Friedrich Nietzsche:


"Beyond Good and Evil" (1886)

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This is another extremely confusing book. If i didn't know how famous the writer became, i would think that this book was written by an ignorant idiot who didn't study history, and didn't study philosophy, and was simply a verbose, delirious individual. So much for a book that was written to "explain" the obscure ideas of "Zarathustra". In general, the book is an attack on traditional morality. Most of the book is, in fact, just the "attack". He keeps insulting philosophers (and not only philosophers) without really explaining what is wrong with them. It's like me beginning this article by saying that you are an idiot, your father is an idiot, your brother is an idiot, your neighbor is an idiot, etc. End of chapter 1. Chapter 2 is a long discussion of how smart i am (Nietsche calls himself "a free spirit" and rejoices in telling us how smarter he is than all the previous philosophers). He also points out that scientists are idiots and in particular that "atomism is one of the best refuted theories". Seriously, at the beginning Nietzsche accuses philosophers of having invented theories to justify their own moral preferences ("to justify his moral prejudices, which he solemnly baptizes as truths"). Their quest for knowledge is just an excuse: they are not after knowledge, they are after imposing their favorite morality on the world. Physics is not the way to explain the world, psychology should be considered the "queen of sciences" because it studies human nature. The list of all the philosophical schools that he insults would be too long. Suffice it to say in his opinion morality should be about the consequences of an action not about the intentions. The ethical theme of the book is set in the statements "Will to Life had to be increased to the unconditioned Will to Power" and that "severity, violence, slavery, danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter's art and devilry of every kind, that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man, serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite".
Humanity is cursed with a surplus of people who deserve to suffer (which includes "defective, diseased, degenerating, infirm" individuals). Buddhism and Christianity are religions for the sufferers and as such they harm the "higher men". The long-term effect has been to create an inferior race in Europe ("a dwarfed ludicrous species... a gregarious animal... sickly, mediocre"). He mocks "the man of the future" which socialists aspire to as a "degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal" and he mocks free society as the ultimate nightmare, a society in which the individual becomes "a pigmy with equal rights and claims".
He cannot help including another series of aphorisms, that revisit his favorite themes, like how stupid and vicious women are ("woman is essentially unpeaceable", "woman is more barbarous than man", "When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature", etc) and the destiny of great men ("A nation is a detour of nature to arrive at six or seven great men").
After a long tirade (#232-239) against the emancipation of women (but good words for the Jews as "the strongest, toughest, and purest race at present living in Europe", although he blames them for starting the "slave-insurrection in morals" #195), and superficial racist comments on various nationalities (he likes France, "the seat of the most intellectual and refined culture of Europe", but dislikes the English as the worst philosophers, and scolds Germans for not possessing a "third ear" for the musicality of written language), he begins his sermon on the superiority of an aristocracy society and his "je accuse" against the "slave morality" of Christianity, which is meant to protect the dumbest and weakest not the smartest and strongest (like himself). Slave morality is afraid of evil men, whereas master morality is afraid of good men. He praises selfishness (#265) and scorns the fictitious division of morality into good and evil, when in fact there is only human nature, a very selfish nature (the "all too human" nature), that different individuals express in different ways. Every individual is different, and therefore morality should be different too. In practice, he favors the establishment of a new aristocracy (based on merit, not on lineage) with special privileges. The strongest people (presumably the "free spirits" like him) will have a more cruel morality. In the age in which democratic and socialist ideas were beginning to spread, Nietsche advocated unequal rights not equal rights.
Best quote: "The time for petty politics is past: the very next century will bring with it the struggle for mastery over the whole earth".
An incredibly boring read if you can make it to the end.
"On the Genealogy of Morality" contains three essays. The first one begins with an interesting observation: that we knowers are unknown ourselves to ourselves; we never found ourselves because we never searched for them. He sets out to search for the origin of the fundamental concepts of "good" and "evil". What he finds going back in history (don't expect references to archeology, bibliography, etc: for Nietzsche a "proof" of his argument is simply a convoluted verbose explanation of his personal opinione), he finds that the concept of "good" came naturally to the aristocracy that ruled the world ("master morality"). "Bad" was simply the state of the lower classes. Then the priests took this aristocratic morality and turned it upside down, identifying "good" with the poor, the weak and the sufferers, and therefore creating hatred for the masters ("slave morality"). The Jews were the best race at creating this priestly class and therefore the greatest haters of all time. He views a cosmic battle between the ideals of Rome (the morality of the strong aristocracy) and the ideals of the Jews (the morality of the hating priests). The Jewish civilization won: Jesus, the Reformation, the French Revolution, the defeat of Napoleon are all stages in this war that the Jews keep winning against the aristocracy. Slave morality is born out of hatred for the master class and views the master as "evil". The master views the slave as "bad", the slave views the master as "evil". A mere empirical fact versus a moral judgment. The weak (the slaves) define "good" the behavior of the weak, but the truth is that such behavior is the only behavior that the slaves can possibly adopt. They are not free to be "evil": they can only be "good". Out of their hatred for the masters, the slaves invented the concept of "justice". "Christian love" is actually a form of this hatred. Slave morality also invented "free will".
In the second essay Nietzsche says that torture is a natural state of the human race: inflicting suffering used to be a joy. In the old days suffering was not inflicted as a punishment but simply because it was fun to see others suffer. Punishment has become "moral", a consequence of "justice", because of our "will to power". But "bad conscience" does not originate from this materialistic process. It originates from the transition from the invidivisualistic lifestyle of the prehistoric man to the social lifestyle of the modern man who lives in a state: the brutal instincts (the "will to power") are still the same, but instead of using them for, say, hunting, we bend them inside ourselves and torture ourselves. Bad conscience originates from the idea that we have a debt that we have to repay, and Christianity created the ultimate metaphor of debt: God sacrificed himself to redeem our sins, and now we owe him. Bad conscience did not exist in the Greek world because their gods protected them against a bad conscience. Nietzsche repeats that having a bad conscience is an illness. The master race did not have any concept of guilt. We modern men, instead, vivisect our conscience, we practise cruelty on our animal selves.
The third essay is about ascetic ideals. After a lengthy and confusing discussion on Wagner and Schopenhauer, Nietzsche makes some silly comments such as that science shares the same foundations with ascetism because it searches for truth, that Plato was Homer's worst enemy because he hated art, that ascetism is a way to escape the existential void, that man wills suffering on himself.
What he lacks is erudition: he talks of things that he blatantly didn't study or didn't understand. His books are random collections of highly opinioned and poorly justified statements about historical, philosophical, scientific, anthropological and psychological studies that he only superficially understood. He is not confusing because he is a bad writer: he is confusing because he was confused.