Nietzsche’s preface to Beyond Good and Evil
is just two pages long.
It begins with an infamous opening line, “Suppose
truth is a woman…”
Nietzsche compares past philosophers to clumsy
and hapless suitors, who disappoint and annoy
truth with their “gruesome seriousness.”
Here, as elsewhere, he has Kant clearly in
mind.
Nietzsche calls dogmatic philosophies of the
past a kind of noble childishness of the human
spirit, something like astrology.
Although we are surprised to find that intelligent
people were ever serious about dogmatic philosophy
(or astrology), they may serve an important
preparatory function.
As astrology gave way to astronomy, perhaps
the dogmatism of the past has prepared our
minds for something greater.
We should be grateful to the dogmatists, even
to Plato, writes Nietzsche.
In struggling against and overcoming dogmatism,
the European mind has acquired a new strength
and depth.
The fight against Plato and his heirs, including
the Christians, has created a new spiritual
tension, which can be used to strive for something
truly great.
Ordinary Europeans experience this spiritual
tension as a sense of distress or unease.
Two recent movements attempted to discharge
the tension, to create something from the
built-up potential.
But both the Jesuits and the democractic 
enlightenment thinkers failed.
We free spirits, Nietzsche writes, will use
the built up tension in European culture to
shoot for a farther goal, which he does not
name.
The preface ends here.
Nietzsche will take up the critique of past
dogmatic philosophies in Part One, On the
Prejudices of Philosophers.
We will examine that next. Goodbye.
