All eleven chapters — from the preface that wagers everything to the closing poem on the heights.
Beyond Good and Evil moves in nine thematic parts plus a preface and a closing poem. Part 1 attacks the philosophical tradition. Part 2 sketches the free spirit. Part 3 examines religious psychology. Part 4 is a hundred and twenty-five pure aphorisms. Part 5 — the conceptual centre — is the natural history of morals, where the master/slave distinction first appears in full. Parts VI through VIII examine scholars, virtue, and European peoples. Part 9, "What Is Noble?", is the closing manifesto. Read each section to the end and sit with it. Nietzsche compresses arguments into single paragraphs.
The wager and the attack on philosophy.
Two pages that place the entire wager. Dogmatic philosophy has courted truth like a clumsy suitor — and she has not been won. Nietzsche announces that the whole tradition may have been "a noble childishness," and that what comes after will be different.
Twenty-three sections. Why do we want truth? Who are the philosophers who claim to have it? Nietzsche diagnoses Plato, Kant, and Schopenhauer as thinkers who gave their needs the form of arguments — and asks what a philosophy would look like that was honest about this.
The free spirit and religious psychology.
Twenty-one sections introducing the free spirit — the thinker in transit between inherited certainties and new values. Will to power appears in its sharpest formulation (§36). The part closes with the meditation on masks: every profound nature builds one involuntarily.
Eighteen sections on the psychology of the religious experience. Not refutation but diagnosis: what the saint and the mystic want, what solitude and fasting and asceticism are doing to and for the religious type, and how the philosopher of the future will relate to religion.
125 pure aphorisms — the most-quoted sequence in the book.
One hundred and twenty-five numbered sections, most of them a single sentence or two. The purest expression of Nietzsche's aphoristic method. Read fast once, then return to each one slowly.
The natural history of morals — the conceptual centre.
Eighteen sections — the conceptual centre of the book. Morality is not THE morality but a morality, with a history and a psychology. The herd instinct. The democratic movement as the heir to Christianity. The seedbed of the Genealogy of Morals.
Scholars, virtue, and European peoples.
Ten sections distinguishing the scholar from the genuine philosopher. The man of learning has "something of the old maid about him." Section 211 gives the philosopher of the future his clearest job description: he commands and legislates.
Twenty-five sections on the moral psychology of the contemporary educated European. Pity as weakness rather than virtue. The will to knowledge as will to power. A closing section on woman that has been almost universally misread.
Seventeen sections on European cultures — German, French, English, Jewish — and what they reveal about the direction of European civilization. The democratic movement produces two types simultaneously: the useful herd animal and, as counterreaction, the exceptional individual.
What is noble? And a poem from the heights.
Thirty-seven sections — the closing manifesto. Aristocracy, the pathos of distance, master and slave morality in full (§260), the anatomy of nobility, and the portrait of the philosopher the book has been calling for.
Ten stanzas. The philosopher at midday on his heights, calling for companions who are not yet there. Not triumphant but wistful. The formal opposite of the prose — strict stanza, rhyme, refrain — and the contrast is the point.