The Heart of Darkness

What is the fundamental aim of Beyond Good and Evil? As we shall see, the work develops a distinction (greatly expanded in the Genealogy of Morals) between the ‘slave’ morality (a morality of ‘good’ versus ‘evil ’) introduced by Christianity, and the ancient world's ‘master’ morality (a morality of ‘good’ versus ‘bad ’) that preceded it. And so what the title tells us is that we must advance ‘beyond’ the ‘good and evil’ morality that we have grown up in. Presumably we are also told that we must recover some version of the ‘good and bad’ morality. We need, the title tells us, a moral revolution.

The subtitle, Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, tells us the same thing in a different way. To understand it one has to notice its double reference to Wagner, the composer who called Das Rheingold a ‘Prelude’ to the remainder of the Ring cycle, and his music-dramas, collectively, the ‘artwork of the future’.* As well as making clear Nietzsche's continuing power-struggle with his former ‘Master’, the function of the subtitle is to identify Beyond Good and Evil as a ‘preview’, a brief ‘prelude’ to a future work which will actually be the ‘philosophy of the future’. A letter written just after the appearance of Beyond Good and Evil makes this clear: he is now planning, Nietzsche writes Elizabeth, to spend the next four years producing a ‘four-volume masterwork with the fearsome title of The Will to Power.