00 - Preface - Beyond Good and Evil - Friedrich Nietzsche

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in
the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, visit
LibriVox dot org. Beyond Good and Evil by Frederic Nietzsche,
preface read by Hugh maguire. Supposing that truth is a woman,

(00:22):
what then is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers,
in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed
to understand women, That the terrible seriousness and clumsy in
opportunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to
truth have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman.

(00:47):
Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won. And
at present every kind of dogma stands with a sad
and discouraged mean, if indeed it stands at all. For
there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen that
all dogma lies on the ground, nay more that it
is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there

(01:12):
are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy,
whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided errors, it has assumed,
may have been only a noble purialism and tyrannism, and
probably the time is at hand when it will be
once and again understood what has actually sufficed for the

(01:34):
basis of such imposing and absolute philosophical edifices as the
Dogmatists have hitherto reared. Perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time,
such as the soul superstition, which in the form of
subject an ego superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief.

(01:57):
Perhaps some play upon words, exception on the part of grammar,
or an audacious generalization of very restricted, very personal, very human,
all to human facts. The philosophy of the Dogmatists, it
is to be hoped, was only a promise for thousands

(02:19):
of years afterwards, as was astrology in still earlier times,
in the service of which probably more labour, gold, acuteness,
and patience have been spent than on any actual science.
Hitherto we owe to it and to its superterrestrial potensions.

(02:39):
In Asia and Egypt, the grand style of architecture. It
seems that, in order to inscribe themselves upon the heart
of humanity with everlasting claims, all great things have first
to wander about the earth as enormous and awe inspiring caricatures.
Dogmatic philosophy has been a caricature of this kind, for

(03:02):
instance the Vedanta doctrine in Asia and Platonism in Europe.
Let us not be ungrateful to it, although it must
certainly be confessed that the worst, the most tiresome, and
the most dangerous of errors hitherto has been a dogmatist error,
namely Plato's invention of pure spirit and the good in itself.

(03:25):
But now, when it has been surmounted, when Europe, rid
of this nightmare, can again draw breath freely and at
least enjoy a healthier sleep, we whose duty is wakefulness itself,
are the errors of all the strength which the struggle
against this error has fostered. It amounted to the very

(03:49):
inversion of truth and the denial of the perspective, the
fundamental condition of life, to speak of spirit and the
good as plato'spoke of them. Indeed, one might ask, as
a physician, how did such a malady attack the finest
product of antiquity? Plato had the wicked Socrates really corrupted him?

(04:14):
Was Socrates, after all a corrupter of youth and deserved
his hemlock. But the struggle against Plato, or to speak
plainer than for the people, the struggle against the ecclesiastical
oppression of millenniums of Christianity. For Christianity is Platonism for
the people produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul,

(04:36):
such as had not existed anywhere previously. With such a
tensely strained beau, one can now aim at the furthest goals.
As a matter of fact, the European feels this tension
as a state of distress, and twice attempts have been
made in grand style to unbend the bow, once by
means of Jesuitism, and the second time by means of

(04:59):
democratic anas enlightenment, which, with the aid of liberty of
the press and newspaper reading, might in fact bring it
about that the spirit would not so easily find itself
in distress. The Germans invented gunpowder, all credit to them,
but they again made things square. They invented printing.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
But we, who are neither Jesuits nor democrats, nor even
sufficiently Germans, we good Europeans and free, very free spirits,
We have it still, all the distress of spirit, and
all the tension of its bow, and perhaps also the
arrow the duty. And who knows the goal to aim at,

(05:42):
written in SILS Maria Upper Engadine, June eighteen eighty five.

Speaker 1 (05:50):
End of preface