Ye fancy that ye will have a long rest ere your second birth takes place,—but do not deceive yourselves! 'Twixt your last moment of consciousness and the first ray of the dawn of your new life no time will elapse,—as a flash of lightning will the space go by, even though living creatures think it is millions of years.... 253
Are ye now prepared? Ye must have experienced every form of scepticism and ye must have wallowed with voluptuousness in ice-cold baths,—otherwise ye have no right to this thought; I wish to protect myself against those who gush over anything! I would defend my doctrine in advance. It must be the religion of the freest, most cheerful and most sublime souls, a delightful pastureland somewhere between golden ice and a pure heaven! 256
[VII]
"Beyond Good and Evil"
Double purpose animated Nietzsche in his writing of "Beyond Good and Evil" ("Jenseits von Gut und Böse"). It is at once an explanation and an elucidation of "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and a preparatory book for his greatest and most important work, "The Will to Power." In it Nietzsche attempts to define the relative terms of "good" and "evil," and to draw a line of distinction between immorality and unmorality. He saw the inconsistencies evolved in the attempt to harmonise an ancient moral code with the needs of modern life, and recognised the compromises which were constantly being made between moral theory and social practice. His object was to establish a relationship between morality and necessity, and to formulate a workable basis for human conduct. Consequently "Beyond Good and Evil" is one of his most important contributions to a new system of ethics, and touches on many of the deepest principles of his philosophy. As it stands, it is by no means a complete expression of Nietzsche's doctrines, but it is sufficiently profound and suggestive to be of valuable service in an understanding of his later works. The book was begun in the summer of 1885 and finished the following winter. Again there was difficulty with publishers, and finally the book was issued at the author's own expense in the autumn of 1886.
Nietzsche opens "Beyond Good and Evil" with a long chapter headed "Prejudices of Philosophers," in which he outlines the course to be taken by his dialectic. The exposition is accomplished by two methods: first, by an analysis and a refutation of the systems of thinking made use of by antecedent doctrinaires, and secondly, by defining the hypotheses on which his own philosophy is built. This chapter is a most important one, setting forth, as it does, the rationale of his doctrine of the will to power. It has been impossible to make extracts of any unified sequence from this chapter because of its intricate and compact reasoning, and the student would do well to read it in its entirety. It establishes Nietzsche's philosophic position and presents a closely knit explanation of the course pursued in the following chapters. The relativity of all truth—the hypothesis so often assumed in his previous work—Nietzsche here defends by analogy and argument. Using other leading forms of philosophy as a ground for exploration, he questions the absolutism of truth and shows wherein lies the difficulty of a final definition. Here we become conscious of that plasticity of mind which was the dominating quality of his thinking. It is not, however, that form of plasticity which on inspection resolves itself into amorphic and unstable reasoning, but a logical, almost scientific, method of valuing. The mercurial habits of the metaphysicians who deny absolutism are nowhere discernible in Nietzsche's thought. His mind is definite without being static. The basis of his argumentation is what one might call floating. It rises and falls with the human tide of causation; yet the structure built upon it remains at all times upright and unchanged.
Nietzsche points out that the numerous "logical" conclusions of philosophers have been for the most part a priori propositions, the results of prejudices or desires, and that the syllogistic structures reared to them came as explanations and defences, rather than as dialectic preambles. In their adopting a hypothetical truth as a premise, he sees only the advocacy for a point of view, arguing that in order to erect a system of logic the initial thesis must be proved. Therefore he questions the fundamental worth of certainty as opposed to uncertainty, and of truth as opposed to falsity, thus striking at the very foundations reared by those philosophers who have assumed, without substantiation, that only certainty and truth are valuable. Nietzsche calls these absolutists astute defenders of prejudices, and characterises the verbalistic prestidigitation of Kant as a highly developed form of prejudice-defending. Spinoza, with his mathematical system of reasoning, likewise falls in the category of those thinkers who first assume conclusions and then prepare explanations for them by a process of inverted reasoning. Nietzsche proceeds to pose the instinctive functions against conscious thinking. He asserts that the channels taken by thought are defined by the thinker's nature, and that even logic is influenced by physiological considerations. The whole fabric of philosophic thought is held up to the light of immediate necessity.