Comparing Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil

Beyond Good & Evil is an extensive synopsis of the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche. The book contains 296 aphorisms split up into 9 chapters based on different theoretical themes being dissected. In the first three chapters of the book Nietzsche aims to re-evaluate our beliefs of will, truth, religion, morality, and much more. The first chapter, “On the Prejudice of Philosophers” discusses Nietzsche’s criticism of metaphysicians’ blind ways of accepting dogmatic ideas about morality. He argues that their truths and wills were founded on prejudice, leading them to misunderstand truly profound thoughts. This leads into chapter two, “The Free Spirit”, where Nietzsche states that knowledge is dependent upon the simplification of the

This is the previously accepted idea that everything originates from it’s opposite. One must doubt that there are any opposites at all, and that these opposites are not just mere perspectives and prejudices. Nietzsche attacks the metaphysicians for failing to conjure up any doubt at the threshold of their thinking and calls them all dogmatists. Nietzsche charges them with building philosophical systems upon false beliefs, and makes us question what we used to think of as certainties. Truth, a multi-dimensional idea, can be inadvertently built upon our prejudices if thought about narrow-mindedly. Nietzsche believes philosophy to be a system built only to justify the “truths” of previous philosophers. In order to explain the obtuse claims of metaphysical philosophers, it is necessary to look at their morality, or drive to knowledge. These so called philosophers were worried about advancing their theories meanwhile; they left the foundations of their theories weak and vulnerable for Nietzsche to

In other words, Nietzsche is saying that “I think” is to compare your current state to other states of mind that you already know and have experienced. However, without any certainties there’s no way of knowing if we are thinking or if we are willing or feeling something completely different. Assuming that Nietzsche was correct to say that thinking is to compare states of mind, it would mean that everything we think stems from something we already know. In turn, we must have been born with some preset knowledge, or immediate certainties in order to build off of those ideas and create new ones. Yet again Nietzsche contradicts himself, this time telling us that there are no immediate certainties despite the fact that we must possess some certainty early in our life in order to think and build new knowledge. Nietzsche would most likely combat this proposition by accusing people of being introduced to the world with false certainties and building ideals upon these false certainties our entire