Beyond good and evil

Nietzsche’s work is an example of the downside of political satire. His work is in some ways reminiscent of Stephen Colbert when he was doing his Colbert report. In 100 years, if all that’s left of Stephen is the Colbert Report, how much of it would the average person be able to understand?

I am aware that much of his style was hyperbole intended to spark a reaction, to spark deep discussion; however, it’s hard for someone like me, coming in as a lay person to separate what is hyperbolic, and what is reflective of his actually beliefs.

Even experts seem fairly certain that his anti-feminism was really how he felt. In my opinion, a philosophy that dismisses about half of the entire world’s population is inherently flawed to begin with.

His style is very much like the stoned ramblings of teenagers who feel that smoking dope enhances the mind’s ability to philosophize. It’s often nonsense that must be heavily parsed to get anything out of. From a simple literary standpoint, this book is drivel. Good writing is clear, and a good writer provides clarity in their work. If you need to take a college class to have professors, and other authors to teach you what his words mean, then, in my opinion, he has failed as a writer.

His work may have been revolutionary at the time he wrote it, but just because something was game changing a hundred years ago, doesn’t mean it should become a thing of unchanged worship today. In fact, I think Nietzsche himself would be disappointed that his work tends to be held as near scripture, rather than people today arguing against his philosophies as a way to further develop and refine our modern philosophy. This may be exactly what happens in PDH Philosophy circles, but the image that is projected to us non-philosophers is that if you trash on Nietzsche, you must be an idiot.

I don’t regret reading this, I just didn’t enjoy reading it.

Let me start off by admitting that ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ was a real challenge from the very first start. Though it doesn’t get particularly easier as it progresses, one gets accustomed to Nietzsche’s writing style and thus keeps up with the flow of thought – albeit not always grasping the cram-full ideas it carries.

In section nine, paragraph 289, Nietzsche postulates: “does one not write books precisely to conceal what lies within us?” to assert in the following paragraph (290) that “Every profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” In these perspectives, I genuinely feel less culpable of being unable to clutch some of the book’s insights, despite my re-re-reads.

Far from the essence of parables fused in the pages of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche employs direct narrative to debate some untimely questions. I personally preferred this style over Zarathustra’s preaching technique. I found the former to be less scornful and, in one way or another, more direct.

Nietzsche arises a truly philosophical question: “Why knowledge at all?” What resides inside us that strives for ‘the truth’? The answer to this question lies behind the ‘the faith in antithetical values’ concept, which Nietzsche introduces in section two of the book. We operate with a series of opposites, of which truth-falsity is the most obvious and fundamental.
Most of what resonated throughout me after reading the book was Nietzsche’s perspective of values. He condemns The Stoics that stress on coping with the world and claim that values are imposed upon us. Thus he claims that we create values, whether we want to or not.

Another resonating perspective is the German philosopher’s standpoint regarding suffering and cruelty which I thoroughly share. “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?”
“One should open one’s eyes and take a new look at cruelty […] Almost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization and intensification of cruelty – this is my proposition. […] There is also an abundant, over-abundant enjoyment of one’s own suffering, of making oneself suffer.”

And, of course, one must not forget the ‘will to power’ which Nietzsche considers to be basic concrete to everything. He also introduces an intriguing dichotomy, the concepts of ‘master morality’ and ‘slave morality’ which respectively confront ‘good and bad’ and ‘good and evil’.
All these topics and more are treated in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ and here are some excerpts of some of my favorite assertions:
“Measure is alien to us, let us admit it to ourselves; what we itch for is the infinite, the unmeasured.” (Nietzsche speaking of virtues.)
“What? A great man? I always see only the actor of his own ideal.”
“What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate and immediately forget we have done so.”
“The chastest expression I have ever heard: ‘Dans le véritable amour c’est l’âme, qui enveloppe le corps.’”

This is where the praising stops; for there are portions of the book I disliked and others which I skipped ahead. Some of the parts I disliked were mostly attacks on woman, the “weaker sex” according to Nietzsche. He claims that her perspectives are distorted, that she’s a “mediocre player” when it comes down to matters involving “neither love nor hate” (115), that “there is usually something wrong with her sexuality” when she has “scholarly inclinations” (144). Let’s not linger here a lot. As for the paragraphs that I skipped, they all figure at the ending of section eight entitled ‘Peoples and Fatherlands’.

Rating – and well, reviewing – this book is as much a challenge as reading it. It really depends on one’s stance. And despite the fact I sometimes lost interest (and seldom became disinterested) in this book’s content, I nevertheless found deep insight and foreknowledge in its folds. I think I have had enough of Nietzsche insights for this lifetime though. Some say “life’s too short to learn German” and to that I might add “Life’s too short to learn German and to read Friedrich Nietzsche’s translated German works – and thoroughly understand them.”