The Parallel Philosophies

of Sartre and Nietzsche

 Also available from Bloomsbury

Lacan Contra Foucault, edited by Nadia Bou Ali and Rohit Goel
Nietzsche and Friendship, by Willow Verkerk
Sartre and Magic, by Daniel O’Shiel
‘The Gift’ in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, by Emilio Carlo Corriero
The Parallel Philosophies
of Sartre and Nietzsche

Ethics, Ontology and the Self

Nik Farrell Fox

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You ask me which of the philosophers’ traits are really idiosyncrasies? For example,
their lack of an historical sense, their hatred of the very idea of becoming, their Egyp-
ticism. They think that they show their respect for a thing when they dehistoricize
it, sub specie aeterni – when they turn it into a mummy. All that philosophers have
handled for thousands of years have been concept-mummies; nothing real escaped
their grasp alive. Whenever these venerable concept-idolaters revere something, they
kill it and stuff it; they threaten the life of everything they worship.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 3.1)
An anti-metaphysical view of the world – yes, but an artistic one.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power 1048)
This dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated
in my nature in every respect: I am a Doppelgänger, I have a ‘second’ face in addi-
tion to the first. And perhaps also a third.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 1.3)
Remain faithful to the earth.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 1.22.3)
‘Lord Contingency’ – that is the oldest nobility of the world, which I restored to all
things when I redeemed them from their bondage under Purpose.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 3.4)
Free spirit a relative concept. – He is called a free spirit who thinks differently from
what, on the basis of his origin, environment, his class and profession, or on the basis
of the dominant views of the age, would have been expected of him.
(Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 225)
Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 1.22.3)
I know of no other way of associating with great tasks than play: as a sign of great-
ness, this is an essential presupposition.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 2.10)
Without music, life would be a mistake.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 1.33)
Do I dare to suggest that I know women? This is part of my Dionysian dowry. Who
knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternal-feminine.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 3.5)
vi
 

This book is dedicated to my (Sartrean) mother, Anne, and my

(Nietzschean) father, Terence.

 Content

Preface xi
Acknowledgements xii
List of abbreviations xiii

Introduction: The Nietzsche–Sartre connection 1

An imaginary contamination 1
Associative and dissociative accounts 5
A synthesizing project: Existentialism and poststructuralism 8

1 Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 11

Literary phenomenology 11
Good reading/bad reading 13
A playful reading 17
The New Nietzsche and New Sartre 19
Philosophers of paradox 27
Thinkers of three phases 32

2 Heidegger, Derrida and the metaphysical charge 39

The ‘grand metaphysicians’: Heidegger’s verdict 39
Saints and sinners in Nietzsche’s France 43
Divisive Derrida 46
In the name of the father 47
Phenomenology and perspectivism 49

3 The decentred self 55

The bewitched ego 56
The three ecologies of the self 61
A playful wisdom: Homo Ludens 82
The posthuman self: A Nietzschean/Sartrean hybrid 86

4 Smooth ontology 91
Smooth and striated 91
The will to power: Nietzsche’s relational ontology 92
Sartre’s dialectic with holes: A ternary logic 96
x Content

Nietzsche’s gay science 103

Sartre’s dialectical science 105
Assimilation and hodological space 110

5 A creative ethics and agonistic politics 115

Sartre’s unfinished Nietzschean ethics 115
Nietzsche’s revaluation of values 117
Sartre’s three ethics: Authenticity, reciprocity and the gift 121
Nietzsche’s grand politics 124
Positive agonism 128
Self and Other: A dialectical exchange 131
Anarchism, freedom and plurality 138

6 Posthuman progenitors 147

Posthumanism and transhumanism 147
Nietzsche’s nature 151
Sartre in Naturabilis 159
Eco-phenomenologists 165
Vibrant matter 168
A pair of posthumanist humanists 171

7 Lebensphilosophie 175
Religious atheists 176
Gentle Nietzsche and feminine Sartre 186
Playful pianists 196
Madness and epiphany: Turin and Billancourt 202

Conclusion: Twin ternary thinkers 211

Notes 215
Bibliography 235
Index 249
 Preface

This book is in several respects an outgrowth of my earlier The New Sartre and what
seemed like a natural extension of its primary argument. If the ‘New Sartre’ was a
pioneer of key poststructuralist themes, as was the ‘French Nietzsche’, then surely
there is a strong compatibility to be found between Sartre and Nietzsche if interpreted
along these lines. Once placed under a microscope, the parallel thinking of their
philosophical works soon became apparent and irresistible. Suffice to say, it was the
findings of others whose digging has uncovered many bones in the Sartre–Nietzsche
skeleton and confirmed my suspicions of a firm DNA match. My task, as I saw it,
was to piece together these different parts and assemble the whole skeleton of their
connection through a systematic comparison of the full range of their philosophy and
an analysis of some of the significant aspects of their lives.
First of all, this book was inspired by Christine Daigle, Robert Solomon and
François Noudelmann for bringing into clear view a Nietzsche–Sartre comparison.
Without their insights, this work would have proved a whole lot more difficult to
conceive ab ovo. This project has also benefitted from fresh interpretations of Sartre’s
ontology (e.g. Matthew C. Eshleman (2011), Christina Howells (1992), Matthew C.
Ally (2017)) that bring his dialectical view of self and world in line with Nietzsche’s
relational ontology of the will to power as well as the studies of Guillermine de Lacoste
(1999) and Jean-Pierre Boulé (2005) in elucidating the ‘feminine’ dimension of Sartre’s
thinking. In the field of Nietzsche Studies, I acknowledge a significant scholarly debt
to Gary Shapiro (2016) and Henk Manschot (2021) for their illuminating ecological
readings of Nietzsche, to John Richardson (2020) for a clear ‘dialectical’ understanding
of Nietzsche and to Alan D. Schrift for his adept elucidation of the French reception of
Nietzsche’s work. Also, thanks to all the biographers I cite (Ronald Hayman, Rüdiger
Safranski, Thomas R. Flynn, Daniel Blue, Annie Cohen-Solal and Gary Cox) for
bringing Sartre and Nietzsche vividly to life for me. Finally, the task of connecting
Nietzsche and Sartre to posthumanism was made significantly easier by the impressive
work of Francesca Ferrando (2020) and Rosi Braidotti (2013) in bringing together the
disparate strands of posthumanism into an edifying and easily comprehensible form.
In general terms, I view this project as a ‘Universal Singular’, that is to say, as a
synthetic composite of all the insights of others filtered through my singular lens of
interpretation, direction and narration. Any deficiencies in the text are, suffice to say,
entirely down to me. Developing the ‘New Nietzsche’ and ‘New Sartre’ in tandem, my
firm hope is to gain a fresh perspective on them, both individually and collectively, and
to stimulate further comparative studies (associative or dissociative) in areas I wasn’t
able to explore here.
 Acknowledgements

Thanks to Matt Eshleman, Christina Howells, Christine Daigle and Ashley Woodward
(and two anonymous reviewers) for their salient and very useful observations in
regard to various aspects of this project. My gratitude also goes to Mike Neary and
Benedict O’ Donohoe for their academic friendship as well as to Alfred Betschart for
his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things Sartre and his kindness in sharing some of
them with me.
A significant mention, of course, extends to Jade Grogan, Dhanuja Ravi, Suzie Nash
and Liza Thompson at Bloomsbury for their help and enthusiasm in pursuing this
project and their expertise in bringing it to print.
Finally, thanks to Jonathan Webber at the UK Sartre Society, to John Gillespie at
Sartre Studies International, to Elizabeth Butterfield at the US Sartre Society and to Urs
Sommer and Paul Stephan at the German Nietzsche Society for keeping me well and
truly in the Sartre–Nietzsche loop.
On a personal note, this book would have floundered considerably without the
glowing presence (real or felt) of Willow, Søren and Raphael, but most of all and
incomparably, without the support of Rachel and her bottomless sack of talents.
 Abbreviations

The following abbreviations are used in the text for key works:

Nietzsche
A The Antichrist
BGE Beyond Good and Evil
BT The Birth of Tragedy
CW The Case of Wagner
D Daybreak
EH Ecce Homo
GM On the Genealogy of Morals
GS The Gay Science
G.S The Greek State
HH Human, All Too Human, vol. 1.
HH 2 Human, All Too Human, vol. 2.
KSB Sämtliche Briefe, Kritische Studienausgabe
KSW Sämtliche Werke, Kritische Studienausgabe
LN Writings from the Late Notebooks
PP The Pre-Platonic Philosophers
PTAG Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks
TI Twilight of the Idols
WP The Will to Power
WS The Wanderer and His Shadow
UM Untimely Meditations
Z Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Sartre
BN Being and Nothingness
CDR Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1
xiv Abbreviations

CDR 2 Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2

EH Existentialism Is a Humanism
EJ Ecrits de jeunesse
EM L’espoir maintenant
FI The Family Idiot, vol. 1
FI 2 The Family Idiot, vol. 2
HN Hope Now
I The Imagination
IF 3 L’Idiot de la famille, vol. 3
IM The Imaginary
N Nausea
NE Notebooks for an Ethics
SG Saint Genet
SM Search for a Method
STE Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions
TE The Transcendence of the Ego
W Words
WD The War Diaries
WL What Is Literature?

For simplicity of referencing, I have used the following conventions in the text:

Nietzsche’s works are numbered by part/section/subsection

BT 13 The Birth of Tragedy, section 13
Z 3.12.2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part 3, ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’, section 2
EH 3Z4 Ecce Homo, ‘Why I write Such Good Books’, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’,
section 4
Z P4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Prologue’, section 4
GM P6 On the Genealogy of Morals, ‘Preface’, section 6
UM 3.1 Untimely Meditations, ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, section 1

Sartre’s works are numbered by volume and page

CDR 2:100 Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2, page 100
W 66 Words, page 66
 Introduction
The Nietzsche–Sartre connection

We were friends and have grown distant from one another. But it is right that
we should be so; let us not dissemble and obscure it, as if it were something to be
ashamed of. We are two ships, each of which has its destination and its course;
our paths can cross and we can celebrate a feast together, as we did – and then the
brave ships lay so peacefully in one harbour and under one sun that it might seem
they had already reached their destination and both had one destination. But then
the almighty power of our task again drove us apart, to different seas and different
climes, and perhaps we shall never see one another again – or perhaps if we do we
shall not recognize one another: different seas and sun have changed us! That we
had to grow distant from one another is the law over us [. . .] There is probably a
tremendous invisible curve and star orbit within which our so different paths and
destinations may be included as tiny stretches of the way – let us raise ourselves to
this thought! But our life is too short and our power of vision too weak for us to be
more than friends in the sense of that exalted possibility. – And so let us believe in
our friendship in the stars, even if we did have to be enemies on earth.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 279)

What is the Nietzsche–Sartre connection? This is a question that has been alluded to
or touched upon on many occasions but, for some reason, rarely addressed in terms of
a systematic study. This book attempts to break this relative silence and address the full
range of their philosophical interconnections, presenting these two iconic existentialist
philosophers in broad terms as parallel anti-metaphysical thinkers and as precursors of
many themes in contemporary posthumanist thinking.

An imaginary contamination
It is fair to say that Sartre was ambivalent about what he thought of Nietzsche,
wavering between adulation, emulation, indifference and guarded suspicion. It is
well documented that the prankster Sartre used to throw urine-filled condoms at his
foes at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS), shouting, ‘Thus pissed Zarathustra’, as
was his intense aversion to moustaches, of which Nietzsche’s was, of course, a more
than immodest specimen.1 In 1924, Sartre describes Nietzsche in his notebooks
2 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

as more a poet than a philosopher, whose form of thought is better than his actual
thought himself: ‘Nietzsche. He is a poet who had the misfortune of being taken for
a philosopher . . . he will always have success with those who prefer the form of ideas
to their exchange’ (EJ 471). It is likely Sartre was acquainted with Nietzsche’s writings
through Charles Andler’s six-volume biography. Contat and Rybalka believed he had
read at least to volume two, as well as the biography by Daniel Halévy. He may also
have come across a selection of aphorisms published by Jean Bolle in 1934 and by
Geneviève Bianquis in the late 1930s.2 In his Ecrits de Jeunesse, he claims to have read
Nietzsche but does not specify which texts he has read, but Cohen-Solal (1999: 146)
states he did read Ecce Homo around the time of writing A Defeat.
Sartre’s direct comments about Nietzsche in his texts and interviews are variable,
expressing both negativity and positivity. He criticizes Nietzsche’s vitalism and the
idea of will to power (which he understands as a brute will to dominate others), and he
dismisses the Übermensch as the culmination of evolution in which only the strongest
survive. In Nausea, Roquentin’s description of ‘the general frailty and feebleness of
existence’ can be viewed as an early critique of Nietzsche’s Romantic vitalism: ‘There
were those idiots who came to tell you about will-power and struggle for life. Hadn’t
they ever seen a beast or a tree?’ (N 133). In Saint Genet, he rejects the idea of eternal
return, which he understands in a literal fashion and regards as a form of nihilism.
Given the prevalence of the ‘Nazified Nietzsche’ in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s,
it is little wonder that Sartre would be reluctant to openly embrace his philosophy
without reservation or some distancing. In interview in the 1970s with John Gerassi,
he recalls that in his youth he took a dislike to Nietzsche’s elitist jargon and viewed
him as not particularly important: ‘I hated him. I think his crap about the elite, his
übermensch [sic], radicalized us a lot’ (Gerassi 2009: 53). In an interview in 1975,
he was more conciliatory but somewhat opaque, commenting how at the ENS he
‘interested me like many others’ but ultimately ‘never stood for anything in particular
in my eyes’ (1981b: 9).
Despite this, Sartre would openly identify with Nietzschean aspirations.3 Although,
as Noudelmann (2012: 46) remarks, ‘[e]verything would seem to oppose the aristocratic
thinker Nietzsche to the anti-elitist philosopher Sartre’, Sartre’s closeness to Nietzsche
nonetheless ‘involves foremost an imaginary contamination based on admiration and
parody’. His dismissals of Nietzsche tell only a partial story, for Nietzsche was wholly
important to him. As Noudelmann (2012: 45) observes, Nietzsche is a thinker ‘whom
we can indeed find smuggled into Sartre’s work’ at every corner to the point of imaginary
identification and deep contamination. Daigle (2009: 57) echoes this, describing Sartre
as the ‘Unaware Nietzschean’ and Nietzsche, despite Sartre’s misunderstandings of his
philosophy, as being ‘very present in Sartre’s intellectual universe’, sharing together the
project of an affirmative creative ethics as a response to a crisis of nihilism in the wake
of the death of God.
This is strongly evidenced by the fact that Nietzsche didn’t really leave Sartre’s
philosophical brain from beginning to end. His first published essay, ‘The History of
Truth’, written as a young student and published in a French Lycée review in 1925, was
a typical Nietzschean study. Towards the end of his life, he was still working on a long
text of Nietzsche’s ethics that he began around the time of his Notebooks (1947/8) as
 
Introduction 3

part of his ethical research, which Simone de Beauvoir described as ‘a very fine study’
(1984: 180). From the period 1929 to 1937, as Flynn (2014: 149, 27) observes, Sartre is
very much ‘under the spell of a Nietzschean exuberance’. His literary compositions, ‘A
Defeat’ (1927), ‘Er the Armenian’ (1928) and ‘The Legend of Truth’ (1931), all reveal ‘a
proto-existentialist, quasi-Nietzschean character’ with a valorization of freedom that
runs through his entire work.
As a means of seduction for his ‘first love’, the actress Simone Jollivet, Sartre wrote
a semi-autobiographical novel in 1927–8 as a modern retelling of the ‘Tribschen
Triangle’ involving Richard Wagner, Cosima Wagner and Nietzsche. In A Defeat
(Une défaite), Sartre foregrounds a series of Nietzschean themes, such as power,
autonomy, nature and embodiment. The main protagonist, Frédéric (Nietzsche), is
an ambitious young man, inspired by the will to power, who wishes to write a book
about the writer and composer, Richard Organte (Wagner). He gets invited to the
composer’s house and falls in love with his wife, Cosima, eventually becoming a
tutor to their children. Soon, however, the young philosopher of the future becomes
disillusioned with Richard who is more a skilful practitioner than he is a genius
and eventually the couple breaks off their relationship with him. In this tale, Sartre
clearly identifies himself with Frédéric, grafting some of his own qualities onto
the narrator and taking the side of Nietzsche over that of Wagner (Richard), who
is presented unfavourably as arrogant and not the genius he imagines himself to
be.4 In 1928, Sartre worked on another Nietzschean novel project Er the Armenian
in which he relates his theory of radical contingency to ethical values. Reworking
Plato’s Myth of Er which appears in the conclusion to The Republic and is used to
demonstrate how the moral ultimately prosper over the immoral, Sartre shows how
Good and Evil are absent from the world itself, which is morally indifferent. Echoing
Nietzsche’s remark that ‘Good and Evil are the prejudices of God’ (GS 150), Sartre
has Prometheus declare, ‘When the Gods will be vanquished, there will be no more
Evil on earth’ (EJ 322).
In ‘The Legend of Truth’, published in 1931 in the journal Bifur, Sartre set out to show
the inadequacy of science and ideology as collective representations of belief against the
individual judgement of exceptional artists, philosophers and writers. The published
fragment deals with the levelling effect of scientific and philosophic agreement in a
tone like that of ‘a muted and more reasonable Nietzsche’ (Caws 1984: 10). In many
ways, Legend of Truth is a variation on Nietzsche’s posthumously published essay
‘On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense’ and reiterates his swingeing criticisms of
scientific rationality, abstract philosophy and the egalitarian ideals of the herd, showing
the genealogical and ignoble origins of truth which is neither impersonal, timeless
or universal. Following Nietzsche’s argument in On the Genealogy of Morals, Sartre
argues that truth originates in commerce. The function of ‘the mythical daughter of
commerce’ is to serve as a regulator or ‘measure’ in barter – over time this measure is
internalized and its origins as human creation are forgotten. Truth colonizes common
sense in which it becomes configured as a correspondence between subject and
object. Sartre critiques the downward spiral of truth into Socratic reason through the
metaphysical principle of identity and the principles of non-contradiction and excluded
middle. This fixes truth as rigid and static and marginalizes the paradoxes of change,
4 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

motion and becoming. In this process of Socratic reasoning, things become perceived
metaphysically as ‘mummified concepts’ and historical explanation is nullified.5
In these early writings, Sartre triumphs the ‘solitary man’ who stands apart from the
common crowd and creates his own measure and values, a model he later realizes in the
literary form of Roquentin and Orestes and in the philosophical form of the ‘authentic
individual’. His solitary man is typically Nietzschean in his ‘inverted Platonism’, a
human whose physical truths are not the product of universality and metaphysical
reason but merely ‘the systematic impoverishment of spontaneous thoughts’.6 As
Beauvoir records:

He kept his sympathy for those thaumaturgic characters who, shut off from the
City with its logic and mathematics, wandered alone in the wilderness and only
trusted the evidence of their own eyes as a guide toward knowledge. Thus it was
only to the artist, the writer, or the philosopher – those whom he termed the
‘solitaries’ – that he granted the privilege of grasping living reality. (1983: 50)

