Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, Sections: 1-4

If you believe that there is no place where anyone completely squashes all of the major questions of mankind, then you have not ventured into the first section of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. “Prejudices of Philosophers” is nearly a perfect title for an assuredly perfect first section to this book. Every line of reason and unreason is followed to bizarre conclusions, every thought that man has ever been haunted by is brought up here only to be dismantled and born afresh. Only Nietzsche could write like this and only Nietzsche could conjure up an introduction that is worthy of beginning a discussion on his thought.

We immediately begin with the most unruly of opponents, the “Will to Truth”. This is one of the many places in which we can see Nietzsche’s explicit and implicit views mingling to display a wonderful dance of befuddlement and depth. We have peculiar questions before even leaving off the first sentence, in particular the question, “how could any philosopher doubt and view as ‘hazardous’ the notion of Truthfulness and its pursuit?”. This is brought up in modern folk philosophy as the question of whether the proposition “truth is an illusion/fake” could be true. This is a much weaker formulation than Nietzsche’s but still presents an interesting and introductory question for the current state of philosophy. Throughout Nietzsche’s corpus we grapple with the difference between “Truth” and “truth”, where the capital letter denotes something like absolute truth. This isn’t the kind of truth that you invoke when you say you “truly love lime sherbet ice cream” or even the truth present in assertions like “2+2=4”. This Truth is what lies behind the veil of all existence, a “God’s eye view” of things independent of any determination from social or historical context. Nietzsche, as we shall see, often likes to forgo ridiculing this idea directly and instead likes to point out how inimical it can be for the survival of the individual and the species alike. Similarly his focus is on a wholly original question, that of the value of the Will to Truth.

First, a preliminary remark on the nature of willing in general is necessary. Nietzsche studied Schopenhauer, one of the most prolific philosophers of the will, and was incredibly fond of him in his youth; however, at the time of writing Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche no longer wanted anything to do with Schopenhauer outside of reproaching him. For Schopenhauer the Will (Wille zum Leben) is the pervasive essence of all of being, and for him we can find this essence within ourselves just as we can in everything else which is why he believes in his introspective method. This is what our hero finds most dubious, the idea that there is an internal consistency found in man that could be described in any way as a totality. In the preface Nietzsche already discusses the “soul superstition” which is just one name for what he saw in many disciplines as the assumption of a fundamental essence or unity within each of us. One of his most brilliant formulations contrary to this is to say that we are “oligarchies as organisms” (The Genealogy of Morals). You can look as deep as you want to go in yourself, in fact you can look deeper than this, and you will find no soul, you will find no one thing that could be neatly outlined as The Will either. No matter how you look within yourself you will always generate a sort of Lacanian alienation, you are separating yourself into observed and observer in order to get at the nature of the observer as unobserved. 

One way of putting Schopenhauer’s trouble, though Nietzsche didn’t say this, is that he clumsily mingled Hinduism and Buddhism. His primary obsession was the Upanishads, a founding text for Hinduism, which involves the belief in the existence of a true self (Atman), though this may be interpreted as just a manifestation of Brahmin or the Godhead. For Buddhism on the other hand, we have the fundamental belief in the unreality of the self (Anatman) and the existence of dizzying layers that cover up our fundamental lack of a soul. Both of these ancient religions tend to agree on a kind of monism that states that there is one ultimate reality and they disagree on our relation to it. Now Schopenhauer held that we can come to understand this monistic principle via introspection, but he could never seem to decide on the nature of the self as will. Nietzsche could decide and he decided that nobody had adequately explained the nature of our position (or lack thereof) yet. In The Gay Science, section 127 Nietzsche says that Schopenhauer took the will to be simple and comprehensible and so he never fully analyzed it. He states, “willing is actually a mechanism that is so well practiced that it all but escapes the observing eye.” So what is this mechanism? What is the will in general? Will to power, death drive, or simply the habit of grammar by which responsibility is attributed? This questioning must be cut short now to continue our reading but we will work with a base level understanding of willing as striving. 

