Beyond one opposition, rather than beyond every valuation
He said, "beyond good and evil," because he had not the courage to say, "more good than good and evil," or, "more evil than good and evil."
Nietzsche explicitly distinguishes rejecting the opposition good/evil from abandoning discrimination between good and bad. At the end of the first essay of The Genealogy of Morals (1887), he explains his earlier title: it is not the same as being beyond good and bad. Chesterton's alternatives therefore assume precisely what Nietzsche disputes: that any defensible judgment must remain within the inherited good/evil opposition. First essay, §17.
This does not establish Nietzsche's rival valuation as sound. It does mean that calling the formula nonsense passes over its stated distinction. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), §260, contrasts noble self-valuation with slave morality and describes pride, self-command and generosity from abundance. Those commitments can be criticized; they are more definite than mere altitude. §260. The witnesses used here are the later Samuel translation (1913) and Gutenberg's Zimmern text derived from the 1909–1913 collected edition, not evidence of the editions Chesterton read.
Sources
Revision 1 of 1 · 2026-11-07 · Suggest an edit