Friedrich NietzscheBeyond Good and EvilReading Guide

Part One. On the Prejudices of the Philosophers

1. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is considered one of his mature works in

ethics. As the title makes clear, he has philosophical questions about the

distinction between what is considered good and evil, and he is trying to move

beyond past ways of conceiving of the distinction. The book is quite puzzling—

especially on a first reading. In order to understand the text, some background

will be helpful. Part of the background that is needed is an understanding of the

history of Western culture—especially as it takes shape in the classical period of

the Greeks. Another part of the background that is needed is an understanding of

the history of philosophy in the Western tradition. Nietzsche suggests that a

number of the problems that philosophers consider to be “timeless” questions

about the truth are really best understood in terms of the particular questions that

arose in a culture at some point in its history. For instance, questions about the

nature of truth itself and whether it has some timeless character arose within

Greek culture in the writings of Plato, Aristotle and others. There are reasons that

these questions were pressing for the classical Greek philosophers, and we need to

understand those reasons in order to appreciate the questions they were trying to

answer.

2. Here is some background for understanding what Nietzsche is doing in Beyond

Good and Evil. If we look at the history of Western cultures, we see different

cultures coming into ascendency and then dissipating at different historical

periods. Consider the following timeline across some of the history of Western

cultures, along with the names of famous philosophers from each period:

a. Ancient Greek culture of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle (600-300 BC)

b. Roman culture of Cicero and the Stoics (300BC-400 AD)

c. Medieval European culture of St. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and

William of Ockham (500AD-1400AD)

d. Modern European Culture of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and

Immanuel Kant (1500-1800AD)

e. 19th Century and Contemporary Culture of John Stuart Mill and Friedrich

Nietzsche.

3. All of these philosophers were trying to find the truth about what we can know

and how we ought to live. As such, virtually all of these philosophers take their

cue from the kinds of questions Plato raises in the Socratic dialogues.

a. In the Euthyprho, Plato portrays Socrates as asking: what is the nature of

piety, justice and, more generally, virtue? Before he examines the answers

that Euthyphro offers, Socrates articulates three key assumptions: first,

piety is the same and alike in every action that is pious; second, piety and

impiety are opposites; third, piety has one form or appearance. Each of

these assumptions express the idea that there is a truth about the real

nature of virtue. For example, we take it to be true that piety and justice

are good, and that impiety and injustice are wrong. As such, the fact that

piety and impiety, justice and injustice, and virtue and vice are opposites

is, in some sense, rooted in the idea that truth and falsity are opposites.

4. Nietzsche starts by posing a series of questions that anyone who is engaged in

philosophical inquiry should be able to answer. The first key questions surface

in chapter 1: Who really is it that here questions us? What really is it in us that

wants ‘the truth’? One reason he seems to pose the questions in this style is that

he would like for us to take the questions in a personal way. Are we trying to

answer questions posed by others? Or, are these questions that we must ask

ourselves? What is in us that gives rise to these questions in the first place? The

last version of the question seems to call out for an answer that is given in terms

of the basic faculties that are involved in our cognition. Is the source of the

questions our reason, will, feelings, imagination, or something else?

5. In the Apology, Socrates tries to understand the meaning of the Oracle of Delphi,

and he tries to do this by working from the interpretative assumption that the

oracle is a riddle. The priestess at the temple of Apollo were asked the question

“Who is the wisest in all of Athens?” and the answer they gave was “Socrates is

wisest.” After questioning the politicians, poets and craftsmen, Socrates came to

the conclusion that none of these people could answer the most important

questions: “What is justice? What is wisdom? What is virtue?” But all three

groups of people took themselves to know the answers to the questions. The only

sense in which Socrates is wiser than these people who had reputations for

wisdom is that he did not assume that he already knew the answers to the

questions. As such, the politicians, poets and craftsmen took themselves to have

knowledge but they were really ignorant. Socrates, on the other hand, knew that

he did not have such wisdom. The advantage of knowing this about oneself is

that, by seeing that one does not already have adequate answers to the questions,

one will thereby have the motivation needed to go in search for the right answers.

Those who take themselves to have wisdom but who lack it will have no motive

to start the search.

6. Nietzsche seems to be drawing on these Socratic dialogues as a way of raising

some fundamental questions about the impulses that are needed to engage in

honest inquiry in search of the truth. We who live in the contemporary period

take truth to be the aim of all real inquiry. Our model of the most successful kind

of inquiry is found in the empirical sciences. Philosophers in the modern period,

such as Hume, Kant and Mill, are modeling philosophical inquiry about questions

in ethics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology on the scientific method.

Nietzsche is asking these philosophers—and us—what the value is of having a

will that takes truth as its main aim? Granted that, like any good scientist, we are

all in the search for the truth, why should we value truth higher than untruth? Or,

to put it in clearer terms: what is the value of uncertainty, ignorance and error in

comparison to the value of truth? We might think that the ignorance and error are

the very things we’re trying to avoid. The truth has a positive value, but

ignorance and error lack any such positive value. As such, we have pretty good

reasons for trying to avoid these things.

7. Nietzsche suggests that this assumption that truth has positive value and that

ignorance and error lack any positive value might very well turn out to be a

mistake. When it comes to the most fundamental principles that are at the

foundations of modern culture—including the logical principles of non-

contradiction and excluded middle, and the metaphysical principles of causality

and sufficient reason, and the moral principles that govern our ideas of good and

evil--it might turn out that these principles are not literally true. Having said that ,

these principles may have value independent of being literally true. Nietzsche

wants to examine the value that such principles might have if we think of them as

something like a guess or a conjecture.

8. Starting in the second section of Part One, Nietzsche characterizes a discussion

that goes back and forth between those, like the modern philosophers, who say

that they are in the search for truth, and those, like Nietzsche, who insist on

starting with these questions about the value of uncertainty, ignorance and error.

9. In chapter 2, he poses a key question: “How could something originate in its

antithesis?” Nietzsche asks this general question because he is trying to

understand how something like truth might originate in something like error, or

how freedom might originate in processes of brute causation, or how rationality

might originate in animal impulses. In response to these questions: the other

philosophers respond by saying that it is impossible for something to originate

from its opposite. As such, Nietzsche claims that the fundamental faith of other

philosophers is in antithetical values. They take the opposition between central

conceptions, such as the oppositions between truth and falsity and between good

and evil as givens. These things, in their very nature, appear to be dichotomies.

Part Two: The Free Spirit

1. Nietzsche starts off with the kind of assumptions that we find Socrates making in

the Apology in response to the Oracle of Delphi. Instead of assuming—as many

other philosophers have done—that we know much. Nietzsche takes same stance

the Socrates adopts in response to the Oracle. He wants to start from the

assumption that he knows very little. This assumption is one of relative

ignorance: we should assume that we do not have knowledge of the most

important matters—such as how to live our lives. By starting from this

assumption of ignorance, we can then ask the questions honestly and engage in

inquiry with the aim of finding the strongest answers.

2. This starting point is different from what we find in many philosophical works.

In Descartes’ Meditations, for instance, he starts by trying to isolate those claims

that we can hold with complete certainty. On his account, we can have such

certainty about our own nature as a thinking self that exists. While the starting

points are very different, the guiding assumptions behind Hume’s radical

empiricism are very similar. Hume doubts that the principles of reason can

supply us with certainty about any matters of fact. As such, he turns to the

evidence of the senses. The content of our impressions are something, on Hume’s

account, that we simply cannot doubt. If I have an impression of red when

looking at a stop sign, the claim that it is a quality of redness that is before my

mind is something about which I can have complete certainty. The reason is that,

when it comes to the quality of any given impression, there is no possibility of

error.

