Name: Beyond good and evil
ISBN: 9781453640203

Beyond good and evil

"Beyond Good and Evil" is a collection of aphorisms and essays in which Friedrich Nietzsche explores a wide range of philosophical and moral themes. The book is divided into nine parts, each containing a series of short, often provocative, and thought-provoking passages. Nietzsche begins by challenging traditional moral and philosophical concepts, including the notions of good and evil. He argues that conventional moral values are often shaped by the interests and prejudices of those in power and that they inhibit individual freedom and creativity. Throughout the book, Nietzsche critiques various philosophical and cultural ideas, including religion, metaphysics, morality, and democracy. He calls for a reevaluation of these concepts and a reexamination of our understanding of truth, knowledge, and ethics. Nietzsche introduces the idea of the "will to power," which he sees as a fundamental driving force behind human actions and desires. He suggests that individuals should embrace their instincts and desires rather than suppress them in the name of conventional morality. The book also contains Nietzsche's criticisms of various philosophers and thinkers, including Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Socrates, among others. He encourages readers to think critically and independently, to question the status quo, and to live authentically.

What Hacker News says

mikert89Aug 2026

I had a similar experience, but I think a lot of other modern philosophy is really pedantic and builds upon a thousand years of writings. So its very hard to follow without proper academic study or understanding what its in response to.

Nietzsche has paragraphs that could be studied and independently thought about without even reading the rest of the book/chapter. You can crack open beyond good and evil and just start reading a random page.

I still would argue his thought is far more groundbreaking than any contemporaries

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acyouJan 2025

Are we going to see our institutions flexibly re-align themselves basically every US election cycle? Or do the recent changes at Facebook and Amazon, and this essay, herald a long-term shift to the right in USA politics?

Where individuals, institutions and society have to be flexible/whiplashed around in order to survive and thrive, it can be good from time to time, but it's not great for everyone to have too much such change on an ongoing basis.

If we're talking about the origins of wokeness, I would tend to go back further and look at Christianity as a whole. Suggest Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, which states that the morality of the day is somewhat arbitrarily dictated by those currently in power, and you had better snap to it and conform, which I think is more or less what we're seeing here?

Specifically, the idea of wokeness originates in the Christian conceptual understanding of pity, which is basically that we should sympathise with and help other people. Further, wokeness has in it that we don't accept people who work to benefit themselves and their cadres at the expense of society at large. Of course, this is ultimately incompatible with VC, which is why wokeness and tech/VC ultimately make an odd pairing, inevitably destined for a split, which we are now seeing.

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kstenerudOct 2024

Warriors and Worriers (Benenson)

The Prince (Machiavelli)

Beyond Good And Evil (Nietzche)

A History of Western Philosophy (Russel)

The Fourth Turning (Strauss, Howe)

Also, Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius (Machiavelli) is a fascinating read on human political machinations (albeit fairly slanted by Machiavelli's personal views)

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unrestifarianMay 2024

Second Nietzsche - Beyond Good & Evil + Thus Spake Zarathustra.

TPZ is really a poetic/mock religious text version of BG&E.

The first few chapters of BG&E ask the question: why we humans seek knowledge at all? What drives the will to knowledge. . .feelings? A question most scientists never even think to ask. . but that seems the most radical question of all (as in getting to the 'root' of it all).

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keiferskiJul 2023

There are a lot of great suggestions here: https://fivebooks.com/category/religion/

But other than Taylor, I recommend Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution, William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience, and most books by Nietzsche, but specifically Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morality. You might want to pick up an anthology of papers / topics, like Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology by Pojman. Max Weber and Durkheim are also considered to be foundational thinkers in religious sociology. If you get through all that and are looking for something a bit more obscure but super interesting, I would also check out "process philosophy" or "process theology", which addresses a lot of the traditional issues with religious arguments.

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keiferskiJul 2023

Copying a post I made a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28388844

Since this is HN, you might be interested in language, logic, and similar topics. If this is the case, you will likely enjoy analytic philosophy, especially Quine, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Popper.

However, if you are coming at philosophy cold, I really don't recommend the academic analytic path. It's too easy to get lost in the weeds and decide that all this stuff is just too obscure and abstruse to be useful.

If that's the case, I suggest a very brief reading list to shake up your default preconceptions of how the world works. The goal here is to make you question your basic assumptions, which is when philosophy is at its best.

- Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. Classic Stoic works. Very accessible entry points to classical philosophy and Stoicism.

- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche. If you read this and understand it, your entire conception of ethics, values, and how we use labels like "good" or "evil" will be shaken up.

- Republic by Plato. If you live in a Western country, you probably think that democracy is the highest and best form of government. Plato thinks otherwise and it's worth understanding why.

- A Tractate on Japanese Aesthetics by Donald Richie. This is a fairly recent book but it serves as an excellent introduction to East Asian and Japanese thought via art and aesthetics.

- I Ching. The Chinese classic is super easy to read and is diametrically opposite to the static, eternal universal Platonic model much of Western thought it built upon.

- You should also probably read something from India, the Islamic world, and Russia, but I wanted to keep my list fairly short. Some recommendations here are The Bhagavad Gita, Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, and anything by Dostoyevsky. For reference: I have a bachelor's in philosophy from a program in the US which is almost exclusively analytic in nature.

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