Will and Beyond Good and Evil

Spinoza's definitions of 'good' and 'evil', in terms of 'utility' and 'harm', anticipates the anti-Manicheanism of Nietzsche's 'master' morality, though not the anti-universalism of the latter. Spinozism is also 'beyond good and evil' in another respect--his infallible rational automaton has no need of axiological alternatives, though Deleuze's characterization of that infallibility as 'amoral' seems misleading. Still, as appealing as that rational ideal is to Spinoza, and to many of his successors, it lacks the necessity that he, and they, attribute to it. For, as analyzed here, all conduct entails Will, a principle of indefinite self-activation, so any delimitation of its exercise, e. g. via the maximality of an ideal, is extrinsically arbitrary. Spinoza's repeated reliance on that ideal seems undermined by his own Preface to Part IV of the Ethics, in which he acknowledges the inadequacy of the ontological perfectionism from which the ideal is derived.