Resumo de Beyond Good and Evil

The title shows Nietzsche's goal: transcend our way of life seeking higher realities. Until today, humanity lived according to Logic - Aristotelian or Cartesian, whatever, or according to that thing which we we call Reason. But Reason or Logic is only one way to consider existence and reality. We still did not transcend Reason. This is the theme of this book of Nietzsche.

When he speaks of going "beyond good and evil," he wants us to consider a mode of consciousness that observes the world without giving meaning to anything, without defining things as good or bad, but apprehending and percepting them as they are for us, as they apear to us directly. He speaks of transcending values because Reason is just one value an element within the universe of values. Our way of being starts from the moment we create values, that is, when we define and say what is good and what is evil. To transcend this way of being that limits us, (because we have become slaves of the concepts that we create), to become better and better, "to be noble," we need to create new values, new definitions of what is good and evil: we might say that what was good is now bad and vice versa. But this is only the beginning; the goal is to reach the conscience that there is no good, nor is there evil, but only experience and phenomena.

Life was, for Nietzsche, the happiness of observation and contemplation of the infinite multiplicity of phenomena of existence without giving them direction, not wanting to define these, but enjoying them in their spontaneity, in their mystery and curiousity. The super-man of Nietzsche is one who lives in a state of wonder at the things of life; it is this state what we must achieve.

To say that someone believes that life is tragic, in the Nietzschean sense, is to say that someone observes his or her own misfortune, the catastrophe itself, his or her own pain and suffering as just phenomena, as just an experience, like events that he does not understand and because of this not knowing, he watches them carefully to try to perceive them clearly, to identify them or recognize them and describe them in detail; however, without thinking anything about them, without making statements about them, not wanting to deduce anything, without saying whether they are good or bad, or for what reason, nor to know the causes or effects; he pays attention only with philosophical curiosity and admiration as if they were objects of study, as if these tragedies and sufferings that are ours, were not happening with us but with another person.

In the aphorism 292 of the book, we find Nietzsche's famous words that sum up excellently "Beyond Good and Evil". They also show to us the fundamental idea of the author: to transcend the human. (According to Nietzsche this was his best book. He said that it was the same thing he had written in Zarathustra but in prose.) Here is the excerpt: (the text is an adaptation of our translation.)

"The philosopher is a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes and dreams extraordinary things ... he is struck by his thoughts from outside, from above and below; for him, such thoughts are personal experiences, luminous as lightning; he is like a storm full of lightning bolts, full of thoughts, a fatal human being around whom there are strange experiences and strange thoughts. Unfortunately, a being who runs away from himself for fear of these dark thoughts. However, he is too much inquisitive and curious... to go back again to himself and to his strange thoughts and brightess. "

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