Nietzsche is asking us to go Beyond Good and Evil, but as we will see, he will also ask us to look beyond appearance and reality, beyond will and reason, beyond true and false. In a broader sense, this first part of the title also invites us to look beyond any pair of opposites, not just good and evil.

Traditionally, the “good” was viewed as something entirely different and opposite from “evil” – Nietzsche will attack this presupposition. As we will see, Nietzsche does not propose, as the philosophers before him have done, that good is the opposite of evil – in other words, Nietzsche rejects the dichotomy of good versus evil. In the first part of the title, Nietzsche is inviting us to look beyond this binary mode of thinking. By contrast, a bad thing, or an evil act, is the opposite of “good.” This is a moral value judgment: when we say: “he did a good thing”, we are paying someone a compliment. What does this mean? Historically, philosophers have been operating under the assumption that any given act is either good or evil. Let’s dissect the meaning of this lengthy title.īeyond Good and Evil gives us a clue as to what Nietzsche is trying to accomplish here: he wants us to go beyond the concepts of good and evil. The full title of the work actually reads: Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. With that out of the way, let’s dive into this fascinating work. If you want to be notified when we release the other videos in this series, please consider subscribing to the channel. This first video will be something of a warm-up, or a teaser, if you will. This is the first video in a planned three-part series on just this one work by Nietzsche. We hope that after watching this series, you will have a solid grasp of the main ideas in the work, but more importantly, that you will understand Nietzsche’s way of looking at the world.

In this series we will explore the main themes of one of the most puzzling and infamous works in all of philosophy. Written in 1886, it has become hugely influential but also widely misunderstood.

This video attempts to set the stage for a deeper understanding of this seminal work of German philosophy.įriedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is a notoriously difficult book to understand. Unfortunately, the book is also very difficult and widely misunderstood. Written in 1886, it represented Nietzsche’s attempt to elucidate ideas first written about in Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is one of the most important works in Western philosophy.

Nietzsche beyond good and evil