Nietzsche and Rand: 96 Similarities and Differences

Materialism. Importance of Friedrich Lange’s The History of Materialism (1866): “Nietzsche’s first reaction was that it was undoubtedly the most significant philosophical work to have appeared in the last hundred years” (postscript to a letter of February 1866 to Hermann Mushacke, in Hayman 1980, 82)

“there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.” This substance/action ontology leads people to maintain the belief that “the strong man is free to be weak and the bird of prey to be a lamb—for thus they gain the right to make the bird of prey accountable for being a bird of prey.” (GM 1:13)

Yet regular reductionist causal explanations

Not “mechanistic”: “Let us even beware of believing the universe is a machine: it is certainly not constructed for one purpose, and calling it a ‘machine’ does it far too much honor.” (GS 109)

“The ‘inner world’ is full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps: the will is one of them. The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain anything either—it merely accompanies events; it can also be absent. The so-called motive: another error. Merely a surface phenomenon of consciousness, something alongside the deed that is more likely to cover up the antecedents of the deeds than to represent them. And as for the ego! That has become a fable, a fiction, a play on words: it has altogether ceased to think, feel, or will.

“What follows from this? There are no mental causes at all.” (TI “The Four Great Errors” 3)

“Europe would never have become Christian in the first place if the culture of the ancient world in the south had not gradually been barbarized through an excessive admixture of Teutonic barbarian blood, thus losing its cultural superiority.” (GS 149)

Consciousness as a defense mechanism against reality, not a cognitive mechanism. Language and art as shields, as comforting illusions.

Daybreak 117:“In prison.” “The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deception of sensation: these again are the basis of all our judgments and ‘knowledge’—there is absolutely no escape, no backway or bypath in the the real world!”

Yes: “they [the senses] do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. … . The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.” (TI “Reason” in Philosophy 2)

“The demand for an adequate mode of expression is senseless: it lies in the essence of a language, as a means of expression, to express a mere relationship—the concept ‘truth’ is nonsensical.” (WP 625)

“Thus the strength of knowledge does not depend on its degree of truth but on its age, on the degree to which it has been incorporated, on its character as a condition of life.” (GS 110)

“The conditions of life might include error.” (GS 121)

“What are man’s truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.” (GS 265)

“Truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked.” (TFEMS, q. Hayman 164)

“We are none of us that which we appear to be in accordance with the states for which alone we have consciousness and words, and consequently praise and blame; those cruder outbursts of which alone we are aware make us misunderstand ourselves, we draw a conclusion on the basis of data in which the exceptions outweigh the rule, we misread ourselves in this apparently most intelligible of handwriting on the nature of our self.” (D 115)

“The unknown world of the ‘subject’.” (D 116)

“every action is unknowable” (GS 335)

“However far a man may go in self-knowledge, nothing however can be more incomplete than his image of the totality of drives which constitute his being.” (D 119)

“Our thinking is only a picture of the primal intellect, a thinking that arises from the ideas of the single will … . I believe in the incomprehensibility of the will.” (q in Hayman 136-7)

How does the above fit with BGE 6 which claims deep knowledge of self based on knowledge of surface philosophy?

“What we make of [the senses’] testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. ‘Reason’ is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. … . The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.” (TI “Reason” in Philosophy 2)

“Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir”. “In the philosopher, conversely, there is nothing whatever that is impersonal; and above all, his morality bears decided and decisive witness to who he is— that is, in what order of rank the innermost drives of his nature stand in relation to each other.” (BGE 6)

“our moral judgments and evaluations too are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us” (D 119)

“the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices” (D 542)

“most of the conscious thinking of a philosopher is secretly guided and forced into certain channels by his instincts.” (BGE 3)

No: “Beware of systematizers! – There is a play-acting of systematizers: … they will to impersonate complete and uniformly strong natures.” (D 318)

“I mistrust all systematizers and I avoid them. The will to system is a lack of integrity” (TI Maxims and Arrows 26)

Issue of organic growth versus top-down intellectualized imposition?

Anti-a-priori speculation.

“Today we possess science precisely to the extent to which we have decided to accept the testimony of the senses—to the extent to which we sharpen them further, arm them, and have learned to think them through.” (TI Reason 3)

Development: pro-science in 70s (HAH), then Kantian/Schopenhaurian skepticism about the noumenal (e.g., BGE 21); then denies noumenal/phenomenal distinction in TI (“How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable”)

“the ideal scholar in whom the scientific instinct, after thousands of total and semi-failures, for once blossoms and blooms to the end, is certainly one of the most precious instruments there are; but he belongs in the hand of one more powerful” (BGE 207; the one more powerful being a philosopher-creator)

GM 3: 25: “No! Don’t come to me with science when I ask for the natural antagonist of the ascetic ideal …” and: “all science … has at present the object of dissuading man from his former respect for himself …”

Anti-a-priori speculation

Inductive evidence’s role.

“Prayer has been invented for those people who really never have thoughts of their own and who do not know any elevation of the soul or at least do not notice when it occurs” (GS 128)

“It is precisely the best science that will best know how to keep us in this simplified, utterly artificial, well-invented, well-falsified world, how unwillingly willing science loves error because, being alive,—it loves life!” (BGE 24)

Yes: “We … want to become those we are—human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.” (GS 335)

Stoic fatalism? One controls only one’s response to one’s fate?

Hayman on GS 55: The noble individual does not proceed according to reason: when he is magnanimous or self-sacrificing, it is his instincts he is following, and when he is brave it is not for the sake of winning honours. His overflowing magnanimity empowers him to be generous.” (237)

Self-creation: “The one thing needful. – There is one thing one has to have: either a cheerful disposition by nature of a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.” (HAH 486)

Yes: GS 293

No: “For what does one have to atone most? For one’s modesty; for having failed to listen to one’s most personal requirements; for having mistaken oneself; for having underestimated oneself; for having lost a good war for one’s instincts: this lack of reverence for oneself revenges itself through every kind of deprivation: health, friendship, well-being, pride, cheerfulness, freedom, firmness, courage. One never afterward forgives oneself for this lack of genuine egoism: one takes it for an objection, for a doubt about a real ego.” (WP 918)

Yes: GS 119 speaks of those who desire only to be a function of others.

The above two as representative of N’s descriptive and normative uses of the same concepts: third-person description of the phenomenon and first-person evaluation of the phenomenon from the perspective of his moral-psycho-biological type.

Nietzsche has two theses: 1. Egoism as universal and natural. All have will to power. But not all are equal. So altruism as the egoism of the weak. 2. Egoism as not universal: physiological sickness causing a will to nothingness and then moral nihilism. Altruism as the will to nothingness of the weak. Which is it—1 or 2?

“That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no grounds for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: ‘these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: ‘we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.’” (GM 1:13)

“Not one of these clumsy, conscience-stricken herd animals (who set out to treat egoism as a matter of general welfare) wants to know … that what is right for someone absolutely cannot be right for someone else; that the requirement that there be a single morality for everyone is harmful precisely to the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between people, and between moralities as well. (BGE 228)

N’s is an activist Stoicism. A cheerful Byronic fatalism.

No (WP 287); every living being “is only a means to something; it is the expression of forms of the growth of power” (WP 706) ; 13: “A living thing seeks above all to discharge its strength—life itself is will to power; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most frequent results” (BGE 13); every “living creature values many things higher than life itself; yet out of this evaluation itself speaks—the will to power” (Z 2:12) ; “Not ‘mankind’ but overman is the goal!” (WP 1001) ; Morality is a social product: it arises “when a greater individual or a collective-individual, for example the society, the state, subjugates all other single ones … and orders them into a unit.” (HH 1.99)

“My philosophy aims at ordering of rank not at an individualistic morality” (WTP 287).

“For the question is this: how can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? … Only by your living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens and not for the good of the majority.” (SE)

The free spirit: “Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed and affirmed in the whole—he does not negate any more. Such a faith, however, is the highest of all possible faiths: I have baptized it with the name of Dionysus.” (TI Skirmishes 49)

HH 2.89: community more valuable than individual, and to create that which is enduring is the goal; morality is for that purpose: to limit and channel the individual. This, e.g., was the great accomplishment of the Roman Empire (A 58)

Zarathustra says: “The overman is the sense of the earth … . I love those who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s.” (Z I.P.3)

“Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!” (Z, Prologue, § 3).

“I write for a species of man that does not yet exist: for the ‘masters of the earth’” (WP 958)

“the feeling of power: this wants to express itself, either to us ourselves, or to other men, or to ideas or imaginary beings. The most common modes of expression are: to bestow, to mock, to destroy—all three out of a common basic drive” (D 356)

“An animal’s capacity for development ends at physical maturity and thereafter its growth consists of the action necessary to maintain itself at a fixed level; after reaching maturity, it does not, to any significant extent, continue to grow in efficacy … . But man’s capacity for development does not end at physical maturity … . His ability to think, to learn, to discover new and better ways of dealing with reality, to expand the range of his efficacy, to grow intellectually, is an open door to a road that has no end.” (ITOE 81?)

“[T]he subject—the striving individual bent on furthering his egoistic purposes—can be thought of only as the enemy of art, never its source.” (BT 5)

Egoism among noble equals: “It is one piece of its egoism more, this refinement and self-limitation with its equals … —it honors itself in them and in the rights it cedes to them.” (BGE 265)

“At the risk of annoying innocent ears I will propose this: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul. I mean that firm belief that other beings will, by nature, have to be subordinate to a being ‘like us’ and will have to sacrifice themselves. The noble soul accepts this fact of its egoism without any question-mark, and also without feeling any harshness, compulsion, or caprice in it, but rather as something that may well be grounded in the primordial law of things. If the noble soul were to try to name this phenomenon, it would call it justice itself” (BGE 265)

“Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to ascribe value to himself only as a function.”(GS 116)

“No altruism!” (GS 119)

The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as in eradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

“’We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink ….” (Z P:5)

“Pseudo-egoism.—Whatever they may think and say about their ‘egoism’, the great majority nonetheless do nothing for their ego their whole life long: what they do is done for the phantom of their ego which has formed itself in the heads of those around them and has been communicated to them;-as a consequence they all of them dwell in a fog of impersonal, semi-personal opinions, and arbitrary, as it were poetical evaluations, the one for ever in the head of someone else, and the head of this someone else again in the heads of others: a strange world of phantasms” (D 105)

The “‘great man’ is great owing to the free play and scope of his desires and to the yet greater power that knows how to press these magnificent monsters into service” (WP 933) An actor (not a re-actor).

“… one could conceive of such a pleasure and power of self-determination, such a freedom of the will that the spirit would take leave of all faith and every wish for certainty, being practiced in maintaining himself on insubstantial ropes and possibilities and dancing even near abysses. Such a spirit would be the free spirit par excellence” (GS 347).

Zarathustra says: “The overman is the sense of the earth … . I love those who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s.” (Z I.P.3)

“The essential point is: the greatest perhaps also have great virtues, but in that case also their opposites. I believe that it is precisely through the presence of opposites, and their feelings, that the great human being, the bow with the great tension, arises.” (WP 967) [Hegelian]

“What makes one heroic?—Going out to meet at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope.” (GS 268)

“Greek ideal.—What did the Greeks admire in Odysseus? Above all, his capacity for lying, and for cunning and terrible retribution; his being equal to contingencies; when the need be, appearing nobler than the noblest; the ability to be whatever he chose; heroic perseverance; having all means at his command; possession of intellect—his intellect is the admiration of the gods, they smile when they think of it–: all this is the Greek ideal!” (Daybreak, 306)

The weapon of altruism (AS 142)

“Their [i.e., the healthy’s] right to exist, the privilege of the full-toned bell over the false and cracked, is a thousand times greater: they alone are our warranty for the future, they alone are liable for the future of man.” (GM III:14)

“The invalid is a parasite on society. In a certain state it is indecent to go on living.” (TI Skirmishes 36)

Work and trade (GS 31)

Productiveness (“TOE” 25)

