Beyond Good and Evil reading notes
In the introduction about Nietzche:
Thus we often find him praising lightheartedness: urging us not to burrow but to remain at the surfaces of things, practising a kind of ideal frivolity. But no less often he exhorts us to stop at nothing in order to find out what is really the case, especially in that most treacherous area, the human heart. In urging both these ideals on us, he is acknowledging something of the utmost importance to human beings that anyone acquainted with the greatest art recognizes: the juxtaposition of unblinking recognition of the frightfulness of life with a stubborn determination not to be subdued by it […]
Part 1: On the Prejudices of Philosophers
Judgements may be valuable even if they are false; we depend on false judgements to live. For the purpose of advancing and preserving our species, some judgements have to be believed to be true, even if they are false.
The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement […] The question is to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving […] and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements are the most indispensable to us, […] to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life.
On the hypocrisy of philosophers:
You want to live ‘according to nature’? O you noble Stoics, what fraudulent words! Think of a being such as nature is, prodigal beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without aims or intentions, without mercy or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain; think of indifference itself as a power - how could you live according to such indifference? To live - is that not precisely wanting to be other than this nature? Is living not valuating, preferring, being unjust, being limited, wanting to be different? and even if your imperative ‘live according to nature’ meant at bottom the same thing as ‘live according to life’ - how could you not do that? Why make a principle of what you yourselves are and must be?
Nietzsche believes nothing is impersonal, that values are invented not discovered, and they depend strongly on their inventor. He is sceptical of how some philosophers believe their opinions to be obtained via cold, unperturbed thought, when ultimately their opinions are just a manifestation of the thinker’s prejudices, only “a desire of the heart sifted and made abstract”.
[…] the philosopher must say to himself: when I analyse the event expressed in the sentence ‘I think’, I acquire a series of rash assertions which are difficult, perhaps impossible, to prove - for example, that it is I who think, that it has to be something at all which thinks, that thinking is an activity and operation on the part of an entity thought of as a cause, that an ‘I’ exists, finally that what is designated by ‘thinking’ has already been determined - that I know what thinking is.
We can replace the Kantian question ‘how are synthetic judgements a priori possible?’ (see [the-critique-of-pure-reason]) with another question: ‘why is belief in such judgements necessary?’
On free will:
‘Unfree will’ is mythology: in real life it is only a question of strong and weak wills. - It is almost always a symptom of what is lacking in himself when a thinker detects in every ‘causal connection’ and ‘psychological necessity’ something of compulsion, exigency, constraint, pressure, unfreedom […]
On questioning yourself:
After all, you know well enough that is cannot matter in the least whether precisely you are in the right, just as no philosopher hitherto has been in the right, and that a more praiseworthy veracity may lie in every little question-mark placed after your favourite words and favourite theories (and occasionally after yourselves) than in all your solemn gesticulations and smart answers before courts and accusers!
Part 2: The Free Spirit
Without appearances there is no truth, again tying to Nietzsche’s scepticism on the dichotomy of truth and falsehoods:
It is no more than a moral prejudice that truth is worth more than appearance; it is even the worst-proved assumption that exists.
On masks:
Every profound spirit needs a mask: more, around every profound spirit a mask is continually growing, thanks to the constantly false, that is to say, shallow interpretation of every word he speaks, every step he takes, every sign of life he gives.
Part 3: The Religious Nature
He who has seen deeply into the world knows what wisdom there is in the fact that men are superficial.
Why atheism and the decline of theism in Europe?
‘The father’ in God is thoroughly refuted, likewise ‘the judge’, ‘the rewarder’. Likewise his ‘free will’ - he does not hear, and if he heard he would still not know how to help. The worst thing is: he seems incapable of making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he means?
However, Nietzsche still considers modern philosophy (during his time) religious but atheistic and anti-Christian. Religion demands sacrifice - in primitive religions we first begin by sacrificing others (loved ones, first born), then as we progressed to the moral epoch, instead of others we sacrificed things within ourselves (our instincts, our will, our strength). When there is nothing left to sacrifice, the next logical step is sacrificing our God and turn to worshipping rocks, gravity, nothingness (referring to science?), i.e. we have sacrificed God for this nothingness and he calls this the ‘paradoxical mystery of the ultimate act of cruelty’.
Religion teaches the people to be content in their current position and social standing, so that order is kept:
Religion and the religious significance of life sheds sunshine over these perpetual drudges and makes their own sight tolerable to them, it has the effect which an Epicurean philosophy usually has on sufferers of a higher rank, refreshing, refining, as it were making the most use of suffering, ultimately even sanctifying and justifying.
Nietzsche believes religions (mainly Christianity and Buddhism) treat illness and suffering as something right, something that ought to be preserved, and this is among the reasons ‘man’ has been kept on a lower level - the religions have preserved too much of “that which ought to perish”. By giving comfort to the suffering and giving courage to the depressed, European Christianity comes to value “suffering” so much that they reversed our moral valuations, such that illness and suffering is considered good and befitting of a ‘higher man’ but beauty and strength is not, and it is this turn of events that turned humans (as a species?) from a ‘beautiful stone’ into a ‘sublime abomination’, a process of ‘deliberate degeneration and stunting of man’. Christianity as a philosophy keeps the masses fearful, obedient, in their place, and teaches people to value the traits which Nietzsche believes to be worst for species preservation, while rejecting the good and noble.
