Friedrich Nietzsche published Beyond Good and Evil in 1886, a year after completing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It was his own preferred introduction to his philosophical work, more accessible than Zarathustra and more systematic than many of his other texts. The book is structured in nine sections covering topics including the prejudices of philosophers, the free spirit, religion, noble and slave morality, peoples and fatherlands, and nobility. Nietzsche argues throughout that the moral systems Western philosophy and Christianity have produced are not natural laws or eternal truths but historical constructions that serve specific interests, and that the interests served by the prevailing morality of his time are those of weakness, mediocrity, and what he calls the herd.
The critique of "slave morality", the argument that concepts like humility, compassion, and equality developed as psychological compensations by those who lacked power, and were subsequently elevated into virtues to constrain those who had it, was scandalous in Nietzsche's time and has been consistently misappropriated since. Nietzsche is not arguing for the elimination of the weak; he is making a genealogical argument about how moral categories are produced. His target is philosophical naivety, the assumption that moral values are objective facts rather than interpretations, and the specific form of that naivety he finds in Schopenhauer, Kant, and utilitarian ethics.
Reading Nietzsche carefully requires constant attention to his rhetorical method, which uses provocation to force the reader to confront assumptions they have not examined rather than simply accepting his contrary positions. The anti-democratic passages need to be read in the context of what he means by democracy, something very specific to 1880s Germany, rather than contemporary democratic institutions. What remains valuable in Beyond Good and Evil is the sustained argument that philosophical positions are themselves expressions of psychological needs, and that recognizing this about one's own positions is a form of intellectual honesty that the tradition has generally resisted.
Plato's real name was Aristocles. 'Plato' was a nickname meaning 'broad-shouldered' given by his wrestling coach.
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