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Should we really want to be “beyond good and evil”?
Some cautions based on Nietzsche’s texts
The man who is beyond ‘the city’ (human community), said Aristotle, is either a beast or a god. Both situations seem to have their attractions. It is probably an all-too-human human thing to wish to be more than simply human, to be rid of the vexing restrictions placed upon us by our mortality, and by morality.
Freud said it well: there are irremovable discontents associated with civilization (Kultur). These Unbehagen follow from being bound by rules which ask us to tame our basic drives, and divert their energies into causes and activities consistent with social cohesion. To be an adult, one can no longer remain a child — a third figure Aristotle missed in his ‘transhuman’ typology.
Friedrich Nietzsche in 1887 wrote an impassioned, extremely radical book, Beyond Good and Evil, one of a sequence of such dynamitic works cast at the modern West, and modern world more widely. He subtitled it a “Preface to a Philosophy of the Future”.
One purpose of the book, Nietzsche later tells us, was to explain in more prosaic terms the rhapsodic teaching he’d proclaimed in mock-Biblical form in his 1883-‘85 , Thus Spake Zarathustra.
Beyond Good and Evil, as good as its title, proposes that some people, at least, should become “beyond good and evil”. These folk would overcome the morality the modern West has inherited from the Jewish prophets, Socratic philosophy, and Christianity, at least after Saint Paul.
And a ‘good’ thing too, in an ultra-moral sense. Many, many readers have supposed Nietzsche was onto something, from Right and Left, the old and the young, mostly men but also some women.
It was in Thus Spake Zarathustra, after a prolonged period of isolation, far from human community, that Nietzsche had announced the advent, or at least the desirability, of the “Overman” or “Superman” (Ubermensch).
The old gods, above all, the God of the Bible, Nietzsche alleged, were dead or dying. Already by the 1870s, Nietzsche saw that fewer and fewer Europeans were flocking to their ancestral Churches. The new sciences had rolled back, one by one, claims suggested in the Bible about the natural world, and most…
