In the absence of details substantiating this view, however, it has been difficult to avoid reading BGE as a mere collection. Because its remarks are given the form of numbered sections and organized into nine parts, each with its own title, Kaufmann warned us long ago not to read them as a mere “collection of aphorisms for browsing.” With one exception, each part was to be read “straight-through,” for each “pursues one set of problems” and ideas are frequently qualified in later sections and may undergo surprising developments. It appears to be an arbitrarily arranged collection of the author’s most passionately held opinions, without argument or grounds to support them. Its “distinctive positive doctrines,” such as that of the will to power, are difficult to find plausible, and its “stylistic peculiarities” as a work of philosophy are that it seems unconcerned with either the objectivity of its views or the structure of their presentation. After explaining why, I will suggest an alternative view of the book’s greatness, one that forms the basis for my judgment of Judith Norman’s new translation, which I believe improves upon Walter Kaufmann’s standard English translation in certain respects, but backtracks from it in others.īGE’s apparent faults concern both content and style. In fact, his account of how BGE might plausibly be considered a great book is fairly unconvincing.
He presents it as “a perplexing fact” that it is “so difficult” to decide whether the book is great or “utterly irrational,” containing only “silly proclamations based on unwarranted generalization,” and seems to find it easier to support the latter view. Introductions to earlier English translations of Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) hail it as “one of the great books of the nineteenth-century, indeed of any century,” and as “one of the greatest books of a very great thinker.” Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s introduction to this new translation is decidedly less enthusiastic.
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