Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche

In fact, upon initially encountering certain passages in this book, I found myself rolling my eyes back in my head and clucking my tongue in disgust. On a first take, and without trying to charitably understand his philosophical message, this stance might strike one as retrograde and misogynist. The world is ambiguous, and Nietzsche thinks it virtuous to recognize the full depth of this ambiguity, savoring it and relishing its potential.įor Nietzsche, women symbolize everything that is mysterious, irrational, obscure and superficial. Nietzsche wants us to see things through new eyes and to drop the old “masks” that encourage us to carve reality up into conventional, neatly categorized and mutually exclusive regions. Throughout this book, he admonishes us to be “free spirits” in the sense of becoming accustomed to the “tension” and ambiguity of the world so that we can utilize it for our own truly creative projects.

This initiating metaphor might strike some readers as bordering on sexist, but the lesson that Nietzsche hopes to teach us in this book is how to regard the world in a manner that transcends such simplistic dichotomies as male/female, good/evil, true/false, free/unfree, strong/weak, etc. “Supposing truth is a woman–what then?” These, the very first words in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, set the mood for everything else that is to come. Tags 1980's punk rock Albert Camus american philosophical association anarchism anarchist bookfair Antichrist APA conference Arthur Schopenhauer Buddha Buddhism Cinematic Nihilism Cloud Atlas College of Marin death DOA Edinburgh University Press existentialism Fascism Fight Club Film film and philosophy Friedrich Nietzsche Glasgow Horror horror films Humor Immanuel Kant International Association for the Philosophy of Humor Jean-Paul Sartre John Marmysz Lars Von Trier Laughing at Nothing literature Marin County Punk Rock marin punk rock Martin Heidegger meaning of life music NEDs Nietzsche nihilism No Frills Buffalo pandemic philosophy Philosophy of Humor political philosophy punk punk rock punk rock flyers religion Robert Burns Runaway Horses sacrapolitical sacrifice sacripolitical San Francisco Punk Rock scotland Sea of Fertility Tetralogy Spring Snow teaching Teaching philosophy The Angelic Upstarts The Eternal Return The Nihilist: A Philosophical Novel The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook The Pukes The Wicker Man travel Under the Skin UXB world cinema World War Z Yukio Mishima zero ZerOrigIndia

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche