(032) 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
32. Throughout the longest period of human history — one calls it the prehistoric period — the value or non-value of an action was inferred from its CONSEQUENCES; the action in itself was not taken into consideration, any more than its origin; but pretty much as in China at present, where the distinction or disgrace of a child redounds to its parents, the retro-operating power of success or failure was what induced men to think well or ill of an action. Let us call this period the PRE-MORAL period of mankind; the imperative, “Know thyself!” was then still unknown.
Nietzsche starts by describing a period of history over ten thousand years ago, which he calls the Pre-moral period of mankind. This period is characterized by the fact that human beings were not concerned with the origins of one’s action, only its consequences.
— In the last ten thousand years, on the other hand, on certain large portions of the earth, one has gradually got so far, that one no longer lets the consequences of an action, but its origin, decide with regard to its worth: a great achievement as a whole, an important refinement of vision and of criterion, the unconscious effect of the supremacy of aristocratic values and of the belief in “origin,” the mark of a period which may be designated in the narrower sense as the MORAL one: the first attempt at self-knowledge is thereby made. Instead of the consequences, the origin — what an inversion of perspective!
In the last ten thousand years, which covers most of our knowledge of human civilization on Earth, a new Moral period of human history formed. This period is characterized by having its first attempt at self-knowledge, whereby the origins behind an action is measured more greatly than the consequence of that action.
If you were to hit someone with your car, it matters if it was done by accident or on purpose. We still hold people accountable for their actions, but how that action occurred is highly important in the moral age when human beings were starting to develop self-consciousness.
And assuredly an inversion effected only after long struggle and wavering! To be sure, an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation, attained supremacy precisely thereby: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense possible, as origin out of an INTENTION; people were agreed in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention.
The origin of an action was interpreted as being directly related to its intention. Therefore, the value of an action is directly related to the value of its intention.
The intention as the sole origin and antecedent history of an action: under the influence of this prejudice moral praise and blame have been bestowed, and men have judged and even philosophized almost up to the present day. — Is it not possible, however, that the necessity may now have arisen of again making up our minds with regard to the reversing and fundamental shifting of values, owing to a new self-consciousness and acuteness in man — is it not possible that we may be standing on the threshold of a period which to begin with, would be distinguished negatively as ULTRA-MORAL: nowadays when, at least among us immoralists, the suspicion arises that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in that which is NOT INTENTIONAL, and that all its intentionalness, all that is seen, sensible, or “sensed” in it, belongs to its surface or skin — which, like every skin, betrays something, but CONCEALS still more?
As Nietzsche stated previously, the past ten thousand years were characterized by a shift or inversion of values where the origin and intention behind our actions started to become more important. But we seem to be moving into a new stage of history where we understand that a person’s unconscious mind may influence a person’s actions more than their intentions. A person’s intentions only show us something that is surface-level and may conceal a deeper, unconscious motivation.
We’re not transparent to ourselves. And what we claim to be our intentions may not accurately represent the truth that lies at the depths of our being.
In short, we believe that the intention is only a sign or symptom, which first requires an explanation — a sign, moreover, which has too many interpretations, and consequently hardly any meaning in itself alone: that morality, in the sense in which it has been understood hitherto, as intention-morality, has been a prejudice, perhaps a prematureness or preliminariness, probably something of the same rank as astrology and alchemy, but in any case something which must be surmounted.
Nietzsche describes intention-based morality as a kind of premature version of something that is still growing and in refinement, like astrology and alchemy to modern science. He describes it as something to be overcome.
In a previous part of this aphorism, he describes the new moral period’s focus on the origins of an action as an “ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation”. There is an emphasis on something being missing from our ability to create an accurate picture to frame morality.
The surmounting of morality, in a certain sense even the self-mounting of morality — let that be the name for the long-secret labour which has been reserved for the most refined, the most upright, and also the most wicked consciences of today, as the living touchstones of the soul.
The overcoming of morality has been the work of the most subtle and honest in human history. But it has also been the work of the most wicked and malicious.
We’ve arrived at the part of Nietzsche’s work that was influential to psychoanalysts like Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud.
Carl Jung, specifically in “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious”, continued to explore the depths of the human soul and its relationship with morality.
