Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is a novel by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. It is a book of philosophical thoughts about which the author wrote: "It's an awful book that comes out of my soul this time, it's very black, nearly an ink-fish. It braces me up as if I took someone by horns, not a bull, obviously." Here Friedrich Nietzsche disputes some basic backgrounds of an old philosophical tradition, such as "self-understanding", "knowledge", "truth" and "freedom of will" explaining them by a discovery of the moral consciousness. Instead of them, he offers the desire for a power as the explanation of any behaviour. He overestimates humanistic beliefs by showing that even the desire for power or harming the weaker is not absolutely indecorous.