The first section continues in a way that reminds us of the common American idiom “ignorance is bliss”. This is almost a laughable consequence as Nietzsche could argue that such a view is a manifestation of the Will to Truth. One must want to know the truth of bliss to come to such an axiom, an axiom which is itself a possible truth which must be brought out by willing it. We get no answer as to the nature of the Will to Truth before our question is distorted into a far more original and disturbing one “what is the value of this Will?”. This is a hard question to even get a grip on, but there is a useful method for evaluating this kind of question by rephrasing it “who is the one that wills thus?”. This may seem confusing but it fits what is typically dubbed Nietzsche’s perspectivalism, what view must we have of things to have the problem of Truth be our problem, that is our question. A rather arrogant view may be one satisfying answer. Another is a hopelessly confused one. So now we have to inquire into how our willings and queries shape the place from which we will and query. This is the nature of values that had remained mostly in the dark before Nietzsche, and we will come back to this nature several times here. 

Two interesting points from the first section remain, who is the Sphinx and who is the Oedipus? And what is the risk in raising this kind of question? For the first question it seems that we must realize that there is no answer beyond an almost Hegelian one involving a parallax between Oedipus and the Sphinx, in other words, we are the question and the inquirers. There are no other actors here, we play both parts by distancing various forces within ourselves from one another so as to measure them by metrics external to the measured object. The latter question comes back time and time again in the form of “dangerous maybes” and the gaze of the abyss. If we look too closely at the ground from which we look we may find ourselves endlessly displaced until all we feel is a kind of lethal vertigo. This is the significance of both questioning truthfulness and Nietzsche’s relation to Schopenhauer. We can agree with Schopenhauer that the external world and our internal environment are two aspects of one continuous thing, it’s not as if the universe is out there and we are inside some other space. We are penetrated, permeated, and fucked by the one space that all things occupy. So we really can look inside of ourselves to get a sense of what is going on with existence more generally. The anti-Schopenhauerian point is that we don’t find much in there, and as Slavoj Zizek and many Hegelians point out this is the “immanent gap in being itself”, that is to say that it isn’t as if we are an absent mishap in the universe while the universe remains complete; instead, the case is that if mankind is something incomplete or inconsistent then the “way things are” is incomplete and inconsistent in totality as well. 

If the truth is poison then should we drink our hemlock or should we save this toxin for our enemies and keep the healthy illusions for ourselves? Regardless of what we choose we have before us, beneath us and in us the problem of problems. I suppose a third question remains obviously up in the air and that is the question of method employed here, why ask so many questions without positing answers? I would like to write a separate essay concerning the methods of Nietzsche in general at a later date so I will allow this to go more or less unquestioned for now. 

Section 2 begins in a strange tone as Nietzsche isolates a block of text so as to highlight his caricature of a metaphysician and deal with the thought it expresses. This section mostly deals with what we may call enantiodromia, the tendency of a thing to come from its opposite. Now the initial block calls this patently absurd, saying that nothing can come from its opposite. This is a sort of Platonic notion and the writing ends with a Kantian reference showing how this is a “typical prejudice by which metaphysicians of all times can be recognized,…”. He goes on to say that “The fundamental belief of metaphysicians is the belief in antitheses of values.”. He then doubts the existence of  antitheses in general and the value thereof. Plato may be seen as a philosopher of opposition as many of the dialogues focus on notions like the unjust vs the just and appearance vs reality. Kant can similarly be classified as the philosopher of antinomies as he established the difficulties that pure reason has of grasping external reality. Interestingly enough each of Kant’s four antinomies can be challenged in a Nietzschean way here by simply looking at them without this prejudice which this section mentions. For example, the antinomy of space and time, which says that the world has a beginning in time and is limited in space yet it is infinite in time and space, can be solved by simply pointing out perhaps the finite beginnings of the universe created an infinite process. Something here emerges from its supposed opposite. There is another Nietzschean solution to this problem that would be much more sophisticated involving Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence of the same and the infinite moment but this discussion must come later. These antinomies are meant to focus on reason’s relation to a world that it cannot fully access or control, but Nietzsche can show how Kant takes reason to be reliant upon the prejudice of antitheses and thereby makes itself out of joint with the way things may be and any understanding of the world. The fundamental antithesis of metaphysics is that between appearance and reality which Nietzsche never tires of toying with. 

Deleuze argues at length that Nietzsche had silently opposed himself to Hegel and this is one of the passages in which we might suspect a thoroughly un-Hegelian stand point to be evinced. This may be the case if Nietzsche failed to understand Hegel or only listened to Hegelians on what Hegel was saying, but this passage doesn’t touch on any of the nuance of the dialectic in its capacity to say exactly that everything emerges out of its opposite, being from non-being as well as vice versa. If you Google Nietzsche and Hegel together you will see results indicating that Nietzsche disagreed with Hegel largely because the latter was a systematic thinker. This is almost laughable as something like The Phenomenology of Spirit could only be called systematic next to a book like Beyond Good and Evil. This passage is if anything disorientingly Hegelian. 

The next section finds Nietzsche challenging one of the age old oppositions, that between conscious thought and instinct. This is an ancient notion going back to mythical thinking with the difference between Epimetheus (action before thought) and Prometheus (thought before action) in the Greeks and more clearly with Plato’s chariot analogy and the tripartite soul comprised of logos (reason), eros (passion) and thymos (appetite). Here we have a strange analogy between the relation of the act of birth to heredity and instinct to reason. I believe the point of the analogy is to acknowledge how the discussion of ones heredity often precludes any discussion of the circumstances of the event of a person’s birth. This is so with the thoughts of philosophers before Nietzsche, we discuss their ideas without questioning how their appetites aligned at the time of writing. This illustrates Nietzsche’s insistence upon a notion of subjectivity that incorporates the body. He frequently uses bodily metaphors, referring to thinkers as being “dyspeptic” is a brilliant example, which is a tendency that could be tied to his sickly nature by an astute biographer. And here Nietzsche makes himself more explicit than he tends to when he says that behind our channels of thought and logic there are valuations, “or to speak more plainly, physiological demands,..”. Here we are looking at what may be dubbed the a priori constituents of our notions, though Nietzsche’s pronouncements are actually somewhat distinct from this category as the a priori still applies to the realm of reason. You could say that the a priori is what prefigures reason, but values give a figuration to what prefigures reason. We can go behind, but also strangely beyond, the concept of reason with the perspectivalist notion of values. It is the underpinning of reason, the constituted metric of reason, and something opposed to reason altogether. What is the will to truth? It is a mode of being that values truth. What is the value of the will to truth? It is the production of a mode of being that furthers the will to truth. Prior to reason there is instinct that will appear as reason to the perspective that looks for its own base. After reason there is evaluation that then configures the channels of reason. This is a strange sort of temporality where values are the birthplace, telos and opposite of reason all at once. 

This section ends with a difficult to grasp allusion to a famous Pre-Socratic philosopher and his most well-known quote. “Man is the measure of things”, as said by Protagoras has been given a lot of special analysis by Heidegger but prior to this was well embedded in the history of philosophy as a bit of weak sophistry pointing towards relativism. Here Nietzsche almost opposes this view to his own relativism, that of his perspectivalist approach. It is hard to understand the placement of this quote here as it seems as if Nietzsche is describing man as the measure of things insofar as he describes man as giving character to things through instinctual evaluations or “physiological demands”. This can be somewhat cleared up by comparing the German and English where in English we have the statement, “Supposing that man is not just the ‘measure of things…’”. The word “just” here is derived from the German “gerade” which has a slightly different sense and can also be translated as “directly” or “right now”. So when he says this in relation to the idea that our valuing truth over illusion and the certain over the uncertain may just be superficial evaluations he is regarding this in opposition to the statement that our evaluations have some metaphysical priority over things themselves. We are not “directly” the measure of things. Despite the apparent implication that there is something deeper than these “superficial” evaluations we should not forget that Nietzsche is hardly a realist and is likely just leaving us without a leg to stand on here in his characteristic fashion. 

