Read Beyond Good and Evil by email.
Some mornings are one sentence. That is the book.
Two hundred and ninety-nine numbered aphorisms against the philosophers, the moralists, the patriots and the scholars — and against the assumption that we should want the truth at all. Some run a page, many run a line, and the shortest is seven words long.
Under a minute a day, and each installment stands alone.
Ten months from now, you will have read Nietzsche.
301 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1886
- Translation
- Zimmern
- Installments
- 301
- Each installment
- under a minute
How long it takes
- Words
- 62,454
- Reading time
- 4 hours 20 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 7 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 4 weeks
- At 20 minutes a day
- 13 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read Beyond Good and Evil?
Beyond Good and Evil opens “Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then?” and its first aphorism asks the question the rest of the book keeps asking: granted that we want the truth, why not rather untruth? There are no chapters to follow, only nine parts of numbered pieces — the prejudices of philosophers, the free spirit, the religious mood, a hundred and twenty-five loose epigrams, the natural history of morals, we scholars, our virtues, peoples and countries, and what is noble. The method throughout is to ask what a belief is for and whom it flatters rather than whether it is true.
So know what you are choosing: some mornings are a single sentence. Half the installments are under ninety words, seventy-six of the 301 are twenty words or shorter, and the shortest — one of the 125 epigrams in Part Four, “Apophthegms and Interludes” — is seven words long. That is the book, not an abridgement of it. §146 is twenty-nine words, and it is the one about fighting monsters and the abyss that gazes back; a sentence like that is meant to be carried around all day rather than skimmed on the way to the next. Other mornings are a full page — the longest installment runs 1,311 words, about five and a half minutes.
We serialize Helen Zimmern’s translation in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition: the preface, all 299 aphorisms in Nietzsche’s own numbering — Zimmern letters three of them 65A, 73A and 237A — and the closing poem, “From the Heights,” in L. A. Magnus’s verse — 301 mornings in all. The subject line carries the number and the part you are in, “§214 · Our Virtues,” so even a one-line morning tells you where you stand. No recaps, because none are needed: an aphorism does not continue the one before it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read Beyond Good and Evil?
Just over four and a quarter hours straight through (62,454 words) — and almost nobody remembers an aphorism read at that speed. By email it’s 301 installments, under a minute on the average morning, finished in about ten months; at a premium pace of two or three a day it’s a few months.
Are some of the emails really one sentence?
Yes, and you should hear that now rather than on day 70. Seventy-six of the 301 are twenty words or shorter, the shortest is six words, and the median morning is 83 words. They are aphorisms: the brevity is the argument, and a line you can hold in your head all day does more than a page you skimmed. If you would rather have Nietzsche at length, The Genealogy of Morals is three sustained essays.
Which translation is this?
Helen Zimmern’s, in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition. It is Victorian English, and it keeps Nietzsche’s italics and his dashes, which matter more here than in a novel — in an aphorism the emphasis is often the joke. The closing poem is L. A. Magnus’s verse translation. The modern translations are more precise and all still in copyright.
Do I need to read it in order?
No. Each aphorism is complete in itself, which is why there are no recaps and why missing a day costs you nothing. They do arrive in Nietzsche’s order, and each part has its own subject, so a week tends to hang together even though a morning need not.
How does it arrive?
One numbered section per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick. Never split, never abridged. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Helen Zimmern translation, Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.