In Part VII of Beyond Good & Evil, we get to learn about why “spirit” resembles a “stomach” and try to make sense of Nietzsche’s misogynistic remarks at the end of the chapter.

In this chapter Nietzsche continues his dissection of morality by turning to one of the major topics in the history of moral philosophy — virtue. The first handful of sections begin with an exploration of the relationship between virtue and “order of rank”. This all comes to a head in sections 230 which concerns the “fundamental will of the spirit”, before coming to a clunky conclusion in sections 232-239 which contain Nietzsche notorious remarks about “woman”.

We have been engaged in an extended exploration of the “free spirits” and “philosophers of the future” throughout BGE, and the title of this section tells us that Nietzsche wants to determine what sorts of virtues such individuals will posses.

What are virtues?

Aristotle is the most influential classical source for the ethics of virtue. Aristotle ar…

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“I have set up the most difficult ideal of the philosopher. Learning is not enough! The scholar is the herd animal in the realm of knowledge”

The Will To Power, 421

This week, we consider Part Six of Beyond Good and Evil, which Nietzsche titled “We Scholars”.

This chapter is the most essay-like chapter in the text, and probably the easiest to read out of the entire book.

It is important to keep in mind throughout that when Nietzsche uses the term “science” this is a translation of the German Wissenscahft, which is not restricted to the natural sciences like Physics.

Kaufmann writes

“Wissenschaft might just as well be rendered as ‘scholarship’ in this section — and in much German literature: the term does not have primary reference to the natural sciences as it does in twentieth-century English”.

The core concerns Nietzsche expresses in this part of the book are the nature and fate of philosophy, the problem of the scholar, the possibility of greatness.

Section Commentary

204

Nietzsche opens t…

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Nietzsche on morality is my personal favorite topic that he covers, since it subverts conventional thinking and truly forces individuals to question their lives.

Morality also serves as the intersecting point of many of his other themes: religion, psychology, art, history, and so on.

This chapter of BGE is a condensed version and precursor to Nietzsche’s next great work On The Genealogy Of Morals.

Below I provide a thematic overview as well as a section-by-section commentary on select sections from the reading.

Suggested Reading

• Beyond Good And Evil, Part Five: Natural History of Morality

Thematic Overview

In German, Naturgeschichte (“natural history”) can refer directly to study of the development or evolution of life forms, from the past to the present.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the expression would have brought Darwinian theory to mind.

Nietzsche’s title tells us that he is goi…

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We saw last time that the world, for Heidegger, is not merely a list of stuff or a collection of physical objects.

He reserves “world” in quotation marks for that idea.

The world is Dasein’s world — a world that is experienced in a unique way phenomenologically and that reveals itself to us through our dealings with it.

After reading this guide and the suggested readings below, you will have an answer to what makes the world in this sense a world — what Heidegger calls the “worldhood of the world”.

In other words, the being of the world that we are beings-in.

Suggested Reading

This week we will discuss the following stretch of text:

• Being and Time, Part One, Division One, Chapter Three, Sections 15, 16, 17, 18.

This is a bit more reading than usual since we had some extra time.

After we get through Heidegger’s account of the …

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By the end of this week, we will be about halfway done Beyond Good & Evil, since we will be skipping over Part Four: Epigrams and Interludes.

This is probably the toughest section of the book, since it contains intricate and highly idiosyncratic interpretations of the history of the Christian faith, the religious attitude, and its relationship to psychology, culture and morality.

Nietzsche makes many references and allusions that are pretty specific, and his writing here is pretty dense.

My advice is to focus your energy on sections 54-62 which constitute the second half of the chapter.

Do not get bogged down in the details of the earlier sections.

The most important section, on my reading, is section 56, where Nietzsche introduces one of his most famous ideas in BGE for the first time — the eternal recurrence.

Next up would be the final few sections such as 58-62.

I would focus your best energy on those sections, since 61 and 62 provide a general summar…

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We have made it to one of the most famous sections of Being and Time, section 15.

Although nearly everything we have read is important for understanding the history of philosophy and for thinking differently about your own existence, section 15 contains what is probably the most well-known collection of ideas in Being and Time.

