The Life Enhancing Value of Hatred: Reading Beyond Good and Evil

Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we're now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to reading Nichch's Beyond Good and Evil part 7. And this will cover chapters 22 and 23.

What's really significant here, again, he's just been smashing and smashing and smashing so far, but now we're getting he's shifting a little bit more over towards the argument that he's clearing the ground for, which is his notion of will to power. [clears throat] And he starts this by saying, hey, let me be pardoned as an old philologist, which I've mentioned before. He is a philologist who cannot desist from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation. And what he means here is that the way people deploy language, the way they read the world and reinterpret it acts as if it's a direct onetoone presentation, but in fact it is a rereading and a retelling which often creates meaning that has nothing to do with what was in the original.

And here he's attacking this notion that uh natural law, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident. All men are created equal. This [clears throat] it's a phrase like this, this notion of national natural law, natural justice that was very much in the air at this time and of course given the the the you know American Revolution, the French Revolution earlier than this, but still very powerful in this notion that there is some [clears throat] natural law that says you know all men are created equal. there's a natural justice before which we all stand with equality.

And he's like, no, no. Uh nature's conformity to law, right? This is the notion that nature conforms to some set of abstract principles or laws that then because we're part of nature, we also stand before. And he says this is a desire to say there is no God, there is no master.

But he says this is not a reading of it. This is a retelling. This is a creation. Why?

It exists only owing to your interpretation and bad philology. It is not a matter of fact, no text, but rather just a naively humanitarian adjustment and perversion of meaning with which you ...