Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

As I said in my previous post, I feel a deep need to write something in response to all the Nietzsche I’ve been reading lately, yet it is impossible to write something resembling a book review (not that I’m very good at writing book reviews) that would somehow encapsulate his ideas in a few paragraphs or pages. There are too many ideas, too many new and truly thought-provoking concepts that come up in his work that I think the only way I can “exorcise” them is by now and again writing about some idea that’s been dogging me—and there certainly have been a lot of them lately. But I also want to be careful not to claim any kind of authoritative interpretation here. I’m obviously a dilletante when it comes to Nietzsche; this is just my way of “working out” a lot of what I’ve been reading.

What I like most about Nietzsche’s philosophy is that he exhorts us to be our best selves, to rise up above the herd, to not settle for mediocrity, to defy conformity, and to question everything, including all those things we consider to be unassailable truths. Nietzsche begins Beyond Good and Evil by doing precisely this. Why should good and evil, he asks, be considered opposites? Could it be possible, he goes on to say, that doing so is really a reflection of moral prejudice (one influenced by Christianity) and a habit of grammar? Could it be possible that these seemingly opposite values are really one in essence? Nietzsche proposes that what is considered to be “good” or what is considered “evil” depends entirely on who (or what) has power; or, put another way, it depends on the dominant moral belief system governing society at any one time. It’s an idea that’s so vast in scope with regard to culture and history and habit that it’s difficult to escape it and look beyond it. But then again, within many of our own lifetimes, we’ve seen such issues as access to abortion, same-sex marriage, and doctor-assisted suicide go from being crimes to now receiving sanction within our legal system, to go, in short, from “bad” to “good.” But Nietzsche even takes it a step further, by saying that the presence of both so-called “good” and “evil” is essential for the propagation of the species, for human survival. If we were to eradicate “evil” (which is impossible), humans would be somnambulant, indolent creatures (which we largely are anyways). Evil can, in other words, rouse us to be our best selves, to be defenders of “good”, to rise up for “justice.” Think, for example, of how the recent US election campaign wakened, more than ever before, a largely indifferent electorate into political activism. A record number of women, women of colour, LGBTQ people and others—many of whom lacking in political experience—ran for office of one sort or another, many intent on tipping political power in a different direction from that of the current administration.

And for Nietzsche, power—the Will to Power—is what lies behind all our actions, not just political or military power, but all our desires and relationships are governed by it. (But maybe further discussion of this might be best saved for another time.)

What I really want to get at, though, for today at any rate, is that Nietzsche doesn’t stop at challenging our habit of pitting good against evil; all antipodes, he says, especially those that carry a moral value, including the concepts of “truth” and “deception,” are worth re-examining. For Nietzsche, there is no such thing as objective truth, only varying degrees, which again, is intrinsically related to who or what has power. A mother, for example, punishes her child based on her notion of what is right and wrong, her notion of truth, and in accordance to her notion of justice—things that another mother may disregard, overlook, or respond to in a completely different manner.

 But to look again at the more salient example of the recent US election: for a significant segment of the American population, including its president, the official results of that election are impugned—as was seen especially strongly last weekend by the large pro-Trump rally in Washington. One woman at the rally was quoted as saying: “I don’t know why they’re feeding us this garbage. We all know who really won the election.” Many of us (particularly the left leaning) gazed on, baffled and perplexed. How is it that so many people can deny what is so evidentially true? Are they motivated by the will to ignorance (Nietzsche has some interesting things to say about that), or are they motivated by the will to truth? Like all conspiracy theorists, what they ostensibly seek is the will to truth (This is what’s really going on, is what their message is. Listen to me and together we can overturn the system.) But again, Nietzsche would attribute their actions as an expression of the will to power. After all, who is doing the protesting? It’s not so much the powerless inasmuch as those who feel their power is being threatened or undermined in light of recent economic and cultural changes in society. And by protesting, by being seen and heard, by not feeling ashamed for their beliefs and identity, is, by its nature, empowering. And as long as the one who continues to sit in power refuses to concede defeat, as long as he continues to tweet “I won the election,” so it shall remain true, both for him and a great many other Americans. Nor would he be entirely wrong either: in many ways Trump has won, because what he has succeeded in doing is sowing the seeds of doubt in many of his supporters, solidifying in their minds that the election has been stolen from them, regardless of whatever evidence to the contrary there may be. He has also single-handedly destabilized democracy, not only in the US but also globally, all of which, again, underscores what Nietzsche says: that when it comes to truth we can only “assume degrees of apparentness and, as it were, lighter and darker shadows and shades of appearance—different ‘values,’ to use the language of painters.”