In particular, Heidegger’s famous distinction between “ready-to-hand” and “present-to-hand” and “equipment”.

The past few weeks have been pretty heavy, so with this guide I want to tie together sections 12-15 into a clear and comprehensive overview.

By the end of this guide, you should feel like you have a pretty good idea of what’s going on and why it matters philosophically.

The fog should begin to clear very soon.

Review Of 12 & 13

I want to spend some time reviewing and synthesizing sections 12 and 13 to make sure everything is as clear as possible as we move ahead.

Much of th…

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We will continue covering one chapters per week until we finished the book.

In Part One, we saw Nietzsche attack conventional philosophical ways of understanding the concepts like “truth” and “freedom of the will”.

Since Part Two is concerned with “The Free Spirit”, we should expect to learn a new way of understanding what “free” means — since it obviously can’t mean what it has traditionally meant.

The “free spirit” is an individual who anticipates and prepares the way for the new type of human being that Nietzsche calls the “philosopher of the future”.

When Nietzsche uses “We”, he is referring to “free spirits” like himself and his ideal readers.

These free spirits, however, are not themselves “philosophers of the future”.

Nietzsche takes himself and his ideal readers to be pre-cursors or “heralds” who are paving the way fo…

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• For this week, we will look at sections 14-23 of Part I.

• In these sections, Nietzsche attacks various scientific and metaphysical prejudices that form an interconnected web.

  • Most of all, Nietzsche attacks the concept of free will, which is one of the primary starting points for philosophy (especially when it comes to moral philosophy).

• Another general theme is undermining the relationship between surface level language and complex psychological phenomena.

  • Nietzsche takes aim at the inadequacy of words to capture what’s really going on inside of our minds and bodies.

  • These conceptual prejudices lead philosophers to distort reality and draw various false conclusions.

• A general theme is respecting the extent “physiology” affects our thinking.

14

In this section, Nietzsche criticizes the assumptions behind modern scientific thinking, in particular Physics.

“Now it is beginning to dawn on maybe five or six brains that physics too is only an interpretation and arrangemen…

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• It is suggested to read sections 12, 13, and 14 for this week.

  • We will continue our study of section 12 from last week where Heidegger commences his analysis of Dasein’s existence and then proceed to his discussion of “the world” which starts in section 14 of Chapter III.

• Heidegger undertakes two primary tasks in Chapter II (sections 12, 13).

  • 1) to describe the ontological significance of what it means to-be-in-the-world.

  • 2) to show that this existential is a priori, and discuss what this entails.

• One of the main points that Heidegger argues for is that being-in-the-world must be understood ontologically rather than ontically.

The First Existential: Being-In-The-World

• Last time, we spent a good amount of time discussing the concept of “existential structures”.

• The first “existential” (what appears in your text as existentialia) is “being-in-the-world”.

  • Heidegger analyzes this existential in different stages. Last time we looked at “being-in” and discussed how a pl…

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If you look back to section 8 of Introduction II, Heidegger proposed to write two parts to Being and Time, each containing three “divisions”, but only completed Division One and Division Two of Part One (with Division Two being rushed).

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Welcome to the wonderful and terrifying world of 19th century Europe.

This was a world in which the horrors of mass industrialization led to violent and widespread revolts in 1848, a world in which Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony, and in which Italy and Germany became the unified nations we know them as today.

This was the world that Friedrich Nietzsche was born into, and also the world that he died in (1844-1900).

Nietzsche’s life was completely contained by the 19th century, and he understood the significance of his own age perhaps more deeply than anyone.

Nietzsche’s philosophy is an embodiment of his historical self-awareness and it serves as both a warning to future humans, as well as a reason for hope.

What he has handed down to us is not only relevant to contemporary life, but urgent.

Nietzsche believed that the future of humanity, the human spirit, and everything that gives our lives meaning is being fundamentally threatened in the modern world.

If you agree…

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I am incredibly excited because by the end of this week, you will all have achieved something very impressive.

Making it through the introductions to Being and Time is a major intellectual achievement.

Congrats!

You should also, at this point, start to have a better idea of what Heidegger is proposing to do in the work and why it matters not just to the history of philosophy, but to humanity.

