Beyond Good and Evil

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses the philosophers of the past of being uncritical and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. Specifically, he accuses them of founding great metaphysical systems on the faith that the good man is the opposite of the evil man, rather than a different expression of the same basic impulses that find a more direct expression in the evil man. The work moves towards the realm "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind traditional morality that Nietzsche subjects to destructive criticism in favor of what he considers an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectival nature of knowledge. and the dangerous condition. of the modern individual. Of Nietzsche's four "late period" writings, Beyond Good and Evil most closely resembles the aphoristic style of his middle period. In it he exposes the deficiencies of the habitually called "philosophers" and identifies the qualities of the "new philosophers": imagination, self-affirmation, danger, originality and the "creation of values". He then questions some of the key presuppositions of the ancient philosophical tradition such as "self-consciousness", "knowledge", "truth" and "free will", and explains them as inventions of moral conscience. Instead,