Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Overview

Includes a new chronology and further reading

This work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a "slave morality." With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own "will to power" upon the world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780486115511
Publisher:	Dover Publications
Publication date:	04/25/2012
Series:	Dover Thrift Editions: Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	1 MB
Age Range:	14 - 18 Years

About the Author

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a 19th-century German philosopher and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism. Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, perspectivism, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power. Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. At the age of 24 he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel (the youngest individual to have held this position), but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life. In 1889 he went insane, living out his remaining years in the care of his mother and sister until his death in 1900.

Table of Contents

After kicking open the doors to twentieth-century philosophy in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche refined his ideal of the superman with the 1886 publication of Beyond Good and Evil. Conventional morality is a sign of slavery, Nietzsche maintains, and the superman goes beyond good and evil in action, thought, and creation. Nietzsche especially targets what he calls a "slave morality" that fosters herdlike quiescence and stigmatizes the "highest human types."In this pathbreaking work, Nietzsche's philosophical and literary powers are at their height: with devastating irony and flashing wit he gleefully dynamites centuries of accumulated conventional wisdom in metaphysics, morals, and psychology, clearing a path for such twentieth-century innovators as Thomas Mann, André Gide, Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all of whom openly acknowledged their debt to him.