3. This is the place where Nietzsche wants to question other philosophers and the

assumptions they have adopted as starting points. Instead of making an

assumption that there are some things that are immune from error, Nietzsche

wants to question the very basis of what makes some claims correct and other

claims erroneous. The apparent antithesis that is woven through the fabric of the

languages we use to express our claims about matters of fact is the opposition

between truth and falsity. Nietzsche claims that this opposition hides something

from us. What it hides is the fact that this opposition—like every antithesis

present in the way we think and act—may very well have evolved slowly over

time. If that is the case, then the opposition between every thesis and antithesis

may have grown oppositions by a continuous process from ideas that did not

express such dichotomies.

4. This gives rise to a key question: how is it possible for an opposition between

thesis and antithesis—such as the opposition between truth and falsity or between

good and evil—to evolve in a continuous manner from ideas that did not express

such oppositions? The stark contrast between those ideas that do not express

oppositions—such as the contrast between more and less plausible, or the contrast

between better and worse—and those ideas that do express oppositions seems to

suggest that there is a dramatic discontinuity between the two kinds of ideas.

Nietzsche claims that these are competing hypotheses, and that we see which

provides a better explanation of the data.

5. Nietzsche shifts his attention from these questions about truth and falsity to

questions about aesthetics. These are questions that he addressed in a series of

earlier essays and books, including “On Truth and Falsity in Their Ultramoral

Sense,” and On the Birth of Tragedy. The reason he shifts attention from a theory

of cognition to aesthetics is that he thinks there are prior questions that need to be

addressed before we can evaluate the competing hypotheses concerning the nature

of the opposition between truth and falsity. On his account, every philosophy

starts out as a tragedy. In his earlier work on the origins of the tragic spirit in

ancient Greek culture, Nietzsche examined the contrast between the Apollonian

and Dionysian impulses. The Dionysian impulse is a symbol for the general drive

for totality among the enormous diversity of qualities found in our experience.

The Apollonian impulse, on the other hand, is a symbol for the general drive for

unity of an individual. On Nietzsche’s account, the epic poetry of Homer

represents the growth of the drive for unity of aesthetic experience in the

Apollonian spirit. The lyric poetry of Archilochus represents the growth of the

drive for totality in aesthetic experience in the Dionysian spirit. The birth of

tragedy in the poetry of Aeschylus, and the development of this form of art in

Sophocles, represents a drive to bring these two impulses into harmony with one

another.

6. For some time, the poetry of the ancient Greeks embodied a healthy growth of

both the Apollonian and the Dionysian impulses—and the combination of the two

in tragedy. In the poetry of Euripides, however, there is a shift in attention to

expressing the way things actually are. Instead of celebrating the great deeds of

heroes such as Odysseus and the tragic fall of figures such as Oedipus in works of

art that are staged in a world of the ideal, the poetry of Euripides was designed to

portray the wants and beliefs, along with the struggles and failings of human

beings as we find them in the world of the actual. This shift in the art of the

classical Greeks from the ideal to the actual paved the way for a philosopher like

Socrates to search for the reasons that explain what is true. As such, Niezsche has

developed an evolutionary account of the gradual development of an impulse to

the truth in “scientific” works—such as we find in the writings of Plato and

Aristotle—from artistic works of fiction that are designed to portray and celebrate

a fictional world of the ideal.

7. Nietzsche is engaged in two projects. One is a negative project of trying to

understand where things have, in one way or another, gone awry. In many cases,

he is examining a particular culture at a particular time. As such, he is asking,

where did the classical Greeks go wrong, or the Romans, or where are we

moderns going wrong. Other philosophers are engaged in the same kind of

criticism of the ideas and principles present in a given culture. For the most part,

however, they have focused mainly on this kind of question: “what is the truth of

the matter—and how did this or that culture arrive at a falsehood?” In addition to

asking that question, Nietzsche is also asking a question that he thinks is more

fundamental: did a given set of questions and a purported set of answers

represent a growth of the vitality of the soul of the individuals in that culture and

the spirit present in the society as a whole, or did they undermine that vitality and

lead to a weakening of the spirit?”

