Nietzsche and Rand: 124 Similarities and Differences

Materialism. “The most important philosophical work, which has appeared in the last ten years doubtless is Lange’s History of Materialism. Kant, Schopenhauer, and this book of Lange’s—I need no more.” (Letter of November 1866 to Hermann Mushacke)

“Actually, do you know what we can ascribe to the universe as such, apart from scientific discovery? Only those fundamentals that we can grasp about existence. Not in the sense of switching contexts and ascribing particular characteristics to the universe, but we can say: since everything possesses identity, the universe possesses identity. Since everything is finite, the universe is finite. But we can’t ascribe space or time or a lot of other things to the universe as a whole. (ITOE, 273)

“Nature, i.e., the universe as a whole, cannot be created or annihilated … it cannot come into or go out of existence. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, it is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the law of identity. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe—from a floating speck of dust to the formation of a galaxy to the emergence of life—are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved. Nature is the metaphysically given—i.e., the nature of nature is outside the power of any volition.” (PWNI, “The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made,” 25)

“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)

“Descartes was the first to have dared, with admirable boldness, to understand the animal as machine; the whole of our physiology endeavors to prove this claim. And we are consistent enough not to except man, as Descartes still did” (A14).

Also WP 507-517)

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.” (JS 109)

Also: WP 552, 1067, Postcard to Overbeck.

“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.” (JS 149)

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

“We do not even have any organ at all for knowing, for ‘truth’; we ‘know’ … just as much as may be useful in the interest of the human herd.” (JS 354)

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 world seems logical to us, because we have already made it logical.” (WP 521)

Also: WP 477, 512; JS 111.

Also: “Philosophical Detection,” PWNI, 17, pb 15.

“These Nay-sayers and outsiders of today who are unconditional on one point—their insistence on intellectual cleanliness, these hard, severe, abstinent heroic spirits who constitute the honor of our age; all these pale atheists, anti-Christians, immoralists, nihilists, ephectics, hectics of the spirit  … they certainly believe they are as completely liberated from the ascetic ideal as possible, these ‘free, very free spirits’ … They are far from being free spirits: for they still have faith in the truth” (GM III.24).

“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.” (JS 110)

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

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

“Truths are illusions whose illusoriness is overlooked.” (TFEMS)

“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” (JS 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?

Conscious and subconscious.

Psychological role of art in cognition.

Friendship and love: “visibility”.

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)

Also: “The Left: Old and New,” NL, 84)

“Thoughts.—Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier and simpler than these.” (JS 179)

And: “reason is man’s only means of grasping reality and of acquiring knowledge—and, therefore, the rejection of reason means that men should act regardless of and/or in contradiction to the facts of reality.” (NL, “The Left: Old and New,” 84)

Also: GS, FNI, 156, pb 128; VOS, 13, pb 20.

“In that sense, man is the weakest of animals: he is born naked and unarmed, without fangs, claws, horns or ‘instinctual’ knowledge.” (NL, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” 136)

“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 …”

Continuity but sharper division of labor. E.g., on evolution.

No-a-priori speculation.

Inductive evidence’s role.

Also: “Introducing Objectivism,” TON, Aug 1962, 35.

Also: GS, FNI, 187, pb 150.

“Mystical explanations.—Mystical explanations are considered deep. The truth is that they are not even superficial.” (JS 126)

“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” (JS 128)

And: “Mysticism is the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason. Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as ‘instinct,’ ‘intuition,’ ‘revelation,’ or any form of ‘just knowing.’” (PWNI, “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World,” 70)

“Although skepticism and mysticism are ultimately interchangeable, and the dominance of one always leads to the resurgence of the other, they differ in the form of their inner contradiction—the contradiction, in both cases, between their philosophical doctrine and their psychological motivation. Philosophically, the mystic is usually an exponent of the intrinsic (revealed) school of epistemology; the skeptic is usually an advocate of epistemological subjectivism. But, psychologically, the mystic is a subjectivist who uses intrinsicism as a means to claim the primacy of his consciousness over that of others. The skeptic is a disillusioned intrinsicist who, having failed to find automatic supernatural guidance, seeks a substitute in the collective subjectivism of others.” (ITOE, “Consciousness and Identity,” 79)

“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)

