Daniel Conway

Friedrich Nietzsche’s surprising evaluation of the title he assigned to the book Beyond Good and Evil (1886) may be understood to motivate a re-appraisal of the brief he extends to those readers whom he intends to include within the circle of his “we.” Acknowledging that the title of Beyond Good and Evil essays a “dangerous slogan” (GM I:17), which he elsewhere describes as “malicious,” Nietzsche signals to his unknown friends and readers that the business of emigrating “beyond good and evil” is far more complicated than they initially might have realized.

In this presentation, I suggest that the “danger” and “malice” in question arise from the precise nature of the relationship to morality that his target readership is encouraged to cultivate. Rather than emigrate cleanly beyond the jurisdiction of the morality of good and evil, his best readers are invited (and dared) to lean into the morality they have pledged to retire from service. In their capacity as “immoralists,” Nietzsche and his best readers will tell the truth about the morality of good and evil and thereby expose the lies, fictions, and calumnies on which it continues to trade. They will do so, evidently, by aligning themselves with the recently ascendant disciplinary regime of “Christian truthfulness,” whose authority they will channel (and eventually exhaust) in their truth-intensive assault on the fading disciplinary regime of “Christian morality.” Their “immoral” experiments with truth at the limits of this fading disciplinary regime will yield an experience of having freed themselves from the constraints imposed on them by the morality of good and evil.

Bio

Daniel Conway is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Texas A&M University. He has lectured and published widely on topics in post-Kantian European philosophy, political philosophy, aesthetics (especially literature and film), philosophy of education, and genocide studies. His short-term residency in Lisbon is funded by a generous grant from the Film and Death ERC project.