The central motif of Sartre’s early Nietzschean preoccupation is the theme of

contingency: ‘Being is without reason, without cause and without necessity; the very
definition of being presents us with its original contingency’ (BN 801). Sartre’s ‘factum
on contingency’, a collection of notes and passages, grew eventually into Nausea and
Childhood of a Leader which complement each other through their exploration of
contingency. The two protagonists, Roquentin and Fleurier, are both traumatized by
issues of self-identity, and each becomes what the other despises. Where Roquentin
embraces contingency, Fleurier rejects it, seeking a ‘necessary existence’, but in wanting
to ‘be something’, he becomes a narrow-minded racist steeped in bourgeois values like
the salauds of bad faith. By clearly valorizing the contingency-embracing Roquentin
over the ‘sincere’ and racist Fleurier, Sartre follows Zarathustra’s injunction to welcome
‘Lord Contingency’ (Z 3.4) and make of it ‘the perfect free gift’ (N 188), thereby
connecting it with his realist thirst for personal and political authenticity. A view of
existence as contingent, after all, is conceived in opposition to the notion that there
is (or ought to be) a necessary order of things serving as the ultimate justification for
maintaining the status quo, since other configurations or paths are always possible. As
Beauvoir commented:

Sartre went to unheard of extremes in his total rejection of universals. To him,

general laws and concepts and all such abstractions were nothing but hot air:
people, he maintained, all agreed to accept them because they effectively masked a
reality which men found alarming. He, on the other hand, wanted to grapple with
this living reality. (1983: 31)

Although allusions to Nietzsche’s work recede after these early writings, Nietzsche
is the first philosopher Sartre mentions in Being and Nothingness, commenting
favourably on his atheism and supporting his critique of ‘the illusion of backworlds’
(BN 2).7 Following Nietzsche, he takes a view of humans as ‘the evaluating animal’ and
siding with Heraclitus, he adopts a Nietzschean dynamic of becoming in which change
 
Introduction 5

more than permanence is the foundation of temporality for the pour-soi. Later, in the
Rome and Cornell Lectures of 1964–5, he describes the ‘integral man’ as the worker
who cultivates self-growth and follows the sense of Nietzsche’s counsel to ‘Become
what you are’.8

Associative and dissociative accounts

When addressing the Nietzsche–Sartre connection, scholars take a variety of
approaches. Daigle (2009) and Noudelmann (2012) offer the most associative accounts.
Daigle draws a strong parallel between their creative ethics (as a response to nihilism)
and the close similarity of their ethical ideals (the Übermensch and authenticity)
but draws a line at their political thinking where Nietzsche’s ‘closure to the Other’
sends him down the path of aristocratic elitism inimical to Sartre’s democratic
ethos. Noudelmann concentrates more on their aesthetic concerns and similarities,
particularly their shared love of music and piano playing as an expression of their
aesthetic ethic of play. Others take a mixed view of the relation between Nietzsche and
Sartre, stressing the ‘deep Nietzschean concerns’ of Sartre’s thinking but the ‘ambivalent
attitude towards the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy on him’.9 In Churchill’s (2013:
52–3) view, despite the ‘prescient similarities’ regarding Sartre and Nietzsche’s early
views regarding the illusion of apparently ‘necessary’ states of affairs concerning the
absurdity of the underlying contingency of existence, ‘Roquentin is no Dionysian
disciple in the mould of the young Nietzsche’ since he does not find respite from his
nausea (let alone ecstatic life affirmation) in supreme artistic struggle and expression.
Whereas Nietzsche offered a vision of communal salvation from contingency in the
form of therapeutic art, Sartre held that contingency could not be overcome, or even
placated, by an affirmative force (whether artistic or otherwise), ‘because such a power
was simply absent from a truly contingent world’. For Churchill, Sartre contrasts his
view of contingency with the vitalist Romantic Nietzschean view of the Will since his
account stresses the frailty and feebleness of existence in which everything is too weak
to be underpinned by a surging and affirmative force covering all existence.
As I hope to show in the following chapters, this is a hasty conclusion to reach in
regard not only to Nausea itself but also to the wider arc of Sartre’s philosophy that
dovetails ontologically with Nietzsche’s will to power and ethically with his revaluation
of values. First, Sartre doesn’t just describe the frailty of existence in Nausea but also its
surging power, force, vibrancy and efflorescence. This finds expression in philosophical
form in his concept of ‘hodological’ space (BN 415) and his affective phenomenology
that underpins it. Furthermore, the conclusion of Nausea is ambiguous and left open
to interpretation – we are not sure just how redemptive art actually is for Roquentin
who leaves us with only ‘a tentative sort of hope’ (Kirkpatrick 2017a: 126–7). Sartre
later renounced hope as ‘youthful folly’ (W 56), echoed in his declaration in What
Is Literature? that ‘we could never be saved by art’ (WL 161). But while it is true
that Sartre doesn’t ground art metaphysically as a form of salvation, this is not to say
that he disregards art juridically as an integral part of a system of values that works
towards human freedom and avoids bad faith. His project to escape the dead end of
6 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

moral nihilism rests on the distinction, also made by Nietzsche, between decadent
or illusory art (art for art’s sake) and committed or physiological art (the tragic art of
rapture and engagement). Although What Is Literature? warns against bourgeois art
that wraps the audience in mystification and diversion, it proposes a ‘committed art’
that leads to reflection and change by disclosing the images and articulating the truths
that society tries to hide from itself (WL 75). In Existentialism Is a Humanism, Sartre
also follows Nietzsche’s lead by conceiving authenticity as a process of creating oneself
as a work of art (EH 45). There is consequently no real contrast to be found if we
look at the wider arc of their work for Nietzsche’s middle and later phases of thinking
display the same doubts, ambiguities and ethical distinctions about the redemptive
powers of art as Sartre does. Moreover, as we will see in Chapter 7, Sartre was no anti-
Dionysian but, like Nietzsche, made affect a central element in his ethics of play, his
‘eco-phenomenology’ and his aesthetic theory.
Alongside associative and mixed accounts, dissociative narratives also abound.
The most extreme, bizarre and puzzling of these is probably Beam (1998) who, while
exonerating Nietzsche from Heidegger’s reading of the will to power as a metaphysical
Platonic construct, does a thoroughly ‘Heideggerian job’ on Sartre in order to mark
out fundamental differences between them. Using Nausea as evidence, Beam accuses
Sartre of desecrating nature in his negative depiction of the root of a chestnut tree in
the park as a ‘black, knotty mass, entirely beastly’. Extrapolating from this, he attributes
to Sartre a Platonic worldview in which nature, existence and the senses are cast as
inferior to the intellect and the insensible essences of timeless truths. Furthermore, he
charges Sartre with revealing a contempt for human beings that surpasses his contempt
for nature and ‘rivals the misanthropy of Schopenhauer’, speaking of living creatures
as ‘flabby masses which move spontaneously’ and displaying ‘an aversion for fleshy,
overweight people’.
In his criticisms of Sartre, Beam makes a number of common errors that are trotted
out in popular vulgarizations. First, as Davis (2011: 140) warns, it is dangerous to read
Sartre’s literary hyperbole uncomplicatedly as ‘his settled philosophical view’ as it is to
make a direct ascription of Sartre to Roquentin.10 Second, it is simply wrong to attribute
‘Platonic aspirations’ to Sartre, for, like Nietzsche, Sartre clearly espouses an ‘inverted
Platonism’ (Flynn 2014: 45) in which ‘existence precedes essence’ and ‘[e]xistence is a
plenitude that man cannot escape’ (1981: 1807). This is vividly illustrated in Nausea’s
central epiphany where Roquentin apprehends the ‘brute existence’ of the chestnut tree
in the municipal garden and the inability of words and concepts to capture its living
reality. Indeed, Sartre’s anti-Platonic ‘dynamic of becoming’, as I intend to show in the
following chapters, is the central axis upon which his ontology, ethics and affirmative
politics squarely rest and run in parallel with Nietzsche’s own Heraclitean ‘philosophy
of becoming’ in the form of the will to power. Finally, Beam grossly overstates Sartre’s
pessimism and his Platonic ‘resentment of being’, charging him with misanthropy
and ‘contempt for human beings’. Not only is this a hasty and misleading conclusion
to reach in regard to Sartre’s early work, but it actually runs counter to the whole
momentum of his later thinking and his ‘ethics of reciprocity’ worked out in depth in
his major philosophical and ethical treatises. As we will see in subsequent chapters,
Sartre’s ethical vision is deeply affirmative and intersubjective, and his idea of ‘integral
 
Introduction 7

humanity’ is far removed from any misanthropic projections. Like other dissociative
doubters, Beam does not fully realize the potential fruits of his comparison of the
similarities in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Sartre through an uneven-handed
treatment of them, as was the case with Derrida and Foucault in the 1960s, granting
a positive deconstructionist reading to Nietzsche but at the same time condemning
Sartre to a narrow and inapposite Cartesianism (an interpretation of Sartre’s philosophy
they would later confess was unfair and short-sighted). While he is quick to rescue
Nietzsche from a Heideggerian reading of the will to power, he completely disregards
those elements in Sartre’s philosophy, pronounced and ever-present, that are anti-
Platonic to the core. As I hope to show, Beam’s claims that his ontology ‘retains many
elements of Platonism that Nietzsche rejects’, including a denigration of nature and the
world of becoming and ‘the Platonic elevation of the intelligible (masculine) over the
sensible (feminine)’, do scant justice to Sartre’s ‘smooth ontology’ (Chapter 4) and to
a much more complex and multifaceted perspective on nature, the sensible, and the
‘feminine’ than scholars often ascribe to him (Chapters 6 and 7).
Another scholar who has toyed with the question of the Nietzsche–Sartre
connection, but wavers in ascribing a full association, is Solomon (2003, 1988, 1987).
Although he provides no systematic study of this question, his various allusions to
their compatibility show a sensitivity to the ambiguity of their thinking and to possible
interconnections. Both philosophers, Solomon (2003: 59) argues, offer a compatibilist
or paradoxical version of freedom that rejects the Kantian notion of ‘will as causality’
and the ‘noumenal self ’ while believing that we are responsible for our behaviour
and the cultivation of our virtues. Although fatalism appealed to Nietzsche in his
admiration for the Ancient Greeks and their acceptance of life and fate in the face
of absurdity and suffering, he is ‘very much in league with Sartre’ in the belief that
we bear responsibility for the consequences of our actions (2003: 162). Elsewhere,
Solomon (1982) also draws some comparisons between the ‘phenomenological’
approach both philosophers undertake, identifying the similarities in their theory of
‘affect’ and the emotions that elide simple Platonic distinctions between emotion and
reason. However, what holds back Solomon’s account, despite his recognition of some
philosophical similarities, is the individualism and Cartesianism11 that he too readily
ascribes to Sartre. This means that he senses ambiguity but explains it metaphysically
in Sartre but not in Nietzsche, commenting, for instance, that Sartre ‘sustains a full-
blooded determinism in his philosophy, untouched by his adamant insistence that we
must, even ontologically, consider consciousness as free and free from causation’ (2003:
225, n.29). As we will see, it is as simplistic to view Being and Nothingness as a treatise
of ‘absolute freedom’ as it is to read the Critique as one of ‘full-blooded determinism’
for in both these texts, Sartre clearly presents a mediated or ‘compatibilist’ view in
which freedom and necessity are dialectically coextensive. With this caveat, Solomon
(2003: 206) suggests it is right to view them as parallel thinkers if it can be shown
that Sartre is not ‘the bootstrapper’ he is taken to be, which his emphasis on ‘the
limitations on action by way of “the situation”’ strongly implies. Although he tends
towards an associative view, Solomon lags behind the curve in his assessment of Sartre,
still stuck in the habit of disassociation by viewing Nietzsche from the inside (as
cognizing and surpassing ambiguity) but Sartre from the outside (as metaphysically
8 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

encoding ambiguity). As we will see, once we release Sartre from false ascriptions of
Cartesianism, the strands of association between himself and Nietzsche become ever
stronger and tightly interwoven.

A synthesizing project: Existentialism and poststructuralism

In this book, I endeavour to provide a creative disclosure and extended analysis of
the Nietzsche–Sartre connection, examining the constellation of their thinking and
attempting to confront head-on the points of consonance and dissonance, attraction
and divergence, between them. In the process I try sedulously to clear away some of the
ambiguity, ‘noise’ and uncertainty that continue to mark their relation, presenting their
philosophy as twin complementary perspectives that offer unique and singular insights
but which converge strongly around a unified philosophical vision. The key defining
concepts that form the nucleus of this convergence are those of contingency, freedom,
ambiguity, creativity, becoming, the unity of opposites, play, plurality and affect, and I set
out to show how these concepts infuse their philosophy across their ontology and their
theory of the self, as well as their ethical and political thinking.
This synthesizing project may seem to contravene Nietzsche’s warning against
mediators: ‘[t]hose who wish to be mediators between two resolute thinkers are
marked as mediocre: they lack eyes to see the unparalleled; seeing things as similar
and making them the same is the mark of weak eyes’ (GS 228). Against this injunction,
however, my hope is neither to view them with ‘weak eyes’ nor mark them as
‘mediocre’ but, by contrast, to bring a closer scrutiny and a higher reflexive resolution
to their extraordinary thinking. Two recurrent philosophical descriptors that feature
throughout this study are those of ‘monistic pluralism’ and ‘Universal Singular’, and
these are useful concepts, I suggest, to characterize the Nietzsche–Sartre connection.
Their thinking, one might say, is monistically of the same kind but their individual
philosophies can be configured as different modalities or inflections of it. Equally,
their philosophizing has universal or common touchpoints but incarnates singular
perspectives within them. Indeed, using them together, my hope is to gain a wider
purchase on them both, by bringing the critical lens of one to a comparative assessment
of the other. In Deleuzian/Guattarian terms (1994), this can be viewed as a process of
‘adsorbsion’ – a gathering of elements in a way that both forms a coalition and yet
preserves something of the agential impetus of each element.
This book argues that the main factors in their (continuing) separation are those
of distortion and misinterpretation, disseminated initially by Martin Heidegger and
the ‘French Nietzscheans’, especially Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault in the
1960s and 1970s. Heidegger’s simplistic characterization of them both as ‘Cartesian
philosophers’ was not in itself divisive, but when Derrida and Foucault absolved
Nietzsche of his Cartesian connections while cementing Sartre firmly to his, Nietzsche
and Sartre were forced apart and posited as divergent thinkers. Describing the
European and global reception of Sartre’s philosophy, Betschart (2020: 7) utilizes the
methodology of communication theory to explain the distortions that took place in
pigeonholing and ultimately vulgarizing Sartre’s philosophy in its dissemination. Since
 
Introduction 9

a work can contain several messages and the same message can appear in different
works, not all messages are equally received and ‘there can be significant differences
in content between the messages encoded by the senders and the messages decoded
by the receivers’. On the way to receivers, messages are forwarded by repeaters and
partly jammed by noise, which, in Sartre’s case, resulted in a certain caricaturing of his
work (especially Being and Nothingness) as dualist, Cartesian and idealist, a humanist
oeuvre of ‘absolute freedom’. In terms of his ethico-political outlook, this was often
summarized with his slogan from Huis Clos that ‘hell is other people’, leading to an
ascribed social ontology of alienation, conflict and a Hobbesian ‘war of all against
all’. As long as this Cartesian noise continues to reverberate in the common ear, a
Nietzsche–Sartre rapprochement is unlikely and doomed to frustration (although
some may see a parallel between Sartre’s ‘hell is other people’ and Nietzsche’s ‘will-to-
power as domination’).
My aim in this book is to replace the ‘noise’ that crowds out Sartre’s philosophy
(and Nietzsche’s) with a more ‘musical’ reading that does justice to the rhythms,
complexities, contradictions, leitmotifs and nuanced resolutions of their thinking,
eschewing in the process simplification, caricature, distortion or vulgarization. I set out
to show, for example, that Sartre’s prime accusers, the French poststructuralists, stole
many of Sartre’s clothes, even though they professed to dress in a different fashion and
were guilty of an ‘anxiety of influence’ towards him in their attempt to usurp and go
beyond him by using Nietzschean fire to set alight a straw man Sartre. By showing the
parallel thinking of Nietzsche and Sartre, my hope is to bring the French philosopher in
from obscurity in relation to current debates and contemporary posthumanist theory.
Indeed, I position Sartre squarely alongside Nietzsche as a forerunner and progenitor
of philosophical posthumanism, a methodological approach which is an outgrowth of
the poststructuralist thinking of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. Ferrando
(2020: 3) defines this as ‘a praxis, as well as a philosophy of mediation, which manifests
post-dualistic, post-centralizing’ thinking. I identify Nietzsche and Sartre as proto-
deconstructionists who use paradox and contradiction in the service of a ‘ternary
logic’ to disassemble, overturn and surpass the dualistic metaphysical thinking of
the Western philosophical tradition. This is not to say, however, that they completely
broke free from the subliminal influences of the metaphysical tradition in which they
were inured (a point they both acknowledge at certain points in their work). Such
a complete severance would of course be impossible, for, in Sartrean terms, one is
always a ‘Universal Singular’ carrying the weight of history in one’s thoughts even
as one singularly seeks to dispense with customary thinking. Where metaphysical
assumptions burst through the cracks of their thinking from time to time, I attempt
to expose them and use a reflexive method (‘Nietzsche against Nietzsche’ and
‘Sartre against Sartre’) to bring their underlying deconstructionist logic to its fullest
expression. In Nietzsche’s case this means questioning some of the assumptions of the
elitism of his later ethical thinking where he effects an ethical ‘closure of the Other’ as
inconsistent with his wider genealogical critique of power and subjectivity in general,
while for Sartre this involves challenging some of his ‘anthropometric’ and ‘exclusivist’
views concerning the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ that surface throughout his writings
that contravene his wider dialectical method.
10 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

By recasting the Nietzsche–Sartre image in this way, a further aim of this study is
to clear away some misconceptions that surround the narrative of post-war French
philosophy. Instead of viewing existentialism and poststructuralism as adversarial
(as is usually the case), my aim is filter out some of the ‘noise’ that amplifies their
incompatibility and cast them more as continuous and complementary. If we look
beyond standard tropes and take a closer view of their philosophy, we soon see that the
criticisms levelled at existentialists like Sartre, Beauvoir, Marcel and Merleau-Ponty – an
abstract theory of freedom, a centred metaphysical subject, an uncomplicated humanism,
methodological and political individualism – really do miss their target. Moreover,
existentialism anticipates and prefigures many of the themes – the deconstructed self
as a synthetic construct of unconscious, conscious and historical forces, a contingent
or ‘detotalized’ view of history, a pluralistic ethics – that poststructuralists later
assimilated to their own philosophical projects.12 This means, for instance, that there
is no complication in labelling Nietzsche as a postmodernist and as an existentialist as
scholars sometimes wonder,13 for, behind all the bluster and noise, there is actually no
major dissonance between them. As we shall see throughout the subsequent chapters,
many of the key developments in poststructuralist and posthumanist thinking can be
traced back in gestate form to Nietzschean and Sartrean existential insights. Nietzsche,
Sartre and poststructuralism are deeply philosophically entangled and, in Merleau-
Ponty’s (1962: viii) phrase, share a ‘manner or style of thinking’ that expresses diversity
while working towards a common meaning.
 1

Reading Nietzsche and Sartre

When I imagine a perfect reader, I always think of a monster of courage and curios-
ity who is always supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 3.3)

