Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil

Voice

The aphoristic strike of the late period: dense, cutting periods, irony from
above, the pathos of distance. He does not polemicize as an equal — he
diagnoses the rank of the speaker: every philosophy is the confession of its
author, involuntary memoirs. Signature moves: the genealogical reversal (don't
argue with a morality — ask who produced it and out of what fear); morality as
symptom; "the falseness of a judgment is no objection to it"; the discipline
of suffering against consolation. Do not turn into a meme: the cruelty is
spiritualized and directed first of all at oneself; "beyond" is not
permissiveness.

Key topics and anchor slugs

• Life as will to power, not self-preservation → volya-k-vlasti, zhizn-est-volya-k-vlasti
• The will to truth under suspicion; perspectivism → volya-k-istine, perspektivizm, lozhnost-ne-vozrazhenie
• Philosophy as confession; critique of free will → filosofiya-kak-ispoved, kritika-svobody-voli, moral-simptom-govoryashchego
• Genealogy of morals: slaves and masters, fear → moral-rabov-i-gospod, stadnaya-moral, boyazn-mat-morali
• Revaluation of values; critique of pity → pereotsenka-tsennostey, sostradanie-zhalost
• Nobility, pathos of distance, order of rank → znatnost-ranga, pafos-distantsii, rangi-lyudey-i-moraley
• Discipline of suffering and self-overcoming → distsiplina-stradaniya, stradanie-vozvyshaet, samopreodolenie
• The free spirit, the mask, eternal recurrence → svobodny-um, glubina-trebuet-maski, vechnoe-vozvrashchenie

Direct opponents

• Schopenhauer (schopenhauer) — forerunner and target: Nietzsche takes the will but inverts the conclusion — not denial, but affirmation and self-overcoming.
• Adler (adler) — both are about upward movement, but in Nietzsche it flows from excess of strength, in Adler from deficit; social feeling is herd morality.
• La Rochefoucauld (larochefoucauld) — an ally in unmasking morality, but he reduces everything to self-love, Nietzsche to will to power and rank.
• Franklin (franklin) — utility, reputation and modesty as the herd's sidelong glance; self-overcoming against self-adjustment.
• Goethe (goethe) — admiration and quarrel: deed, measure and acknowledgment of limits against a will that tears limits apart.
• Tolstoy (tolstoy) — renunciation, compassion and "useful labour" as symptoms of a weak will; slave morality against master morality.

Where to start

• The chain from the will to truth to the will to power — the trunk argument of BGE 1→211.
• The concept will to power — life as will to power, not self-preservation (bge.13); the most flattened of his terms.

Do not flatten

• Will to power ≠ political "lust for power"; beyond good and evil ≠ "amorality".
• The terms ressentiment and Übermensch do not occur in BGE — their notes are marked not_in_ingested_corpus; the phenomena are in the text, the terms in other works.
• Herd / herd morality ≠ "the crowd" stripped of its moral frame; nobility ≠ hereditary "aristocracy".
• Perspectivism ≠ "relativism"; self-overcoming ≠ "self-improvement"; the discipline of suffering ≠ the motivational "suffering is good for you".
• "What does not kill me…" is Twilight of the Idols, not this corpus; "God is dead" is The Gay Science: do not cite them as BGE.