Reading Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil part 4

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]I have red in my eyes because I got chemicals in them. And out of vanity, I wanted to continue this book off camera, but I must finish what I started. So, we're reading Friedri Niche's Beyond Good and Evil in the center of the chapter, The Free Spirit.

[00:00:16]When we are young, we revere and revile without benefit of the art of the nuance, life's greatest prize. And it is only fair that we must later repent bitterly for having pounced upon people and things with a yes or no. Everything is designed so that the worst of all possible tastes, our taste for the unconditional is terribly and foolishly abused. Until we learn to put some art into our feelings and even take a chance with artifice, as do the real artists of life. Young people with their characteristic anger and awe seem to find no peace until they've neatly falsified people into things so that they can vent their feelings on them.

[00:01:01]Youth by its very nature is something falsifying and deceptive. Later our young after our young soul has been tormented by unreieved disappointments and finally turns suspiciously back upon itself. still hot and wild even in its suspicion and pangs of conscience. Then how angry we are, how impatiently we tear ourselves apart, taking vengeance for having deluded ourselves for so long as if our delusion has been had been voluntary.

[00:01:33]When we make this transition, we punish ourselves by distrusting our feelings.

[00:01:37]We torture our enthusiasm with doubt.

[00:01:40]Indeed, we even experience our good conscience as danger as if it it were veiling us or wearing down our finer honesty. And above all else, we take sides on principle. We take sides against youth. A decade later, we understand that this whole process too was youth.

[00:02:02]That's so real. During our longest age of human history, it is called the prehistoric age. An action's value or lack of value was determined by its consequences. The action itself was taken into consideration as little as its origin. More or less, as in China today, where a child's distinction or disgrace reflects back on the parent, the retroactive force of the success or failure of an action determined whether people thought well or badly of it. Let us call this period mankind's pre-moral period.

[00:02:39]At this time, no one had heard of the imperative, know thyself.

[00:02:44]During the last 10,000 years, however, over large stretches of the earth, people have little by little reached the point of determining the value of an action not by its consequences, but by its origins. Taken as a whole, this was a great event, a considerable refinement in perceptions and standards. With the unconscious influence of the dominance of aristocratic values and the belief in origins still persisting, it was the badge of a period that we may designate in the narrower sense as the moral period and it signals the first attempt at self-nowledge instead of consequences origins. What a reversal of perspective and most certainly a reversal achieved only after long struggles and hesit hesitations.

[00:03:36]Along with it, to be sure, came an ominous new superstition, a peculiar narrowness of interpretation took hold.

[00:03:43]The origin of an action was interpreted in the most precise terms as itself originating in an intention. Everyone was united in the belief that the value of an action lay in the value of its intention. Intention as the entire source and past history of an action.

[00:04:02]Almost right up into modern times, this prejudice has determined how moral judgments have been made on earth.

[00:04:09]Praising, blaming, judging, philosophizing.

[00:04:13]But now, but now that human beings are again gaining a deeper self-awareness, shouldn't we weigh a more shouldn't we weigh another reversal and fundamental shift in values? Might we not be standing at the threshold of a period that to put it negatively would would at first have to be described as extramoral?

[00:04:36]It is not the suspicion growing, at least among us immoral immoralists, that an action's decisive value is demonstrated precisely by that part of that it is not intentional.

[00:04:52]Do we not suspect that all of an action's intentionality, everything that can be seen or known about it, that can be conscious about it, is still a part of its surface and skin, which like all skin reveals something, but hides even more. In short, we believe that the intention is but a sign or symptom.

[00:05:13]first of all requiring interpretation and furthermore that is a sign with so many meanings that as a consequence it has almost none in and of itself. We believe that morally in its earlier sense intention morality it was a prejudice something precipituous or perhaps pre preliminary something of the order of astrology or alchemy but in any event something that must be overcome.

[00:05:44]The overcoming of morality or even in a certain sense the self overcoming of morality. Let that be the name for the long clandestine work that was kept in reserve for the most subtle and honest and also the most malicious people of conscious today living in touchston of the human heart.

[00:06:09]There's no help for it. We must haul into court and mercilessly interrogate our feelings of devotion of sacrifice for our neighbor. the whole morality of self- renunciation as well as the aesthetic of disinterested contemplation which the current emasculation of art is trying to use seductively enough to clear its conscience for the sake of others not for me. These are feelings containing so much sorcery and sugar that we must be doubtly doubtly distrustful of them and ask are these not perhaps seductions that we like these feelings whether because we have them or enjoy the fruits or merely observe them as spectators furnishes no argument for them but rather demands that we exercise caution.

[00:07:01]So let's be cautious.

[00:07:04]No matter what philosophical standpoint we may take these days, looking out from any position, the erroneousness of the world and what we and the erroneousness of the world we think we are living in is the most certain and concrete thing our eyes can fasten on. We find a host of reasons for it. reasons that might tempt us to speculate about a deceptive principle in the nature of things. But anyone who would try to claim that the falsity of the world is due to our thought process to our intellect, an honorable way out taken by every conscious or unconscious advocac.

[00:07:47]Anyone who takes this world with all its space, time, form, movement to be falsely inferred would at the very least have a have good reason to end by distrusting the thought process itself.

[00:08:02]For wouldn't this thought process have made us the victims of the greatest hoax ever? And what guarantee would we have that it wouldn't go on doing what it has always done? In all seriousness, there is something touching and awe inspiring in the innocence of thinkers that allows them even nowadays to request honest answers from their consciousness about whether it is substantial, for example, or why it insists on keeping the outside world at such a distance and all sorts of other questions of that kind.