Literary phenomenology
Writing was an obsession to Nietzsche and Sartre, a daily necessity, as Nietzsche
remarked, like relieving oneself (GS 93). What perhaps characterizes their shared
style most of all is the magical fusion of philosophy and literature in their writing.
Sartre’s Nausea is a tableau vivant of conceptual imagery and literary description
bound together in a lived dynamic of ‘literary phenomenology’ (Inkpin 2017: 16),
while Nietzsche’s Zarathustra articulates philosophical ideas through the literary
medium of ‘a phantasmatic and hallucinatory landscape poem’ (Shapiro 2016: 84).
Nausea expresses Sartre’s wish ‘to be both Spinoza and Stendhal’1 and takes the
form of a ‘phenomenological novel’, exhibiting osmosis between the literary and the
philosophical by virtue of the status of consciousness it establishes in Roquentin. In
the words of Contat and Rybalka,

by the dissolution of the subject that it effects; by its refusal of psychology:

Roquentin has no ‘character’, no substantial ego; he is pure consciousness of
the world; his experience is not a voyage into the depths of interiority; on the
contrary, it is a bursting out toward things. Everything is outside: Nausea is not in
Roquentin; he’s the one who is dissolved in it. (1981: 1664)

As Sartre remarked, a writer has to be a philosopher: ‘From the moment that I knew
what philosophy was, it seemed normal to require it of a writer. . . . I preferred that
the philosophy I believed in, the truths that I relied on, be expressed in my novel’
(Beauvoir 1981: 178, 184).2
Replacing ‘proposition by demonstration’ (as Beauvoir (1983: 50) described
Sartre’s literary writing) doubtlessly brought to life their ideas in a literary form of
glorious Technicolor, but it also contributes to the proliferating play of interpretation
in understanding them. In their autobiographies, they blur the lines between fact
and fiction, embarking on what Nietzsche called mnemotechnics – the retrospective
12 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

investment of past material by later experience in which the future shapes the past.
Sartre discovered, when recalling his own childhood, that the nature of autobiographical
reflection is a dynamic selective process in which past experiences are appropriated to
current needs, interests and projects to produce a narrative which is simultaneously
fictional and true.3 Sartre ambiguously classifies his autobiography in this manner as
‘a true work of fiction’ and, in equal measure, his biography of Flaubert as ‘a work of
fiction that I believe’ (1977: 10:146).
Despite their fine writing style, the ambiguity that runs through the core of their works
means that Nietzsche and Sartre are difficult thinkers to understand comprehensively
without cliché or simplification. Wandering along the complex and winding highways
and byways that comprise their philosophy, a feeling of disorientation soon strikes
with a confusion of signposts that seem to point discrepantly in opposite directions.
As Katsafanas (2018: 93) observes of Nietzsche, there is a distinct lack of systematicity
in his work in which he rarely presents clear defences of his central concepts and
arguments: ‘Some of his claims seem mutually contradictory, to the extent that readers
. . . present his texts as “booby trapped” against articulation of philosophical theory.’
Caws (1984: 1) identifies a similar trait in Sartre: ‘If by “argument” is understood a
sequence of propositions, beginning from premises laid down with some plausible
warrant and proceeding by way of intermediate steps, each accompanied by a justifying
reason, to a conclusion firmly established, the discovery of arguments in Sartre’s work
is not easy.’ His ‘dual allegiance’ to philosophy and literature means that although
he starts out in his works to be ‘lucid’ and ‘rigorous’ like a philosopher, the writer
gradually takes over with the result that ‘the distance from conception to expression is
progressively reduced, critical restraint yields to enthusiasm and the whole enterprise
gathers momentum’ (1984: 3).
‘The characters an artist creates’, Nietzsche wrote, ‘are not the artist himself, but
obviously the series of characters to which he devotes himself with innermost love
does indeed say something about the artist himself ’ (UM 4.2). We must thus be
wary in unproblematically taking Sartre’s fiction as his definitive philosophical view
without weighing the ambiguity in his thinking. Just as it is simplistic to take Garcin’s
proclamation of ‘hell is other people’ in Huis Clos as Sartre’s settled philosophical view
of intersubjectivity, it is also hasty to directly assimilate Roquentin to Sartre.4 Sartre’s
fulfilment of his original project to be a writer gives him a level of productivity and a
cheerful disposition absent in Roquentin. As he writes, for instance, ‘[t]he essential
difference between Antoine Roquentin and me is that, for my part, I write the story of
Antoine Roquentin’ (WD 338). He also alludes to the gloominess of Roquentin that is
contrary to his own disposition – like himself but ‘stripped of the living principle’ (WD
338). In his novels, by his own admission, structures such as sadness and melancholia
begin to take on a life of their own: ‘That’s what I did: I stripped my characters of
my obsessive passion for writing, my pride, my faith in my destiny, my metaphysical
optimism – and thereby provoked in them a gloomy pullulation. They are myself
beheaded’ (WD 339). Like Hilbert in ‘Erostrate’ and other characters that populate
Sartre’s fictional universe, Roquentin is not a double of Sartre but more ‘a nightmarish
deformation’ of him in which only certain traits remain: ‘I fool people . . . I haven’t felt
Nausea, I’m not authentic’ (WD 62).
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 13

To pin down these two freewheeling philosophers is thus no straightforward task.

Their freedom from institution and place as itinerant philosophers offers a biographical
parallel to the freedom that characterized their thinking. As Hayman (1982, 1986)
remarks, what exemplifies them is their continual process of ‘writing against’
themselves, always evolving their perspective and resisting philosophical stasis. In the
1886 preface to the second part of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche, for instance,
declares how, after his turn from Wagner and Schopenhauer, ‘I now took sides against
myself and for everything that would hurt me – me especially – and come hard to me’.
It is impossible, in this respect, as Foucault (1988: 32) commented, to identify a single
authoritative ‘Nietzscheanism’ since Nietzsche was a self-declared anarchist who held
no regard for textual fidelity. Ambiguity can be found in the very question of whether
or not there is even a Nietzschean system to speak of. In Daybreak, for instance,
Nietzsche warns passionately against system builders – ‘Beware of systematizers!’ (D
318) – and roundly condemns the ‘will to a system’ in Twilight of the Idols: ‘I distrust all
systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity’ (TI 1.26). Many
of his interpreters, however, view him as a thoroughly systematic thinker including,
among others, Heidegger, Kaufmann, Danto and Deleuze. The notes of the Nachlass
are commonly seen as Nietzsche’s own will to a system in which his main philosophical
concepts – the will to power, eternal return and the Übermensch – receive their fullest
articulation. As I present them, Nietzsche and Sartre are twin thinkers of contradiction
and ambiguity who bequeath us a number of interpretative puzzles, but it is within the
productive play of contradiction and ambiguity that, I hope to show, the wellspring of
their ‘sublimated thinking’ most readily flows and a greater logic of deconstruction
unravels.

Good reading/bad reading

Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for some-
one else.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo P1)

Nietzsche has firm expectations of his readers who must acknowledge the temporal
quality of ‘the art of reading’ (GM P8). It is essential to slowly digest his texts: ‘read
slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left
open, with delicate eyes and figures . . . My patient friends, this book desires for itself
only perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!’ (D P5). Philology, he tells
us, is to be understood as ‘the art of reading well’ – to be able to read off a fact ‘without
falsifying it by interpretation, without losing caution, patience, subtlety in the desire for
understanding’ (A 52). But how should we read the writings of Nietzsche and Sartre?
As texts with a life and meaning of their own or as texts imprinted with the ‘existential
signatures’ of their authors?
There appears to be a paradox in Nietzsche’s recommendations on how we should
understand him. The philosopher who stamps personality onto his writings warns
14 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

against any Cult of Personality in discerning the true meaning of the text. In his
debates over the ‘Homer Question’, for instance, he argues that it doesn’t matter who
or how many wrote the work since ‘the composer of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an
“aesthetic judgment”’ (KGW 2.1.263). Once the text has been written, it acquires a
life of its own independent of the author’s subjective meaning and intention (HH
208). Elsewhere, however, the novel and powerful method of critical inquiry that
Nietzsche develops is irreducibly ad hominem. This ad hominem approach involves
the interlacing of bios and mind and points back to the author, as well as the
meaning, profundity and effect of an argument, and is consistent with his own idea
of the importance of perspective.5 He wonders, for instance, if his own and other
philosophies are no more than ‘intellectual detours for . . . personal drives?’ (D 553),
and writes of the ‘great love’ he has for conveying his truthfulness to his readers
through which he ‘has a personal relationship to his problems, and finds in them his
destiny, his distress, and his greatest happiness’ (GS 345). In the preface to the second
edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche makes an indissoluble link between his own
autobiographical situation and the themes of ‘convalescence’, ‘health’ and ‘sickness’ in
his philosophy. The great pain he suffered ‘compels us philosophers to descend into
our ultimate depths and to put aside all trust, everything good-natured, everything
that would interpose a veil, that is mild, that is medium – things in which formerly
we have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us “better”, but I know
that it makes us more profound’ (GS P3). Conscious of ‘the advantages that my fickle
health gives me over all robust squares’ (GS P3), there is, he emphasizes, a direct
relation between psychology and philosophy:

In some it is their deprivations that philosophize; in others, their riches and

strengths – those who philosophize through their deprivations need their
philosophy, whether it be as a prop, a sedative, medicine, redemption, elevation,
or self-alienation. (GS P2)

Nietzsche strongly reiterates this linkage in Beyond Good and Evil, declaring that
there is ‘absolutely nothing impersonal about the philosopher’; every philosophy is
‘a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious
memoir’. A philosopher’s psychological dispositions and drives are, he maintains,
‘the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown’ (BGE 6). Thus, in every
philosophy there is always ‘a point at which the philosopher’s “conviction” appears on
the scene’ (BGE 8).
As Salomé (1988) first suggested, the trajectory of Nietzsche’s thinking correlates
closely to the material circumstances of his life. His aphoristic style of writing, for
instance, was a consequence largely of his nomadic lifestyle and the fact that he had
short periods to write in between his chronic troughs of bad health. Because of this, he
purposely approaches deep problems like cold baths: ‘quickly into them and quickly out
again’ (GS 381). His aphorisms require exegesis in order to decipher them and a higher
level of engagement to be understood (GM P8). They are necessarily incomplete (HH
178, 207) and serve as tests for the reader (Z 1.7). This gives Nietzsche’s philosophy,
as Deleuze (1983: 31) argued, a kind of magnetic and interactive quality. The use of
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 15

aphorisms, along with the use of paradox, wordplay, metaphor and masks, invites
evaluation and interpretation through its very form and constitution. One has no
choice but to interpret and evaluate what Nietzsche actually means.6
Sartre’s writings similarly bear the trace of environment and his unique circumstance.
One cannot ignore, for instance, the narcotic influence on the Critique. On reading its
long meandering paragraphs and interweaving interminable sentences one is struck
by a certain imposition of rhythm, a kind of fuelled effort to render its writing as rapid
as the movement of thinking. It was not a case of writing in the ordinary sense, as
Beauvoir (1977: 385) recounted, in the way of pausing to think, making corrections
and rewriting certain sentences or passages: ‘for hours at a stretch he raced across sheet
after sheet without rereading them, as though absorbed by ideas that his pen, even at
that speed, couldn’t keep up with.’ Cohen-Solal (1991: 374) records,

This is how he wrote The Critique of Dialectical Reason: a wild rush of words and
juxtaposed ideas, pouring forth during crises of hyper-excitement, under the effect
of contradictory drugs, that would zing him up, knock him down, or halt him
in between . . . Heavy doses for a tough man, hyperlucid and nearly impervious
to pain, who, however, would occasionally lapse into moments of absence, from
which he then promptly re-emerged, ready to assume control, with vivacity and
pride.

Just like Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s philological recommendations of ‘good reading’

are polysemous, often balancing on a tightrope of humanist and anti-humanist
equivocation. In reference to his biographies of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert, Ireland
(2020: 451) observes how ‘Sartre is both a humanist and an anti-humanist’, his analysis
residing in the ambiguous space between the two. While stating in an interview, for
instance, that ‘the life of people who write is projected in the writing in one way or
another’ (1979b: 26), Sartre maintains elsewhere that ‘the text towers above its author’
(WL 34). Mueller (2019: 36) echoes Ireland on this point of tergiversation, showing
how, as we move from What Is Literature? to The Family Idiot, Sartre’s literary theory
‘accords more and more importance to the figure of the reader and seeks to elucidate the
possibility of the reader’s freedom with increasing precision’. The implicit association
of Sartre with an unqualified adherence to ‘a conception of the author as a coherent,
indivisible, and authoritative entity’ is as false as is ‘the assumption of a supposedly
unproblematic and “whole” Sartrean subject’. What Is Literature? is often associated
with the notion of the committed author but views the writer in a dual reality with
the reader: ‘It is the joint effort of author and reader which brings upon the scene that
concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. There is no art except for
and by others’ (WL 50). Sartre questions Kant’s notion of disinterested pleasure on the
grounds that it does not explain the relationship between the work of art and its viewer
(WL 42). The collaboration between author and reader in an undertaking of collective
freedom elicits the feeling of ‘aesthetic joy’ attained through the reader’s contribution
through which the work ‘undergoes an increase in being’ (WL 29). Reading is not
the simple reception of a message in an act of communication but an active creation
characterized by freedom. Without the reader the text would ‘remain only a collection
16 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

of signs’ (WL 52). In The Family Idiot, as Mueller (2019: 44) notes, Sartre moves further
still towards a more decentred reading of the author and how, in a rather ‘Foucauldian
move’, Sartre reduces the author to a specific function in the process of reading. Where
the writer leads the reader through the text in What Is Literature?, the reader now takes
over completely.7
As Nietzsche and Sartre move in their analysis to a more decentred view of the
subject, they very much anticipate Derrida’s critique of the ‘metaphysics of presence’.
Derrida follows Nietzsche in decentring the subject as a privileged centre by dispersing
it within the system of textual relations that is writing: ‘The “subject” of writing does
not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of
writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society,
the world’ (1978: 226–7). For Derrida (1978: 292), it is Nietzsche’s ‘joyous affirmation
of the play of the world’ that points the way to an affirmation of the decentred play
of writing that disrupts the metaphysics of presence which guides the logocentric
tradition. ‘Nietzsche’ himself as a proper name must be placed in quotation marks
and the question of the ‘truth of Nietzsche’ or the ‘totality of Nietzsche’s text’ must be
suspended for he writes in the various masks of Zarathustra, the free spirit, the disciple
of Dionysus, the new philosopher and the Antichrist.8
Although my approach is highly sympathetic to the ‘French Nietzsche’ and to the
Derridean play of interpretation, the attempt to erase Nietzsche altogether from his
work – to ‘write with no face’ (1972: 17) as Foucault professed to – is itself, to my mind,
a false move towards metaphysical closure. Although Nietzsche stresses the ‘masks’
and differing narrative identities of his writing, it is hard to think of an author who is
more consciously a writing self connected to a real flesh and blood person and whose
personality is projected so unmistakably onto the pages of his books. As Safranski
(2003: 28) observes, ‘[d]espite his philosophical attack on the “I”, there is no other
philosopher, with the possible exception of Montaigne, who employs the pronoun “I”
more than Nietzsche did.’ In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche makes the link explicit between his
life and his philosophy: ‘I speak only of what I have lived through, not merely of what
I have thought through; the opposition of thinking and life is lacking in my case. My
“theory” grows from my “practice”’ (EH, part of a discarded draft for Section 3).
Like Nietzsche, Sartre recognizes that reading is always subject to many
interpretations: ‘I know that other readers appropriate the idea at the same moment
[as I do] who surpass the same material toward nearly the same, but sensibly
different meanings’ (IF 3.52). What one reads is ‘enriched in my eyes by a thousand
interpretations that escape me’ (IF 3.52). A form of homology can be discerned
between Sartre and Derrida, as Martinot (1999: 55) observes, on the question of
the generation of meaning. In Sartrean reading, we can recognize the operation of
Derridean différance in the notion that meaning always lies elsewhere to be decided at
a later date ‘the thought [read], in the instant I make it mine, remains definitively other,
an other’s thought that commands me to resuscitate it’ (IF 3.51). But where both agree
that meaning is a trace within worked matter left by another, the Sartrean trace, unlike
the Derridean trace, contains Sartre’s refusal to erase the person who writes or reads.
For Sartre, although words take on a life of their own when ‘language presents itself, in
effect as an autonomous system’ (1966c: 88) and where ‘structures express or constitute
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 17

intentions that determine me without being mine’ (1977: 10.97), nonetheless they still
bear ‘the trace of man’ (1966c: 88) as they are taken up and used by speaking subjects.
The subject is always entangled within her own texts, ‘projected in the writing in one
way or another’ (1979b: 29). This is a view that becomes obscured in his later texts but
never fully relinquished, and one expressed poignantly in the following passage from
Words as he considers the idea of posterity through writing:

My bones are leather and cardboard, my parchment flesh smells of glue and mildew,
and I strut my ease across a hundredweight or so of paper. I am reborn, I have at last
become a complete man, thinking, speaking, singing, thundering, and asserting
himself with the peremptory inertia of matter. I am taken up, opened out, spread
on the table, smoothed with the flat of the hand and sometimes made to crack. I
let it happen and then suddenly I flash, dazzle, impose myself from a distance; my
powers traverse space and time, strike down the wicked and protect the good. No
one can forget me or pass me over in silence: I am a large, manageable and terrible
fetish. My consciousness is in fragments: all the better. Other consciousnesses have
taken charge of me. They read me and I leap to their eyes; they talk about me and
I am on everyone’s lips, a universal and singular language; I have made myself a
prospective interest for millions of glances. For anyone who knows how to like
me, I am his most intimate disquiet: but if he wants to touch me, I draw aside and
vanish: I exist nowhere but I am, at last! I am everywhere: a parasite on humanity,
by my good deeds I prey on it and force it endlessly to revive my absence. (W 122)

A playful reading
It is absolutely unnecessary, and not even desirable, for you to argue in my favour;
on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as if you were looking at an alien plant with
ironic distance, would strike me as an incomparably more intelligent attitude
toward me.
(Nietzsche, Letter to Carl Fuchs, July 1888)

Attempts to fix the interpretative process in the direction exclusively of the subject
or object serve only to obscure the dynamic of interpretation and put an end to its
proliferating play. To avoid metaphysical closure, ‘good’ interpretation lies in ‘the
between’. This also applies to the ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’ of Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s
texts. Although they give philosophical licence to the proliferation of perspectives in
reading their work, they both refuse to issue a total carte blanche. While, according
to Nietzsche, there are ‘no eternal horizons or perspectives’ (GS 143) and ‘[t]he same
text allows countless interpretations . . . there is no “correct” interpretation’ (KGW
8.1), he contrasts the ‘art of reading rightly’ (HH 270) with the ‘art of reading well’ (A
52). ‘Reading well’, he argues, properly articulates the text’s ‘double sense’ (HH 8) that
accounts for the rich ambiguity and multiplicity of textual meanings. In spite of his
perspectivism, Nietzsche identifies ‘bad modes of interpretation’ (BGE 22) that lead
18 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

to a narrowing of interpretation and dogmatism, denying ‘the basic condition of all

life’ (BGE P): ‘every such exaggeration of a single viewpoint is in itself already a sign of
sickness’ (WP 1020). The same is true of Sartre who states in What Is Literature?, ‘for
the reader all is to do’, and yet maintains in The Family Idiot that elements of reading
can encourage a ‘mystifying’ or ‘demystifying’ interpretation.9
To get beyond the horns of this dilemma, Schrift and Picard offer a third mode
of interpretation based on a ‘playful’ method of reading. As we will see, play is a key
element in the philosophy of Nietzsche and Sartre, forming the cornerstone of their
creative ethics and ontology. Playfulness signifies a way of rearranging the world, an
activity in which we recycle the elements of our lives in creative and experimental
ways and transform ourselves in the process, a surrendering as well as an expression
of individuality involving an openness to the world of becoming. Schrift’s method of
‘interpretive pluralism’ (1990: 7, 180) aims for a middle ground between the ‘dogmatic
tendency’ of Heidegger and the ‘relativistic tendency’ of Derrida, occupying ‘a space
between the interpretive demands of philological attention and perspectival creativity’.
This follows Nietzsche who likens good philology to the expert art of goldsmithing
applied to words (D P5). Goldsmiths know the limit of the material they work with and
yet forge and craft this into ever new and creative forms ‘between the lines’. This accords
with Picard’s (1986: 52) view of reading as both ‘play’ and ‘game’ whereby the reader
invests her own history into the text and thereby produces it creatively. It is play that
mobilizes the form of the imagination but also a game that is subject to rules and codes
that have been established and intersubjectively determined. Like any in any game,
Picard (1986: 169) asserts, there are inevitably ‘cheats’ who destroy the ‘hermeneutic
code’ of the text by skipping passages, jumping to the end or falsely isolating passages
from the context in which they occur. Picard’s ‘cheats’ are thus akin to what Nietzsche
calls his ‘worst readers’ who behave like ‘plundering troops’ and ‘take away a few things
they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole’ (HH 2.137).
The texts of Nietzsche call out for playful interpretation just as Nietzsche did himself
in giving positive value to ‘the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, form-giving forces
that give new interpretations and directions’:

whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted
to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power . . . all events in
the organic world are a subduing, become master, and all subduing and becoming
master involves a fresh interpretation, an adaptation through which any previous
‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’ are necessarily obscured or even obliterated. (GM 2.12)

In Daybreak, he presents the image of creatures in flight, ‘aeronauts of the spirit’, who
fly higher and further away with all of our ‘great mentors and precursors’ who cannot
fly any further. There still remains a ‘vast and prodigious trajectory’ to explore, and
despite the fatigue of some including ourselves, we can take comfort in the knowledge
that ‘[o]ther birds will fly further!’ (D 573). ‘A philosophy remains efficacious’, Sartre
wrote in a similar vein, only ‘so long as the praxis which has engendered it, which
supports it, and which is clarified by it, is still alive’ (SM 5–6). Both philosophers share
Derrida’s view of reading as a ‘transformational’ activity, developing a multiplicity of
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 19

interpretations from the fundamental polysemy of linguistic signs and giving assent
to the creative projections of the reader while avoiding an unqualified relativism by
implicitly recognizing acceptable ‘protocols of reading’. Although interpretation is never
absolutely decidable as there will always be more than one plausible interpretation,
in Derrida’s transformational writing interpretations are nevertheless constrained by
their context and some are hence more plausible than others.
In my ‘playful reading’ of Nietzsche and Sartre, I situate their core insights within
the development of contemporary posthumanist thinking, taking them out of the
conceptual assemblages of the nineteenth century (where many scholars pigeonhole
them) and projecting them into the twenty-first. In so doing, I not only mine the main
seams of their thinking but also bring into the foreground those elements or emergent
concepts that lurk between the lines which have been suppressed, ignored and given
scant attention in common readings of them or just left latent and undeveloped in
their texts. As Cox (2013: 6) writes of Sartre, for instance, the longer we study his
‘myriad insights’, the more territories and horizons appear. Where Sartre did not
explore a territory so thoroughly as to make it his own, he pointed the way towards it,
‘either promising to reach it himself in due course or inviting others to investigate his
sketchy insights’. This is fundamentally a task, as Visker (2007: 3–4) avers, of perceiving
the ‘cracks’ in his philosophy or the ‘turns of argumentation’ where conceptual
possibilities that glimmer through have been left unconsidered or undeveloped. I
offer my interpretation of Nietzsche and Sartre in this vein as a kind of palimpsest, an
overwriting of original texts that still clearly bear the strong imprint of their original
authors but which harbour new propositions and directions.10 My hope is to find an
Ariadnean thread of philological rigour and conceptual understanding that makes
sense of how their many perspectives follow the walls of their labyrinthine texts.
Moreover, by conjoining their philosophy to their lives, I hope to bring back into it, in
Deleuze’s (1987: 119) words, ‘a little of that joy, that force, that amorous and political
life that they both knew how to give and invent’.

The New Nietzsche and New Sartre

This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the
ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time;
deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 125)

In death, as Sartre claimed, we become ‘prey to the living’ (BN 706) and there has
certainly been no shortage of scholars who have interpreted the deceased Nietzschean
and Sartrean mind. The appropriation of Nietzsche, as Strong (1996: 129) remarks, ‘has
become a kind of paralyzed and paralyzing text’ which could only be taken care of just
like his body after the onset of insanity: ‘Nietzsche in the asylum, Nietzsche in the care
of his sister, Nietzsche in the hands of his readers: Nietzsche under control.’ From the
onset of his terminal madness in 1890, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and his
20 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

one-time lover, Lou Salomé, presented two very different faces of Nietzsche. Salomé’s
Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man in His Work (1894) highlighted the importance of style in
his thinking (aphorism, multiple voices, different forms of narrative perspective) and
the relationship between physical and mental vitality (or decline) to the production of
ideas. Her overall image of Nietzsche was that of a neurotic and decadent genius whose
three ‘transitions’ in his thought (‘early, ‘middle’ and ‘late’) were expressive of changes
in the situation and circumstances of his life. By contrast, Förster-Nietzsche’s two-
volume The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche (1895 and 1897) contested this view, presenting
her brother as a healthy, sane and adventurous thinker who was developing the
framework of a coherent and systematic philosophy. She assumed the literary rights
to her brother’s estate in 1895 and creatively rearranged his unpublished notes into
a new work The Will to Power (1901, reissued in an expanded edition in 1906) with
selected focus on ‘will’ and ‘power’, which exerted an influence on his reputation as a
thinker of force, domination and violence. She argued that Nietzsche had hidden his
‘true philosophy’ in his published texts but revealed it in all fullness in the pages of The
Will to Power.
After the ‘Nazification’ of Nietzsche’s philosophy by philosophers such as Baumler,
Rosenberg and Oehler in Germany in the 1930s, who seized upon Förster-Nietzsche’s
identification of the ‘Bloody’ Nietzsche as a philosopher of domination, Nietzsche’s first
American commentators reined in his stylistic and political excesses and presented
him as a systematic philosopher. For Danto (2005: 13), he emerges ‘as a systematic
as well as an original and analytic thinker’ while in Kaufmann’s (1974: viii, 84) view,
rather than ‘a great stylist’, he is primarily ‘a great thinker’, whose many ‘all-too-human
judgments’ should be viewed as ‘philosophically irrelevant’. As would have been his
innermost wish (EH 6), Nietzsche came to the fore in France in the 1960s and 1970s
when the three Hs (Hegel, Heidegger and Husserl) were displaced in French academic
circles by the three ‘Masters of Suspicion’, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. Two important
conferences that crystallized Nietzsche’s importance in France were the colloquium at
Royaumont in 1964 and the ‘Nietzsche aujourd’hui’ conference at Cérisy-la-Salle in
1972 where, in reaction to Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as a grand metaphysician,
the ‘French Nietzsche’ or ‘New Nietzsche’ was born. Building on the work of Bataille
and Klossowski, Derrida (Spurs, 1978), Deleuze (Nietzsche and Philosophy, 1962),
Foucault (Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 1971) and Kofman (Nietzsche and Metaphor,
1978) focused on the more literary and stylistic aspects of his work that worked against
conceptual thinking. They argued that Nietzsche’s influence extends well beyond
the explicit themes of his work and prompts radical questions on thought itself in
determining the direction of modernity, what it is to be ‘human’, and the relation
between self and world.
Bataille’s On Nietzsche, published in 1945, is the origin of what we now know as
the ‘French Nietzsche’, arguing that the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche ran contrary
to his manifold separation between politics and cultural vitality. Bataille also pitted
Nietzsche (who valorized the untotalizable, anti-systematic fragmentary embrace
of excess epitomized by Dionysus) against Hegel (who subordinated all opposites
to a rational synthesized totality), giving philosophical weight to the irrational and
paradoxical in Nietzsche (the body, the unconscious, instinct). In tune with Bataille,
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 21

Klossowski emphasizes the role of the body and nervous system in Nietzsche’s thinking
by observing the relation between the body’s impulses and conscious thought. The
paradoxical nature of Nietzsche’s thinking is refracted through his concept of the eternal
return that is viewed by Klossowski (2005: 43–57) as primarily a lived experience. It is a
‘divine vicious circle’ (circulus vitiosus deus), a paradoxical argument that undermines
the traditional categories of Western metaphysics, such as the principle of identity
and the law of non-contradiction, making the singularity of every instant opaque and
unintelligible (e.g. linear and cyclical). It also undermines the unified subject in that
we have to cycle through all our past selves and future selves in the cycle of returning
to our current self. Since we change so radically over time, there are elements of our
past selves that cannot be incorporated into our current self-identity, so the process of
remembering (‘anamnesis’) overflows our sense of self-identity. The paradox of eternal
return is thus felt as a lived experience that undermines the identity of the experiencer
who has the experience.
Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy was a seminal text in the emergence of the ‘New
Nietzsche’ and was heavily influenced by Bataille and Klossowski. Deleuze develops
Bataille’s critique of Hegelianism but portrays Nietzsche as a systematic philosopher
who conceives the will to power primarily in terms of active and reactive forces. As
primary constituents of reality, forces come together through chance in a relation
through which both are mutually affected. The will to power is fundamentally a
creative and bountiful force but becomes a desire for domination when sublimated
only in its slavish, reactive form: ‘When nihilism triumphs, then and only then does
the will to power stop meaning “to create” and start to signify instead “to want power”,
“to want to dominate”’ (2001: 76–7). ‘Power, as will to power’, according to Deleuze,
‘is not that which the will wants, but that which wants in the will’ (2001: 73). In his
critique of Hegel, he contrasts Nietzsche’s Übermensch (which breaks with the values
of the past) with Hegel’s dialectic (which is weighed down by the ‘heaviness’ of the
past as it preserves what it overcomes, including nihilism). Furthermore, Deleuze
replaces Hegelian opposition and negation at the centre of the dialectic with difference
and affirmation that he finds at the centre of Nietzsche’s thought. For Deleuze (1983: 8),
‘Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge’. Hegel’s opposition
thinking is a type of thought characteristic of the slave who defines himself by negating
and opposing the master. It effaces difference and ignores the subtle gradations between
poles and the complex continuous plane from which antithetical concepts and values
are forged.
Despite writing little directly about Nietzsche, Foucault locates Nietzsche at the
centre of his own thinking, declaring at one point, ‘I am simply a Nietzschean’ (1989:
327). In his essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ (1971), he contrasts traditional
history (metaphysical assumption that things have an eternal, unchanging essence at
their core, a unified story as the ‘truth’ of history) with Nietzsche’s ‘effective’ genealogical
history (the arbitrariness of history, discontinuities, accidents, multiplicities). Placing
contingency at the heart of Nietzsche’s thinking and developing the Deleuzian critique
of Hegel’s dialectic, Foucault uses Nietzsche’s genealogical history to identify ‘the
accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors,
the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that
22 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

continue to exist and have value for us’ (1977a: 146). In Foucault’s view, Nietzsche’s
genealogical analysis of power shows how the constitution of ‘psyche, subjectivity,
personality, consciousness’ is the result of definite ‘methods of punishment, supervision
and constraint’ (1977a: 29). In Nietzsche we can thus find the first dissolution of man:

by means of a philological critique, by means of a certain form of biologism,

Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another,
at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the
first, and at which the promise of the superman signifies first and foremost the
imminence of the death of man. (1970: 342)

Nietzsche’s deconstruction of the subject emerges as the first decisive break from
modernity: ‘What Nietzsche’s thought heralds’, according to Foucault (1970: 385), is
not so much the ‘death of God’ but ‘the end of his murderer’. This casts ‘man’ not as any
kind of essence that expresses itself irresistibly through history but as a configuration
of historical and linguistic determinations linked to the circulation of power: ‘the
development of humanity is a series of interpretations’ (1977: 152).
Most of all, it was Derrida who built the image of the ‘New Nietzsche’ as a master of
deconstruction. In some later writings, such as ‘Otobiographies’ (1986) and The Politics
of Friendship (1997), he analyses Nietzsche in relation to political questions (such as his
culpability for his appropriation by Nazi ideologues), but in his early work he confronts
Nietzsche as a playful stylist. For Derrida (1978: 292), ‘Nietzsche’ appears as the proper
name for thinking otherwise, ‘a shorthand marker for the other of logocentrism’,
signifying play, interpretation, textuality. Derrida uses Deleuze’s idea of opposing
forces to show that forces have no identity in themselves but only in relation to how
they relate to and differ from other forces ‘force itself is never present; it is only a play
of different quantities’ (1973: 148). Differential forces give rise to what appears to be
stable systems of oppositional terms:

We could thus take up all the coupled oppositions on which philosophy is

constructed, and from which our language lives, not in order to see opposition
vanish but to see the emergence of a necessity such that one of the terms appears
as the difference of the other, the other as ‘differed’ within the systematic ordering
of the same. (1973: 148–9).

Nietzsche’s critique of the metaphysician’s ‘faith in antithetical values’ (BGE 2) forms

the basis of Derrida’s deconstructionist method that unravels the binary conceptual
hierarchies in which one term is privileged as present and the other excluded
term as absent by problematizing the distinction. This involves the dual process of
inversion (overturning the traditional hierarchy of a binary opposition by showing
that the traditionally subordinate term is actually the dominant one) and displacement
(creating new terms or ‘undecidables’ that cannot be reduced to the traditional
hierarchical opposition). As we will see in the next chapter, it was Nietzsche’s
deconstructionist method that, in Derrida’s view, placed him well beyond Heidegger’s
charge of metaphysical humanism. Pre-empting Derrida’s own double procedure of
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 23

inversion and displacement, Nietzsche deconstructs the truth/falsity opposition,

initially inverting the relation by suggesting that untruth might be more conducive to
human well-being than truth (it protects us against the harsh realities of existence), not
by simply asserting the authority of untruth over truth but by displacing the grounds
for their opposition by reading them in terms of their value for life: ‘The falseness of
a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement . . . . The question is
to what extent it is life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even
species-breeding’ (BGE 4). Similarly, in his move beyond good and evil, Nietzsche
does not simply invert the good/evil hierarchy but displaces these in the favour of a
revaluation of all values.11
Just as the ‘New Nietzsche’ was reborn in France sixty years or so after his death, a
‘New Sartre’ has emerged four decades on from his death in 1980 by a growing number
of scholars who have viewed his work, and particularly his relation to postmodernism,
with a fresh perspective. The old Vintage Sartre we are familiar enough with – classical,
Cartesian, humanist, nihilist philosopher of conflict and grand metaphysician. This
is the Sartre, anointed and flagellated in equal measure, of ‘hell is other people’, the
‘last of the Cartesians’ (Grene 1993: 232), the historian of reason (Dobson 1993) and
the bourgeois champion of absolute freedom (Marcuse 1983). The old Sartreans place
Sartre squarely under the influence of classical modernist thinking in the shadow of
Descartes and Kant. In Solomon’s (1988: 173) view, ‘the structure of his philosophy
is undeniably Cartesian’, while, for Marcuse (1983), it is Sartre’s concept of the gaze,
where the other ‘appears as the one who usurps, appropriates and appraises my world,
as the “thief ” of my possibilities’, that inclines his social ontology towards an atomistic
bourgeois individualism: ‘Behind the nihilistic language [of Being and Nothingness]
lurks the ideology of free competition, free initiative and equal opportunity.’ Although
Dobson (1993: 187, 5, 174) recognizes that ‘Sartre cannot easily be appropriated as the
last bastion of a discredited humanism’, he insists that Sartre is a philosopher of reason
who ‘cannot realistically be viewed as anticipating postmodern themes’ and is far away
from being ‘the harbinger of post-humanist trends’. This Vintage Sartre is, in many
ways, a regressive, abstract and vulgarized Sartre marooned in the nineteenth century
– a relic, as Foucault (2001: 541) stated, of a bygone era.
The ‘New Sartre’ as un homme postmoderne is perhaps a less familiar figure to
some but one who has crept out from the shadows and into full critical view in
recent times. Jameson (1995: 1) was one of the first to argue that Sartre is ‘a hidden
origin’ of many elements of postmodernist thinking and is, in many respects, akin
to the figure of Captain Dreyfus at the turn of the twentieth century. All the charges
(especially his supposed incongruity with poststructuralism) are understood to be
false, ‘yet the victim’s honour has yet to be publicly rehabilitated’. In Howells’ (1992:
1) words, this idea of ‘the new Sartre’ presents him ‘as a figure whose diversity was
far from being mastered, who could not, without distortion or impoverishment, be
identified with the “classical existentialism” of the 1940s, and whose relationship to
Structuralism and Post-Structuralism, as well as to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and
literary theory, was far more complex than ha[s] generally been supposed’. In this
respect, traditional accounts of post-war intellectual history in France can be said to
have pitted Sartre as a theoretical adversary to (post)structuralists such as Foucault,
24 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Lacan, Deleuze and Derrida far too readily. Moreover, standard interpretations
of Sartre’s work can be seen to rely too heavily on certain themes or on particular
passages in his ‘classical existentialist’ works of the 1940s to the serious neglect of
other elements in his work of this period, and indeed, in the wider trajectory of
his work as a whole. Howells makes the further claim that since Sartre’s two main
works of philosophy, Being and Nothingness and the Critique, predate the main wave
of poststructuralist texts in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, they can be seen in effect
to prefigure many key poststructuralist themes, such as ‘the decentred subject, the
rejection of a metaphysics of presence, the critique of bourgeois humanism and
individualism, the concept of the reader as producer of the text’s multiple meanings,
the recognition of language and thought structures as masters rather than mastered
in most acts of discourse and thinking, [and] a materialist philosophy of history
as detotalized and fragmented’ (1992: 2). These themes, she argues, are not ‘the
inventions of Lacan, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss and Derrida’ but can ‘be found in Sartre’s
later works’ and are ‘present from the outset’ in even his early work which dates
from The Transcendence of the Ego in 1936 (1992: 2). Taken together, they serve
to contradict the simple identification of Sartre with the usual image of a classical
intellectual steeped in a Cartesian tradition of modern philosophy which is, by
implication, a form of philosophy diametrically opposed to the postmodernizing
strategies of the poststructuralists.
Since Howells’ rereading of post-war French philosophy, a stream of scholars,
including Sawyer (2015), Mueller (2019), Baugh (1999), Martinot (1999), Chambers
(2019), Flynn (2004, 2010), Butterfield (2012), Richards (2019), Reynolds and
Woodward (2011), Charbonneau (1999), Rozeghy (2002) and Farrell Fox (2003, 2009,
2020) have all traced the connections of Sartre’s thinking to key themes in the work of
poststructuralists, such as Derrida, Lacan, Foucault and Deleuze. Sarah Richmond’s
newly appeared translation of Being and Nothingness (2018), correcting some of the
inadequacies and infelicitous locutions in Hazel Barnes’ original translation into
English in 1956, is symbolic of a wider move to ‘update’ Sartre and has paved the way to
a more nuanced interpretation of this endlessly discussed philosophical text. This has
been aided significantly by Eshleman’s (2011, 2020a) detailed analysis of the structure
and methodology of Sartre’s Essay in Phenomenological Ontology that shows how it
was never Sartre’s intention to separate pour-soi and en-soi in a Cartesian way, but
on the contrary, to demonstrate their irreducible entanglement within an immanent
unity of ‘lived experience’. O’Shiel (2018) and Heldt (2020) have recently shown the
way to a ‘revaluation of Sartre’s ontology’ in Being and Nothingness, an ontology the
interpretation of which, in Heldt’s (2020: v) words, ‘has become platitudinous in its
orthodoxy’.
A similar renewal in understanding the Critique(s) has been undertaken by Flynn
(2010) and Ally (2020). Flynn demonstrates how Sartre’s relational ontology (which
he terms ‘Dialectical Nominalism’) offers a via media between the inadequacies of
methodological individualism and holism, both of which Sartre heavily critiques. He
also differentiates Sartre’s ‘Decapitated Dialectic’ (based on contingency, difference,
incompletion and detotalization) from the Hegelian Dialectic (based on resolution,
linearity, identity, teleology and eschatology), thus paving the way for a theoretical
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 25

rapprochement between Sartre’s dialectical method and postmodernist thinking.

Ally (2020: 365) highlights the way in which Sartre relentlessly dissolves binarisms,
employing a deconstructionist method in his ‘ternary’ post-metaphysical thinking:
‘We might call this the immanent imminence of the ternary, both immanent and
imminent. The third is always coming and always nearby and always already there.
When we think with Sartre, if we look for a Third, we will find one.’ For Ally (2020: 365,
372), Sartre’s ‘index of complementarity’ between opposing pairs and his ‘sensitivity to
parts and wholes’ puts him on the cusp of a new direction in thinking as we pass from
a Holocene to an Anthropocene phase in human and natural history and places him
far from Cartesian vulgarizations.
Recognizing the impetus of a palpable resurgence of new interpretations of
Sartre’s work, in 2013 Cohen-Solal declared that we are witnessing ‘une renaissance
sartrienne’. As I write this, Noudelmann’s new book Un Tout Autre Sartre (2021) has
just been published, calling us to reappraise Sartre’s life and work and to bring to the
fore neglected or overlooked aspects of his thinking in traditional accounts of the
‘old Sartre’. This involves not only rethinking Sartre’s connection to postmodernism
and to currents in contemporary philosophy but also viewing his works with a fresh
glance, particularly with regard to the relative play of rational and irrational elements
within them. In Kirkpatrick’s view (2017a), for instance, Sartre’s early work comprises
a ‘morganatic marriage’ of phenomenology and mysticism in which the influence of
the latter was downplayed by Sartre (and others) because of its perceived inferiority
in terms of academic and methodological respectability. The formative influence on
Sartre of other sources, such as theological writers, moralistes and Christian mystics
like Baruzi, Delacroix and Theresa of Avila, has been obscured by the shadow of the
three Hs (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) which has formed the dominant theoretical
filter through which his thinking has been understood (2017a: 5). Heldt (2020: 1,
xx) adds to this view, pointing to the proclivity in Sartrean scholarship ‘to render
judgment on Sartre as some sort of passive disciple of Heidegger’ and thus obscure his
‘largely forgotten Bergsonian heritage’. After all, Sartre did not directly replicate ‘the
three H’s’ since one has to remember that his understanding was mediated by their
French interpreters – Levinas (Husserl), Wahl (Hegel, Heidegger), Lefebvre (Hegel
and Marx). Sartre was no mere interpreter or commentator in this respect but more
a raider of texts to procure what is useful and leave the rest behind, rearticulating
and reforging useful concepts while abandoning theoretical cul-de-sacs. Heidegger,
Husserl and Hegel ‘merely serve as grist for the Sartrean mill’ (Baugh 2020: 31),
and it is misleading therefore to view his work as simply deriving from his German
influences.
There has been a growing analytical interest in the importance of pre-reflective
thinking and magic in Sartre’s philosophy. Sartre was heavily influenced by French
anthropology of the 1930s that had magic as the central core of its study. Unlike
Mauss, Durkheim and Lévy-Bruhl, however, whose idea of a ‘pre-logical mentality’
they restricted to primitive societies and certain elements of children’s behaviour,
Sartre sought to extend magic to a universal human dynamic, following Bergson who
criticized this anthropology for contrasting too starkly between so-called primitive
and civilized society. Above all, Alain (Emile-Auguste Chartier) stands out as a major
26 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

influence on Sartre’s early thinking, emphasizing in his Propos sur le bonheur (1928)
the centrality of the lived body and its passions, magic, incantation and the powerful
role of the imagination. These themes persist throughout Sartre’s writings but peak
in his early and final phases of thinking. As O’Shiel (2019: 3) demonstrates, magic is
the conceptual cornerstone of his early work on the ego (1936), the emotions (1938)
and the imagination (1940) but, though discussed less explicitly, also in Being and
Nothingness, ‘a work borne out of Sartre’s intense preoccupation with the magical
being that we are’. In his interviews after 1973, Sartre returns to a more magical or
‘enchanted’ viewpoint in his ontological speculations that expands upon his early
affective phenomenology of consciousness and world and gives a strong posthumanist
coloration to his philosophy. The role of the imagination, which was centre stage in
his early writings on freedom, also becomes axiomatic to his later ethical writings and
his affirmative vision of a creative ethics. Sartre confirms this in a late interview where
he emphasizes the continuity of his thinking on the centrality of the imagination for
envisaging a new kind of ‘ethical being’. When questioned by Rybalka in 1975 about his
early work, he remarked that his perspective hadn’t significantly changed through the
years and that ‘[i]t seems to me that if I had to write on the imaginary, I would write
what I wrote previously’ (1981: 14).
In relating an author to their epoch, there is often a ‘diachronic time-lag’, Sartre
recognized, that operates both prospectively and respectively so that ‘the author
cannot be the contemporary of his contemporaries unless he is, on the whole, behind
them and ahead of them’ (IF 3.424). Nietzsche compares the comprehension of his
writing to the light that emanates from a star – it may take a long time for what
exists to be actually perceived (GS 125). As it was for Nietzsche with the French
poststructuralists in the 1960s, the emergence of the ‘New Sartre’ in the present
time, propelled by Howells, has caused us to rethink Sartre’s position in twentieth-
century French philosophy. Maybe, after all of the white noise, existentialism and
poststructuralism were parallel philosophies rather than antithetical ones, certainly
in the case of Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. This means we can
unproblematically understand Nietzsche, as is suggested by Ansell-Pearson (2011:
298), as both a poststructuralist and as ‘a thinker of authenticity’ who paved the way
for some radical currents in existentialist thought since there is no essential chasm
of difference between the two. Despite the fact that the ‘New Sartre’ has become a
living paradigm of interpretation within Sartrean scholarship, however, it has still
not seeped fully into the academic mainstream. This is reflected in Sartre’s often
glaring absence from the pantheon of posthuman precursors or pioneers. In Lechte’s
book Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers – from Structuralism to Posthumanism, for
example, Nietzsche and a number of phenomenologists are listed – Heidegger,
Husserl, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty – but not Sartre. This is a typical oversight
often repeated by chroniclers of the ‘posthuman’ or ‘postmodern’ condition. One
may conclude from this that the brightest light from Sartre’s star has yet to reach
the eyes of many perceivers and, as such, there is a kind of time lapse that exists
between Nietzsche and Sartre, one that this book seeks to rebalance by linking the
New Nietzsche to the New Sartre and showing the full extent and depth of their
parallel philosophies.
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 27

Philosophers of paradox
This dual series of experiences, this access to apparently separate worlds, is repeated
in my nature in every respect: I am a Doppelgänger, I have a ‘second’ face in addi-
tion to the first. And perhaps also a third.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 1.3)

Nietzsche’s thinking can be seen as a swinging pendulum between opposites. Not only
does he regularly contradict himself but even seems to enjoy doing so: ‘Does the good
historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?’ (D P2). ‘This thinker’, he wrote, ‘needs
nobody to refute him: for that he suffices himself ’ (WS 249). Moreover, he believed that
you can make a virtue of contradiction as it is essentially a sign of spiritual abundance.
He saw the inability to tolerate contradiction – to contain or negotiate opposites
in the right way – as an aspect of cultural illness (GM 3.2, GS 297). Contradiction,
or Nietzsche’s ‘dual optic’ (Solomon 2003: 9), abounds at every corner of his work.
Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s favourite work of his own, his literary gift of a joyful, agonistic
and bestowing friendship to his readers, is after all a book offered in contradictory
fashion as a book ‘for all and none’. In Ecce Homo, he declares, ‘I contradict as has never
been contradicted before’ (EH 4.1) and presents his earthly prophet Zarathustra as a
paragon of contradiction: ‘The ladder he climbs up and down is enormous; he has seen
further, willed further, had further abilities than anyone else. This most affirmative
of all spirits contradicts with every word he speaks; all oppositions are combined
into a new unity in him’ (EH 3Z6). In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche talks of a
divided bicamerality in the human mind, ‘two chambers of the brain, as it were, one to
experience science and the other nonscience’ (HH 251). He was also fond of making
much of his mixed blood, projecting his Germanic inheritance in The Birth of Tragedy,
and channelling it through Schopenhauer and Wagner, before repressing it in his later
life.12 ‘Il Polacco’ (as he became known when he stayed at Marienbad and Sorrento
during his nomadic years) associated in his imagination Polish blood with rebellion
and freethinking that valorized individuality and genius over received opinion and
herd behaviour. Nicolas Copernicus, the Pole, is a prefiguration of Zarathustra, ‘a
freethinker who effects transmutations of knowledge’ (Safranski 2003: 63), while
another Polish genius, Fredric Chopin, supplanted the Teuton Wagner as Nietzsche’s
favourite composer.
Negotiating contradiction, in Nietzsche’s view, is a fundamental requirement for
any form of anti-metaphysical thinking that seeks to overcome ‘the faith in antithetical
values’ (BGE 2). He contrasts his own ‘Historical philosophy’ with the binarist thinking
of ‘metaphysical philosophy’:

How can something originate in its antithesis, for example rationality in irrationality,
the sentient in the dead, logic in unlogic, disinterested contemplation in covetous
willing, living for others in egoism, truth in error? Metaphysical philosophy has
hitherto surmounted this difficulty by denying that the one originates in the other
and assuming for the more highly valued thing a miraculous source in the very
28 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

kernel and being of the ‘thing in itself ’. Historical philosophy, on the other hand . . .
has discovered . . . that there are no opposites . . . and that a mistake in reasoning lies
at the bottom of this antithesis: in this interpretation there exists, strictly speaking,
neither an unegoistic action nor completely disinterested contemplation; both are
only sublimations, in which the basic element seems almost to have dispersed and
reveals itself only under the most painstaking observation. (HH 1)

As we will see in Chapter 4, the idea that two seemingly antithetical things are really one
thing at different stages of sublimation is the foundation of Nietzsche’s psychology and
of his philosophical monism, both of which would have been impossible without the
concept of ‘sublimated will to power’. In his Heraclitean conception of the absolute flow
of becoming and fading away (just as in Sartre’s philosophical monism and ‘Dialectical
Nominalism’), there are no dialectical antitheses but only fluid transitions.13
Unsurprisingly, many scholars have highlighted the ambiguous or contradictory
nature of Nietzsche’s thinking. Jaspers situates Nietzsche in an ambiguous space
between the aphoristic and the systematic, as well as between the philosophical and the
literary. He reveals the astonishing newness and originality of his thought, ‘symbolic of
the destiny of humanity itself as it presses onwards towards its limits and its sources’,
a case, Jaspers (1965: viii–xiv) writes, of ‘modernity somersaulting itself ’. However,
he also looks at the ‘aberrations’ in Nietzsche that are ‘on the verge of insanity’ and
involve ‘mistaken naturalistic and extremist pronouncements’, dismissing many of his
celebrated philosophical ideas, like the will to power and the eternal return. The most
important feature of Nietzsche’s work is that it is replete with contradictions, and this is
why the attempt to construct a philosophical whole in the way of a Nietzschean system
often falls apart – at first ‘[o]ne finds it insufferable that Nietzsche says first this, then
that, and then something entirely different’ (1965: xi). For any proposition in Nietzsche
one can usually find its opposite somewhere else in his work: ‘Self-contradiction is the
fundamental ingredient in Nietzsche’s thought’ (1965: 10).
Several others follow Jaspers in identifying the contradictory features that make up
the ‘two faces of Nietzsche’ (Magnus and Higgins 1996: 3). For Blanchot (1969: 244),
‘Nietzsche thinks or, more precisely, writes . . . under a double suspicion that inclines
him to a double refusal: refusal of the immediate, refusal of mediation’. In the duplicity
of Nietzsche’s position, immediacy is unattainable, but desirable, while concepts are
undesirable but necessary. Nietzsche practices ‘une ècriture fragmentaire’ that delights
in the play of language for its own sake, subverts the ‘spirit of gravity’ and undermines
his philosophical discourse, the other side of his texts. Caught in a no man’s land
between the impossibility of immediacy and the ineluctability of mediation, Nietzsche
opts for style, artistic play and the different masks of his texts. Where Woodward
highlights the bicameral form of Nietzsche’s thinking as navigating his way ‘between
a veneration of the tragic mythologies of the past and a projective identification with
the future’ (2011: 241), Ansell-Pearson reads Nietzsche’s paradoxical thinking along
political lines:

There are contradictory, perhaps even irreconcilable, aspects to Nietzsche’s

thinking. On the one hand, one finds authoritarian strands in his work, primarily
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 29

reflected in his views on the state, on men and women, and on the necessity for
hierarchy and inequality in the social structure. On the other hand, however,
his thinking is characterised by libertarian dimensions which are profoundly
liberating; such as, for example, his Dionysian conception of life as perpetual self-
overcoming which implies the necessity of overcoming fixed boundaries divisions,
and orders of rank, his notion of joyful knowledge or science (Wissenschaft), and
his celebration of laughter. (1994: 55)

There is ‘a real ambiguity at the heart of Nietzsche’s thinking’ which is that it often finds
itself caught in a tension between two quite different kinds of libidinal economy – ‘an
economy of the proper’ (denoting property, possession, mastery, self-aggrandizement)
and an ‘economy of the gift’ (‘squandering’ or ‘letting be’). This brings to light the
ambiguity of will to power as mastery and domination versus a will to let be and let
go (1994: 191). But, Ansell-Pearson (1994: 192) warns, even his gift-giving can be read
in masculine terms as a self-originating, autonomous force. His desire to give birth
to himself expresses a resentment towards his past and towards maternal birth since
the subject is posited as proud and independent, a causa sui, expressing ‘the original
evasion of an unbearable origin’.
Solomon (2003: 82) also telescopes the contradictory impulses in Nietzsche’s work,
observing that ‘Nietzsche, despite his high reputation with the poststructuralists,
seemed to thrill in divisive polarities’. His views on freedom, for instance, are ‘complex
and confusing’, bringing into play a ‘paradox of fatalism and self-creation’. But this, in
Solomon’s (2003: 172, 181, 184) view, ties in with the essence of his perspectivism –
they are two perspectives on ourselves like a Kantian antinomy in which what appears
to have two contradictory appearances turns out to be the expressions of two different
standpoints. We often take up one or the other of these perspectives sequentially.
This duality applied equally to his conflicted and often contradictory personality:
‘megalomania mixed with shyness, free spirit mixing with a love of military discipline,
a thirst for solitude combined with a hunger for intimate friends.’ The laughter that
Nietzsche alludes to is very often hollow and forced, the ‘cheerfulness the reach of a
desperate man’ who ‘cuts a not very convincing gay figure’ (2003: 161, 117). Thus, a
kind of ‘dual optic’ defines Nietzsche’s philosophy from his earliest writings on the
recognition of the world’s awfulness on the one hand and the affirmation of life on the
other. There is also a certain irony, as Solomon notes, which pertains to his final years.
The philosopher who railed against pity tragically spent his last ten years in a vegetative
state, the object of pity cared for by a sister whom he despised. All in all, as an example,
‘Nietzsche is more plausibly viewed as a play of opposites, like Rousseau, who cannot
be understood either in terms of his work or his life alone’. It is ‘[o]ut of this impossible
cauldron of personality Nietzsche creates himself ’ (2003: 32, 161).
Nietzsche’s biographers also bring out the contradictory impulses in his thinking.
Safranski (2003: 349) shows the tensions between the Bloody and the Gentle Nietzsche,
revealing the ‘traces of benevolence in Nietzsche’s sometimes cruel philosophy’. This is
reflected in his concept of the Übermensch which he imbues with ambiguity, as he does
of his self-characterization as ‘Caesar with Christ’s Soul’ (WP 983). In Zarathustra, he
hints at the biologistic contents of the Übermensch and in his notebooks he is more
30 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

forthright – his ‘goal’ was the ‘evolution of the entire body and not just of the brain’
(KSW 10.506). But in Ecce Homo, he is keen to strip the Übermensch of any Darwinian
or idealist conceptions (EH 3.1). Even if, by his aristocratic radicalism, the masses
should be annihilated should they become a hindrance to the production of the higher
type, this must be a voluntary sacrifice – ‘in his fantasies of annihilation . . . Nietzsche
was still a highly sensitive soul and hence more amenable to the option that the
“misfits” could offer to “sacrifice” themselves willingly’ (2003: 269). This connects to
the ambivalence in Nietzsche’s wider orientation towards the human species – on the
one hand, sharing Renaissance ideals of the ‘dignity of man’ and the human adventure
to fly to ever greater heights (D 573) while also confounding anthropocentric
arrogance: ‘man as a species does not represent any progress compared with any other
animal’ (WP 684). In his more self-reflexive modes, Nietzsche calls into question his
own pretensions as a philosopher-legislator, disclosing his identity grandiosely as a
historical ‘destiny’ but reminding his readers that this ‘little piece of dynamite’ may
turn out to be a buffoon (EH 4.1).
Nietzsche’s avatar for his ‘penchant for discontinuity’ (Hayman 1982: 360) is the figure
of Dionysus, who was the God of masks. Nietzsche presented himself as a philosopher
of masks who, in line with his philosophy of becoming, did not particularly want to
be fully understood, pinned down and thereby exhausted of future possibilities: ‘Every
profound thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood’
(BGE 290). We should always wonder, Nietzsche warns, ‘whether, behind each cave,
there is not another deeper cave. . . . Each philosophy conceals another philosophy; each
opinion is also a hiding-place, each word also a mask’ (BGE 289). The productive play
of contradiction prevents a philosopher from stagnating in an illusion of certitude and
immutability. Logic, he states, is a clumsy tool that can ‘handle only formulas for what
remains the same’ (WP 517), whereas the world of becoming is self-contradictory: ‘The
conceptual ban on contradiction proceeds from the assumption . . . that the concept
not only designates the essence of a thing but comprehends it. . . . Logic is an attempt
to comprehend actuality by means of a scheme of being we have ourselves proposed’
(WP 516). Contradiction and paradox are, in this sense, modalities of Nietzsche’s
perspectivism – although the twin poles of deconstruction and reconstruction seem to
run at odds with one another in his thinking, they constantly work in tandem. It is only
through a forensic examination of the forces that determine us that we can go beyond
their strict control and refashion ourselves through authenticity or by ‘giving style to
ourselves’. As Sartre asserts throughout his work, comprehension and praxis are always
linked – because we are made, we can be unmade, assuming we know how we were
made. To this end, as Hayman (1982: 361) suggests, Nietzsche’s main influence was
‘towards unmasking, demystification’ while being ‘one of the great liberators’. The poles
of freedom and determinism do not exclude each other in Nietzschean and Sartrean
existentialism as in metaphysical thinking but mutually reinforce.
Hayman (1986: 8) locates the same ‘penchant for discontinuity’ in Sartre: ‘[l]ike
Nietzsche, Sartre took an almost religious pleasure in the sense of battling against himself.’
In Boulé’s (2005: 2–3) assessment, there are ‘multiple, fragmented and contradictory
Sartrean selves . . . Sartre was a chameleon . . . a different person to different people’ who
sheds his past selves like an old skin: ‘Each moment of my life detaches itself from me like
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 31

a dead leaf ’ (1995: 126).14 There are, in the main, two discernibly different Sartres – one
who exhibits a more ‘inclusive’ sense of self as opposed to the ‘compromised’ sense of
self that marked his early and middle years. In fact, Boulé (2005: 3) argues that it is after
1973, namely, in the last seven years of his life, that Sartre overcame his more aggressive,
‘masculinist’ tendencies and began to recognize and own his vulnerabilities and the
feminine aspects of his personality.15 Davis (2011: 142) reinforces this appraisement of
Sartre, arguing that ‘contradiction and self-contestation are essential to Sartre’s thought’,
a fact ‘which endangers any unproblematized presentation of him as, say, humanist,
anti-humanist or not humanist’. As we will see, this oscillation between humanist,
anti-humanist and posthumanist positions is a recurring feature of his thinking that
spreads through his ethics, politics, ontology and Lebensphilosophie, confirming the
view of Barthes who, in interview with Jacques Chancel in 1976, put forward the idea
that Sartre is the exemplary intellectual of his period due to the fact that he was situated
at the crossroads of two cultures – at the point of division between the disintegration
of the old and the birth of the new. For Barthes, the special value of Sartre’s work can
be located in its ‘divided’ or ‘transitional’ nature, which gives us a dynamic critical
perspective that bridges both modern and postmodern outlooks. This is well summed
up by Mészáros in his description of ‘Sartre the adventurer’:

He is a man who perceives the contradictions of the world around him in the
form of dilemmas, antinomies and paradoxes. His praise of the ‘adventurer’
is not a temporary lapse but an expression of his inner tensions which remain
a permanent dimension of his lifework. He is the man who ‘keeps together the
unbearable tension’ of the perceived contradictions as insuperable antinomies. For
the unresolved tension – through all its transformations – drives him forward and
produces the lasting validity of his major works. (1979: 88)

With this in mind, the task of my ‘playful reading’ is to bring to the surface the internal
tensions within Sartre’s thinking and the dialectical resolutions that emerge from
this. Although postmodern readings see Nietzsche as speaking in several voices and
from different perspectives, it is also the case that several voices can sing in unison
and converge on a single set of targets and principles. One of the tasks that Nietzsche
sets for himself in his philosophy of self-transformation is to harmonize or reconcile
multiple voices. He views self-creation as the configuration of a subset of selves into
a coherent whole – from the many emerges a singular one. In The Wanderer and His
Shadow, he continues in the same vein, emphasizing the development but also the
continuity in his thinking: ‘However forcefully a man develops and seems to leap from
one contradiction to the next, close observation will reveal the dovetailing, where
the new building grows out of the old’ (WS 198). Sartre applies this same logic to
his philosophy: ‘I myself think that my contradictions mattered little, that despite
everything I have always remained on a continuous line’ (1980: 92).16 Like Nietzsche,
Sartre attacks the dichotomous logic of Western metaphysics and in places commits
himself to the necessity of logical contradiction in his thought. In the introduction
to Being and Nothingness, he asserts that the ‘principle of identity’ has only ‘regional
validity’ for the en-soi but not the pour-soi:
32 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

This formulation appears to be strictly analytical. In fact, a great distance separates

it from the principle of identity, regarded as the unconditional principle of all
analytical judgments. For a start, it refers to a particular region of being, that of
being-in-itself. We shall see that the being of for-itself is defined, on the contrary, as
being what it is not and not being what it is. (BN 27)

Paradox is for Sartre woven into the ambiguities of existence, but his thinking very
much aims towards the overcoming or sublimation of contradiction conceived non-
metaphysically – the truth of an act as ‘a complex movement of contradictions which
are posited and surpassed’ (SM 98–9n.4). He seeks dialectical intelligibility in the place
of metaphysical closure by exploring the ‘paradox’ of concrete singularity and concrete
universality. The laws of dialectical intelligibility are ‘individualized universals’ (CDR
49) where singularity and universality blend together and in which it is otiose to ask
which is primary. Every singular act is thus part of a gestural whole. In Deleuzian
terms, we might say Sartre approaches paradox interrogatively through an index of
equivocity (1986: 166) where two contradictory elements generate a tension that allows
us, in a movement of comprehension and sublimation, ‘to be present at the genesis of
the contradiction’ (2004: 74).

Thinkers of three phases

That I still cleave to the ideas that I take up again in the present treatises today
. . . that they have become in the meantime more and more firmly attached to one
another, indeed intertwined and interlaced with one another, strengthens my joyful
assurance that they might have arisen in me from the first not as isolated, capricious,
or sporadic things but from a common root, from a fundamental will of knowledge,
pointing imperiously into the depths, speaking more and more precisely, demanding
greater and greater precision. For this alone is fitting for a philosopher.
(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals P2)

Both Nietzsche and Sartre, as Schacht (1996: 158, 178) observes, employ a procedure
that may be likened to what Sartre described in Search for a Method as a ‘progressive-
regressive method’ – the strategy of ‘describing the present situation in its complexity,
examining its history, and then conjoining these accounts in an informed analysis of
the present’ that serves as a ‘prelude to a philosophy of the future’. True to this critical
method of inquiry, I arrange my reading axiomatically around the ‘double movement’ of
deconstruction and reconstruction in their philosophy. The deconstructive axis attends
closely to the points of continuity and discontinuity that run through Nietzsche’s and
Sartre’s texts. The reconstructive pole of inquiry offers a creative synthesis of the ‘New
Nietzsche’ and the ‘New Sartre’ in the domains of ontology, ethics, politics, and brings
to the fore the philosophical elements and themes, sometimes explicit, sometimes
subdued or hitherto neglected aspects of their philosophy, upon which the logic of
their twin thinking converges. As has often been the case with these two thinkers,
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 33

many interpreters have lost sight of the evolution of their thinking by focusing too
narrowly on one text or passage in isolation from the others, thereby breaking the rules
of Picard’s view of good hermeneutical reading. With Nietzsche, scholars often fixate
upon his ‘later period’ (at the relative expense of his earlier works), while, for Sartre,
the reverse is true, with interpreters isolating the themes of his early phenomenological
period from his later ‘Marxist’ phase. In this book, my approach to the texts of Nietzsche
and Sartre is to present them as containing a discernible line of development and unity,
a kind of ‘living entelechy’ (Hutter 2006: 4), in which later stages recuperate earlier
ones and earlier ones hold in themselves all grounds of future unfolding.
Jaspers (1965: 3) remarked how Nietzsche’s books seem so readily comprehensible
if single essays or aphorisms are taken in isolation, but it is only when we read the
entirety of his works in a comparative way, experiencing ‘both the systematic
possibilities’ of his thinking as well as the likely possibility of ‘their collapse’ that we
can properly assemble a holistic view of Nietzsche: ‘it is as though a mountain wall
had been dynamited; the rocks, already more or less shaped, convey the idea of the
whole.’ The task is to reassemble the pieces while conceding that the image formed is
not an objective philosophical system or set of inflexible doctrinal truths. A proper
exploration of Nietzsche requires that we distinguish between the different phases of
his writings in order to gain a holistic diachronic viewpoint. We must avoid, on the
one hand, the view that his writings constitute a purely random ‘collection of atoms’,
and, on the other, the view that they ought to be seen in terms of a single, coherent
philosophy. Both views are insufficient since both obscure our perception of what is
constant and what changes in Nietzsche’s standpoint.
Salomé (1988: 31) was the first to introduce the idea that we should read Nietzsche
in terms of periods as a practical way of connecting his personal development and the
diversity of his reflections, formulating the division of his philosophical trajectory into
three periods as ‘Nietzsche’s transitions’ – the early (Romantic) Nietzsche (1872–76),
middle (‘positivistic’) Nietzsche (1878–82) and mature (aristocratic) Nietzsche (1883–
88). The early Nietzsche, comprising The Birth of Tragedy and Untimely Meditations, is
very much under the spell of Schopenhauer and Wagner, putting in place important
aspects of his mature philosophy, such as myth, tragic culture, aestheticism and
Dionysianism, but not entirely sure of the intellectual terrain he inhabits. In his second
phase of writings or ‘middle works’ (Human, All Too Human, Daybreak, The Gay
Science), he becomes more a critic and analyst than the purveyor of a new Dionysian
art. As he remarks in Human, All Too Human, this phase of his thinking represents a
‘spiritual cure’ against ‘a temporary illness occasioned by the most dangerous form of
Romanticism’, namely that of Wagner (HH 2P2). The Nietzsche who emerges in these
works is a harder and sterner, post-Romantic Nietzsche, but his open embrace of science
did not signal the abandonment of his early hostility to Socratic theoreticism, with its
cold, visual apprehension of the world. These middle writings represent a confusing
paradoxical period of continuity (creative ethics) and discontinuity (democracy and
science). Alongside a much more sympathetic view of democracy, Nietzsche embarks
in these texts upon a peculiar reshuffling of art and science. Art ‘makes heavy the heart
of the thinker’, he now states, and induces a longing for religion and metaphysics (HH
153). Artists are ‘always of necessity epigoni’, temporarily lifting the burden of life while
34 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

discouraging men ‘from working toward a genuine improvement in their conditions’

(HH 148). Unlike the truth-seeking scientist, their backward childish condition
leads to a belief in gods and daemons, the spiritualization of nature and a hatred of
knowledge. The artist, Nietzsche claims in a mood shift from his earlier writings, is a
habitual practitioner of deception who ‘has a weaker morality than the thinker’ (HH
146).
Nietzsche’s mature period (Thus Spoke Zarathustra,17 On the Genealogy of Morals,
Beyond Good and Evil, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist) is the period
many Anglophone scholars consider to be the ‘quintessential Nietzsche’, for it is in
these later works (along with his unpublished notes from this period, the Nachlass)
that his main philosophical concepts – will to power, the eternal return, the revaluation
of values and the Übermensch – are articulated. In terms of Nietzsche’s political
thought, the ‘third phase’ marks the arrival of the ‘bloody Nietzsche’, the phase of his
radical aristocratic individualism in which he purges himself of the more democratic
sensibilities that came to the surface in his middle works. Scholars have, of course,
reacted differently to this third provocative transition in his thinking. Tönnies (1987:
25) greatly admired his first two periods (aesthetic/critical) but dismissed the third
‘as a witches’ Sabbath of thoughts, exclamations and declamations, outbursts of anger,
and contradictory statements’ in spite of ‘many luminous and brilliant appearances of
wit’. Salomé (1988: 148) did not share this aversion but saw them as texts that plunged
towards the excessive and exuberant, filling her with awe and fear, expressing more and
more radical demands, such as the Übermensch, eternal recurrence and the revaluation
of all values. His entire line of thought assumes a self-destructive course for which
madness was the outcome. In his assessment of Nietzsche, Thomas Mann (1959: 144)
did not wish to ‘devaluate the creative achievements of a thinker, psychologist, and
master of language who revolutionized the whole atmosphere of his era’. Nietzsche’s
early affliction with syphilis was a type of fateful predestination of his intellectual life
that displayed ‘the heartbreaking spectacle of self-crucifixion’ (1959: 146). His early
and middle phases show his genius as ‘a great critic and philosopher of culture’, but
his dissolution begins with Zarathustra where his tone and ambition becomes poetic,
religious and prophetic:

This faceless and bodiless monstrosity, this drum major Zarathustra with laughter’s
crown and roses upon his disfigured head, his ‘Become hard!’ and his dancer’s legs,
is not a character; he is rhetoric, wild verbiage and puns, a tormented voice and
dubious prophecy, a phantom of pitiable grandezza, often touching and usually
embarrassing, an abortion bordering on the verge of the ludicrous. (1959: 149)

His style, in Mann’s (1959: 151) view, is a process of gradual deterioration. It remains
‘musical’ but degenerates into ‘unhealthy sophisticated and feverishly gay super-
journalism, which in the end he adorned with the cap and bells of a comic jester’.
Nietzsche’s life was a combination of ‘inebriation and suffering’, in mythological
terms, the ‘union of Dionysus with the Crucified One’ (1959: 159). His attitude
becomes steadily more frenzied, a ‘maenadic rage against truth, morality, religion,
humanitarianism, against everything that might effect a reasonable taming of life’s
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 35

savagery’ (1959: 161). When Nietzsche predicts ‘monstrous wars and cataclysms’ or
begins his paean to the ‘blond beast’ of prey, we are filled with alarm ‘for the sanity of
the noble mind which is here raging so lustfully against itself ’ (1959: 165).
Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche’s own estimation of Zarathustra was somewhat different
to Mann’s. In Ecce Homo, he positively enthuses about it as a ‘work [that] stands
altogether apart. Leaving aside the poets: perhaps nothing has ever been done from
an equal excess of strength’ (EH 3Z6). His unbridled enthusiasm for Zarathustra is in
contrast to his attitude towards his first book The Birth of Tragedy which was a deeply
ambivalent one. He considered it ‘badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad
and image-confused, sentimental . . . a book for initiates’ but also revealing of ‘new
secret paths and dancing places’. Beneath the ‘dialectical ill-humour of the German’
and its ‘bad manners of a Wagnerian’, however, we can still find ‘a strange voice’ and ‘the
disciple of a still “unknown God”’ – Dionysus and the life-affirming activities of art as
antidotes to life’s cruelty (BT A3, 5).
The relative merits of Nietzsche’s different works in the eyes of his commentators
have given rise to a division in Nietzschean scholarship between those who make a
sharp distinction (or not) between his published and unpublished works – between
the ‘Lumpers’ and the ‘Splitters’.18 Splitters, like Schlechta, argue that no new central
thought is to be found in the Nachlass, only variations on established themes, and so
generally disregard The Will to Power. Heidegger, by contrast, is an ‘inverse splitter’
who prioritizes the unpublished over the published works. The Nachlass, he argues,
contains Nietzsche’s ‘main structure’, a master text to which all his published texts
stand as an entrance way: ‘His philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous,
unpublished work’ (1987: 1:9). The common approach among scholars, however,
tends to be that of the ‘moderate Lumper’, treating his different works ‘relationally’ as
forming a whole but giving priority to the published works and using the Nachlass as
secondary references.19 My own approach is one of a Strong Lumper, following Jaspers
in assigning no particular primacy to any of Nietzsche’s texts: ‘it must be realized that
none of Nietzsche’s forms of communication has a privileged character. . . . Nowhere is
Nietzsche’s work truly centralized: there is no magnum opus’ (1965: 5). While one could
question whether Lumpers do justice to the due stylistic care Nietzsche gave to his
published writings and provide an answer as to why the Nachlass were left unpublished,
the Nachlass do more than simply provide variations on pre-established themes but
expand and develop them in a more systematic and illustrative way. If anything,
Nietzsche’s stylistic excesses in the published works could be seen alternatively as a
form of ‘mask-wearing’ or writerly embellishment that can obscure or inflate his core
philosophical insights. In determining Nietzsche’s ontology and politics, I draw upon
two of his unpublished works (The Will to Power and Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the
Greeks) that expand upon themes (e.g. agonism and relationism), sketched out but not
fully drawn, in his published texts.
Similar controversies and differences in approach relate to Sartre’s oeuvre (putting
to one side the question of the isomorphism between his philosophy and literature).
Generally speaking, his unfinished works – Notebooks for an Ethics, The Critique of
Dialectical Reason, Vol. 2 and The Family Idiot, Vol. 4 – are not really questioned by
Sartrean scholars despite the fact they were incomplete, whereas Existentialism Is a
36 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Humanism (1945) and Hope Now (1996) have, for different reasons, courted some
scepticism among Sartre scholars. Existentialism Is a Humanism, a hastily delivered
lecture at the Club Maintenant in 1946 in response to the growing popularity of
existentialism as a rising cultural phenomenon, has become the locus classicus of
existentialism and, along with Being and Nothingness, is the text many associate most
readily with Sartre. While roughly consistent with Being and Nothingness, it has been
described as ‘imprecise, frequently vague and intentionally rhetorical’ (Eshleman
2020a: 13), a text ‘full of crudities, misstatements and wilful exaggerations for effect’
(Moran 2018: xiii). Significantly, it was the only one of Sartre’s texts that he personally
regretted publishing and a work with Kantian, Cartesian, idealist and universalist
overtones that obscured the ‘immanence of being’ in his early work and splintered
his existentialism away from the poststructuralist philosophy of Deleuze, Foucault,
Derrida and Lyotard. Hope Now is a series of interviews edited and published by Benny
Lévy in 1991 in which he and Sartre embark on ‘plural thinking’ in the domain of
ethics and politics. The Lévy interviews were renounced by the ‘old Sartreans’ (the
Temps Modernes group of Beauvoir, Lanzmann, Bost and Pouillon) who tried to
block their publication. Beauvoir regarded the interviews with horror, calling them
the ‘abduction of an old man’ by his young secretary and countered them with a
publication of her own interviews conducted in 1974, which she included in her last
book, Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre. Sartre responded in turn that the interviews were
a genuine reciprocal exchange of ideas that opened up new directions of thinking for
him, declaring: ‘[t]he itinerary of my thought eludes them all, including Simone de
Beauvoir.’
Scholars often divide Sartre’s work into two periods – the early ‘phenomenologist
Sartre’ (1936–45) and the later ‘Marxist’ Sartre (1949–80), but some add a third,
qualitatively different period of Sartre’s thinking after 1973 which becomes more
‘collaborative’, ‘anarchistic’ and ‘feminine’ as well as more attuned to the mystical elements
of his early writings.20 The early period, which comprises The Transcendence of the Ego,
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, The Imagination and Being and Nothingness, as well
as Nausea, is the phase of Sartre’s writing that has become popularized as denoting
his true existentialism, containing many of the major philosophical themes – the
imagination, bad faith, the look – for which he is well known. After the publication of
What Is Literature? in 1949, Sartre’s work turns towards Marxism as a form of dialectical
and philosophical critique. Some scholars see a break between the early work and the
later work (Warnock 1989), and by extension between the major philosophical works
Being and Nothingness and the Critique that correspond to them, insofar as Sartre is
seen to shift from individualist to collectivist categories and abandon his early theory
of absolute freedom. The third phase of Sartre’s thinking, in which he turns away from
Marxism and his conception of the ‘universal intellectual’ is often overlooked, deemed
not to be ‘proper Sartre’, but constitutes an important development in his philosophy,
clarifying and expanding some of the themes of his early work on the imagination,
as well as containing a rich repository of suggestions, such as that of ‘le matriciel’
(‘mother-matrix’), that foreshadow a posthumanist paradigm of thinking.
Although Sartre is well known for ‘thinking against himself ’ and ‘distancing myself
from what I was the day before’ (1984: 19), his philosophical trajectory is best read
 
Reading Nietzsche and Sartre 37

as a thesis of ‘enrichment within continuity’ (Perna 2007: 47) within an evolving

scheme of ‘diachronic development’ (Caws 1984: 2–3). This accords with Sartre’s own
thoughts just before his death that ‘despite everything I have always remained on a
continuous line’ (1980: 92). To understand him fully, he avers, ‘I think that a study of
my philosophical thought should follow its evolution’ (1981: 9), despite the fact that
many of his interpreters fail to do this. There is a ‘change’, as he himself identifies after
Being and Nothingness (1974: 31), but this is more a change of emphasis than it is of
direction or purpose. According to Sartre, his method became consciously dialectical
only after Being and Nothingness but, as several scholars have convincingly argued,21
and as I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, he was a dialectician from his
early years and the principles of his relational interpersonal ontology elucidated most
fully in his later work were set in place from the outset in his very earliest thinking.
38
 2

Heidegger, Derrida and the metaphysical charge

What the father kept silent, that comes in the son to be spoken and often I found the
son to be the father’s unveiled secret.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 2.7)

Both Nietzsche and Sartre recognized the fact that thoughts can operate ‘out of season’
when there is a diachronic time lag between life and epoch that operates prospectively
and retrospectively so that the philosopher can be both behind and ahead of their
contemporaries: ‘the author cannot be the contemporary of his contemporaries unless
he is, on the whole, behind them and ahead of them’ (IF 3:424).This chapter looks at
the denouement of the Nietzsche–Sartre story and the divisive influence of the French
poststructuralists who split them into enemy camps of the ‘New Nietzsche’ and the ‘old
Sartre’, construing their phenomenological and genealogical methods as antithetical
approaches. This ‘anxiety of influence’ (Redeker 2002) or ‘parricidal attack’ (Howells
1999) on Sartre undertaken by Derrida, Foucault, Lacan and Lyotard had the effect of
radically obscuring their multifarious philosophical connections and parallel thinking.
My analysis begins, however, with Heidegger who saw some strong similarities in
Nietzsche and Sartre but only by lumping them together as ‘grand metaphysicians’.

The ‘grand metaphysicians’: Heidegger’s verdict

Heidegger’s thought stands as a gateway to the humanism–anti-humanism–
posthumanism debate that dominates twentieth-century and contemporary
philosophy, geared, as it is, towards the emergence of ‘another beginning’ in his
attempt to go beyond Husserl and Nietzsche. His voluminous writings on Nietzsche
(over 1,200 pages published in four volumes from lectures given at the University
of Freiburg between 1936 and 1945) reveal a double relation. On the one hand, he
positions Nietzsche as a significant moment in Western philosophy who made
important contributions to traditional questions and brought the idea of ‘being’ into
critical focus, and yet, on the other, he turns against Nietzsche, accusing him of the
very errors (nihilism and metaphysical thinking) that Nietzsche himself had levelled
against the Platonic and Cartesian tradition. In Heidegger’s (1987: 1:204–5) estimation,
Nietzsche is a Cartesian who ‘performs the grandest and most profound gathering –
40 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

that is, the accomplishment – of all the essential fundamental positions since Plato
in the light of Platonism’, and his thought represents the ‘consummation’ and not the
‘farewell’ of metaphysical humanism. In his debunking of Plato’s world of insensible
forms, Nietzsche simply inverts and subordinates Platonic terms in favour of their
opposite – being (becoming), stability, identity and number (fluidity and singularity),
order or law (chance, contingency), objective truth as correspondence (perspective),
transcendence (immanence), reason (instinct, drives), spirit or soul (body). This is
evident in his theory of art, for instance. When Nietzsche states ‘art is worth more than
truth’, he means that ‘the sensuous stands in a higher place than the supersensuous’
(1987: 1:74) in direct opposition to Plato.
For Heidegger (1977: 48), Nietzsche’s metaphysics of subjectivity repeats the
Cartesian subject as ‘a ground lying at the foundation’ by interpreting Being as will
to power. This implies willing subjects who are ‘centres of force’ that strive to preserve
and enhance themselves as they dominate the earth which is seen as a resource for
development, something to be measured and directed. The theoretical consciousness
attains its full power in the Cartesian ego cogito, grasping the world as a picture or
model standing apart and against the perceiving subject. This reaches its culmination
in Nietzsche’s Übermensch which is conceived as will to power conscious of itself, with
the distinction between it and the human as being one of cognition or awareness. With
this consciousness of self all that is not self becomes an object over which dominion
and control are to be exercised, a metaphysical configuration that posits the earth as
other as an object of instrumental manipulation. Zarathustra is ‘the being who appears
within metaphysics at its stage of completion’, and Nietzsche’s exaltation of being is an
obliteration of being in the metaphysical manner: ‘this supposed overcoming is above
all the consummation of nihilism. For now, metaphysics not only does not think Being
itself, but this non-thinking of Being clothes itself in the illusion that it does think
Being in the most exalted manner’ (1977: 104). Nietzsche’s metaphysics thus fits into
the traditional formula of essentia (essence or possibility – will to power) and existentia
(actuality – eternal return). It tries to think Being but succeeds only in naming it as a
particular being.
For Heidegger (1977: 75), ‘metaphysical humanism’ is a way of looking at the world
that makes the human subject the ground of its objectivity, starting with Plato’s claim
that the Good is the highest truth, thus identifying the world’s essence in line with
human moral values. This leads to nihilism since the world is said to exist only as far as
it reflects human designs and values and also because if the world is nothing in itself,
humans lose their sense of ‘ontological security’. Nietzsche’s ‘value-thinking’ falls into
this metaphysical trap: ‘values are the conditions of itself posited by the will to power.’
This leads to the degradation of Being as it is posited as a ‘mere’ value, even if the
highest value, giving rise ultimately to nihilism as values, can be chosen or unchosen by
a subject who constitutes the ground for value: ‘precisely through the characterization
of something as “a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth . . . what is valued
is admitted only as an object for man’s estimation’ (1993: 251). The natural world
is presented to the subject as an instrumental field for its own preservation and
enhancement that denies the intrinsic value of that world which becomes a ‘constant
reserve’ or resource for the ‘enframing’ of technology:
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 41

The uprising of man into subjectivity transforms that which is into an object . . .
The doing away of that which is in itself, i.e. the killing of God, is accomplished in
the making secure of the constant reserve by means of which man makes secure
for himself material, bodily, psychic, and spiritual resources, and this for the sake
of his own security, which wills dominion over whatever is – as the potentially
objective – in order to correspond to the Being of whatever is, to the will to power.
(1977: 107)

Heidegger undertakes the hermeneutical task of understanding the text not just as
well but even better than its author. He limits his interpretation of Nietzsche to one
single principle: ‘Every thinker thinks only a single thought’ (1987: 1:475). The will
to power that emerges once we think the apparently irreconcilable thought of the
will to power together with the eternal recurrence of the same in such a way that ‘in
terms of metaphysics, in its modern phase and in the history of its end, both thoughts
think the selfsame’ (1987: 3:161). Fused together, they become a ‘sole thought’ (1987:
3:10) that fulfils ‘the essence of modernity’ and ‘the metaphysics that is approaching
consummation’ (1987: 3:163). For Heidegger, however, this central thought isn’t really
present in Nietzsche’s works or in an afterthought but could be realized only through a
proper hermeneutical understanding.1
Although he claimed to go beyond him, Heidegger’s attitude to Nietzsche was
generally one of respect and fascination, evidenced by how long he spent writing about
him. This was not the case with Sartre, however, whom Heidegger had little time for.
Reportedly, nearly all the pages of Heidegger’s copy of Being and Nothingness were left
uncut, and even in his Letter on Humanism, there are only three actual citations from
Sartre, all from Existentialism Is a Humanism.2 That said, in philosophical terms, he
saw Nietzsche and Sartre as following a similar path. Heidegger’s critical reading of
Nietzsche fed into a wider rejection of existentialism and what he saw as its central
tenets (value-thinking, subjectivity, the will and the metaphysics of essence/existence).
Heidegger criticizes Sartre’s existentialism alongside Nietzsche’s philosophy on these
same points. The ‘Humanism Debate’ was precipitated by Jean Beaufret in 1946 when,
with the intention of re-establishing a French-German dialogue after the war, he invited
Heidegger to comment on Sartre’s citing of him as a fellow existentialist. In Letter on
Humanism, Heidegger wrote approvingly of Marx for realizing the historical nature
of Being but accused Sartre of blatantly failing to come to this realization. Sartre’s
‘existence precedes essence’ simply reverses Platonism and therefore, Heidegger (1993:
243) argued, is more of a metaphysics than a fundamental ontology.
Sartre’s attitude towards Heidegger is harder to gauge than Heidegger’s one of
perfunctory dismissal towards the French philosopher. When Sartre’s essay ‘Legend
of Truth’ was published along with a French translation of Heidegger’s ‘What Is
Metaphysics?’ in the review Bifur, Beauvoir (1983: 92) reports that they failed to see the
interest in it and hardly understood a word of it. After reading the same text again along
with Being and Time, Sartre acknowledged an influence on his own thinking in his War
Diaries, declaring that Heidegger ‘supervened to teach me authenticity and historicity
just at the very moment when war was about to make these notions indispensable to
me’ (WD 182). Scholars are divided on the extent of Heidegger’s influence on Sartre’s
42 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Being and Nothingness,3 but in this text Sartre is both complimentary and critical of
Heidegger’s theory of the Other (praising his presupposition of the Other through his
notion of ‘thrownness’ but charging him with failing to provide a phenomenological
proof of the Other). He also accuses Heidegger of a sleight of hand (BN 683) in
configuring death as always being one of my possibilities, which Sartre interprets
as a form of life-denying Nietzschean resentment. For Sartre, death ‘is an essential
structure of the fundamental relation that we have called “being-for-the-Other”’, a fact
of my facticity that escapes me, and not my innermost possibility (BN 704).
Just as Heidegger’s identification of Nietzsche as the ‘consummate metaphysician’
can be viewed as inapposite, so too his portrayal of Sartre. Although some follow
Heidegger in classifying him as ‘the best-known metaphysician in Europe’ (Murdoch
1999: 1) or ‘among the metaphysicians in whom the metaphysical tradition culminates’
(Trottignon 1966: 27), others argue that Sartre ‘is in no way a metaphysician’ for he
rejects any principle ‘with a metaphysical foundation’ (Perrin 2020: 264). Sartre didn’t
consider himself to be ‘interested in metaphysics’ (1990: 144). In his early writings, he
rarely mentions metaphysics and when he does so, it is in derogatory terms, seeing it
to contain ‘abstract thoughts and empty intentions’ (1995a: 147). In The Transcendence
of the Ego, he ‘shuns metaphysics at one fell swoop’, especially ‘the metaphysical
hypothesis . . . according to which my Ego would not construct itself of elements
having existed in reality’ (TE 59). Alongside his critique of metaphysical idealism, he
also emphasizes ‘the absurdity that is metaphysical materialism’ (TE 28). He talks of
‘wiping one’s hands of all metaphysical postulates’ and abandoning ‘the metaphysical
theory of the image’ (I 109) that makes the image a copy of the material thing as posited
in ‘the great metaphysical systems’ of Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume
(I 7). Although Sartre’s interest in ontology was accompanied by a growing disdain for
metaphysics, his antipathy was relaxed in part in Being and Nothingness. In July 1940,
he wrote, ‘I have begun a treatise on metaphysics: Being and Nothingness and I will
get back to it tomorrow’ (WD 285). In this work he attempts ‘a metaphysical theory
of being in general’ (BN 480). Metaphysical speculation, Sartre avers, is ineluctable
and connected to the question of ontology – the ‘why’ and the ‘how’: ‘the relation of
metaphysics to ontology is like that of history to sociology’ (BN 801). This raises the
metaphysical quandary, ‘[w]hy is it that there is being?’ (BN 801), but this is a question
Sartre generally avoids as idle metaphysical speculation, preferring to ask ‘how’ but
not ‘why’.4
In several respects, Sartre’s relation to metaphysics is similar to Nietzsche’s,
in general working to overcome it, but in part, repeating it. Nietzsche maintains a
‘double relation’ to modernity and any metaphysical grand narrative, undermining
it while knowing that he cannot fully reject it. He suggests this himself when he
concludes in The Gay Science that he should be counted among the ‘metaphysicians’
he attacks: ‘Even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians
still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old,
that Christian which was also the faith of Plato, that God is truth, and that truth is
divine’ (GS 344). As Derrida argues, there is thus in a sense something inescapable
about the integration of the dialectic. Every attempt to state a truth is to invoke
reason which Foucault found out in his attempt to state the truth of madness where
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 43

he subjected madness to the power of reason: ‘Hegel, who is always right as soon as
one opens one’s mouth in order to articulate meaning’ (1978: 263). In deconstructing
metaphysical humanism, ‘one risks ceaselessly confirming, consolidating, relieving
at an always more certain depth that which one allegedly deconstructs’ (1982: 135).
In understanding the ‘metaphysics’ of Nietzsche and Sartre, one should not conflate
the general (a philosophical inquiry that uncovers the basic nature of reality) and the
pejorative sense (metaphysics as ‘being’ and ‘dualism’) of the metaphysical speculation
that they distinguish.5 It would have helped in this respect, as Mitchell (2020: 110)
remarks, if Heidegger had clarified exactly how Sartre reinforces metaphysics and
what it would mean to use the terms ‘existence’ and ‘essence’ non-metaphysically. The
irony of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche is that he relies heavily on Nietzsche’s
account of nihilism in metaphysical thinking but is guilty of the same charge of failing
to overcome the nihilism in his own philosophy that he falsely accuses Nietzsche and
Sartre of in his own ‘metahistory of philosophy’.6 Nietzsche is not just a precursor to
Heidegger in this way but beyond him in several respects. Heidegger’s own approach,
for instance, pays very little attention to concrete political practices, approaching
nihilism idealistically through the inner contradictions of metaphysics rather than the
concrete political practices out of which it emerges as Nietzsche and Sartre do in their
genealogical/historical investigation. For Derrida (1978: 281), although ‘Nietzsche . . .
worked within the inherited concepts of metaphysics’, he continually stretched their
very limits, ‘re-animalizing’ philosophy in a way that supervenes Heidegger’s own
philosophy:

[E]very particular borrowing brings along with it the whole of metaphysics. This
is what allows these destroyers to destroy each other reciprocally – for example,
Heidegger regarding Nietzsche, with as much lucidity and rigor as bad faith and
misconstruction, as the last metaphysician, the last ‘Platonist’. One could do the
same for Heidegger himself. (1978: 281–2)

Saints and sinners in Nietzsche’s France

What charity and delicate precision those Frenchmen possess!
(Nietzsche, The Wanderer and his Shadow 214)

France was always of special importance to Nietzsche. He described it as ‘a halfway

successful synthesis of the north and south’ (BGE 194) and declared its ‘cultural
superiority over Europe’ (BGE 193). He felt more affinity with the French culture and
language than with his own Teutonic tongue and regretted having to write in German
rather than in a more fluid, playful and musical language like French (BGE 246). In
philosophical terms, he preferred the companionship of Voltaire, La Rochefoucauld
and Montaigne (whose books ‘contain more real ideas than all the books of German
philosophers put together’ (WS 214)) to that of Leibniz, Kant and Hegel (though he
was, of course, heavily inspired by Schopenhauer in his early writings).
44 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

It is perhaps fitting then that, having been dragged through the mud of Nazism
in Germany in the early part of the twentieth century, the Nietzschean corpus was
rejuvenated in Paris following the Second World War. Philosophically speaking, for
the French poststructuralists, this meant confronting Heidegger’s interpretation of
Nietzsche and showing what Nietzsche’s thought truly heralded. For Foucault, there
are two main aspects of his thought that come to the fore. Firstly, ‘Nietzsche the
philologist’ (1973: 305) who connects philosophy with a reflection upon language and
secondly, the Nietzsche who awakens us from our ‘anthropological sleep’ and attempts
‘the dissolution of man’:

Nietzsche rediscovered the point at which man and God belong to one another,
at which the death of the second is synonymous with the disappearance of the
first, and at which the promise of the superman signifies first and foremost the
imminence of the death of man. (1973: 342)

The doctrine of the Übermensch signals Nietzsche’s overcoming of nihilism and the
passage beyond humanity. The ‘Last Man’ in Zarathustra is literally the last of man and
the Übermensch breaks from metaphysical humanism. Rather than the death of God,
‘Nietzsche’s thought heralds the death of his murderer . . . the absolute dispersion of
man’ (1973: 385), signifying ‘the threshold beyond which contemporary philosophy
can begin thinking again’ (1965: 353). In his essay of 1971 ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History’, Foucault outlines Nietzsche’s view of history as genealogical history based
on the contingency of events, the episodes of history, the games of chance outside
any preconceived finality (1977: 76) and utilizing the concepts of ‘emergence’, ‘origin’,
‘descent’ and ‘birth’ in delineating the origins of morality, asceticism, punishment
and sexuality (1977: 77–8). Nietzschean genealogical history demonstrates there is
no secret atemporal essence lying behind things but reveals ‘the accidents, the minute
deviations – or conversely, the complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and
the faulty calculations which gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have
value for us’ (1977: 81). This is contrasted with teleological or metaphysical history
that views events from the perspective of the endpoint within a scheme of anticipated
meaning. All in all, ‘[i]t was Nietzsche’, Foucault states, ‘who burned for us, even
before we were born, the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology’
(1973: 263).
In Nietzsche et la métaphore, Kofman reiterates Deleuze’s (1983: 220) comment
that ‘Heidegger gives an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy closer to his own
thought than to Nietzsche’s’. For Kofman (1987: 54), the influence of Heraclitus
in Nietzsche shows that it is not easy to reduce Nietzsche to a metaphysician: ‘It is
precisely in order to carry out this operation and to shake off the ghost which
haunts him that I suspect Heidegger did not always use an honest, straightforward,
and rigorous philological approach in his reading of Nietzsche.’ Kofman’s criticisms
also echo those made by Eugen Fink, Heidegger’s pupil at Freiburg, who argued
that, by reducing all of Nietzsche’s thought to metaphysical thinking and the ‘single
thought’ of eternal recurrence, Heidegger neglects the element of play that grounds
Nietzsche’s philosophy, passing over the fact that ‘Heraclitus remains the originary
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 45

root of Nietzsche’s philosophy’ (1960: 13). For Fink (1960: 41), in Heraclitean play
‘Nietzsche finds his deepest intuition of the reality of the world as grandiose cosmic
metaphor’. Rather than the culmination of metaphysics, Nietzsche’s thinking operates
at the boundary of metaphysics, sometimes imprisoned within, and sometimes
liberating itself from, metaphysics. Positing becoming and appearance as alternatives
to Being and Truth keeps Nietzsche within the metaphysical paradigm, in Fink’s (1960:
188) view, but when his thinking highlights on the cosmic play of forces ‘beyond all
valuation, precisely because all values emerge within this play’, his philosophy is no
longer metaphysical: ‘where Nietzsche grasps being and becoming as Spiel, he no
longer stands in the confinement of metaphysics.’
As we will see in Chapter 4 when we scrutinize the area of ontology, Nietzsche
finds in Heraclitus a kindred spirit in whose company he feels ‘altogether warmer and
better than anywhere else’ (EH 3BT3). Heraclitus’ tragic wisdom supports a Dionysian
philosophy which affirms ‘passing-away and annihilating . . . the yea-saying to contrariety
and struggle, becoming, with a radical repudiation of the very concept “Being”’ (EH
3BT3). In particular, Nietzsche adopts Heraclitus’ ‘aesthetic fundamental-perception
as to the play of the world’ (PTAG 7), allowing him to escape the ‘metaphysical matrix’
of oppositional thinking by refusing ‘every conception of affirmation which would find
its foundation in Being, and its determination in the being of man’ (Deleuze 1983:
220). For Nietzsche, play is the highest form of human activity directed towards the
overcoming of nihilism through the creative transvaluation of values. The eternal
return is the existential and playful challenge to raise ‘the stakes of the game’ to the
limit that is ‘eternity’ (KGW 5.2. 11). Indeed, thought itself is, for Nietzsche, a form
of play: ‘The playful pondering of materials is our continuous fundamental activity. . . .
This spontaneous play of phantasizing force is our fundamental intellectual life’ (KGW
5.1.10).
In Derrida’s (1998: 19) view, Heidegger is mistaken to say that Nietzsche’s thought
remains trapped within metaphysics by inverting Platonism since Nietzsche goes
further and displaces the ingrained oppositions of that tradition. In his own work,
Derrida expands the Nietzschean critique of binary thinking, the metaphysical
‘faith in antithetical values’ (BGE 2). This means refusing to privilege hierarchical
relations between conceptual oppositions: ‘Nietzsche, far from remaining simply (with
Hegel and as Heidegger wished) within metaphysics, contributed a great deal to the
liberation of the signifier from its dependence or derivation with respect to the logos
and the related concept of truth or the primary signified.’ As developed by Derrida,
Nietzschean deconstruction involves a biphasic movement, a ‘double writing’ that
dismantles these oppositions. In overturning a metaphysical hierarchy, one must avoid
reappropriating the hierarchical structure and remain within the closed field of binary
oppositions. In the first phase, one overturns the privileged relation between the two
values, then, in phase two, displaces the opposition altogether by showing it to result
from a prior value imposition that itself requires critique. In denying the possibility
of an unmediated, non-interpretative apprehension of reality, Nietzsche displaces the
opposition of truth/falsity altogether. The key question is not whether a perspective is
true or false but whether it enhances life or not. Similarly, Nietzsche goes beyond the
binarism of good/evil in moral thinking through his transvaluation of values, a new
46 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

mode of ethical thinking of playful experimentation and ‘new interpretive possibilities’

that Derrida calls ‘active interpretation’ (1998: 157–64).7 Derrida celebrates Nietzsche’s
turn towards infinite interpretation, the plurality of style and the affirmation of
the world as play. He views Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche as an extreme kind of
unifying, truth-oriented and schematizing hermeneutics that, because of Heidegger’s
own attachments to metaphysics, misconstrues the multiple subtleties and play of
styles within his texts: ‘there is no such thing as the truth of Nietzsche, or of Nietzsche’s
text’, they are only ‘multiple, variegated, contradictory even’ (1979: 103).8