“My ideas do not revolve around the degree of freedom that is granted to the one or to the other or to all, but around the degree of power that the one or the other should exercise over others or over all, and to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, even enslavement, provides the basis for the emergence of a higher type.” (WP 859)

“[T]he democratic movement is the heir of the Christian movement.”; it will become a tool of “a master race, the future ‘masters of the earth’ … philosophical men of power and artist-tyrants’ who will “employ democratic Europe as their most pliant and supple instrument for getting hold of the destinies of the earth” (Note for BGE, quoted in Hunt 39)

“I used the word ‘state’: it is obvious who is meant by this—some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and nomad. That is after all how the ‘state’ began on earth: I think that sentimentalism which would have it begin with a ‘contract’ has been disposed of.” (GM II:17)

“I am beginning to touch on what is serious for me, the ‘European problem’ as I understand it, the cultivation of a new caste that will rule Europe.” (BGE 251)

“Every enhancement of the type ‘man’ has so far been the work of an aristocratic society—and it will be so again and again—a society that believes in the long order of rank and differences in value between man and man, and that needs slavery in some sense or other.” (BGE 257)

“For institutions to exist there must exist the kind of will, instinct, imperative which is anti-liberal to the point of malice” (TI Skirmishes 39)

“War essential. It is vain rhapsodizing and sentimentality to continue to expect much (even more, to expect a very great deal) from mankind, once it has learned not to wage war. For the time being, we know of no other means to imbue exhausted peoples, as strongly and surely as every great war does, with that raw energy of the battleground, that deep impersonal hatred, that murderous coldbloodedness with a good conscience, that communal, organized ardor in destroying the enemy, that proud indifference to great losses, to one’s own existence and to that of one’s friends. That muted, earthquakelike convulsion of the soul.” (HA 477)

“One must learn from war: … (2) one must learn to sacrifice many and to take one’s cause seriously enough not to spare men” (WP 982)

“Culture absolutely cannot do without passions, vices, and acts of malice.”

“Religious war has signified the greatest progress of the masses hitherto; for it proves that the mass has begun to treat concepts with respect.” (GS 144)

Also: (TI Skirmishes 38 on “war is a training in freedom”)

“Our liberal representatives, as is well known, lack the time for reflecting on the nature of man: else they would know that they work in vain when they work for a ‘gradual decrease of the military burden.’ Rather, only when this kind of need has become greatest will the kind of god be nearest who alone can help. The tree of war-glory can only be destroyed all at once, by a stroke of lightning: but lightning, as indeed you know, comes from a cloud—and from up high.” (WS 284)

“One hardly dares speak anymore of the will to power: it was different in Athens.’ (Notes 1880-81, x, 414

“He cannot control himself, and from that a poor woman infers that it will be easy to control him and casts her net for him. Soon she will be his slave.” (GS 227)

Equal existential and psychological competence.

Some sexual-psychological differences between men and women.

“Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit …. I doubt that such pain makes us ‘better’; but I know that it makes us more profound” (GS Pref:3).

To his kind of men: “I wish [them] suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities—I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished” (WP 910)

Though out of this will/can come joy, gaiety, and being a free spirit.

GS 48; BGE 56

“To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is.” (EH ‘Why I am so Clever’ 9; echoes of Kant on genius in CJ and Hegel on the Absolute’s coming to self-awareness)

“Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his ‘most natural state’ is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly and subtly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts.” (BGE 188)

“The Christian idea of God”: “is one of the most corrupt conceptions of God the world has ever seen … . God having degenerated into a contradiction of life instead of its transfiguration and eternal yes! God as declared aversion to life, to nature, to the will to life! God as every slander against the ‘here and now’” (A 18).

“Being profound and seeming profound.—Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water” (GS 173)

“Our highest insights must—and should—sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them” (BGE 30).

Contrast GM Preface:2

“Thinking out the principle problems … always brings me back … to the same conclusions :they are already there, as veiled and obscure as possible in my Geburt der Tragödie, and everything I have since learned has become and ingrown part of them.” (Letter to Franz Overbeck, 2 July 1885; q Hayman 286)