(030) Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”, One Paragraph at a Time
I’ve struggled in all my attempts to read and comprehend Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil”. These blog posts are my attempt to better understand this material. I encourage any corrections or criticisms in the comments.
Chapter Two: The Free Spirit
30. Our deepest insights must — and should — appear as follies, and under certain circumstances as crimes, when they come unauthorizedly to the ears of those who are not disposed and predestined for them.
Nietzsche begins by expressing that some ideas are so lofty that they must sound downright foolish and even criminal to those who are not suited or predestined to hear them. He uses the word “unauthorized”, or “forbidden” in another translation.
The exoteric and the esoteric, as they were formerly distinguished by philosophers — among the Indians, as among the Greeks, Persians, and Mussulmans, in short, wherever people believed in gradations of rank and NOT in equality and equal rights — are not so much in contradistinction to one another in respect to the exoteric class, standing without, and viewing, estimating, measuring, and judging from the outside, and not from the inside; the more essential distinction is that the class in question views things from below upwards — while the esoteric class views things FROM ABOVE DOWNWARDS.
He goes on to talk about the differences between the exoteric (generalized knowledge) and the esoteric (specialized knowledge). Nietzsche puts forward this idea that generalized exoteric knowledge, rather than being different because it sits on the outside looking inward, is more accurately described as being underneath looking upward. The notion is that specialized esoteric ideas sit above looking downwardly. He validates this idea by mentioning that there are cultures, like Indian, Greek, Persian, and Muslim, that have stronger beliefs in the hierarchy than they do in equality and equal rights.
There are heights of the soul from which tragedy itself no longer appears to operate tragically; and if all the woe in the world were taken together, who would dare to decide whether the sight of it would NECESSARILY seduce and constrain to sympathy, and thus to a doubling of the woe?…
This idea of there being a hierarchical distinction between exoteric and esoteric begins to translate into something more, namely the idea that tragedy, when viewed from certain “heights of the soul”, no longer appears to have the same effect.
Nietzsche goes on to mention this idea that, if all the sorrow in the world were to be put together somehow, it would not be possible to look at it and feel a doubling of that sorrow.
That which serves the higher class of men for nourishment or refreshment, must be almost poison to an entirely different and lower order of human beings. The virtues of the common man would perhaps mean vice and weakness in a philosopher; it might be possible for a highly developed man, supposing him to degenerate and go to ruin, to acquire qualities thereby alone, for the sake of which he would have to be honoured as a saint in the lower world into which he had sunk.
Nietzsche is setting up an inversion of values between higher and lower classes of human beings. He describes a “highly developed man” that has sunk into the world of the common man where he is regarded as a saint.
Is Nietzsche simply stroking his ego here?
There are books which have an inverse value for the soul and the health according as the inferior soul and the lower vitality, or the higher and more powerful, make use of them. In the former case they are dangerous, disturbing, unsettling books, in the latter case they are herald-calls which summon the bravest to THEIR bravery.
Here the ideas of superior and inferior souls are restated about books which can be, depending on one’s predisposition, disturbing and dangerous or “herald-calls which summon the bravest to their bravery”.
Books for the general reader are always ill-smelling books, the odour of paltry people clings to them. Where the populace eat and drink, and even where they reverence, it is accustomed to stink. One should not go into churches if one wishes to breathe PURE air.
Without reading too much into what is present in the text here, this statement reveals a lot about how Nietzsche viewed Christianity. He believed that Christianity “has taken the side of everything weak, base, failed” and that it has “made an ideal out of whatever contradicts the preservation instincts of a strong life”.