“There is no necessary clash, no dichotomy between man’s reason and his emotions—provided he observes their proper relationship. A rational man knows—or makes it a point to discover—the source of his emotions, the basic premises from which they come; if his premises are wrong, he corrects them. He never acts on emotions for which he cannot account, the meaning of which he does not understand. In appraising a situation, he knows why he reacts as he does and whether he is right. He has no inner conflicts, his mind and his emotions are integrated, his consciousness is in perfect harmony.” (“Playboy Interview,” 1964)

BGE 21; GM II:10: no “guilt,” only sickness; Postcard to Overbeck);

“[T]he concept of a causa sui is something fundamentally absurd” (BGE 15), and that it is “the best self-contradiction that has been conceived so far … a sort of rape and perversion of logic” (BGE 21); the desire for “freedom of the will” in the superlative metaphysical sense … the desire to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for one’s actions oneself, and to absolve God, the world, ancestors, chance, and society involves nothing less than to be precisely this causa sui and … to pull oneself up into existence by the hair, out of the swamps of nothingness” (BGE 21);

“at the bottom of us, really ‘deep down,’ there is, of course, something unteachable, some granite of spiritual fatum, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined questions. Whenever a cardinal problem is at stake, there speaks an unchangeable ‘this is I.’ (BGE 231).

Free will is a “Great” errors (TI “The Four Great Errors” 7).

“the single human being is a piece of fatum from the front and from the rear, one law more, one necessity more for all that is yet to come and to be. To say to him, ‘Change yourself!’ is to demand that everything be changed, even retroactively.” (TI ‘Morality as Anti-Nature’ 6);

“the voluntary is absolutely lacking … everything has been directed along certain lines from the beginning” (WP 458); “one will become only that which one is (in spite of all: that means education, instruction, milieu, chance, and accident)” (WP 334); “A man as he ought to be: that sounds to us as insipid as ‘a tree as he ought to be’” (WP 332). “There is only aristocracy of birth, only aristocracy of blood” (WP 942);

“perhaps there exists neither will nor purposes, and we have only imagined them. Those iron hands of necessity which shake the dice-box of chance play their game for an infinite length of time; so there have to be throws which exactly resemble purposiveness and rationality of every degree. Perhaps our acts of will and our purposes are nothing but just such throws—and we are only too limited and too vain to comprehend our extreme limitedness: which consists in the fact that we ourselves shake the dice-box with iron hands, that we ourselves in our most intentional actions do no more than play the game of necessity.” (D 130)

Opening line of EH: “The good fortune of my existence ‘lies in its fatality.” (EH ‘Why I am so Wise’, 1) “It was a lucky fact of nature that I, Nietzsche, was a healthy organism, that is, the type of creature that instinctively does the right things to facilitate its flourishing.” (EH ‘Why I am so Wise’, 2); “Amor fati: Let that be my love henceforth!” (JS 276)

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

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

Also: “The Left: Old and New,” NL, 84; “Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” pamphlet, 6)

Hayman on JS 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: (JS 293).

“By the grace of Aristotle, of Galileo, of Pasteur, of Edison, and of a long, thin line of often-martyred mean stretching back through millennia …” (NL, “The Left: Old and New,” 88)

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: JS 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 causes a will to nothingness and then moral nihilism. Altruism as the will to nothingness of the weak. Which is it—1 or 2?

Will to power “can manifest itself only against resistances; therefore it seeks that which resists it” (WP 656) .

“The well-being of the majority and the well-being of the few are opposite viewpoints of value,” (GM , end of First Essay note).

“There is no egoism that remains by itself and does not encroach … . ‘One furthers one’s I always at the expense of others’” ; alternative translation:

“‘One furthers one’s ego always at the expense of others’ (WP 369) ; (cf. BGE 265).

Further: “If a man believes that the good is intrinsic in certain actions, he will not hesitate to force others to perform them. If he believes that the human benefit or injury caused by such actions is of no significance, he will regard a sea of blood as of no significance. If he believes that the beneficiaries of such actions are irrelevant (or interchangeable), he will regard wholesale slaughter as his moral duty in the service of a “higher” good. It is the intrinsic theory of values that produces a Robespierre, a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Hitler. It is not an accident that Eichmann was a Kantian.” (“What is Capitalism,” CUI, 21-22)

Also: VOS; “What is Capitalism,” CUI, 22)

One’s moral code is a “decisive witness to who he is”, to the “innermost drives of his nature” (BGE 6).

