Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. It takes up and expands on the ideas of his previous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, but approached from a more critical, polemical direction. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of lacking critical sense and blindly accepting Judeo-Christian premises in their consideration of morality. The work moves into the realm "beyond good and evil" in the sense of leaving behind the traditional morality which Nietzsche subjects to a destructive critique in favor of what he regards as an affirmative approach that fearlessly confronts the perspectivistic nature of knowledge and the perilous condition of the modern individual. In it he exposes the deficiencies of those usually called "philosophers" and identifies the qualities of the "new philosophers": imagination, self-assertion, danger, originality, and the "creation of values".