Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil

An introduction to the endeavor of elucidating it

Introduction to this endeavor

This is going to be the first part in a series of posts about Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good & Evil. A word of caution before I start: This is not your average medium article. If your attention span can barely go more than 9 seconds and you are in need of a 99 cent cheeseburger in order to duly consume knowledge then please close this page right now. I am going to be assuming that you already have a deep interest in the subject which is: learning more about the world and, however not learning more about Nietzsche’s philosophy. This means that the purpose of these essays will be general discussions and thus the target is a general audience with the abovementioned interest.

The book itself needs no introduction but suffice it to say that it is one of philosophy’s most important books and a goldmine of ideas where you frequently encounter a dozen of them per page, which equals a full 200-page book of the average joe out there. Although the sum and weight of Beyond Good & Evil’s ideas per page would not be equal to the sum of ideas throughout hundreds of joe’s books.

Scope of articles

I am not going to go through every section of the book. Even if I was capable of such an endeavor -which I am not- I think such an endeavor would be futile as is seen for example by Jung’s seminars on Zarathustra: Almost half of them deal with very few portions of the book until Jung finally realizes that he will need another lifetime to finish it at this pace and decides to speed it up.

Therefore I am going to cherry-pick parts of the book that interest me (or you if you should have any suggestions) and even in those parts I will most likely not address every single train of thought that arises of this or that sentence/word.

This is a book where you can go on hours upon hours of trying to follow all the train of thoughts spurred by a single page and so the scope of these articles must be somehow limited.

I will also mostly focus on the final part of the book, ‘What is noble’.

Timespan

I intend to publish at least one article per month and will continue to do so until I am done. Even then I intend to go back to the individual articles and add any new thoughts that I might have had. This basically means that after the initial run I intend to update these articles for life (eternally occurring 😅) or at least for a very long time.

Contributions

If you have any thoughts that you feel should be part of the articles please comment on the individual article and I shall consider incorporating it. Also, it goes without saying that if you have any subjection to the already articulated ideas, you are most welcome to point them out and again I shall reflect any appropriate changes in the article.

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