Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (German: Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft) is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that covers ideas in his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra but with a more polemical approach. It was first published in 1886 under the publishing house C. G. Naumann of Leipzig at the author‘s own expense and first translated into English by Helen Zimmern, who was two years younger than Nietzsche and knew the author. According to translator Walter Kaufman, the title refers to the need for moral philosophy to go beyond simplistic black and white moralizing, as contained in statements such as "X is good" or "X is evil". At the beginning of the book, Nietzsche attacks the very idea of using strictly opposite terms such as "Good versus Evil". In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality.