Beyond Good and Evil

What It Is

Nietzsche published it in 1886 at his own expense, after his publisher lost interest. In the first year it sold well under a hundred copies. He was forty-two, in ruinous health, a former professor of classical philology living out of suitcases in Swiss and Italian boarding houses, and he was writing what he called a prelude to a philosophy of the future.

The form is nine parts made of numbered sections, some a single line, some running for pages, with a stretch of epigrams in the middle and a poem at the end. It is not a treatise. There is no chain of proof to follow, and readers who look for one come away convinced they have missed something.

What is here instead is an assault. On philosophers and their pretence of disinterested reason. On the origins of morality. On scholars, on democracy, on nationalism, on the English. He is out to unsettle you, and he is often extremely funny while doing it.

Why It Matters

Nietzsche asked a question that reorganised the century after him: not whether a belief is true, but what kind of person needs it to be true. Once that question is loose it cannot be recalled. Psychoanalysis, sociology, existentialism, critical theory and the whole modern habit of suspecting motives all run back through this book.

He is also the most consequential critic of morality the West has produced, and he does not argue that morality is false. He argues that it has a history, that it was made by particular people for particular purposes, and that we have forgotten this. Whether you end up agreeing matters less than whether you can answer him.

His afterlife is the strongest argument for reading him firsthand. His sister edited his unpublished notes into something the Nazis could use, and the association stuck for decades, in spite of the fact that Nietzsche despised German nationalism and wrote about antisemites with open contempt. Read the man and the forgery collapses.

Before You Read

Eight to ten hours of reading, spread over weeks. Aphorisms punish speed. Read ten or twenty sections, stop, and let them work.

Come without a system to find. He is thinking in front of you, contradicting himself, testing positions he does not hold. The unit of meaning is the section, not the book.

Two honest warnings. Part One, on the prejudices of philosophers, is the densest thing here and assumes you know who Kant and Schopenhauer were; a page of background will save you an hour of confusion. And the passages on women, mostly in Part Seven, are ugly. Not misunderstood, not ironic, not a product of their time. Ugly. Read them, note what a great mind is capable of, and carry on.

Which Translation to Read

• Walter Kaufmann (Vintage, 1966) — recommended. The version that rescued Nietzsche for English readers, with a running commentary in the footnotes that quietly dismantles the Nazi appropriation section by section. Kaufmann is a philosopher arguing with you over Nietzsche's shoulder, and eighty years on his notes still land. The cost: his English has dated, and his Nietzsche is a shade too civilised, an Enlightenment humanist with a temper. View on Amazon →
• R. J. Hollingdale (Penguin Classics, 1973; revised 1990, with an introduction by Michael Tanner). The most fluent and idiomatic English of the three, and the one to read for pleasure. The cost: little apparatus, and Hollingdale smooths the barbs Nietzsche meant to leave sticking out.
• Judith Norman (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, 2002, edited with Rolf-Peter Horstmann). The most rigorous. Norman keeps one English word for one German word, so you can actually track a concept across the book. The scholar's choice. The cost: precision at the expense of force. It reads like a study text because it is one.

Take Kaufmann to be argued with, Hollingdale to be carried, Norman to be exact. Marion Faber's Oxford World's Classics version (1998) is a graceful fourth.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read it with a pencil, and mark the sections that offend you rather than the ones you like. Those are the ones doing the work.

Do not quote him until you have finished. A line of Nietzsche lifted out of context can be made to mean almost anything, which is precisely how he was turned into a monster.

Read On the Genealogy of Morality next. He wrote it a year later as a supplement and clarification, and it is the argument this book keeps gesturing at.

The commonest first-timer mistake is trying to find the doctrine. There isn't one. There is a man testing what he can bear to think, and inviting you to find out the same thing about yourself.