Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche

Part 1: On the prejudices of philosophers

• “But this is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, too, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is the this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the “creation of the world,” to the cause prima.”
• “Physiologists should think before putting down the instinct of self-preservation as the cardinal instinct of an organic being. A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is a will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results.”
• “…and also the Darwinist’s and anti-teleologists among the workers in physiology, with their principle of the ‘smallest possible force’ and the greatest possible stupidity.”
• In response to Schopenhauer’s insistence on free will: “Schopenhauer only did what philosophers are in the habit of doing—he adopted a popular prejudice and exaggerated it. Willing seems to me to be above all something complicated, something that is a unit only as a word—and it is precisely in this one word that the popular prejudice lurks, which has defeated the always inadequate caution of philosophers.”
• “That which is termed ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the affect of superiority in relation to him who must obey: ‘I am free, ‘he’ must obey’—this consciousness is inherent in every will.”
  • The desire for will is the desire to control, to exert control over the body, to render obedience from himself—or some subordinate part of himself
• “He who wills believes with a fair amount of certainty that will and action are somehow one; he ascribes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of the sensation of power which accompanies all success.”
  • Stems from the lust to indulge in self-praise, in pride, in a yearning to have an effect, to exert control.
• “The person exercising volition adds the feelings of delight of his successful executive instruments, the useful ‘under wills’ or under-souls—indeed, our body is but a social structure composed of many souls—to his feelings of delight as commander.”
• “Under an invisible spell, [philosophies] always revolve once more in the same orbit; however independent of each other they may feel themselves with their criticism and systematic wills, something within them leads them, something impels them in a definite order, on after the other—to wit, the innate systematic structure and relationship of their concepts.”
• “The desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society…”
• People who misunderstand the unfreedom of will do so in two opposite yet profoundly personal ways: a) they do not give up responsibility, self belief, a personal right to their merits; b) others do not want to be answerable to anything or blamed for anything, and due to their self-contempt, seek to lay the blame for themselves somewhere else.

Part 2: The free spirit

• Talks of pre-morality in prehistory being focused on consequences rather than origins (e.g., disgrace of a family still affects children generations later—the consequence stains them)
  • Reminds me of race politics in the States
• Talks of the morality of today being focused on intention, i.e., the origin rather than the consequence. If i meant well, who cares if people suffered because of it. Argues that intentions aren’t the whole story, and generally lurking below conscious intentions are unconscious ones that deceive us into believing we meant well when really we wanted whatever was best for ourselves.
  • Ah…I’m a big proponent that intentions matter…thinking of things like micro-aggressions and the like. But intentions aren’t the whole story, even though they can seem like it
• “In all seriousness: the innocence of our thinkers is somehow touching and evokes reverence, when today they still step before consciousness with the request that it should please give them honest answers.”
  • Brilliant.
• “Why should the world that concerns us—be a fiction? And if somebody asked, ‘but to a fiction there surely belongs an author?’—couldn’t one answer simply: why? Doesn’t this ‘belongs’ perhaps belong to the fiction, too?”
• Nietzsche believes that the reducible will of all organic matter is the will to power, the desire to affect the world. “Suppose all organic functions could be traced back to the will to power and ones could also find in it the solution of the problem of procreation and nourishment—it is one problem—then ones would have gained the right to determine all efficient force univocally as—will to power.”
• If “truth” is hard to swallow, “the strength of a spirit should be measured according to how much of the ‘truth’ one could still barely endure—or to put it more clearly, to what degree one would require it to be thinned down, shrouded, sweetened, blunted, falsified.”
• “And how should there be a ‘common good’! The term contradicts itself: whatever can be common always has little value.”
  • Perhaps locally, the average value of the good decreases, being blended down by sheer numbers. But the sum of those less formidable common goods can far exceed the more formidable individual goods. Nietzsche seems to value the individual as utmost, at least so far.
• “What [those preoccupied with ‘modern ideas’] would like to strive for with all their powers is the universal green-pasture happiness of the herd, with security, lack of danger, comfort, and an easier life for everyone…—and suffering itself they take for something that must be abolished.”
  • Sounds familiar. Devouring mother.

Part 3: What is religious

• Why do the most powerful human beings still bow worshipfully before the saint? In him, “they sensed the superior force that sought tkt test itself in such a conquest, the strength of the will in which they recognized and honoured their own strength and delight in dominion: they honoured something in themselves when they honoured the saint…In short, the powerful of the world learned a new fear before him; they sensed a new power, a strange, as yet conquered enemy—it was the ‘will to power’ that made them stop before the saint.”

