Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a seminal work of moral philosophy by Friedrich Nietzsche.
First published in 1886, it expands on the ideas put forth by an earlier work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The tone this text carries is more critical, polemical and argumentative, its words representing the fierce maturing of Nietzsche's ideas.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche boldly claims that earlier philosophers are lacking in good critical sense, basing their ideas upon a wide, uncontested acceptance of the dogmatic principles of ordinary morals, virtues and vices.
The first claim Nietzsche makes is that his forebears and contemporaries have founded grand metaphysical systems upon the faith that good people are the opposite of evil people. This, as opposed to both poles of duality being a different expression of the same impulses more directly and plainly expressed by the evil man.
With this as his founding argument, Nietzsche in this book argues it goes "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind older ideas and thoughts. By this token, Nietzsche subjects conventional morality to a heavy, sustained critique in favour of his own novel approach that confronts the perspectives upon which knowledge is assumed, and the tentative nature of man in the world.
