ABSTRACT
From his earliest texts and until the very end of Nietzsche’s writing, evil constitutes an important theme in his thinking. In his reflections on evil Nietzsche is almost always dealing with moral evil. In the preface to On the Genealogy of Morals he writes that “the problem of the origin of evil pursued me even as a boy of thirteen” (GM, Preface 3), and one can still find hypotheses on the origin of evil in his final, posthumously published works (The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo). While his thoughts on evil developed over the years, they are characterized by a great deal of continuity and consistency. That it is nevertheless not easy to summarize his thoughts is, among other reasons, because Nietzsche’s writing is intentionally unsystematic and experimental, often hyperbolic and always polemical.
