical sense" as modern Europe's virtue and vice (§224). - Against pleasure-and-pain moralities and the religion of pity. The discipline of suffering has created "all the elevations of humanity" (§225). - Cruelty refined into culture and knowledge (§229). The "fundamental will of the spirit" to simplify and master, against the knower's will to depth (§230). - English utilitarians (§228). - §§231–239: The notorious passages on "woman as she is" and against the emancipation of women. They attack the women's movement, and Nietzsche flags them as "my truths" only. **Part Eight: Peoples and Countries (§§240–256).** - Wagner's "overture to the Mastersinger" as a portrait of the German soul (§240). - The "European" in the making: democracy breeds "a type prepared for SLAVERY in the most subtle sense of the term", along with rare stronger exceptions (§242). - Germans, English, French, Jews and the coming "good Europeans". - §251: The Germans' "anti-Semitic folly" and other political follies. Nietzsche proposes curbing the "anti-Semitic bawlers" rather than the Jews, and predicts that the Jews could rule Europe if they wished, but do not want to. - §256: Europe's unity as the hidden aim of its great men. **Part Nine: What Is Noble? (§§257–296).** - §257: "EVERY elevation of the type 'man,' has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society". It needs "the PATHOS OF DISTANCE" and "slavery in some form or other". - §259: Life itself is "appropriation, injury, conquest". Exploitation is a basic organic function, not a corruption. - §260: Master morality and slave morality defined. In slave morality "good" is the harmless and kind, and pity and humility are virtues; the noble's "good" becomes the slave's "evil". - §262: How a type is bred by hardship, and how individualism grows when the pressure lifts. - §§263–284: Reverence, distance, solitude and masks as marks of nobility. - §287: "What is noble?" Not deeds or works but faith: "THE NOBLE SOUL HAS REVERENCE FOR ITSELF". - §295: Dionysus, "the genius of the heart", the tempter-god whose last disciple Nietzsche calls himself. - §296: An envoi to his own "written and painted thoughts", already fading into truths. **Poem, "From the Heights".** A hermit on a mountain waits for friends who don't come, and greets instead the new friend, Zarathustra. The Gutenberg text prints L. A. Magnus's verse translation. ### Key ideas - **Perspectivism.** There is no view from nowhere. The value of a belief lies in what it does for life, not in whether it is "true" (§§4, 34). - **Philosophy as autobiography.** Every system serves its author's drives and morals (§6). - **Will to power.** Life is the discharge and growth of force. Self-preservation is a by-product (§§13, 36, 259). - **Master and slave morality.** "Good/bad" against "good/evil" (§260). The *Genealogy* develops this a year later. - **Christianity as transvaluation.** "God on the Cross" turned ancient values upside down (§46). Christianity is "Platonism for the people" (Preface). - **The herd and democracy.** Modern egalitarian morality is the herd instinct made universal (§§199–203). - **Rank and the pathos of distance.** Higher types need aristocratic societies (§257). - **New philosophers.** Legislators of value, not scholars (§§203, 211). - **Masks.** Depth hides itself (§40). ## 6. Fact-check The book is mostly philosophy and prophecy, which can't be fact-checked. Below are its checkable claims about history and texts, plus the video's use of it. | Claim | Verdict | Evidence | |---|---|---| | The video's "transvaluation of all ancient values" line comes from this book | **Supported** | §46, Zimmern: the formula "God on the Cross" "promised a transvaluation of all ancient values" ([Gutenberg #4363](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4363)). Kaufmann renders it "revaluation". | | First published 1886 by C. G. Naumann, Leipzig, at Nietzsche's own expense | **Supported** | [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil), citing Kaufmann's *Basic Writings of Nietzsche* (Modern Library), pp. 182–185 | | The Jews were called a people "born for slavery" by "Tacitus and the whole ancient world" (§195) | **Disputed (misattributed)** | The phrase matches Cicero, *De provinciis consularibus* 10, on "Jews and Syrians, nations born for slavery" (*nationibus natis servituti*). Tacitus (*Histories* 5.2–13) is hostile to the Jews but is not the source of that phrase. I recall the Cicero line from general knowledge and did not open it for this note: **verify** ([Perseus, Cicero, *De prov. cons.