[00:08:38]The faith in immediate certainties is morally naive and does honor to philosophers. But we are not surprised to be only moral after all. In any but moral terms, our faith in immediate certainties is stupid and does us no great honor. Maybe it is true that in our bgeoisi life an ever ready distrust is taken at the sign of a bad character and therefore classified as imprudence here where we are where we are beyond the bgeoisi world and its yeses and nos.

[00:09:19]What is there to keep us from being imprudent in saying that the philosopher has a veritable right to his bad character? As the creature who so far has always been most made a fool of on earth, these days he has a duty to be distrustful, to squint out as maliciously as he can from the bottom of every abyss of doubt.

[00:09:45]Please forgive me for the joking tone of this sad caricature. For a while now, I myself have learned to think differently about deceiving and being deceived.

[00:09:55]Learn to assess them differently. So I am always ready to take a few pokes at the philosophers blind rage at being deceived. Why not? It is nothing but a moral prejudice to consider truth more valuable than appearance. It is in fact most poorly proven assumption in the world. We should admit at least this much there would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspectivist assessments and appearances. And if one wanted to do away with the apparent world entirely as some valiantly enthusiastic and foolish philosophers want to do, well then assuming that people like you could do that, then at the very least there would be nothing left of your truth either. Really, why should we be forced to assume that there is an essential difference between true and false in the first place? Isn't it enough to assume that there are degrees of apparency and so to speak lighter and darker shadows and hues of appearance, different valures to use the language of painters?

[00:11:07]Why should the world that is relevant to us not be a fiction? And if someone asks, "But mustn't a fiction have an author?" Shouldn't we answer him bluntly? Why mustn't this mustn't be a part of the fiction too? Perhaps aren't we allowed to be a little more to be a little bit ironic not only about predicates and objects but also about subjects. Shouldn't the philosopher be able to rise above a faith in grammar?

[00:11:38]My respects the governnesses. But isn't it about time that philosophers renounce the religion of governnesses? Oh Voltater, oh humanity, oh hogwash, truth and the search for truth are no trivial matter. And if a person goes about searching in too human of a fashion, guys, I don't speak French, but I'll try and say this.

[00:12:06]Um, it means I think it means like he searches for truth, for good, to do good or something. Um, I bet he won't find anything.

[00:12:18]Assuming that nothing real is given to us apart from our world of desires and passions. Assuming that we cannot ascend or descend to any reality or then that reality of our instincts for thinking is merely an interrelation of these instincts one to the other. May we not be allowed to perform an experiment and ask whether this given also provides a sufficient explanation for the so-called mechanistic or material world.

[00:12:52]I do not mean the material world as a delusion as an appearance or representation in the Bleian or Shopenharian sense but rather as a world with the same level of reality that our emotion has. that is a more rudimentary form of the world of emotions holding everything in a powerful unity. all the potential of the organic process to develop and differentiate and spoil and weaken too. Of course, as a kind of instinctual life in which all the organic functions, self-regulation, regulation, adaptation, elementation, elimination, metabolism are synthetically linked to one another as a preliminary form of life. In the end, we are not only allowed to perform such an experiment. We are commanded to do so by the conscience of our method.

[00:13:54]We must not assume that there are several sorts of casualty until we've tested the possibility that one alone will suffice. Tested it to its furthest limits, to the point of nonsense, if you'll allow me to say so. We cannot evade this morality of method today. It follows by definition, as a mathematician would say. The question is ultimately whether we really recognize that the will can affect things. Whether we believe in the casualty of the will.

[00:14:25]If we do and to believe in this is basically to believe in casualty itself.

[00:14:31]We must experiment to test hypothetically whether the casualty of the will is the only casualty.

[00:14:39]A will is a will can have an effect only upon another will of course and not upon matter, not upon nerves, for example, one must dare to hypothesize. In short, that where what wherever effects are identified, a will is having an effect upon another will. And that all mechanical events in so far as an an energy is active in them are really the energy of the will, the effect of the will. Assuming finally that we could explain our entire instinctual life as the development and differenti differentiation of one basic form of the will, namely the will to power as my tenant would have it. Assuming that one could derive all organic functions from this will to power and also find in the solution to the problem of procreation and elementation.

[00:15:40]It is all one problem. Then we would have won the right to designate all effective energy unequivoc unequivocally as the will to power. The world as it is seen from the inside. The world defined and described by its intelligible character would simply will be simply will to power and that alone. What's that? But doesn't that mean to speak in the vernacular that God's been disproved but not the devil? On the contrary. On the contrary, my friends, and who the devil's forcing you to speak in the vernacular, take what has happened recently in the full light of our modern age with the French Revolution. that gruesome and judge from close up s surfless bars. Its noble and inspired spectators through Europe have been projecting their own rebellious and enthusiastic feelings onto it from afar for so long with such passion that the text has disappeared underneath the interpretation. A noble posterity might one day misunderstand all of its past history in a similar way. And only in doing so make the sight of it bearable?

[00:17:02]Or rather, hasn't this already happened?

[00:17:05]Haven't we ourselves been this noble posterity? And since we now recognize what we have been doing, can't we stop it?

[00:17:15]I think that's a good place to stop. I know I say this about every one of these videos, but I really like this section and this book in general because I feel like in most or a lot of books, especially philosophy books, you can get pretty enthusiastic at the start. Um, and then once you already understand and that shock wave of whatever prompt they're trying to put upon you kind of, I guess, loses its magic or uh newness, you can get kind of bored. Um, but I I find myself to be very entertained by this. It might just be because he has a very comedic approach at it, but also I feel as if the concepts are very um they're they're not so abstract. He stays I mean I I suppose this could be in abstract in general, but I feel as if he still remains very down to earth in the way that he speaks.

[00:18:14]Um, and I don't need to explain to you guys what we just read. So, I will talk to you guys later. Bye.