Beyond Good and Evil
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886)
Friedrich Nietzsche
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Not that your morality is wrong. That there was never anything there to be wrong about.
- Catch rate
- 16 / 255
- Base research
- 252
- Stat total
- 350
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Cited for this book
Nietzsche saw what the comfortable atheists of his century would not: without God, their values have no ground. He said so, and despised those who would not follow him. The answer to him is not a slogan. It is the point that his own claims need somewhere to stand, and without God there is nowhere left.
Moves learned
This book learns nothing new by levelling — everything it knows, it knew from the start or brought with it through development.
What answers it
The specific move or chapter of Scripture that cuts through this one, and why. The number is how much harder it hits than usual — ×4 is four times the normal force.
A standard that grew up in history can be outgrown by history — and this one is being appealed to as though it could not.
Named in its own vocabulary: this is not an argument that the law is false. It is a refusal to be under one.
Nietzsche says the value is real and the ground is gone. Sorley keeps the value and says the ground is a Mind — which is the half Nietzsche will not consider.
A man who says there is no fact of the matter has just told you a fact about the matter.
Each of these five reached its result by first assuming something it never argued for — that religion climbs from crude to refined, or that a miracle cannot happen, or that a document reporting one must be late. Dispute the results and there are ten thousand of them. Ask instead what had to be true before the first page was opened, and there is one.
Luther wrote this against Erasmus three centuries earlier and it answers Nietzsche exactly: a faith that asserts nothing is not a humbler faith. It is not the thing being discussed.
Nietzsche asks what a conviction is FOR. Luther answers where it comes from, which is the question Nietzsche does not ask.
He does not dispute that it happened. He disputes that it was good — which is a moral claim, from the man who has just said there are none.