*](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/searchresults?q=de+provinciis+consularibus)) | | The Hebrew prophets "for the first time coined the word 'world' as a term of reproach" (§195) | **Unverified** | A sweeping claim with no source given. The negative sense of "world" (*kosmos*) is usually traced to the New Testament (John, Paul), not the prophets | | The Greek nobility called themselves "We truthful ones" (§260) | **Supported** | The aristocratic poet Theognis uses *esthlos* ("good, noble") of his own class. Nietzsche expands the argument in *Genealogy* I §5 ([Gutenberg #52319](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52319)) | | Spinoza made self-preservation the basic drive (§13) | **Supported** | Spinoza, *Ethics* III, props. 6–7 (the *conatus*) | | Kant's explanation is like Molière's "dormitive virtue" (§11) | **Supported as a reference** | The *virtus dormitiva* is from Molière's *Le Malade imaginaire* (1673), final interlude. Whether it is fair to Kant is a matter of interpretation | | Emperor Tiberius made a human sacrifice "in the Mithra-Grotto on the Island of Capri" (§55) | **Unverified** | I found no ancient source for it. Suetonius (*Tiberius* 40–44, 60–62) tells of Tiberius's cruelty on Capri but, as far as I know, of no Mithraic sacrifice | | The Germans invented gunpowder (Preface) | **Disputed** | Said half in jest, and it echoes the medieval legend of the monk Berthold Schwarz. Gunpowder came from China (9th century) and reached Europe in the 13th century | | Early Christianity was a revolt of the "Oriental slave" against Rome (§46), and Judaism began the "slave-insurrection in morals" (§195) | **Disputed (interpretive)** | Thesis, not finding. Historians stress that early Christianity drew converts across classes. Holland's *Dominion* accepts the scale of the moral inversion but not Nietzsche's verdict on it | | Nietzsche was hostile to antisemitism (§251) | **Supported, with qualifications** | §251 calls "the anti-Semitic folly" one of the Germans' "slight attacks of stupidity". The same section and §195 still trade in sweeping ethnic generalization ([SEP](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/)) | ## 7. Citations and references **Works and figures the book engages** - Plato and Socrates (Preface; §§190–191). - The Stoics (§9). - Descartes (§§16, 191), Spinoza (§§5, 13), Kant (§§5, 11, 211), Hegel (§211), Schopenhauer (§§16, 19, 186). - Pascal (§§45–46), Luther, Cromwell (§46). - Molière, *Le Malade imaginaire* (§11). - Tacitus, by name (§195); the phrase is likely Cicero's. - English moralists and utilitarians (§§228, 252–253). - Wagner, *Die Meistersinger* (§240), Goethe, Heine, Stendhal. - The Old and New Testaments (§52). - Nietzsche's own *Zarathustra* (closing poem) and the *Genealogy of Morals* (1887), written as its sequel. **Secondary sources** - Walter Kaufmann, *Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist* (4th ed. 1974). - Laurence Lampert, *Nietzsche's Task: An Interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil* (Yale, 2001) (title known; I did not consult it). - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ["Friedrich Nietzsche"](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/). **Links used in this note** - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4363 (text: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4363/pg4363.txt) - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52190 ; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7202 ; https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/52319 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beyond_Good_and_Evil ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ - https://openlibrary.org/works/OL98174W ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL2212714M ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL666723M ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL355244M ; https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7753418M - https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevilpr00nie ; https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevilpr1909niet ; https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodandevi00nietuoft ; https://archive.org/details/beyondgoodevil00niet - https://librivox.org/beyond-good-and-evil-by-friedrich-nietzsche/ ; https://librivox.org/beyond-good-and-evil-by-friedrich-nietzsche-2/ - https://www.overdrive.com/media/275272 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/5167395 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/179966 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/256877 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/542414 ; https://www.overdrive.com/media/506690 - http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/JGB - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3WGPomiOJs