Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Oxford Worlds Classics)

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Translation, Notes, Index Marion Faber 1998
Introduction Robert Holub 1998
Chronology Duncan Larbe 1997

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First published as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 18441900.
[Jenseits von Gut und Bse. English]
Beyond good and evil: prelude to a philosophy of the future/
translated and edited by Marion Faber: with an introduction by
Robert C. Holub
(Oxford worlds classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Ethics. 2. Philosophy. I. Faber, Marion. II. Title.
III. Series: Oxford worlds classics (Oxford University Press).
PR3313.J42E5 1998 193dc21 9815016

ISBN13: 9780192832634
ISBN10: 0192832638

Typeset by Intype London Ltd.
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Prelude to a
Philosophy of the Future

Translated and Edited by
MARION FABER

With an Introduction by
ROBERT C. HOLUB

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (18441900) was born in Rcken, Saxony, and educated at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. At the age of only 24 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle, but prolonged bouts of ill health forced him to resign from his post in 1879. Over the next decade he shuttled between the Swiss Alps and the Mediterranean coast, devoting himself entirely to thinking and writing. His early books and pamphlets (The Birth of Tragedy, Untimely Meditations) were heavily influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, but from Human, All Too Human (1878) on, his thought began to develop more independently, and he published a series of ground-breaking philosophical works (The Gay Science, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals) which culminated in a frenzy of production in the closing months of 1888. In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown from which he was never to recover, and he died in Weimar eleven years later.

MARION FABER is Professor of German at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Her earlier translations include Nietzsches Human, All Too Human (1994) and Wolfgang Hildesheimers Mozart (1983), a nominee for the American Book Award in translation.

ROBERT C. HOLUB teaches German intellectual, cultural, and literary history in the German department at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his numerous publications on these topics are Reflections of Realism (1991); Jrgen Habermas: Critic in the Public Sphere (1991); Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction (1992); and Friedrich Nietzsche (1995). He is the editor of Impure Reason: Dialectic of Enlightenment in Germany (1993), Responsibility and Commitment (1996), and Heinrich Heines Contested Identities (1998).

THERE is no better introduction to the mature philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche than Beyond Good and Evil. Written during the summer of 1885 and the winter of 1886, this work assumes a pivotal position in his oeuvre. It was the first published work after the monumental Thus Spake Zarathustra, which laid out central tenets of Nietzsches philosophy in parabolic form. Conceived as a parody of the Bible, the four books of Zarathustra presented the reader with the activities and speeches of the eponymous hero, who is surely Nietzsches spokesperson. Beyond Good and Evil covers some of the same ground, but in this work Nietzsche does not offer us a narrative and parables that require interpretation, but rather a series of aphorisms. Nietzsche himself was conscious of the affinities in content between Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil. Writing to his colleague Jacob Burckhardt, the celebrated art historian at Basle, he claimed that his new book says the same things as my Zarathustra, but differently, very differently. But he was also aware that Beyond Good and Evil represents a return to earlier efforts from the 1870s and early 1880s, in which he did not communicate with his reader through a persona. In his correspondence Nietzsche called his new work a fifth Untimely Meditation, referring to writings of the early 1870s in which he focused on a central theme or person. And he told a prospective publisher that he was ready to publish a second volume of