ABSTRACT
Friedrich Nietzsche's 1886 work Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future is "in essence a critique of modernity". It sought to destabilize contemporary political and cultural values, and revive what he saw as a degenerate artistic culture. Nietzsche's attempt to undermine existing values required a different approach to his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries. It was vital to make clear that the Christian interpretation of Good and Evil represented only one of many possibilities for ethical life. Nietzsche takes the view that moral, political and cultural questions cannot be split up into isolated areas of inquiry. Nietzsche's naturalistic approach to the study of values relates to another school of thought he later referred to as the "English psychologists". Nietzsche's achievement was to draw out the consequences of Enlightenment secularism and reveal that the traditional foundations of morality had since slipped away.
