Beyond Good And Evil?

What do you understand of Nietzsche's philosophy of "Beyond Good And Evil"? Personally I think it is just an excuse for taking delight in cruelty and evil. It is no transubstantiation of metaphysics as he claimed but rather an essay in philosophy as pornography.

Would you agree though that contemporary life has something of the Nietzschean about it, even if one largely contests much of his philosophy?

 

ironically I was looking at the classic paperback edition of Beyond Good and Evil this morning thinking I would take it to my doctor's appointment but, since it had a naked woman on the cover I decided not (in case there was a fundamentalist in the waiting room, of uncertain mental capacity).

I'm about to re-read it but I'm inclined to think I'll more or less agree with you. If I believe that there is an irreducible oral core in a human being then attempts to subvert it, as an excuse for indulgence in dopamine-induced delights, are bound to fail.

As for your second point, there's nothing special about contemporary life except that the means to both pain and pleasure are more multi-faceted. King Arthur's England was as Nietzschean as all get out

 

the real good and evil are benefit and harm.
you don't have to be infallible to 91% of the time not need a diagram.

tyranny only exists because people are able to convince themselves and each other,
that wishing to be feared is somehow supposed to be a good thing.

terrorism only exists because people can somehow be convinced that taking potshots at targets of opportunity,
is somehow opposing tyranny.

people can be pushed beyond thinking of course,
and some people seem to think that how people can be induced to act by doing so,
gives them an excuse that convinces others, to get away with almost anything.

some things can be pretty close to obvious,
when people aren't convinced to hate logic.

(sorry i took the thread title at its literal face value, not as a review of some known name's take on the subject)

 

I've only read Thus Spoke Zarathustra but based on that I would say there is. There is a decadence celebrated in that book, with the main character having an initial contrarian attitude to most the characters he comes across. I would say there are elements of those types of things that reflect in contemporary life.

 

As human beings I don't think we can get on at all without some idea of good and bad.

 

It just seems to me that life has become a battle of all against all, and of will against will, in a mad scramble for the top as the ship goes down. Maybe it was ever thus.

 

It can look like that. But I still see people who do genuinely care about others. People who do care about the way we're destroying nature in pursuit of a quick profit.

IMO capitalism is really a huge part of the problem. Law of the jungle. Encourages greed and a wholly self centred kind of attitude And it's interesting that Nietzsche's polar opposite in terms of 19th c philosophers probably has to be Marx.

 

Here is an example from "Maxims And Interludes" contained in Beyond Good And Evil:

108 There are no moral phenomena, only a moral interpretation of phenomena...

 

Maybe it is a question of going "Beyond", as it were, "Beyond Good And Evil"...

 

There's a certain similarity in the form of words 'beyond good and evil' as used by Nietzsche on one hand, and some eastern philosophies on the other. But something quite different is intended. In Hinduism for example, the absolute is sometimes said to be beyond good and evil, in contrast to the all good Christian God. But scriptures like the Bhagavad Gita say that humility, non-violence, harmlessness are all qualities we should seek to embody, unlike Nietzsche who seems to delight in the idea of the strong, as he see's them, stamping down the weak. The strong in Nietzsche's mind seem to be military tyrants and such.

It's well known that the Nazis took Nietzsche's ideas on board, and some say they twisted his thinking to fit their own agenda - but maybe they didn't have to twist it that much.

A lot of his ideas seem like a blueprint for the so called 'dominator culture'. I assume that Nietzsche although highly intelligent was a deeply traumatized person, and it reflects in the bombastic nonsense he wrote, and maybe in the fact that he had a mental breakdown at a relatively young age from which he never recovered.

 

I've never really got the impression, at least from reading Zarathustra or the other bits I've read from him that Nieztche's "strong" was military tyrants. I can see how some of his ideas may have been adapted by "dominator culture" but in Zarathustra, I seem to recall the main character valuing many societal outcasts.

The Nazis also adapted the swastika which had previously symbolized "good" in some Eastern Cultures, so I don't think just because the Nazi's perverted some symbols or ideas, inherently says much about the origin of their content.

I've made this analogy before and I think those who know music movements well may understand what I mean, I view Nietzsche as "Punk Rock" Philosophy, it's got a DIY spirit, often railing against institutions (even philosophy itself), somewhat chaotic and at times seems subversive for the sake of being subversive.

 

Maybe I'm projecting my own view or reaction onto some of Nietzsche's ideas. Long time since I read any of his work, but it isn't at all something I feel much sympathy with.

I'm not sure that the Nazis could have so easily taken up Nietzsche if they hadn't seen some commonality between his and their own views and attitudes. I know that some people say they entirely perverted his work - I suppose the question is open to argument both ways. He had a friendship with the other darling of the Nazis, Richard Wagner, with whom he eventually fell out - so maybe there is cause to wonder.

The punk rock analogy may have something in it. But being subversive for its own sake has it's drawbacks. How can we know where he's doing that and where he's not?

 

I never approached Nietzche's work with that question in mind, I'm reading it as suggesting an aspect of inauthenticity to his work and I never got that impression. I suppose slightly rewording my previous post a bit may have not lead you to that question, but perhaps suffice it to say that his subversiveness jumps off the page at times. However I do agree that there are drawbacks in his approach.

I think his effectiveness is in deconstructing the ideas and institutions he takes issue with. I like that it doesn't feel as if he is speaking from some lofty, authoritative position, which aside from perhaps Socrates to some extent, (although pretty much everyone Socrates interacts with elevates his prowess) is something I've not really encountered when reading any other Philosophy. This is impressive, cause at times, Nietzsche has some very flowery poetic passages. And he did, at least for me, make me cognizant of some things I had generally took for granted when reading Philosophy.

A drawback however is that once Nietzsche deconstructs something, it can feel a bit muddled or lacking a clear direction when suggesting alternative approaches and this is where I think he lacks compared to some philosophers whom tended to follow more strict rules of Philosophy. For instance, comparing him to Descartes, they both have their respective captivating slogan with Nietzsche proclaiming "God is Dead" and Descartes proclaiming "I think therefore I am". But when thinking about the general essence of their respective Philosophies, I find it much more easy to follow Descartes's Reductionism to see how he would have logically arrived at such a slogan, as where with Nietzsche, the arrival of his slogan seems somewhat ambiguous between metaphor and his reasoning.

 

Yes, and Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is an important marker in how that occurs. It's a subversive statement of what I'd call the Frankenstein syndrome--a justification for the "free spirited" genius to free himself of the fetters of conventional morality and assert his creative "will to power",even if it means domination and harm to the weak. Christianity, he says, is a "slave morality" at the core of the "herd animal morality" of the western Europe of his day, that has "beaten everything joyful, assertive, and autocratic out of man and turned him into a 'sublime abortion'." Needless to say, the book was influential on the later Nazis, although they didn't like the parts where he praises the Jews and denounces Anti-Semites. This can be heady stuff for college undergraduates, and it provides a rationale for the cutthroat captains of industry worshiped by Republican ideologues (although they prefer the more respectable version in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.) Unfortunately, the people who take it seriously are not necessarily Supermen, but more typically just greedy bastards or power mad misfits like Hitler. Nietzsche, himself, was something of a misfit, sickly most of his life, and ending up in a mental hospital, literally believing he was Napoleon, along with Jesus and the Buddha. His mind was eventually consumed by syphilis-- a sad fate for a Superman.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=280Ev9h_C3c#!

 

All good points. TBH I don't read a lot of philosophy these days - 25 years ago I considered doing a degree in the subject, was offered a place on a course, but went for sociology/history instead.The way things turned out, I had to drop out after a year because of personal troubles. These days I'm perhaps a bit rusty on a lot of what I did read (quite a bit, but probably with many omissions)

What you say about Nietzsche's use of poetic language is something with which I'd certainly agree. Some of his works, unlike the works of some philosophers, are quite readable, probably the most readable being 'Zarathustra'.
Like Karl Marx, Nietzsche is maybe better at saying what he thinks is wrong, and a bit short on detail as to any proposed solutions. My take on 'god is dead' is that along with many others in the 19th century, he found the kind of Christian intellectualism of the period stifling, limiting and actually hypocritical. And I can understand that. Also as it was quite a provocative thing to say back then, it probably made quite an impact at the time. He seems to have been popular with the generation of German intellectuals, of different hues, who came after. The novelist Herman Hesse for example was a great admirer (he was hated BTW by the Nazis). And I believe his ideas about history influenced Foucault and others.

If you were to give me the choice between chucking either Descartes or Nietzsche out of a falling aeroplane, bye bye Frederick I'm afraid..I suppose there's just something about him and his ideas I just don't like.

 

Since you mention that, as far as I recall, it was over Wagner's anti-Semitism that he and Nietzsche fell out. Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth though was anti-Semitic, and later became a supporter of the Nazis.

Evidently though, others such as Herman Hesse, who I mentioned in reply to GB, who were very much against the Nazis, found something in his work of value. I'm really not sure what though.I suspect it was to do with wanting to free themselves from Christianity. One can find elements of Nietzschean thinking in some Hesse's novels, 'Damian' for example. (I actually find Hesse a bit flaky - haven't read anything by him for a very long time).

There's the rub as they say. Seems to me that it's too easy to just see it in terms of a justification for unbridled power mania, delusions of grandeur and a host of other negative human traits.

 

[SIZE=11.5pt]Nietzche and other german philosophers like Arthur Schopenhauer were very much into Indian philosophy. [/SIZE]

The concept of beyond good and evil is there is in Indian philosophy.


However to understand this, one has to understand meditation as well, because the understanding of what lies beyond good and evil comes through transcendence of the intellect into experiential understanding through meditation, not through mere intellectual understanding.


Nietzche merely intellectualized the whole thing and came up with nihilistic ideas .


Krishna states in the Uddhava Gita thus, 'Evil is relative understanding of good and evil. '


Imho, if Nietzche had studied meditation and tried it out, he could have escaped the insanity that consumed him and relegated him to a mental asylum at a young age.

The potential for enlightenment or Buddhahood was there in him, but the west had not much access to the knowledge and practice of meditation in those times in the late nineteenth century.

 

I like Schopenhauer.

 

I have read that Nietzsche had contracted syphilis, and that may have been a causative factor in his mental breakdown. I think his disposition was not that of a meditative person. He seems to have been what the Gita calls the 'rajasic' type, but frustrated. A product of 19th century German culture. And to me, his work bears that time stamp.