Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is Nietzsche's mature critique of the moral, religious, and philosophical assumptions of European modernity — a book in nine titled parts and 296 numbered aphorisms that develops in concentrated prose the case sketched more poetically in Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche's method is genealogical — he asks where our convictions came from, whom they served, what they conceal — and the cumulative effect is the dismantling of two thousand years of inherited moral thinking.

The book contains the famous warnings about fighting monsters, the discussion of slave and master morality that anticipates the Genealogy of Morals, and the call for the philosopher of the future who will think beyond the inherited opposition of good and evil. It is short, intense, and almost ruinously quotable.