Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
By Friedrich Nietzsche
Published in 1886
240 Pages
Thibault’s Score: 3/5

Nietzsche was undoubtedly insane.

Most of Beyond Good and Evil is complete garbage. The book mostly consists of pointless rants denouncing contemporary and past philosophers. However, in between the disorganized rants, there are predictions. It is for these predictions that Nietzsche is famous.

Nietzsche predicts all of the problems that will arise when religion disappears in the 20th century. In his day, all morality stemmed from religion. Nietzsche - correctly - predicted that the disappearance of religion would be replaced by a secular religion based on empathy and compassion which he described as socialism.

This prediction is remarkable, because in his own day, communism was a tiny fringe movement. However, three decades after his death, the communist revolution would succeed in Russia. Another strain of socialism - national socialism - would take over Nietzsche’s homeland. Even the victorious allies slowly began replacing religion with ideas of “democratic socialism” and “liberalism” which, today, have evolved into communism.

Nietzsche believed that progress came from conflict. Attempting to eliminate conflict would inevitably backfire. In the short term, it would lead to the proliferation of “degenerates” - people who are unfit to survive in nature. The degenerates would then cause far greater future conflicts, while simultaneously slowing down all progress.

Nietzsche attributes this to the dichotomy between “master” and “slave” morality. Populations who were historically masters have nobody to blame but themselves for their failures. They develop ethical systems based on the ideas of individualism, hard work, and honor. On the other hand, the slaves lack free will. They choose to externalize all of their decisions, so that they can instead blame the masters.

Although in Nietzsche’s own day, slavery had been eliminated from Europe, he argued that these two moral forces continued. He saw that Christianity had traditionally represented slave morality, while nationalism represented master morality. In the post-religious world, he predicted that socialism would take on the role that Christianity had previously played.

He makes many predictions about the implications of socialism, many of which are plainly apparent today. One stood out to me. He cautions that in the future, authors who have accepted slave morality or socialism will defend criminals and condemn the innocent. The reason for this is because criminality is often caused by external circumstances over which people do not control (such as childhood poverty). By contrast, non-criminals have less harsh circumstances. Therefore, the socialist solution to crime is to be lenient on criminals but strict on the innocent.

I’m not sure if I recommend Beyond Good and Evil or not. This is a very, very weird book. Today, I am sure that modern psychologist would label Nietzsche as being “mentally ill.” He likely had Aspergers. This book is very poorly written. His rants about other philosophers are boring and substance free. On the other hand, the passages about master and slave morality or his predictions about socialism are fascinating. 

My recommendation would be for most people to pass on this book; and for those who choose to read it to skip over all of the chapters about the history of philosophy.

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