MONOCULTURE | A Recent History

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Zur Genealogie der Moral (Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future), 1896
Published by C. G. Naumann
Collection M HKA, Antwerp 

One of the most ambiguous and influential figures of modern thought, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is invoked in different and often ambivalent ways. The early association of his writing was with Nazism, promoted by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche who posthumously edited his unpublished works to fit her nationalistic ideas, and contradicted Nietzsche’s own stance against nationalism and antisemitism. Nietzsche’s complex philosophical thought and writing, which is commonly divided into three periods, questions the values and motives behind traditional Western thinking, religion and morality by demonstrating their inconsistencies.

In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche expands the ideas of his famous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885) in which he introduced the ideas of the “death of God" and the prophecy of the Übermensch, and attempts to summarise his philosophy. Aphorist in its style, the book is a powerful critique of religion, ethics, philosophical thought, science and politics. Providing a genealogical account of the development of modern moral systems, Nietzsche bases his argument on the idea of a fundamental shift in the history of morality, from thinking in terms of “good and bad” toward “good and evil”. Accusing philosophers of the past of dogmatism in their consideration of morality, he identifies the qualities of the philosophers of the future – what he calls “free spirits”, unbiased critical thinkers who see “beyond good and evil”. The Nietzschean philosophical stance against the resentful “slave morality of Christianity” was further developed in his subsequent book, On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (1887). Beyond Good and Evil was listed in the 'Most Harmful Books' by American weekly conservative newspaper Human Events.