Penguin Select Classics: Beyond Good And Evil: (Original, Unabridged Classic)
"One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired." It's a striking opener, and it sets the tone perfectly for what follows. Nietzsche was one of Germany's most provocative philosophical minds, a thinker who pushed existential questions into the mainstream and unsettled society's comfortable reliance on faith, religion, and the need for collective belonging. This Penguin Select Classics edition presents his work in its original, unabridged form. Nietzsche's central argument is both simple and deeply unsettling: genuine understanding requires ruthless self-questioning. Nothing escapes scrutiny here, not your own self-image, not the values instilled by society, and certainly not organised religion. He won't let you off the hook. One of the book's most persistent ideas is that moral absolutes are a fiction. Rather than any clean division between right and wrong, Nietzsche sees only gradations, a spectrum of grey that complicates every judgement we thought we'd already made. This view shapes much of his thinking on religion and morality throughout the text. What he asks of the reader, ultimately, is personal courage: the willingness to define your own truth, assert your own will, and build a way of living that's genuinely yours rather than inherited. It's a demanding read, but a rewarding one.
- Author: Friedrich Nietzsche
- Publisher: Penguin Select Classics
- Genre: Short Stories
- ISBN: 978-9815202656
- Pages: 228 pages