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Historical Context for Beyond Good and Evil

The historical context that Nietzsche was responding to was not limited to his own specific decade or century, but spanned the distance from ancient Greek culture to the present day. Much of his work struggles with Christianity, which he sees as responsible for the weakening of man. He also attacks the continuing influence of the Alexandrian thinkers, whose Socratic doctrines separated man from his forces of vital nourishment.

One historical event that did affect Nietzsche personally was the war between Prussia and France. Soon after arriving at the university in Leipzig, he left again to fight for Prussia. He was allowed a leave of absence on the condition that he did not actually fight, so he joined the medical corps. After only a month on the front, however, he fell seriously ill and went home to recuperate. In the preface to The Birth of Tragedy that he later added, Nietzsche writes that he wrote this book "in spite of the time in which it was written." As the battle raged, he says, he was holed up in some alpine nook conceiving this book. And, as the peace treaty was being signed at Versailles, he himself made peace with his ideas and completed the final draft of the book. Nietzsche portrays himself as being very much outside the stream of current events even as he was struggling to formulate a theory of modern culture that might explain these events.

Philosophical Context for Beyond Good and Evil

As The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche's first published book, it is a rather awkwardly written representation of his early ideas. Nietzsche lamented as much in a supplementary preface, which he wrote fifteen years later in 1886. The older Nietzsche looks back, as we all do, with embarrassment on the naiveté of his younger self. He writes, "Today I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates..."(section three). Writing with the benefit of hindsight and with many great philosophical successes at his back, the older Nietzsche can afford to laugh at himself. However, he also clearly shows in this later preface that the questions he dared to pose in The Birth of Tragedy are still entirely relevant to him, as is the importance of Schopenhauer, under whose influence he wrote the book. The ideas contained in this small first treatise persisted in his more sophisticated works.

Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay, entitled "On Truth and Lies in an Nonmoral Sense," demonstrates some key developments in his thought. In this essay, Nietzsche rejects universal constraints, claiming that what we call objective truth is only an army of metaphors. There are clear connections here to the criticisms of Socratic thought that Nietzsche presents in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche's contention that "truth" was an idea created for comfort flows naturally from his criticism of Socratic optimism. Objective truth, the foundation upon which scientists build their theories, is only a phantasm. Socrates thought he could uncover the secrets of the universe with logic. But, if 'truth' is relative, then no amount of theoretical thinking can pin it down.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886), Nietzsche takes this subjectivity one step further. There are no absolute moral standards, he argues. Exploitation is not an inherently objectionable activity, but rather its moral acceptability depends upon the position of the one who exploits in society. Nietzsche explains that his philosophy argues from "the perspective of life," rather than from dusty scholarship. In this argument, we see that Nietzsche continues to draw from imagination, self-assertion and originality, traits which, in The Birth of Tragedy, he accorded to the Dionysian artist. Nietzsche frames this attack on 'truth' as a specific criticism of Christian doctrines.

In his next book, On the Geneology of Morals, A Polemic, Nietzsche advances his critique of objectivity still further. Traditional moral standards, he argues, are a product of Christian weakness and should be discarded. Feelings of guilt and bad conscience are an unhealthy and unnecessary limitation on our powers. They are shackles that Christianity has put on our progress. Nietzsche argues that there is no "God's eye," no standpoint from which we may gain a universal perspective. Everything is relative: "there are no facts, only interpretations." Because there is no absolute moral force, we are then responsible for setting our own standards. This is a strongly Existentialist aspect of Nietzsche.

Nietzsche's attacks on modern culture continue in his later works, which include: The Case of Wagner, A Musician's Problem (1888), Twilight of the Idols, or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer (1888), The Antichrist, Curse on Christianity (1888), and Ecce Homo, How One Becomes What One Is (1888). In this last book, Nietzsche wishes to replace Jesus, the god of the 'other' world, with Dionysus, the god of life's vitality and exuberance. Thus we see that while he may have regretted the style of his Birth of Tragedy in later years, Nietzsche remained faithful to its precepts throughout his scholarly life.

Nietzsche has had an enormous effect on thinkers from all disciplines in the 20th century. Some examples include Camus, Derrida, Foucault, Freud, Heidegger, and Yeats. Unfortunately, his mental health collapsed in 1889, and he was to spend the next eleven years of his life in a feeble mental state, unaware of his expanding influence. One other group that looked to Nietzsche for inspiration was the Nazi party, many of whose ideas seemed to coincide with Nietzsche's in theory, although certainly not in practice. Many have seen the sinister references to the "ultimate" man, the Aryan race, and the superiority of the German spirit as a kind of proto-Nazism. However, others argues that Nietzsche's sister, who took charge of his writings after his collapse, endeavored to alter many of them to accord with her clearly stated Nazi beliefs. It is difficult to know just how far she took her alterations, but we must always keep that fact in mind when analyzing Nietzsche's texts.

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