And smash the strong, contaminate great hopes, cast suspicion on joy in beauty, break down everything autocratic, manly, conquering, tyrannical, all the instincts proper to the most highest and most successful type of ‘man’, into uncertainty, remorse of conscience, self-destruction, indeed reverse the whole love of the earthly and of dominion over the earth into hatred of the earth and the earthly - that is the task the church set itself and had to set itself, until in its evaluation ‘unworldliness’, ‘unsensuality’, and ‘higher man’ were finally fused together into one feeling.
Nonetheless it was also acknowledged that religion is valuable in some way: it inspires great, and it makes life bearable for the common man in his suffering (“gives an invaluable contentment”, “some transfiguration of the whole everydayness”).
And Nietzsche finds value in religion if spread in the hands of philosophers as educational tools, but not in their own right:
In the end, to be sure, to present the debit side of the account to these religions and to bring into the light of day their uncanny perilousness - it costs dear and terribly when religion holds sway, not as a means of education and breeding in the hands of the philosopher, but in their own right and as sovereign, when they themselves want to be final ends and not means beside other means.
Part 4: Maxims and Interludes
On love:
Love of one is a piece of barbarism: for it is practised at the expense of all others. Love of God likewise.
‘Pity for all’ - would be harshness and tyranny for you, my neighbour!
That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
On our inner mind / struggle:
‘I have done that,’ says my memory. ‘I cannot have done that’ - says my pride, and remains adamant. At last - memory yields.
Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes - and calls it his pride.
He who attain his ideal by that very fact transcends it.
Under conditions of peace the warlike man attacks himself.
The will to overcome an emotion is ultimately only the will of another emotion or of several others.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
On truth and knowledge:
It is dreadful to die of thirst in the sea. Do you have to salt your truth so much that it can no longer even - quench thirst?
Today a man of knowledge might might easily feel as if it he were God become animal.
Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not that which is desired.
On morality:
There are no moral phenomena at all, only a moral interpretation of phenomena…
One is punished most for one’s virtues.
You utilitarians, you too love everything useful only as a vehicle of your inclinations - you too really find the noise of its wheels intolerable?
There are also (sexist?) those about women:
When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexuality. Unfruitfulness itself disposes one to a certain masculinity of taste; for man is, if I may be allowed to say so, ‘the unfruitful animal’.
Comparing man and woman in general one may say: woman would not have the genius for finery if she did not have the instinct for the secondary role.
Part 5: On the Natural History of Morals
Nietzsche again capitalizes the point that morality does not exist without its author (“what does an assertion say of the man who asserts it?"), in that morality is subjective - sometimes it is meant for the author to justify himself, calm himself, humiliate himself, or hide himself.
[…] in short, moralities too are only a sign-language of the emotions.
Every morality is a tyranny against nature, which is fine unless one subscribes to a morality that rejects any tyranny and unreason.
We always see something and try to compare it with something similar that we have seen before and fill in the blanks. As a result, we hardly ever see something exactly and entirely. For example, we rarely ever see a tree in its entirety, with all its leaves and branches, simply because it is much easier for us to think of an approximation of the tree.
All this means: we are from the from the very heart and from the very first - accustomed to lying. Or, to express it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one realizes.
About herd instinct: From the beginning of humanity there have been herds of people, where there are many who follow and few who lead - people have an innate need to obey, such that even leaders fool themselves into thinking they are obeying something / someone (“the moral hypocrisy of the commanders”), for example, posing as executors of a higher command e.g. God, or “servant of the people”.
Nietzsche believes the herd morality has softened humanity, made humanity value the tamer and more mellow traits instead of intense ones, pushing humanity towards average emotions and desires, towards mediocrity.
Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one’s feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobilify and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust, ‘the lamb’ even more ‘the sheep’ is held in higher and higher esteem.
Part 7: Our Virtues
I think this quite well summarizes Nietzsche’s views on suffering:
You want if possible - and there is no madder ‘if possible’ - to abolish suffering, and we? - it really does seem that we would rather increase it and make it worse than it has ever been! Wellbeing as you understand it - that is no goal, that seems to us an end! A state which soon renders man ludicrous and contemptible - which makes it desirable that he should perish! The discipline of suffering, of great suffering - do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto? That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, it terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune, and whatever of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cunning and greatness has been bestowed upon it - has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?
Short interesting note on language and communication:
Words are sounds designating concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite images designating frequently occuring and associated sensations, groups of sensations. To understand one another it is not sufficient to employ the same words; we have also to employ the same words to designate the same species of inner experiences, we must ultimately have our experience in common. That is why the members of one people understand one another better than do members of differing people even when they use the same language; or rather, when human beings have lived together for a long time under similar conditions, there arises from this a group who ‘understand one another’, a people.