Reddit reviews Nietzsche's 'Beyond Good and Evil': A Reader's Guide (Reader's Guides)

I'm no Nietzsche scholar, but my curiosity was whetted, and I tried to work out an answer from what I could find of secondary works. Hopefully, I'll be corrected if I'm way off.

> Is Nietzsche saying certainty leads to nihilism, or is he saying the certainty can possibly lead to nihilism?

> I'm a bit confused. How can being certain lead to nihilism, surely the certainty makes one sure or confident about 'reality'?

What Nietzsche calls 'passive' nihilism is when "faith in values has been lost but the desire for the absolutes that characterised such faith remains in place."(1) I think this is what Nietzsche has in mind in the first passage you quoted. It's not the 'certainty' that leads, or may lead, to (passive) nihilism. The certainty rather is or represents this passive nihilism, since it's grounded in a will to truth: a need for absolutes in the wake of the death of God.

> Which group of people is he referring to?

I think he's still referring to passive nihilists: not the metaphysicians this time, but the skeptics. They are dismissive of naive realism (they're dismissing sensual experience as sole guide to truth) and positivism, but are really doing the same thing as the metaphysicians: looking for absolutes in the wake of the death of God. These skeptics are right about one thing: their dismissal of the positivists.

I was a bit puzzled about the last sentence of the quote (it's a bit different in my Norwegian translation), but thumbing through another book, I found this quote:

> While admiring their skepticism, Nietzsche thinks they do not follow their ideas far enough, namely to the point of questioning the value of truth as the basis of nobility, such as he anticipates possible (...) (2)

Did this help you at all?

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(1) Sedgwick, Peter R., Nietzsche: The Key Concepts (2009), entry on 'Nihilism', p. 108, which refers to Will to Power § 22, for the categorisation of 'active' and 'passive' nihilism. It's from 1887 (the same year as a year after Beyond Good and Evil), and I'll quote it here for you:

> Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

> A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

> B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism.

(2)* Acampora, Christa Davis; Keith Ansell Pearson, [Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. A Reader's Guide*](http://www.amazon.com/Nietzsches-Beyond-Good-Evil-Readers/dp/0826473644/) (2011), p. 39.

I'd suggest taking your question over to /r/askphilosophy, it's designed for answering questions. I'm not aware of any "reader's guide" for BGE off the top of my head, though there are a couple dozen for Genealogy of Morality. It looks like Keith Ansell-Pearson has written one, which would probably be not bad. I generally think the best way to understand Nietzsche is to read more Nietzsche--Genealogy of Morality is generally the one I'd recommend.

https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Nietzsches-Beyond-Good-Evil/dp/0521793807/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1468641860&sr=8-1&keywords=the+soul+of+beyond+good+and+evil

https://www.amazon.com/Nietzsches-Beyond-Good-Evil-Readers/dp/0826473644/ref=pd_sim_14_12?ie=UTF8&dpID=41fDmPzJHWL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR102%2C160_&psc=1&refRID=YSJS3Q11ZR0KP9PMSVAB

I haven't read these, but look inside and see if they're what you're looking for. I also find Kaufmann's and Hollingdale's (or Tanner's) introductions to Nietzsche's texts useful, along with the footnotes.

Edit: The translation isn't the problem. It's very easy to blame translations but I think people make a much bigger deal about this than they need to. It seems like you're getting lost with two things: 1) keeping track of Nietzsche's train of thought through the winding sentences and 2) the allusions to the history of philosophy. For 1), I'd suggest constantly keeping track of the subjects of the sentence and the referents of the pronouns (that's where I get lost when reading N.). And for 2), just read more history of philosophy. I find intros to anthologies pretty good for getting a working knowledge of the historical developments quickly: the intro to an ancient anthology, than medieval, than modern, that do it again with another set, and again (while reading some core texts, of course).