Hi. This video includes my summary and commentary on section 32 of Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil, followed by the text of section 32. Section 32 comes from
Part 2 of the work, titled "The Free Spirit." Here we go.
In section 32 of Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche discusses the three stages of
social morality. The first stage is the pre-moral stage. This is the stage that
characterizes pre-historical man: cavemen and hunter gatherers and the like.
In this system of moral thinking the value of an action is determined by its
consequences. So the action itself and the intention behind the action is
irrelevant to its moral worth. This is a pre-philosophical way of thinking about
the value of actions and involves no attempt at self knowledge. It is
psychologically very primitive. Nietzsche writes, "the retroactive force of success
or failure is what led men to think well or ill of an action." So we might think,
for example, that a particular tactic in hunting might be regarded as good by
primitive man because it leads to a greater amount of food available for the
clan or for the tribe. The success in bringing food is what causes them then
retroactively to value the skill at hunting which led to that increased food
supply. The second stage of human morality is
the moral stage. This is the stage that has arisen as man has become civilized
over the last 10,000 years or so. It has been a gradual process, taking place step
by step in some regions of the earth, most especially Europe. In this system of
moral thinking the value of an action is determined by its origin, not by its
consequences. Nietzsche observes that this is a kind of psychological progress
for the human race: it involves greater refinement, greater subtlety of vision,
and it constitutes the first reversal of values and the first attempt at
self-knowledge and psychological insight by human beings. But in the modern period
certainly this has led to superstition, the origin of an action being reduced to
its intention alone. Here I think Nietzsche is obviously thinking of
Kant and Kantian ethics. This prejudice of intention-based ethics is what dominates
moral discourse to the present day. The third stage of social morality is
the extra-moral or the post-moral stage. Nietzsche says we are now at the
threshold of a new reversal in values, a new progress to a higher stage of
refinement and subtlety in the human spirit. In this new era the value of an
action will be determined by what is unintentional in it, that is, by the
drives, the psychological drives deep beneath it, or by the will to power.
The conscious intention will be irrelevant in this mode of valuing because it
represents the surface or skin of the action only and is not a source of its
worth. Intention, says Nietzsche, is merely a sign requiring interpretation. The sign
has no meaning in itself and the morality of intention (thinking here
again of Kant) is a philosophical prejudice. It is something like alchemy
or astrology, and most crucially for Nietzsche, it is something to be overcome.
And this is what constitutes the "long secret work" of the group that Nietzsche
refers to as "we immoralists."
During the longest part of human history,
so-called pre historical times, the value or disvalue of an action was derived
from its consequences. The action itself was considered as little as its origin.
It was rather the way a distinction or disgrace still reaches back today from a
child to its parents, in China. It was the retroactive force of success or failure
that led 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 as yet unknown. In the last 10,000 years, however, one has reached the point,
step by step, in a few large regions of the earth, where it is no longer the
consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value.
On the whole this is a great event which involves a considerable refinement of
vision and standards; it is the unconscious aftereffect of the rule of
aristocratic values and the faith in "descent"-- the sign of a period that one
may call moral in the narrower sense. It involves the first attempt at
self-knowledge. Instead of the consequences, the origin: indeed a
reversal of perspective! Surely a reversal achieved only after
long struggles and vacillations. To be sure, a calamitous new superstition, an
odd narrowness of interpretation, thus become dominant: the origin of an action
was interpreted in the most definite sense as origin in an intention; one came
to agree that the value of an action lay in the value of the intention.
The intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action-- almost to the
present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and
philosophy on earth. But today-- shouldn't we have reached the
necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values,
owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in profundity? Don't we
stand at the threshold of a period which should be designated negatively, to begin
with, as extra-moral? After all, today at least we immoralists have the suspicion
that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional
in it, while everything about it that is intentional, everything about it that can
be seen, known, "conscious," still belongs to its surface and skin-- which, like every
skin, betrays something but conceals even more. In short, we believe that the
intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation--
moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, almost
nothing. We believe that morality in the
traditional sense, the morality of intentions, was a prejudice, precipitate
and perhaps provisional-- something on the order of astrology and alchemy-- but in
any case something that must be overcome. The overcoming of morality, in a certain
sense even the self-overcoming of morality-- let this be the name for that
long secret work which has been saved up for the finest and most honest, also the
most malicious, consciences of today, as living touchstones of the soul.