These difficult sections contain Heidegger’s revolutionary remarks about “phenomenology” and “hermeneutics”, and help us understand the method through which Heidegger will carry out his investigation.

Every philosopher has a method, and Heidegger’s is incredibly fascinating.

~

If you want to check in with yourself and see how you are understanding the work, I recommend reading section 8 very slowly and seeing if you can understand what he is saying there.

Section 8 contains an incredible condensed summary of everything we have been discussing so far and serves as a kind of “test’ …

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If you were interested in reading the entire text with me, on April 18th I am launching a complete beginner’s course on Beyond Good & Evil right here on Substack.

You can learn more about it here.

Additionally, has invited me to deliver a “how to read philosophy” workshop at the end of April. If you wanted to learn more about Robin’s work and the workshop, you can visit A Mug Of Insights.

Get more from Paul Musso, PhD in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Thanks for a great chat last week on sections 4 & 5.

The recording from last week is posted in the paid subscribers chat.

This week we will move confidently into Heidegger’s Introduction II to Being and Time.

This is his “methodological introduction”.

We should expect to learn more about how he plans to investigate the Seinsfrage — the question of the meaning of being.

The answer is through history and phenomenology.

Suggested Reading

• Being and Time, Introduction II, sections 6-7A

Notes

Section 5 (The Analysis Of Dasein)

This section was especially difficult, so I want to take a second pass at it with a few notes before moving on to the second introduction and sections 6 & 7.

• In order to avoid a kind of dogmatic statement as to what constitutes the meaning of Dasein, the existential analytic must begin from an account of Dasein in its “average everydayness”.

• “Everydayness” does not have any pejorative connotation -- it is merely descriptive.

  • It means that uncritical mode …

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Thanks for a great discussion last week.

Week 2 Recording Here

As some of you have heard, immediately after our meeting, I got a phone call requesting that I make an emergency trip to New Hampshire to see my mother. As I was leaving my apartment, I discovered that she passed away.

I have been spending the past few days with my family healing, bonding, and grieving. It has been an incredibly challenging and profound experience for all of us.

In her last words to me, shared in private letters, my mom expressed that she wants me to use my writing and mind to impact lives, so here I am.

I truly appreciate all of the patience, understanding, and support you have given me. You’re all so awesome and discussing philosophy with you is an incredible privilege, so thank you.

One request I have, given the circumstances, is to move our meeting to Saturday this week at 12pm EST.

I hope this time works for everyone.

Link For Google Meet

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I wanted to share with you a short guide to help you prepare for our next session.

What you will find below is the selected reading for our next session, some general notes on the selected readings, and some key terms you will encounter in the reading (including ontical vs ontological).

Selected Reading:

• Untitled first page

• Introduction I: sections 1-3

Notes

Untitled First Page

• Heidegger begins the book with a quote from Plato’s Sophist.

  • Michael Gelvin suggests that Heidegger chooses to begin with this quote from Plato for a variety of reasons.

• First, Plato was unique in relating the problems of the individual human being to the immensely speculative reaches of abstract metaphysics.

  • For example, Plato’s theory of Forms arose out of immediately existential needs such as love, death, and justice.

  • Gelvin suggests that Heidegger may have wished to achieve a similar kind of unity between his own ontological theorizing and the immediate existential realities of everyday life.

• S…

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I am publishing this guide to help you prepare for our study of Being and Time.

With a text as difficult and easily misunderstood as Being and Time, it is absolutely critical that we adopt the appropriate approach and start off with the right expectations, assumptions, and warnings.

My first warning to you is this:

This study will be a bit like sailing.

In order to sail it is necessary to do quite a bit of preparatory work — equipment checks, studying the weather, tying knots, untying knots, etc.

But my promise to you is this.

If you put in the time and energy necessary to safely launch into the open ocean, eventually you will be able to sail with this text and enjoy the intellectual thrill that comes with it.

I truly believe your life will never be the same if you are able to understand the key insights contained within it.

Like I said in my video lecture on Heidegger’s philosophical project, what we are receiving here is a new way of seeing — a new kind of truth.

Ready?

Let’s go.

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