The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil

by Maudemarie Clark, David Dudrick

This book presents a provocative new interpretation of Beyond Good and Evil, arguably Nietzsche's most important work. The problem is that it appears to express merely a loosely connected set of often questionable opinions. Can Nietzsche really be an important philosopher if this is his most important book? Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick address this question with a close reading that emphasizes how Nietzsche writes. They argue that the first part of Beyond Good and Evil presents coherent and interconnected arguments for subtle and well-thought-out positions on traditional issues. Nietzsche's infamous doctrine of the will to power turns out to be a compelling account of the structure and origin of the human soul. And although he rejects some aspects of traditional philosophy, Nietzsche's aim is to show how philosophy's traditional aspirations to seek both the true and the good can be fulfilled. Beyond Good and Evil turns out to be a major work of philosophy and Nietzsche's masterpiece.

Genres: Philosophy

288 pages, Paperback

First published July 9, 2012

Reviews

[Tùng Đỗ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nietzsche is a particularly difficult thinker to penetrate, not because of the complexity of the concepts and arguments he employs, but mainly due to his occasional self-contradictions throughout his corpus. This results in the problem of multiple and contentious interpretations for Nietzsche's texts, which, as far as I'm concerned, has never been resolved.

That said, "The Soul of Nietzsche's Beyond Good And Evil" did a successful and persuasive task at reconciling many discrepancies in his writings. Clark makes the argument that Nietzsche is creating a new philosophy to satisfy both the will to value, represented by idealism or dual-world viewpoint, and the will to truth, understood as methodological naturalism. Why is there such a need for reconciliation at all? Clark argues that Nietzsche thinks the will to value alone would falsify reality, whereas the will to truth on its own would inevitable lead to nihilism. The new philosophy that Nietzsche theorizes about is the will to power, i.e. the ability of our willing to govern subordinate drives, hence constituting our personal values. As our capacity to overcome subordinate desires is strengthened, our values are also developed into a stronger will to truth and will to value. Consequently, a "will-to-power" type of person could find out truths, or at least naturalized interpretations, of the world, meanwhile still rationalizing about the meanings of such a reality.

A caveat while reading this work is that Clark's interpretation of Nietzschean thoughts is rather eccentric, which means that it might not necessarily be the common one that readers would encounter. The will to power, as for other scholars, has often been interpreted as a biological explanation of the world, rather than human psychological states.