8. One reason that he often shifts the question is that Nietzsche believes all ideas—

including especially our values—can and should be introduced as conjectures as a

part of an ongoing series of experiments. The experimental method depends upon

a willingness to introduce ideas that may, on further inspection, turn out to be

false. At the initial phases of the inquiry, however, we are not in a position to say

what is true or what is false. Rather, we have some surprising phenomena that

calls out for explanation, and our initial explanations are introduced as conjectures

or guesses. Nietzsche is examining the marks of a good conjecture. What makes

a guess a good conjecture, especially when it is about a fundamental question that

has no obvious answer?

9. In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates asks a general question: how ought one to

live? The question is addressed to all, and he thinks that there are general

constraints that are imposed on any purported answer. In the search for an

adequate answer, we should always act on the argument that seems, on reflection,

to be supported by the strongest reasons. Nietzsche wants to stress a point that

Socrates makes in the Crito, which is that the evaluation of an argument must

always be something that is done by the individual person who is making the

decision. As he sits in the jail cell and faces the decision of whether to escape the

prison and go into exile or stay and accept the death penalty, Socrates says that he

ought to choose the option that is supported by the argument that seems the

strongest “to him.”

10. In stressing this point, Nietzsche claims that every evaluation of a particular

action or of a form of life must be made from one perspective or another. It is an

unwarranted dogmatism to suggest that we can appeal directly to universal truths

and, by doing so, make judgments that somehow avoid the perspective one has in

making an evaluation. He claim can be understood in the following way. Every

judgment we make is shaped by the background beliefs and values we accept. It

is not possible to make an evaluation that is somehow free of such a background.

More to point, however, Nietzsche agrees with Kant that every moral principle is

a general rule that must be interpreted in light of an ideal. The application of the

general principle to a particular case requires an ideal—otherwise it is not

possible to exercise proper judgment over the particular case.

a. In his account of judgment, Nietzsche insists that our personal ideals only

make sense in terms of larger ideals that are held by larger communities.

As such, the vision of life that you or I happen to hold in high esteem with

respect to the kind of life we think it is best to live is really a part of a

much larger set of ideals that have shaped the societal institutions and

practices in our culture. We see these larger ideals expressed in our

literature, science, religion, and morality. They are the product of a long

cultural history in which the particular ideals of individuals in the society

have been shaped by the larger ideals that are expressed in the institutions

and practices of the society and, vice versa, the larger ideals that are

expressed in the institutions and practices of the society are shaped ever so

slowly by changes in the particular ideals of individuals living in that

society.

b. The individuals who have had the greatest impact on the evoluation of the

larger social ideals founds in the institutions and practices of the culture

are those individuals who are most exceptional. We can take this quite

literally in order to form a first approximation of what Nietzsche means.

Those individuals who stand out as deviating strongly from the rule have

disproportionate impact on the subsequent changes in the meaning of the

rule.

11. We can frame a key question in terms of rules and exceptions: which has priority

with respect to the origins of our values—the rule or the exception? Many

philosophers, such as Aquinas and Kant, claim that our moral rules are grounded

on fundamental principles that are universal and necessary. Nietzsche is

suggesting that we can explain the origin of the rules that are embodied in our

values by appealing to exceptional cases of individual actions. In order for a rule

to grow from an action that is exceptional, the action must be representative of

something great. In the upcoming sections, he will examine the requirements for

what makes an exceptional action something that is representative.

Part Three. The Religious Nature

1. Nietzsche begins his discussion of religion in this section by examining two

things: the rule of different religions in different cultures and, the role of

philosophers in drawing on religious ideas in their attempt to answer

philosophical questions. Pascal is a philosopher who wanted to answer the

following question. Given the evidence that is before us, is it rational to believe

in God, or is it rational to deny the reality of God?

2. Philosophers have argued for each of these positions on epistemological and

metaphysical grounds. Pascal offers a practical argument that is stated in the

terms of the following wager. One of the following must be the case. Either there

is a God that is all-knowing, all-powerful and all-good, or there is not. Let’s

consider the first of these possibilities. If there is such a God and I believe in him

and follow his commands, then it is reasonable to think that I will, at the end of

my life here on this earth, be rewarded with the infinite blessings of heaven. If

there is such a God and I don’t believe in him, then it is reasonable to think that I

will be punish with the infinite suffering of hell. Next, let’s consider the second

of the two possibilities. If there is no God and I believe there is, then I have one

(more) false belief. If there is no God and I do not believe in him, there I have

one (more) true believe. Given the enormity of the blessings and sufferings in

heaven and hell, these far outweigh any advantage we might gain from having one

more true belief or any disadvantage we might suffer from having one more false

belief. Consequently, there are strong practical reasons to belief in the reality of

God.

3. Nietzsche raises a question about the impulses guiding this philosophical inquiry

into the reality of God. Is Pascal asking this question because he has a genuine

curiosity that drives him to find the truth? Or, is he driven by some other kind fo

motive? Nietzsche wants to point out that the wager itself is predicated on two

motives: a desire for the pleasures one might obtain in heaven, and a fear of the

painful experiences one might suffer in hell. Neither of these motives, Nietzsche

suggests, are evidence of a courageous soul that is willing to sacrifice what is

needed in order to find the truth. Rather, these motives are marks of a soul that is

passive—one that is waiting to receive punishments or rewards from something

that stands over it with a power that makes the human will seem small and

insignificant. By posing the question about the reality of God in these practical

terms, Nietzsche suggests that Pascal’s own intellectual conscience is profound,

wounded, and monstrous. (45)

4. Nietzsche claims that, if we turn to the roots of the Christian religion itself, we

can see that it was founded from it beginning on the notion of sacrifice. In order

to show proper humility before God, Christians must sacrifice their freedom,

pride and self-confidence of spirit. Considered as an ideal that gives guidance for

the lives of Christians, he suggests that the idea of perfectly knowing, powerful

and good God is rooted in a willingness on the part of Christians to suffer. Early

Christians were made to suffer for their faith by the Romans who ruled over them.

They were persecuted, tortured, and put to death if they were unwilling to express

a loyalty to the supremacy of the Roman rulers and values and renounce their

faith in the supremacy of the values embodied in the Christian God. Instead of

fighting against this persecution, their faith taught them to turn the other cheek

and to accept the suffering. This represents a monstrous denial of their own will.

That is, it represents a paradoxical denial and acceptance of the values they have

given to themselves as Christians. It is a denial of the idea that the values have a

worth that is worth fighting for, but an acceptance of the idea the values dictate

that they should be willing to die in accordance with those values as an expression

that they have given their lives over to something other than themselves.

Nietzsche finds this absurd in the same way that some works of art are an

expression of the absurdism.

5. Nietzsche points out that the Christian values were interpreted in different ways

by the Northern and Southern European cultures. The Northern cultures of the

Germans, for instance, have taken a very serious attitude toward their Christian

values. As a result, the Protestant forms of Christianity that is dominant in

Germanic society represent a serious response to the Catholic values that were

dominant in the early Christian church. The Catholicism of the Southern “Latin”

cultures, on the other hand, represents a more vibrant and colorful celebration of

Christian values. The color and vibrancy found in the traditions of South

American societies such as Argentina and Brazil are a nice illustration of this

point. This helps to illustrate Nietzsche’s claim that all values—including those

that appear to be most conservative—are interpreted in light of the larger ideals

that are found in the fabric of different societies. (48)

6. If we think of the values of Western societies as having an evolutionary history,

then we can examine the movement from the values of classical Greek and

Roman cultures to the values of medieval and modern Christian cultures as

something that represents a continuous process of change. Nietzsche wants to

suggest that the highest ideals of classical Greek culture represented many things

that were healthy and vital for the Greek spirit. The evolution of the values

embodied in these classical Greek ideals into the values embodied in the later

Christian ideals is a change that has taken place by a process of revaluation. This

gives rise to a key question: as the ideals and values have evolved, how have the

attached sentiments and emotions developed? Has the process of the evolution of

values given rise to a spirit in the culture that is deeper and richer in its capacities

for meaning, or have the changes in the values resulted in a spirit that is, in some

respects, shallow and dull?

