Beyond Good and Evil: Deluxe Hardcover Edition

Beyond Good and Evil is a book first published in 1886 by the well-known philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It draws on and expands the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but with a more critical and polemical approach. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than just a different expression of the same basic impulses that find more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves into the realm “beyond good and evil” in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique in favor of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual. Some quotes from the book: “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” “One loves ultimately one’s desires, not the thing desired.” “The strength of a person’s spirit would then be measured by how much ‘truth’ he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.” “Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”