ABSTRACT
In the preface and opening part of Beyond Good and Evil, entitled "On the Prejudices of Philosophers", Friedrich Nietzsche takes aim at philosophers such as Immanuel Kant, Berkeley, Spinoza, and Descartes who have built up elaborate philosophies from rationalist principles. Immanuel Kant's rationalistic morality is grounded in the notion of a categorical imperative: a rule that is binding upon all rational agents. Yet for Nietzsche, his arguments are mere sophistry that conceal a personal drive toward the particular ethical system Kant eventually adopts—which happens to be the same one bequeathed to him by his Lutheran parents. Nietzsche also takes aim at the version of idealism promoted by Berkeley, which views all reality as an immaterial mental construct based on sense experience. Although some anthropologists have pursued a comparative approach, they do so perhaps more gently than Nietzsche would expect from his commanding and dominating "philosophers of the future".