“Moral judgments are symptoms and sign languages which betray the process of physiological prosperity or failure” (WP 258).

“[O]ur moral judgments and evaluations…are only images and fantasies based on a physiological process unknown to us” (D 119).

“it is always necessary to draw forth…the physiological phenomenon behind the moral predispositions and prejudices” (D 542).

“justice … is by all means a matter of taste, nothing more” (JS 184).

“The noble type of man experiences itself as determining values; it does not need approval.” ((BGE 260)

“If you wonder why the world is now collapsing to a lower and ever lower rung of hell, this is the reason.” (VoS, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 15)

Also: “What is Capitalism,” CUI, 22.

“The ideas of the herd should rule in the herd—but not reach out beyond it” (WP 287)

“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.

“Weakness of the will: that is a simile that can mislead. For there is no will, and consequently neither a strong nor a weak will. The multiplicity and disgretation of the impulses, the lack of system among them results in a ‘weak will’; their coordination under the dominance of a single one results in a ‘strong will’” (WP 46).

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)

“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” (WP 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)

“That feeling by which the process of procreation is considered as something shamefacedly to be hidden, although by it man serves a higher purpose than his individual preservation, the same feeling veiled also the origin of the great works of art, in spite of the fact that through them a higher form of existence is inaugurated, just as through that other act comes a new generation. The feeling of shame seems therefore to occur where man is merely a tool of manifestations of will infinitely greater than he is permitted to consider himself in the isolated shape of the individual.” (TGS)

Roark on creating each building, whether small or large: “I love doing it. Every building is like a person. Single and unrepeatable.” (F, Part 3)

“Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man—in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value, that end in itself, which is his own life.” (VoS, “The Objectivist Ethics,” 25)

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)

“To ordinary human beings, finally—the vast majority who exist for service and the general advantage, and who may exist only for that” (BGE 61).

“egoism belongs to the nature of a noble soul—I mean that unshakable faith that to a being such as ‘we are’ other beings must be subordinate by nature and have to sacrifice themselves.” (BGE 265)

Also: “Introduction,” VOS, xii, pb ix)

“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)

(BGE 126; Z Prologue: 4)

“All-too-many live, and all-too-long they hang on their branches. Would that a storm came to shake all this worm-eaten rot from the tree!” (Z, First Part).

A healthy aristocracy “accepts with a good conscience the sacrifice of untold human beings, who, for its sake, must be reduced and lowered to incomplete human beings, to slaves, to instruments” (BGE 258).

“a conqueror- and master-race which, organized for war and with the force to organize unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace perhaps tremendously superior in numbers but still formless and wandering.” (GM II:17)

N seeks “a noble mode of thought … that believes in slavery and in many degrees of subjection as the presupposition of every higher culture” (WP 464);

N wonders “to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, even enslavement itself, gives the basis for the bringing-forth of a higher type.” (WP 859)

“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.” (IOE 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.”(JS 116)

“No altruism!” (JS 119)

“Do not confuse altruism with kindness, good will or respect for the rights of others. … . The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice—which means; self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction—which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as a standard of the good.” (PWNI, “Faith and Force …” 61)

Also:  Galt’s Speech, FNI, 178, pb 144; VOS, 33, pb 34, and xii, pb ix)

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)

“Men have been taught that the ego is the synonym of evil, and selflessness the ideal of virtue. But the creator is the egoist in the absolute sense, and the selfless man is the one who does not think, feel, judge or act. These are functions of the self.” (FNI, “The Soul of an Individualist,” 81).

“When you are in love, it means that the person you love is of great personal, selfish importance to you and to your life. If you were selfless, it would have to mean that you derive no personal pleasure or happiness from the company and the existence of the person you love, and that you are motivated only by self-sacrificial pity for that person’s need of you. I don’t have to point out to you that no one would be flattered by, nor would accept, a concept of that kind. Love is not self-sacrifice, but the most profound assertion of your own needs and values. It is for your own happiness that you need the person you love, and that is the greatest compliment, the greatest tribute you can pay to that person.” (“Playboy Interview: Ayn Rand,” Playboy, March 1964)

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” (JS 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.” (JS 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!” (D, 306)

“What belongs to greatness—Who will attain something great if he does not feel in himself the power to inflict great pain? Being able to suffer is the least; weak women and even slaves often achieve mastery at that. But not to perish of inner distress and uncertainty when one inflicts great suffering and hears the cry of this suffering—that is great; that belongs to greatness.” (JS 325)

Commitment to three core values: Reason, Purpose, Self esteem. (VOS)

“What was especially at stake was the value of the ‘unegoistic,’ the instincts of pity, self-abnegation, self-sacrifice, which Schopenhauer had gilded, deified, and projected into a beyond for so long that at last they became for him ‘value-in-itself,’ on the basis of which he said No to life and to himself. But it was against precisely these instincts that there spoke from me an ever more fundamental mistrust, an ever more corrosive skepticism! It was precisely here that I saw the great danger to mankind, its sublimest enticement and seduction—but to what? to nothingness?” (GM, “Preface” 5)

The weapon of altruism (AS 142)

Keating: “The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly packed that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests, and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful belonged to Peter Keating.

“He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him.” (F I.2)

Roark: “an honest building, like an honest man, had to be of one piece and one faith; what constituted the life source, the idea in any existing thing or creature, and why—if one small part committed treason to that idea—the thing or the creature was dead; and why the good, the high and the noble on earth was only that which kept its integrity” (F I.15)

Anti-duty: “One of the most destructive anti-concepts in the history of moral philosophy is the term ‘duty.’

“An anti-concept is an artificial, unnecessary and rationally unusable term designed to replace and obliterate some legitimate concept. …

“The meaning of the term ‘duty’ is: the moral necessity to perform certain actions for no reason other than obedience to some higher authority, without regard to any personal goal, motive, desire or interest.” (PWNI, “Causality Versus Duty,” 95)

“You are incapable of seeing something that required two thousand years to achieve victory?” (GM I.8)

Also: “The Age of Envy,” TO, July-August 1971, pp. 1057-

Leisure highest: “Leisure and idleness: … More and more, work gets all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a ‘need to recuperate’ and is starting to be ashamed of itself. ‘One owes it to one’s health’—that is what one says when caught on an excursion in the countryside. Soon we may well reach the point where one can’t give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience. Well, formerly it was the other way around: work was afflicted with a bad conscience. A person of good family concealed the fact that he worked if need compelled him to work.” (JS 329)

“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)

Extreme inequality of wealth harmful to society. Financial markets and transportation should not be in private hands (WS 285).

Work and trade (JS 31)

“Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

“The recognition of individual rights entails the banishment of physical force from human relationships: basically, rights can be violated only by means of force. In a capitalist society, no man or group may initiate the use of physical force against others. The only function of the government, in such a society, is the task of protecting man’s rights, i.e., the task of protecting him from physical force; the government acts as the agent of man’s right of self-defense, and may use force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use; thus the government is the means of placing the retaliatory use of force under objective control.” (CUI, “What Is Capitalism?” 19)

Productiveness (VoS, “The Objectivist Ethics” 25)

“Liberalism: in plain language, reduction to the herd animal.” (TI “Skirmishes” 38)

“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)

Though not 20^th-century American so-called “liberals”: “In the 1930’s, the ‘liberals’ had a program of broad social reforms and a crusading spirit, they advocated a planned society, they talked in terms of abstract principles, they propounded theories of a predominantly socialistic nature …” (CUI, “The New Fascism: Rule by Consensus,” 209)

“[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)

“State I call it … where the slow suicide of all is called life”; “Where the state ends” we can then see “the bridges of the overman.” (Z, “On the New Idol”)

“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)

“Ours was the first government based on and strictly limited by a written document—the Constitution—which specifically forbids it to violate individual rights or to act on whim. The history of the atrocities perpetrated by all the other kinds of governments—unrestricted governments acting on unprovable assumptions—demonstrates the value and validity of the original political theory on which this country was built.” (PWNI, “Censorship: Local and Express,” 181)

“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)

Nietzsche wonders “to what extent a sacrifice of freedom, even enslavement itself, gives the basis for the bringing-forth of a higher type.” (WP 859)

“Capitalism cannot work with slave labor. It was the agrarian, feudal South that maintained slavery. It was the industrial, capitalistic North that wiped it out—as capitalism wiped out slavery and serfdom in the whole civilized world of the nineteenth century.

