Beyond Good and Evil
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future

1

The task for the years that followed now was indicated as clearly as possible. After the Yes-saying part of my task had been solved, the turn had come for the No-saying, No-doing part: the revaluation of our values so far, the great war—conjuring up a day of decision. This included the slow search for those related to me, those who, prompted by strength, would offer me their hands for destroying.

From this moment forward all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone?—If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish.

2

This book (1886) is in all essentials a critique of modernity, not excluding the modern sciences, modern arts, and even modern politics, along with pointers to a contrary type that is as little modern as possible—a noble, Yes-saying type. In the latter sense, the book is a school for the gentilhomme,¹ taking this concept in a more spiritual and radical sense than has ever been done. One has to have guts merely to endure it; one must never have learned how to be afraid.

All those things of which our age is proud are experienced as contradictions to this type, almost as bad manners; our famous “objectivity,” for example; “pity for all that suffers;” the “historical sense” with its submission to foreign tastes, groveling on its belly before petits faits,² and “being scientific.”

When you consider that this book followed after Zarathustra, you may perhaps also guess the dietetic regimen to which it owes its origin. The eye that had been spoiled by the tremendous need for seeing far—Zarathustra is even more far-sighted than the Tsar—is here forced to focus on what lies nearest, the age, the around-us. In every respect, above all also in the form, you will find the same deliberate turning away from the instincts that had made possible a Zarathustra. The refinement in form, in intention, in the art of silence is in the foreground; psychology is practiced with admitted hardness and cruelty—the book is devoid of any good-natured word.

All this is a recuperation: who would guess after all what sort of recuperation such a squandering of good-naturedness as Zarathustra represents makes necessary?

Theologically speaking—listen closely, for I rarely speak as a theologian—it was God himself who at the end of his days’ work lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he recuperated from being God.—He had made everything too beautiful.³—The devil is merely the leisure of God on that seventh day.

¹Nobieman, gentleman.

²Small facts.

³Or: too beautifully.