7. Exercising his own judgment in these matters, Nietzsche suggests that much that

was great and powerful in the spirit of the classical Greeks has been inverted—

literally turned upside down—in the spirit of the modern Christians. Those

capacities for feeling that were strong and robust have, over the course of many

centuries, become weak and small. What is more, the modern Christians have

inverted the order of things by calling what is weak and small “good” and

“intrinsically valuable.”

8. Nietzsche takes a step back from his evaluation of the changes that have been

wrought in our values by this evolutionary process, and he asks if there is a deeper

philosophical explanation of what these changes signify. On his account, the

revaluations in the modern history of modern Christianity are but the outward

signs of a long process of attentat in which the ancient opposition between the

subject and predicate concepts that give form to every judgment has been

subjected to a violent attack. Let’s consider what this explanation entails.

a. In the philosophical tradition that runs from classical works of Aristotle,

up through medieval writings of Aquinas, and into the modern critique of

Kant, there has been an long and detailed examination of the grounds of

judgment in every area of inquiry and action—from the scientific

judgments made in physics, biology and psychology, to the practical

judgments made in morality, politics and law. Exercising our scientific

judgment, modern scientists say that every mass is subject to brute forces,

that every living thing evolves by a process of adaptation and selection,

and that every thought obeys certain laws of association. Exercising our

practical judgment, modern practioners say that philanthropy is virtuous,

that democracy protects the rights of the people and that the rule of law is

essential for a just legal system.

b. Nietzsche sees that Kant’s critique of our grounds of judgment in theory

and practice is something that follows from and builds upon a long

tradition of questioning the grounds of judgments of our judgment. Kant

claims that this is something that grows from the exercise of our reflective

capacities. Every time each of us makes a judgment, we must ask

ourselves: why ought to think or act in this way? In asking this question,

we draw on the particular conceptions—such as the conceptions of force,

life, association, virtue, rights and justice above--that form the predicates

in the judgments that are made. In addition to reflecting on the marks

contained in the particular conceptions, Kant maintains that we must also

reflect on the general conditions that pertain to each kind of judgment we

make. There are general conditions that pertain to any theoretical

judgment, and there are general conditions that pertain to any practical

judgment. On this account, the general categories of substance, cause and

effect and reciprocity, for instance, and the particular conditions of

referring to things as being at a time, are the conditions that pertain to the

validity of every theoretical judgment. The general conceptions of abiding

by principles having the form of a categorical imperative and the end of

respecting the humanity of all are the conditions that pertain to the validity

of every theoretical judgment. This kind of reflection is something that

Kant calls “transcendental reflection.”

9. Nietzsche is asking a question about the very division between the object and the

subject that is found in every judgment. The key question is: has the relentless

philosophical questioning and criticism of the grounds of judgment done violence

to the division between the division between subject and object in our power of

judgment? As Kant points out, all rational beings are under a condition of totality

which imposes a demand that they bring their judgments into a systematic

harmony. The demand is not something that we are able, at any point in time, to

meet. Nevertheless, it is something that we must strive towards. What kind of

violence must be done to the opposition between object and subject in order to

make this endless striving possible?

10. It is widely recognized by the philosophers that the highest conception in our

general inventory of conception is that of God. It is the most general idea, it is the

most abstract, it is a conception of what is best, and a conception of what is most

complete. As such, Kant suggests that the conception of God is an Idea of reason

that embodies our response to the rational demand for totality in our every

judgment. Nietzsche is pressing the question: what has been happening to the

conception of God as result of the persistent philosophical questioning of the

grounds of judgment? Do we any longer believe that there is one Idea of reason

that has the power to bring every possible practical and theoretical judgment into

systematic unity?

a. Nietzsche asks: “Why atheism today?” The ancient Jewish notion of the

“Father” that rules, commands and punishes has been transformed over the

course of the history of Christianity. In the modern period, this conception

of God is no longer clear. Nietzsche says that God “seems incapable of

making himself clearly understood: is he himself vague about what he

means?” That, at least, is the question he has asked himself over the

course of his many conversations in which he has asked about the causes

of the decline of European theism. As he has listened for answers to these

questions, this is the philosophical conjecture he is offering as a possible

answer. Is it the correct answer?