“What greater virtue can one ascribe to a social system than the fact that it leaves no possibility for any man to serve his own interests by enslaving other men? What nobler system could be desired by anyone whose goal is man’s well-being?” (CUI, “Theory and Practice,” 136)

“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.” (JS 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)

“The trader and the warrior have been fundamental antagonists throughout history. Trade does not flourish on battlefields, factories do not produce under bombardments, profits do not grow on rubble. Capitalism is a society of traders—for which it has been denounced by every would-be gunman who regards trade as ‘selfish’ and conquest as ‘noble.’

Let those who are actually concerned with peace observe that capitalism gave mankind the longest period of peace in history—a period during which there were no wars involving the entire civilized world—from the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914.” (CUI, “The Roots of War,” 38)

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

“What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion.” (CUI, “America’s Persecuted Minority: Big Business,” 46)

“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.” (JS 227)

“society, the great trustee of life, is responsible to life itself for every miscarried life—it also has to pay for such lives: consequently, it ought to prevent them. In numerous cases, society ought to prevent procreation: to this end, it may hold in readiness, without regard to descent, rank, or spirit, the most rigorous means of constraint, deprivation of freedom, in certain circumstances castration.” (WtP)

“Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes.”

“Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.” (VOS, “Racism” 126)

Equal existential and psychological competence.

Some sexual-psychological differences between men and women. E.g.: “For a woman qua woman, the essence of femininity is hero-worship—the desire to look up to man. “To look up” does not mean dependence, obedience or anything implying inferiority. It means an intense kind of admiration; and admiration is an emotion that can be experienced only by a person of strong character and independent value-judgments. A ‘clinging vine’ type of woman is not an admirer, but an exploiter of men. Hero-worship is a demanding virtue: a woman has to be worthy of it and of the hero she worships. Intellectually and morally, i.e., as a human being, she has to be his equal; then the object of her worship is specifically his masculinity, not any human virtue she might lack.” (“About a Woman President,” TO December 1968)

“Yet persistently a few men awaken—men who look back at greatness, are encouraged by reflecting on it, and feel themselves blessed, as though human life were a splendid thing, as though the loveliest fruit of this bitter plant were the knowledge that before them one man lived his life with pride and strength, another profoundly, and a third with compassion and benevolence—but all bequeathed the same lesson: the man who is ready to risk his existence lives most beautifully.”

“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” (JS 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.

“Conscious of the truth he has once seen, man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of existence. …. He is nauseated.” (BT 7)

“Its consequence is the inability to believe in the power or the triumph of evil. No matter what corruption one observes in one’s immediate background, one is unable to accept it as normal, permanent or metaphysically right. One feels: ‘This injustice (or terror or falsehood or frustration or pain or agony) is the exception in life, not the rule.’ One feels certain that somewhere on earth—even if not anywhere in one’s surroundings or within one’s reach—a proper, human way of life is possible to human beings, and justice matters.” (NL, “The Inexplicable Personal Alchemy,” 118)

“Amor fati: Let that be my love henceforth!” (JS 276)

Also: JS 48; BGE 56

“the 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)

“Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision.” (F, Part 4)

“What one should learn from artists.—How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? And I rather think that in themselves they never are.” (JS 299)

“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)

“Only as an esthetic product can the world be justified to all eternity—although our consciousness of our own significance does scarcely exceed the consciousness a painted soldier might have of the battle in which he takes part.” (BT 5

“What else, in the desolate waste of present-day culture, holds any promise of a sound, healthy future? In vain we look for a single powerfully branching root, a spot of earth that is fruitful: we see only dust, sand, dullness, and languor.” (BT 20)

“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).

“It was Christianity with its ressentiment against life that first made sexuality into something unclean, it threw filth on the origin, the presupposition of our life.” (TI “Ancients” 4)

“Kant’s joke.—Kant wanted to prove, in a way that would dumfound the common man, that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in support of popular prejudice, but for scholars and not for the people.” (JS 193)

“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” (JS 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)

Or ironic honesty: countering Socrates’s modesty about not being wise, and countering Jesus’s admonition to humility. Also countering false modesty of most autobiographies: most such pretend not be telling us how wise and clever they are.

Plus good marketing: arresting.

Plus truth: Nietzsche was clever and dynamite.

Manifesto. Fountainhead. Living. Shrugged. Ideal.