Beyond Good and Evil — who's who

The author. Former professor of classical philology at Basel. By 1886 he has left the university, broken with Wagner, and written Zarathustra. He is working in intense solitude, in declining health, on the books that will make the next century use his vocabulary. He describes himself, in this period, as writing with a philosopher's hammer. Beyond Good and Evil is the first of the late works where the hammer is doing sustained structural demolition.

Not a person Nietzsche has met but a figure he is calling into being: the thinker who has come unstuck from inherited values without yet arriving at new ones. The free spirit is the implicit reader of the book. He is presumed to have outgrown the obvious comforts — religion, progressivism, the dogmas of his profession — and to be ready for the discomfort of suspecting even his own desire for truth. Part 2 is his curriculum.

The figure the book is aimed past, and the only figure capable of carrying philosophy forward after the European tradition collapses under its own weight. The philosopher of the future is not a contemplator of being but a creator of values — a legislator. Nietzsche is careful to say he has not seen one and may not. The job description in Part 6 is the most demanding in modern philosophy: it disqualifies almost everyone, including most who admire the author.

Not a tyrant but the opposite — the comfortable, satisfied modern European who has invented happiness and blinks contentedly. He has his little pleasure for the day and his little pleasure for the night; he no longer believes in great things and is incapable of contempt. For Nietzsche the last man is a greater danger than any revolutionary. The book is, among other things, an attempt to rouse readers who might otherwise become last men.

Kant appears throughout as the exemplar of the philosopher who disguised his needs as pure reason. The categorical imperative, the thing-in-itself, the postulation of free will as a practical necessity: Nietzsche traces each of these to what Kant needed to be true rather than what the evidence permitted. He treats Kant with a kind of irritated respect — the most rigorous of dogmatists is still a dogmatist.

Treated throughout not as a faith to be argued with but as a psychological complex to be analysed. European morality is, for Nietzsche, the historical triumph of slave morality — the priestly inversion that took the values of the powerless and made them into the universal moral demand. He treats it with contempt for what it has cost and reluctant admiration for the depth of the operation. Part 5 is the fullest diagnosis; Part 9 is the proposed alternative.