Beyond Good and Evil

'Supposing that Truth is a woman, what then?' Nietzsche opens by mocking the philosophers who courted truth so clumsily, and then, in nine parts of essays and short aphorisms, he questions almost everything they took for granted: the belief in objective truth, free will and the soul, the value of pity, and the origins of morality, which he traces to a struggle between the 'master morality' of the strong and the 'slave morality' of the weak. Among its many sharp sayings is the warning that whoever fights with monsters should take care not to become one, for if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.

Nietzsche published the book at his own expense in 1886 with the subtitle 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', and it sold very few copies. This translation is by Helen Zimmern, who knew him personally. He despised nationalism and antisemitism, although his sister later bent his name to those causes. His next book, The Genealogy of Morals, develops its argument about morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.

In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.