During the longest period of human history-so-called prehistorical times-the value or disvalue of an action was derived from its consequences: the action itself was considered as little as its origin, it was rather the way a distinction or disgrace still reaches back today from a child to its parents, in China, it was the retroactive force of success or failure that led men to think well or ill of an action.

Let us call this period the pre-moral period of mankind: the imperative "know thyself!" was as yet unknown. In the last ten thousand years, however, one has reached the point, step by step, in a few large regions on the earth, where it is no longer the consequences but the origin of an action that one allows to decide its value.

On the whole this is a great event which involves a considerable refinement of vision and standards, the unconscious aftereffect of the rule of aristocratic values and the faith in "descent," the sign of a period that one may call moral in the narrower sense.

It involves the first attempt at self-knowledge. Instead of the consequences, the origin: indeed a reversal of perspective! And certainly a reversal achieved only after long struggles and vacillations! To be sure: a calamitous new superstition, an odd narrowness of interpretation, thus become dominant: the origin of an action was interpreted in the most definite sense as origin in an intention; one came to agree that the value of an action lay in the value of the intention.

The intention as the whole origin and prehistory of an action: almost to the present day this prejudice dominated moral praise, blame, judgment, and philosophy on earth. But today-shouldn't we have reached the necessity of once more resolving on a reversal and fundamental shift in values, owing to another self-examination of man, another growth in profundity-do we not stand at the threshold of a period which should be designated negatively, to begin with, as extra-mora.

Today, is not the suspicion growing, at least among us immoralists, that the decisive value of an action lies precisely in what is unintentional in it, while everything about it that is intentional, everything about it that can be seen, known, "conscious," still belongs to its surface and skin-which, like every skin, betrays something but conceals even more?

In short, we believe that the intention is merely a sign and symptom that still requires interpretation, moreover, a sign that means too much and therefore, taken by itself alone, almost nothing-that morality in the traditional sense, the morality of intentions, was a prejudice, precipitate and perhaps provisional, something on the order of astrology and alchemy, but in any case something that must be overcome.

The overcoming of morality, in a certain sense even the self-overcoming of morality: let this be the name for that long secret work which has been saved up for the finest and most honest, also the most malicious, consciences of today, as living touchstones of the soul.

There is no other way: the feelings of devotion, self-sacrifice for one's neighbor, the whole morality of self-denial must be questioned mercilessly and taken to court: no less than the aesthetics of "contemplation devoid of all interest" which is used today as a seductive guise for the emasculation of art, to give it a good conscience.

There is too much charm and sugar in these feelings of "for others," of "not for myself," for us not to need to become doubly suspicious at this point and to ask: "are these not perhaps-seductions?"

Whatever philosophical standpoint one may adopt today: from every point of view the erroneousness of the world in which we think we live is the surest and firmest fact that we can lay eyes on:-we find reasons upon reasons for it, which would like to lure us to speculations about a deceptive principle in "the essence of things."

But whoever holds that our thinking itself, hence "the intellect," is responsible for the falseness of the world-an honorable way out which is chosen by every conscious or unconscious advocate of God-: whoever takes this world, along with space, time, form, movement, to be falsely inferred: anyone like that would at least have ample reason to learn to be suspicious at long last of all thinking: wouldn't thinking have put over on us the biggest hoax yet?

Excerpted from ‘Beyond Good & Evil’