Good and evil: contradiction or paradox?

Abstract

These reflections, that place a special emphasis on Nietzsche’s philosophy, aim at showing the fundamental paradox that permeates and crosses through the concepts of good and evil. In fact, and differently from the moral-metaphysical tradition that developed since the Pre-Socratic philosophers and, principally, since Plato, some thinkers, like Heraclitus, Empedocles, Jakob Bóhme, Schopenhauer and,
above all, Nietzsche, see in the so-called oppositions between good and evil, soodness and wickedness, justice and injustice, truth and
non-truth, rather a relation of inclusion, passage, interchange, intertwining, and continuous interplay. Nietzsche, in particular, analyses these notions from the perspective of his fundamental concept of will to power and relation of forces. These forces determine, through
a dynamics of struggle and mutual overcoming, the different values and interpretations, which do not cease, for this very reason, to
construct and to destroy.