4: Epigrams and interludes

• “Not the intensity but the duration of high feelings makes high men.”
• “Many a peacock hides his peacock tail from all eyes—and calls that his pride.”
• “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.”
  • Still thinking about yourself. Bad publicity is still publicity.
• “A soul that knows it is loved but does not itself love betrays its sediment: what is at the bottom comes up.”
• “A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.— What was on the mind of that god who counseled: ‘Know thyself!’ Did he mean: ‘Cease to concern yourself! Become objective!’”
  • We know the sun will rise again tomorrow, we don’t need to concern ourselves with that.
• “Woman learns to hate to the extent to which her charms decrease.”
• “A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”
• “There are no moral phenomena at all, it only a moral interpretation of phenomena.”
  • The subject always wedges themselves in; this is when the moral is injected
• “The will to overcome and affect is ultimately only the will of another, or of several other, affects.”
  • Where’d that will come from? Other wills? And those?
• “There is an innocence in admiration; it is found in those to whom it has never yet occurred that they, too, might be admired some day.”
  • We admire because we’d like to be admired.
• “When we have to change our mind about a person, we hold the inconvenience he causes us very much against him.”
• “The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.”
  • Art.
• “In true love it is the soul that envelops the body.”
  • Quoted from elsewhere. Source?
• “What a time experiences as evil is usually an untimely echo of what was formerly experienced as good—the atavism of a more ancient ideal.”
• “Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil.”
  • Hmmmm…
• “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”
  • A la Eric Hoffer
• “Poets treat their experiences shamelessly: they exploit them.”
  • Oof. So true. What a poet.
• “‘Our neighbour is not our neighbour but his neighbour’—thus thinks every nation.”
• “Talking much about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.”
  • Much doesn’t mean true. You can pile on lies and hide behind them.
• “You utilitarians, you, too, love everything useful only as a vehicle for your inclinations; you, too, really find the noise of its wheels insufferable?”
• “In the end one loves one’s desire and not what is desired.”
  • Brilliant. Reminds me of the Gita. ‘Lust cannot be satisfied by any amount of sense enjoyment, just as fire is never extinguished by a constant supply of fuel.’

Part 5: Natural history of morals

• “This type of inference [that people only behave badly out of stupidity] smells of the rabble that sees nothing in bad actions but the unpleasant consequences and really judges, ‘it is stupid to do what is bad,’ while ‘good’ is taken without further ado to be identical with ‘useful and agreeable.’”
  • Ah…I currently believe in this—that people don’t behave poorly on purpose. Nietzsche sees it as another utilitarianism—the bad are just not doing what is useful! The will to power of the individual is jeopardizing the will to power of the whole! Well, isn’t that just it? Good and bad must be subjective, mustn’t they?
• “Even in the midst of the strangest experiences we still do the same: we make up the major part of the experience and can scarcely be forced not to contemplate some event as its ‘inventors’. All this means: basically and from time immemorial we are—accustomed to lying. Or, to put it more virtuously and hypocritically, in short, more pleasantly: one is much more of an artist than one knows.”
• Nietzsche sees “love thy neighbor” as something closer to “fear thy neighbor”, a normalization of mediocrity to lower the threat of your neighbour exploiting you. Brings up a good point that the same qualities that threaten neighbors can also serve as defences against outside threats, and in this way emphasizing mediocrity can put everyone at risk. Overall I think he places too much emphasis on great individuals rather than great collectives (or herds, as he’d call them) (just struck me he’s like the opposite of Tolstoy), but brings up good points
• “Everything that elevates the individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbour is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors.”
• Talks about how this cultivates complacency and fear, and the society caught in this vortex abolishes anything approaching a sense of superiority—which eventually leads to leaving criminals unpunished. Really, he argues, danger and fear are the enemy of this morality, but if danger and fear were abolished this morality would no longer be needed, and thus it generates fear and danger to remain relevant
• “They are at one, the lot of them, in the cry and the impatience of pity, in their deadly hatred of suffering generally, in their almost feminine inability to remain spectators, to let someone suffer.”

Part 6: We scholars

• “He would even determine value and rank in accordance with how much and how many things one could bear and take upon himself, how far one could extend his responsibility.”

Part 7: Our virtues

• “There are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, pain, and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is a naïveté.”
  • Speaking of hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, and eudaemonism
• “But she does not want truth: what is truth to woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth— her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance and beauty. Let us men confess it: we honor and love precisely this art and this instinct in woman—we who have a hard time and for our relief like to associate with beings under whose hands, eyes, and tender follies our seriousness, our gravity and profundity almost appear to us like folly.”
  • Interesting perspective.
• “And is it not true that on the whole ‘woman’ has so far been despised most by woman herself—and by no means by us?”

Part 8: People and fatherlands

Part 9: What is noble

• “‘Exploitation’ does not belong to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it belongs to the essence of what lives, as a basic organic function; it is a consequence of the will to power, which after all is the will of life.”
• “Words are acoustical signs for concepts; concepts, however, are more or less definite image signs for often recurring and associated sensations, for groups of sensations. To understand one another, it is not enough that one use the same words; one also has to use the same words for the same species of inner experiences; in the end one has to have one’s experience in common.”
  • Brilliantly concise.
• During times of stress, the need for commonality in language increases, as misunderstandings put relationships at risk against the stress. Any leak of energy must be plugged by a swathe of common understanding (regardless of whether true or false)
• Makes an interesting point that people might praise undesirable qualities in others so that it doesn’t look like they’re praising themselves—if they praised people with similar, beneficial qualities it could seen as vain and prideful.
• “Almost everywhere in Europe today we find a pathological sensitivity and receptivity to pain; also a repulsive incontinence in lamentation, and increase in tenderness that would use religion and philosophical bric-a-brag to deck itself out as something higher—there is a veritable cult of suffering.”
  • History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. Similar over-sensitivity is prevalent today, though it is not as associated with traditional religions but more progressive movements (e.g., safetyism), though to be fair they are themselves sorts of pseudo-religions.