Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

This book was interesting to me because it was originally published in 1886 by a fairly famous philosopher that believed he was some sort of prophet because he thought his understanding of everything including human psychology in particular gave him special insight far ahead of his time to help predict the way things were headed. I suppose many skeptics also appreciate the way Nietzsche irreverently questioned almost everything he could and came up with some witty and memorable one-liners to make his points. Why stop with bashing religion when you can just as easily find clever-sounding reasons to criticize many other institutions or popular beliefs people care about such as morality in general, democracy, equal rights and equal opportunity, and the ability of scholarship/science to find objective truth?

Nietzsche basically claimed his philosophy was a daring experiment to see just how much truth anyone could really tolerate. Personally I think poor health and being alone too long made Nietzsche somewhat irritable and unbalanced when he wrote this book. Regardless of the reason, to me some of his grumpy reactions to “modern” ideas sound comical and sad at the same time especially considering the continued popularity and relative success of most of these same ideas to this day. What most readers nowadays will probably not find very amusing are some of Nietzsche’s sexist and racist comments.

This book has something to offend just about everyone and many of his ideas sound completely backwards and upside-down compared to the prevailing opinions in America such as his elitist preference for aristocratic political hierarchies and class privilege as a well-deserved birthright. Another unusual personality quirk is that he sounds like an extreme narcissist the way he fantasized about power and his own relative significance, showed a general disdain and lack of empathy for “common” or average people, and acted like he was so much smarter and knew better than everyone else up to that point including Plato, Descartes, Pascal, Kant, and John Stuart Mill among others.

It looks like much of Nietzsche’s thought started with the premise that “God is dead.” Basically Nietzsche thought that God was already much less believable and relevant to people than before but that most of them had not yet recognized the full implications of what this really meant so they continued to go about their business as if nothing had changed while holding onto values mostly inherited from Judeo-Christian traditions. The problem is that without an authoritative law-giver to defer to then in theory there can be no absolute moral laws.

My take on this debate is that it doesn’t really matter where morality came from because even if it only exists in people’s minds that still doesn’t necessarily make it any more convenient to act in a way that is morally offensive to your own conscience or to others you need to deal with in the real world. Nietzsche himself realized this but rather than just accepting this as the way things are he referred to this natural tendency to judge what is right or wrong disparagingly as a “herd animal” instinct that should be resisted and overcome by so-called uber-men or free spirits that make their own rules with reckless disregard for others. This sort of search for an atheistic meaning and purpose of life to fill the void left by the supposed disappearance of God looks like a major theme behind many of Nietzsche’s ideas. I guess there are worse ways people could spend their time.