We want to generate logical fictions in order to understand reality. Philosophers make an assumption that “the certain is worth more than the uncertain, that illusion is less valuable than ‘truth’”, but such valuations, Nietzsche says, may only be superficial, necessary to a sense of self and our need to create a feeling of certainty for our very survival. Though in Beyond Good and Evil some of the people or events he mentions are of his time, generally his insights – including how to view science and religion - seem very fresh. His startling originality and emotion-charged, non-technical prose could not be more different to today’s dry, over-specialised academic writings.Īfter a promising early start (he became a philosophy professor at only 24), illness and a truly independent spirit saw Nietzsche fall outside the mainstream, and his dismissal of philosophy as an objective science allowed him to write in a brilliantly personal and often mad style. Among contemporary philosophers, Nicholas Nassim Taleb and Slavoj Zizek, although very different in their content, borrow some of their free flowing, idiosyncratic, ultra-personal style from Nietzsche.

The list of people influenced by him is long, and includes Sigmund Freud, Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Heidegger, WB Yeats, Jean Paul Sartre and Foucault. The common reaction to reading Nietzsche is shock, but there are few philosophers who can be more entertaining, or who carry the potential to really change your view of things.

Selfishness, including evasion, distrust and a love of dissembling and irony, Nietzsche says, are signs of health – it is the people who are always after some pure and objective absolute (whether in religion or philosophy) that are the sick ones.

Good and evil are a creation of humankind: “There is no such thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” And if this is so, it frees us to live according to our natural wish to be more, have more, do more, not worrying too much about others. Why are philosophers not as much interested in untruth or uncertainty, he wondered?Īs he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “In spite of all the value which may belong to the true, the positive and the unselfish, it might be possible that a higher and more fundamental value for life should generally be assigned to pretence, to the will to delusion, to selfishness and cupidity.” Perhaps good and evil are more knitted together than we think, although (in the interests of purity) we like to see them as separate. Nietzsche saw the history of philosophy as an expression of the ‘will to Truth’, yet this obsession with truth was simply an arbitrary prejudice.

Nietzsche beyond good and evil