11. Nietzsche offers and image of how we might understand the evolution of values

and the resulting transformation of our ideals. He says that man is surrounded by

a great space and that there are stars shining in the distance. Human beings can

navigate by these stars and thereby give their lives direction and meaning. Over

time, as the human beings have gained spiritual sight and insight, this distance

around them has expanded and ever new stars have come into view. In order to

gain greater spiritual sight, their spirit must continue to grow in its strength and

playfulness. He refers to the key images of the camel questioning the accepted

values, the lion fighting against those values that can’t stand up to the

questioning, and the playfulness of the child in creating new values in order to say

what is necessary for the growth of spirit (56-8).

Part Four. Maxims and Interludes

1. Over the course of the text, Nietzsche has been raising a number of questions

about how a philosopher should write in order to address the questions that he

thinks are pressing. At the same time, he is also raising questions about how a

reader should interpret what he has written. The reason these questions are so

pressing for Nietzsche is that he fully acknowledges that his writing is very

personal—that is, he is expressing ideas that are drawn from his own personal

perspective on these matters. Given the fact that one of the key points he wants to

make is that different people can and should interpret their values from different

perspectives, what choice does Nietzsche have when it comes to writing in a

personal style?

2. One of the forms of writing that he uses in the middle of the text is that of an

aphorism. These very short passages might appear to be entirely fragmentary and

disjointed, but looks can be deceiving. One reason Nietzsche might be writing in

this aphoristic style is that is his illustrating for the reader how his own ideas on

these matters have arisen. They do not arise in a fully developed and systematic

form. Rather, they are the seeds from which more developed ideas might grow.

In order to develop the latent conceptions, he will first need to water and nurture

the first expressions of the ideas. In time, however, they will need to be pounded

and shaped into a more durable form. The maxims expressed in this interlude are,

one might think, at different stages in this process. Some are relatively new,

while others have been hammered into their present form for some time.

3. Let us consider two of these aphorisms as examples. In section 97, Nietzsche

asks the following question: “What? A Great man? I always see only the actor

and his ideal.” (97) We know from his many statements that Nietzsche spent

considerable time studying the writings of the American essayist and poet, Ralph

Waldo Emerson. In fact, he says that Emerson’s writings were so close to his

own heart that he found it difficult to criticize those ideas in the regular manner.

In an series of essays on Representative Men, Emerson offers examples of great

people who he thinks are representative of our highest capacities. Plato is the

representative of “The Philosopher,” and Shakespeare is the represenative of “The

Poet,” Goethe is the representative of “The Writer” and Napoleon is the

representative of “The Man of the World.” Nietzsche agrees with Emerson in

thinking that these man are greater not as individuals, but as actors striving for an

ideal. In their striving for an ideal, they are representative of what is great in the

highest aspirations of mankind. This aphorism is a reminder that, like all writers

with high aspirations, Nietzsche is drawing on other writers—especially those

whose writings seem to him to have special meaning. This puts the reader in the

position of needing to interpret these writings in light of an ongoing conversation

that is taking place between a number of writers—which each has their own

perspective on the questions at hand.

4. In another aphorism, Nietzsche says that “there are no moral phenomena at all,

only a moral interpretation of the phenomena” (108). One of the points he is

making is that, strictly speaking, our moral values are not the only perspective

from which we can or should interpret the phenomena that seem to call out for

explanation. There are logical values, and aesthetic, and religious values and

political—and so on. What is more, the moral values we currently hold are not

the only moral values that we can draw from when interpreting the phenomena

before us. We are capable of thinking from the perspectives of the classical

Greeks and the medieval Christians, or from the perspectives of the modern

Germans, or the contemporary Americans. How, we should ask, is it possible to

move from one perspective to another when interpreting the moral phenomena

that call out for explanation.