In the fourth section we are presented with the philosophical pressures of our “physiological demands”. This section sounds distinctly Darwinian though Nietzsche opposes himself directly to this line of thought elsewhere and implicitly does so here. If the essential Darwinian principle is “natural selection” here we have the essential Nitzschean principle presented as “perspectival selection”. We are meant to venerate false opinions as these are the ones that further our species and our personal genetic material; for instance, in the modern world it would be impossible for the species to continue without the belief in a monetary system which is ultimately a fiction whereby we ascribe an ethereal value to something banal that we create just to appear as holding value. Everyone knows this and maintains it in the Lacanian mode of fetishistic disavowal, or in a relation of perversion. This is characterized by the conjunction “yet”, “I know that it is just paper, yet….”. This section has a perhaps unexpected example of this with the notion of numbers without which “man could not live”. I know that it is just vapor indiscriminately streaking across the sky, yet I nonetheless count two clouds. This is bordering on overly complex questions of metaphysics that will come back time and again in this book, even where you would never expect such speculations. He also references the “purely imaginary world of the absolute and immutable”. This is common for Nietzsche as he often questions our certainty that things continue from one time to another while maintaining identity, this being another product of his encounters with the Pre-Socratics, namely Heraclitus. He later even questions the notion of identity at its core by suggesting that concepts are merely a way to make dissimilar things appear similar. 

This section wraps up with the titular phrase and guide to arrive at it. That is by espousing a philosophy that ventures, “To recognize untruth as a condition of life”. This would allow one to not see good and evil as absolutes to be chased, but to recognize them as emerging out of certain modes of living. This is a minor theme across these first four sections and the whole book. A certain suspicion is born with reading these aphorisms that there may be nothing as solid as Platonic forms, as good and evil, that we can find in this world. The idea here may be similar again to Hegel’s notion that “Evil resides in the very gaze which perceives Evil all around itself”. As soon as we believe ourselves to have found the heart of good or evil we should realize that we have used our values to spot this prey. 

Across each of these sections a theme remains that the time has come to look behind, beneath, and beyond philosophy as it has hitherto been constructed. The time to realize that we are not just plainly looking at “how things are” that even to try to do so is to have already decided that things can be brought out by looking. We have a problem here that is called “the myth of the given” elsewhere in philosophy. It is primarily elucidated by Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars, though it seems to me that Nietzsche was right at home with this notion. Nothing can be viewed directly or neutrally but everything has a frame and a value structure that integrate it so that it can be viewed in the first place. It is also impossible to remove the frame from which things are judged or viewed. There is no perspective-less perspective. This is the birthplace of what can be called the “Nietzschean unconscious”. It is centered around the notions of value and Will to Power. We will see later how it is founded on philological concepts. The closest cousin to this is Lacan’s use of the unconscious as being “structured like a language” which is opposed to Freud’s more diverse use of the unconscious and Melanie Klein’s idea the the unconscious is characterized by memory and contents. Now it may be argued that Nietzsche’s unconscious should be conceived of in more physiological terms and there is some truth to this, but it seems that Nietzsche did not take bodily impulses to be primary over interpretation, over the Will to Power. Again in section 127 of The Gay Science he says, “First, for will to come into being an idea of pleasure and displeasure is needed. Second, when a strong stimulus is experienced as pleasure or displeasure, this depends on the interpretation of the intellect which, to be sure, generally does this work without rising to our consciousness…”. At the time of this utterance many of the ideas in Beyond Good and Evil were only nascent buds yet to bloom. Nietzsche is a deliberately confusing thinker, but through these contortions we are approaching one of his most important ideas that is often expressed through the conflict in his writings, how to tear down as a yes-sayer or how to love life through contempt.