Nietzsche demands that philosophers stand beyond good and evil, recognizing that moral facts do not exist—morality misinterprets phenomena. Yet morality as a system of signs reveals valuable cultural and psychological realities to those who can decode it. Throughout history, efforts to “improve” humanity have concealed two approaches: taming and breeding. The typical improver, the priest, neither understands nor wishes to understand these underlying realities. Taming resembles kennel practices—weakening animals through fear and pain to make them manageable. The Church exemplified this in the early Middle Ages, transforming noble Teutons into sickly, self-loathing “Christians” drawn into monasteries. Physiologically, sickness was the only means to weaken these “beasts,” and the Church understood this. 

The alternative method—breeding—is illustrated by the Law of Manu, which prescribed four distinct castes in Indian society. Nietzsche portrays this as healthier than Christianity’s atmosphere of disease. Yet this system also required terrible measures against the chandala (outcastes), deliberately weakening them through dietary restrictions, restricted access to water, and prohibitions on hygiene. Nietzsche claims that these sanitary police measures produced murderous epidemics and ghastly venereal diseases, alongside “the law of the knife” (40), which ordained circumcision for men and the removal of the internal labia for women. According to Nietzsche, Christianity represents the chandala’s revenge—a countermovement springing from Jewish roots against all breeding-based morality, the victory of outcaste values disguised as a religion of love. For Nietzsche, both improvement methods share one principle: To make people moral required fundamentally immoral means. The pia fraus (holy lie) exemplifies this. Neither Manu, Plato, Confucius, nor Jewish and Christian teachers doubted their right to deceive. Nietzsche concludes that all methods historically employed to moralize humanity were thoroughly immoral.

Nietzsche credits Germany with accumulated strength and virile virtues but identifies a fatal deficiency. Political ascendancy has come at the expense of intellectual and cultural life; the nation once celebrated for thinking now distrusts the spirit, consumed by politics. When asked abroad about German cultural achievements, he can only name Otto von Bismarck. Nietzsche claims that the German spirit deliberately dulled itself through alcohol, Christianity, and “constipating” music—young scholars’ beer-drinking habits exemplify this degeneration. German intellectual depth and seriousness are vanishing. He says that universities exhibit desolate, lukewarm atmospheres; the scientific industry despiritualizes scholars. Germany appears as Europe’s intellectual flatland. 

For Nietzsche, the explanation is simple: One cannot spend beyond one’s resources. Germany has spent its understanding and will on power politics, economics, and military concerns, leaving nothing for culture. Culture and state are thus antagonists—one thrives at the other’s expense. Great cultural periods coincide with political decline. As Germany rises politically, France, particularly Paris, becomes the center of cultural seriousness. Germany’s educational system has lost purpose. Nietzsche states that education should be an end in itself, requiring true educators—cultivated spirits like Jacob Burckhardt—not academic functionaries. Current institutions brutally train masses for government service. Educational democratization contributes to decline. He says that true education involves three tasks: learning to see (cultivating patience, resisting immediate reactions, and suspending judgment), learning to think (mastering intellectual technique as one learns dancing), and learning to speak and write. Germans lack finesse—Nietzsche argues that their ability to tolerate Kant illustrates this lack of intellectual grace.

Nietzsche offers aphoristic critiques spanning numerous topics. He disparages various intellectuals, using Ernest Renan as an example of theology’s corruption of reason. Against George Eliot, he argues that rejecting God while retaining Christian morality is incoherent since the entire moral framework depends on divine authority. On aesthetics, he identifies frenzy—heightened strength—as art’s physiological prerequisite, enabling artists to transform objects to mirror the artist’s own perfection. He distinguishes Apollonian frenzy (the visual state characteristic of painters) from Dionysian frenzy (the compulsion toward metamorphosis characteristic of actors). 

Challenging Charles Darwin, he contends that survival struggles favor the numerous weak who possess greater spirit. He defines freedom as assuming responsibility and overcoming resistance; liberal institutions, once achieved, undermine this by promoting conformity. Nietzsche portrays modernity as marked by degenerate instincts. He argues that institutions fail because people lack the will for tradition and authority. He presents modern marriage, based on transient feeling rather than the enduring institutional foundations that Nietzsche identifies, as an example of decay. According to him, the existence of a labor question is a sign of instinctual degeneration because it is foolish to want a class of enslaved people while simultaneously educating them to be enslavers by granting them rights. 

Criminals are strong individuals corrupted by unfavorable conditions—drawing on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Siberian observations, Nietzsche portrays them as carved from “most valuable wood” (87). He questions claims of moral progress, viewing modern sensitivity as physiological weakness. Arthur Schopenhauer misread art and tragedy as life negating when they affirm existence. Nietzsche celebrates Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a realist who achieved wholeness, embodying Dionysian acceptance of life’s totality—a joyous fatalism he calls the highest possible faith.

Few ancient works significantly influenced Nietzsche. His stylistic sense awakened with Sallust’s compact, severe prose, an influence reflected in his effort to give Zarathustra a Roman style. Horace provided unmatched artistic delight through economical word mosaics achieving maximum energy with minimum signs—quintessential Roman nobility. Greeks impressed him less than the Romans; their fluid manner lacks commanding classical force. According to Nietzsche, we learn writing from Romans, not Greeks. He rejects Plato completely, calling him a stylistic decadent who mixed forms indiscriminately. Platonic dialogues appear childish beside French writers like Fontenelle. His distrust runs deeper: Plato deviates fundamentally from Greek instincts, being moralistic and pseudo-Christian. Nietzsche further suggests that Plato may have received his education from the Egyptians or the Jews in Egypt. Plato’s idealism created a philosophical bridge to the cross, allowing nobler ancient spirits to set foot on the path toward Christianity and shaping church structures. 

Nietzsche presents Thucydides and Machiavelli as antidotes to Platonism through their commitment to perceiving reality without imposing reason or morality upon it. Thucydides embodies Sophistic realism, while Greek philosophy represents instinctual decline. The Socratic schools opposed this earlier factuality with moralistic and idealistic thinking. True Greek culture expressed will to power; institutions protected against this internal drive. Understanding older Greeks requires recognizing Dionysus—explicable only through a surplus of force. German philologists like Christian Auguste Lobeck missed this, trivializing Dionysian mysteries. These mysteries celebrated life’s will through procreation and eternal return. According to Nietzsche, Christianity treated sexuality as unclean, resenting life. Orgiastic psychology revealed tragic feeling’s meaning. Tragedy affirms life even in destruction—Dionysian joy in becoming, not Aristotelian catharsis. This concept, he notes, marked his first revaluation of all values in The Birth of Tragedy. He identifies as Dionysus’s last disciple and the teacher of eternal return.

A brief passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra presents a parable and exhortation. Kitchen coal asks a diamond why it’s so hard since they’re close kin. Zarathustra addresses his brothers, asking why they’re soft, pliant, and yielding, with so little destiny visible in them. He challenges how they can triumph or create with him if they lack hardness and inexorability. All creators are necessarily hard. Impressing one’s hand upon millennia as upon wax and writing upon the will of millennia as upon bronze represent blessedness. Only the noblest achieve complete hardness. Zarathustra places a new tablet before his followers: He commands them to become hard.