Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (German: Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft) is a book by philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche that covers ideas in his previous work Thus Spoke Zarathustra but with a more polemical approach. It was first published in 1886 under the publishing house C. G. Naumann of Liepzig at the author’s own expense and first translated into English by Helen Zimmern, who was two years younger than Nietzsche and knew the author.
According to Walter Kaufman the intent of the title is not about going beyond good and evil in the most obvious sense, but rather that one should not make statements such as “X is good” or “X is evil” or any kind of simplistic black and white moralizing. At the beginning of the book, Nietzsche attacks the very idea of using strictly opposite terms such as “Good versus Evil”.
