Beyond good and evil?

Some thoughts I had in thinking about Nietzsche’s phrase, beyond good and evil…

What does it really mean? It’s not that there are no morals, no values, at all—far from it. It’s more about the way that morality is conveyed, understood—the ways that moral battles are socially waged, and won. The rhetoric, the (gay) science of morality.

Moralism is what needs to be gone beyond—moralism is what is dead (along with god).

For Nietzsche, good and evil exist are real—they absolutely do exist. Nietzsche’s theory makes that clear. It is precisely because good and evil do exist—ontologically, socially, spiritually, etc.—that we must go beyond the traditional means of understanding, describing, and conveying them. Good and evil are too important to be dealt with as they had been, up to that point (19th century Europe).

It’s more about making arguments about why evil things are bad or wrong, but not in moralistic terms—it’s a way of navigating badness and wrongness in new categories, precisely beyond evil. New ways for communicating moral categories, in a non-moral sense.

One example: the importance of cringe as a new category of badness and wrongness, with a kind of moral-aesthetic weight, but one that is totally detached from conventional senses of evil.