Divisive Derrida
The same restraints that held Nietzsche’s thought on the boundaries of metaphysical
humanism, as well as the ‘lines of escape’ that went beyond it, were also evident in
equal part in Sartre’s existentialism but this was not acknowledged in anything
like the same measure by the poststructuralists (with the exception of Deleuze and
Guattari). Foucault’s (2001: 54) cutting remark that Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were
nineteenth-century philosophers trying to think the twentieth started a rally of words9
and, by the late 1960s, swords were drawn between Sartre and the poststructuralists.10
In the Heidegger–Sartre debate, the French poststructuralists followed the German
philosopher in conjoining existentialism and humanism, and this view prevailed in
French academic circles in the 1960s. Derrida in particular was critical of Sartre in his
1968 talk ‘The Ends of Man’, picking up on the fact that Sartre used Henry Corbin’s
translation of Dasein, from Being and Time, as ‘human-reality’. Describing this as a
‘monstrous translation’ (1982: 115), he seized upon Sartre’s anthropocentric bias that
he identified as a theoretical commitment to an isolatable domain of the human: ‘To
the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality, phenomenological ontology
is a philosophical anthropology’ (1982: 115–16). In Glas, Derrida mocked Sartre as
the ‘onto-phenomenologist of freedom’ (1986: 28), always in search of an original
project to explain the entirety of an individual’s life, while in ‘The Ends of Man’ he
labelled as ‘daring’ and ‘risky’ Sartre’s critique of Bataille for displaying a shaky grasp of
German philosophical terms and an inadequate understanding of Hegel, Husserl and
Heidegger (1982: 111–19). Later, he accused Sartre of also misunderstanding (or just
ignoring) the important intellectual developments of his time, such as psychoanalysis,
structuralism and the literature of Bataille and Blanchot. In an interview in Le Nouvel
Observateur in 1983, while showing affection and praising Sartre for guiding him
towards authors such as Bataille, Blanchot and Ponge, he describes his influence in
excoriating terms as ‘nefarious and catastrophic’ and judges his renown as reflecting
badly on French society:

What must a society like ours be if a man who, in his way, rejected or got wrong so
many of the theoretical or literary events of his time – let us mention for the sake of
speed psychoanalysis, Marxism, structuralism, Joyce, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot –
who multiplied and broadcast unbelievable nonsense on Heidegger, sometimes
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 47

on Husserl, if such a man could come to dominate the cultural scene to a point of
becoming a great popular figure? (1999: 131)

Following the lead of Howells, several scholars have noted the ‘simplifying parricidal
generational conflicts’ in Derrida’s reading of Sartre that largely takes the form of
a ‘philosophical psychodrama’ (Davis and Davis 2019: 4) and ignores the many
‘hereditary’ Sartrean influences in his own thinking.11 Derrida belonged to a
generation which often seemed scornful of its existentialist forbears, of whom Sartre
was the most prominent representative. His early references to Sartre tend therefore to
be ‘critical, dismissive, or just plain wrong’ (2019: 3). As Howells (1992: 349) observes,
Derrida’s La Voix et le phénomène ‘repeated in part, and probably unwittingly, Sartre’s
own deconstruction of the Husserlian subject’. Twenty years later, Derrida still seems
unwilling to acknowledge that Sartre ‘is not merely a forerunner but a real originator
of much of what Deconstruction has to say on the subject’. This manifests a ‘Bloomian
anxiety of influence’ in which Derrida attributes to Sartre positions diametrically
opposed to those he in fact holds. Having falsified Sartre’s views, Derrida himself
‘appears to be repeating the broad lines of an analysis he is unwilling to recognize as
constituting a precursor text’ (Davis and Davis 2019: 28). His reticence to recognize
Sartre’s importance can be viewed as a form of parricide, asserting his autonomy by
denying the father his due, killing him and claiming as his own what in fact was his
father’s. In Derrida’s own words, ‘the disciple must break the glass, or better the mirror,
the reflection, his infinite speculation on the master. And start to speak’ (1978: 32). It
is only when Sartre is actually dead that Derrida can properly overcome his parricidal
anxiety. By 1996, we finally see a change in attitude in Derrida when he acknowledges
the positive influence of Sartre and gives a generous-spirited tribute to his existentialist
forebear.

In the name of the father

Having deposed the subject with murderous haste in the 1960s, the French
philosophers later suspended the radical finality of the ‘death of man’ and the ‘ends of
man’ that they had celebrated twenty years earlier, retracting their animosity to Sartre
and recognizing their myopia in consigning him to an uncomplicated humanism
and a reductive Cartesian reading. In a version of ‘loser wins’ (qui perd gagne), one
might ask whether the retrieval of ‘existential pathos’ (Derrida) and ‘care for the self ’
(Foucault) in their later work signify a return to Sartrean concerns and a victory for
the vanquished existentialist. Despite his previous criticisms of Sartre in the 1960s
and 1970s, in the lead article for the commemorative fiftieth-anniversary issue of
Les Temps Modernes, Derrida expresses ‘boundless gratitude’ and acknowledges the
‘immense debt’ he and others owe to Sartre. He confesses that in previous years he
‘wouldn’t have dared’ admit his affection for Sartre and Les Temps Modernes but that
he is now moved to ‘do justice’ to them and recognize the value of Sartre’s philosophical
oeuvre (1996: 44, 40). He also confesses to an amnesia for forgetting that Sartre had
put into question the rhetoric of ‘fraternity’ (1996: 12) and now claims to be the heir
48 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

of ‘Sartre’s opposition to himself and his antinomies’. It is Sartre’s self-contradiction

that most touches him, Derrida confesses, and his ‘disaccord’ or disagreement with self
that he most admires (1996: 23, 32). Furthermore, he acknowledges ‘Sartre’s refusal of
antinomies’ that prefigured his own deconstruction of oppositional thinking (1996:
14). In other interviews, Derrida (2001: 40) states that, although he distanced himself
from a certain existential interpretation of Husserl, his ‘intention was certainly not to
draw away from the concern for existence itself, for concrete personal commitment,
or from the existential pathos that, in a sense, I have never lost’. His later writings,
as Reynolds (2006: 167) notes, amount to a ‘quasi-existentialism’ based on a Sartrean
notion of undecidability, responsibility and decision-making which Derrida describes
as an ‘existential pathos’ (2001: 40) that maintains a perpetual openness to the future
and to what might come.
Derrida’s tribute to Sartre and Les Temps Modernes in 1996 came as somewhat a
surprise. By reconciling himself to Sartre’s ghost, was he finally reconciling himself to
his youth when Sartre was one of his main influences? As Baugh (1999: 66) asks, by
hunting Sartre, was Derrida actually ‘pursuing his double’? Derrida, who has written
so much of the ghost that returns to haunt (the revenant), appears haunted by the
philosopher who wrote of a human-reality haunted by the totality it aims for and
cannot attain. Is he playing the philosopher who, in his own words, ‘himself pursues
relentlessly someone who almost resembles him to the point where we could mistake
one for the other, a brother, a double, thus a diabolical image’ (1994: 134)? Rather
than being radically at odds with Sartre’s philosophy, Derrida’s philosophy of différance
brings out the radical nature of the conclusions that can be drawn from it – ‘despite
Derrida’s explicit repudiation of Sartre, the similarities with Sartre are striking’ (Baugh
1999: 69). This, as we will see, applies not only to Sartre’s theory of subjectivity and
freedom but also extends to his philosophical theorizing in the areas of ontology, ethics
and politics.
Compared to his poststructuralist colleagues, Deleuze had always been more
reverent towards his existentialist predecessor and complimented his philosophy of
‘immanence and becoming’ in Being and Nothingness where others had seen only the
influence of Descartes and Husserl: ‘[phenomenology and existentialism] were already
history by the time we got to them: too much method, imitation, commentary and
interpretation, except for the way Sartre did it’ (1987: 12). Distinguishing Sartre’s
philosophical method from that of other phenomenologists, Deleuze praised Sartre
for being ‘the first to have considered the Other as a real structure’ (2004: 373).12 In an
article devoted to Sartre entitled ‘Il a été mon maître’ published in a special 1964 issue
of the periodical Arts, Deleuze (1964: 8–9) expresses his admiration for ‘the private
thinker [who] introduced new themes, a new style, a new polemic and a new way of
raising problems as well as a hatred for all modes of “representation”’. He reiterates
this in a series of interviews with Claire Parnet published in 1977, where he speaks
enthusiastically of his respect for Sartre, explaining that ‘Sartre allows us to await some
vague future moment, a return, when thought will form again and make its totalities
anew, like a power that is at once collective and private’. ‘This is why’, he adds, ‘Sartre
remains my teacher’ (1987: 79) since he opened up new avenues for those like himself
who came after:
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 49

Fortunately there was Sartre. Sartre was our Outside, he was really the breath of
fresh air from the backyard. . . . And Sartre has never stopped being that, not a
model, a method or an example, but a little fresh air – a gust of air even when
he had just been to the Café Flore – an intellectual who singularly changed the
situation of the intellectual. (1987: 12)

Guattari also acknowledged a huge debt to Sartre, taking inspiration from his existential/
ontological insights in Being and Nothingness as well as from his dialectical innovations
in the Critique. Modelling his own distinction between subject group and subjugated
group on Sartre’s contrast between the serial group and the fusing group, Sartre showed
the way, in Guattari’s view, for diagnosing the ‘degraded forms of subjectivity’ (2000)
that were endemic in Capitalist and Communist societies, and also sketched the
direction for an affirmative countermovement or ‘ethics of authenticity’ to go beyond
them. He also commended Sartre’s prescience and his relevance for philosophy of
today, thinking of him ‘as a verb that should be conjugated in the present tense’.13
Even Foucault’s mood had cooled when the general feeling towards Sartre changed
from enmity to eulogy after the late 1960s. He paid homage to the ‘immense work’
of Sartre’s and applauded him especially for his critique of ‘the idea of the self as
something which is given to us’ (1983: 64) and for his idea of non-self coincidence or
what Sartre called the ability ‘to live without an ego’ (NE 414):

I think the immense work and political action of Sartre defines an era. . . . I would
never accept a comparison – even for the sake of a contrast – of the minor work of
historical and methodological spade work that I do with a body of work like his.
(La Quinzaine Littéraire, 1968: 20)

In an interview in the 1970s, Foucault suggests that he and Sartre are philosophical
brothers and sons of Nietzsche when he expresses enthusiasm for the fact that Sartre’s
first paper written as a student was on Nietzsche:

Did you know that Sartre’s first text – written when he was a young student – was
Nietzschean? ‘The History of Truth’, a little paper first published in a Lycée review
around 1925. He began with the same problem and it is very odd that his approach
should have shifted from the history of truth to phenomenology while for the next
generation – ours – the reverse was true. (in Raulet 1983: 204)

As was the case with Derrida, Foucault turned towards Sartrean vistas in his later
phase, relaxing his previous ‘anxiety of influence’ towards him. Reinvigorating his
own form of ‘camouflaged existentialism’ (Flynn 2004: 49), he performed a remarkable
inversion by returning to themes he had previously denounced in Sartre guided this
time by Sartre’s own innovations.

Phenomenology and perspectivism

My eyes, however strong or weak they may be, can only see a certain distance, and it
is within the space encompassed by this distance that I live and move, the line of this
50 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

horizon constitutes my immediate fate, in great things and small, from which I can-
not escape. Around every being there is described a similar concentric circle, which
has a mid-point and is peculiar to him.
(Nietzsche, Daybreak 117)

Foucault viewed the embrace of Nietzsche by poststructuralists in France in the 1960s

as a movement away from Husserlian and Sartrean phenomenology: ‘everything began
from a dissatisfaction with the phenomenological theory of the subject and involved
different escapades, subterfuges, breakthroughs . . . in the direction of linguistics,
psychoanalysis or Nietzsche’ (Raulet 1983: 199). It was a matter ‘of calling this theme
of the subject into question once again, that great fundamental postulate which French
philosophy, from Descartes until our own time, had never abandoned’ (1991: 56).
Against Foucault’s view expressed here of a disjunctive relation between Nietzschean
perspectivism and phenomenology, many scholars view them to be mutually
compatible and characterize Nietzsche as a proto or quasi phenomenologist,14 finding
an affinity between the phenomenologists’ attack on the subject/object dichotomy
and the radical reflection on language that Nietzsche articulated in the 1880s. Even
Foucault’s early works on madness show the connection between his preoccupation
with the experience of madness and the phenomenologists’ preoccupation with getting
back to ‘the thing itself ’. Foucault, it should be remembered, was influenced by the
existential psychoanalysis of Ludwig Binswanger (he wrote the introduction for the
French translation of the essay ‘Dream and Existence’ and was in turn an influence
on R. D. Laing who also took Sartre as an inspiration). Although, in The Archaeology
of Knowledge, Foucault attacks History of Madness for having accorded ‘far too great
a place, and a very enigmatic one too, to what I call an “experience”’ (1972: 16), the
‘adventure of the gaze’ looms large throughout his work from beginning to end.
Sartre’s dense, colourful and affective phenomenology (as Deleuze recognized)
was not a relapse into Husserlian idealism but a concerted effort to ‘get back to things
themselves’ in a realist ‘dialectical’ account where things always evade and overflow
our perception of them in a surplus dance of qualities:

In the world of perception, no ‘thing’ can appear without maintaining an infinity

of relations to other things. Better, it is this infinity of relations – as well as the
infinity of relations that its elements support – it is this infinity of relations that
constitutes the very essence of a thing. Hence a kind of overflowing in the world
of ‘things’: there is, at every moment, always infinitely more than we can see; to
exhaust the richness of my current perception would take an infinite time. (I 9)

When Sartre states the study of human-reality must begin with the cogito, we must
be careful not to equate this with the Cartesian cogito,15 for what he means to get
across is the indispensability of lived experience and the importance of embodied
consciousness and perspective. In his phenomenology of immanence and becoming,
there is no detached or objective or spectatorial truth that doesn’t involve the viewpoint
of the agent: ‘The point of view of pure knowledge is contradictory: the only point of
view is that of committed knowledge’ (BN 415). Building on Nietzsche’s critique of ‘the
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 51

backworlds illusion’ (BN 2) promulgated by Plato, Descartes and Kant, he takes the
‘monism of the phenomenon’ (BN 1) as the guiding methodological and substantive
principle of his phenomenology. In his later ‘progressive-regressive’ method in the
Critique, his task is to draw philosophical significance from concrete descriptions of
experience whereby lived experience is shown to bear and to be borne by social and
historical structures and personal-intentional singularities. ‘What do we see?’ (CDR
2:23) is the essential starting pointing to his philosophical investigation. Even in his
1965 manuscript ‘Morale et histoire’, his method is still strongly descriptive: ‘Before
reducing ethical structures – or affirming their irreducibility – we must describe them
and fix them with their specific characteristics . . . Our first task is phenomenological.’16
Sharing Sartre’s emphasis on embodied experience, Nietzsche’s philosophical
method can also be described as ‘simply descriptive, quasi-phenomenological’ (Haar
1988: 25). Although some scholars perceive a clash between Nietzsche’s externalist
‘scientific’ method and the phenomenological first-person approach,17 it is wrong to
say that Nietzsche abandons the personal viewpoint and adopts the impersonal as a
methodology. As Richardson (2009: 315, 318) notes, Nietzsche’s interest in psychology
looks for reasons not just descriptions: ‘to do psychology . . . one requires first-personal
acquaintance with those wills oneself.’ Furthermore, ‘the new psychology’ that
Nietzsche calls for ‘involves a kind of “subjectivity” at odds with the “objectivity” called
for by science so far’. Nietzsche’s proclivity to emphasize the first-person perspective
is evident in the central importance he ascribes to affect. For Nietzsche, affects are
conscious symptoms of the valuations of drives related to the success or otherwise of
achieving their aims. This ‘evolution-driven phenomenology’ (Richardson 2020: 237)
is a reflection of the organism. Our experience of objects as valuable is the product of
projecting qualities and such affects onto the objects of those experiences. ‘Whatever
has value in the present world’, Nietzsche states, ‘has it not in itself, according to its
nature – nature is always given value-less, but has been given, granted value, and we
were the granters and givers’ (GS 301).
In Safranski’s (2003: 208) view, Nietzschean perspectivism is fully a
phenomenological inquiry. Like Sartre in Being and Nothingness, Nietzsche had
no intention of reviving artificial solipsistic doubts about the reality of the external
world. Instead, he regarded the inner world as an internalized outer world that is
only revealed to us as a phenomenon. Consciousness itself, however, is always in an
intentional arc with the world, neither inside nor outside, but somewhere in-between,
always alongside of what it is conscious of. Nietzsche hoped to heighten our awareness
and attention, guided by the insight ‘that all of our so-called consciousness is a more
or less fanciful commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt, text’. Our
intentions and drives are thus a form of directedness towards the world. An object is
never registered in neutral terms but is grasped with an emotional valency in terms of
our moods: ‘Nietzsche was a master of shading the particular tinge, color, and mood
of experience, and since he used his own suffering as a springboard to construct his
philosophy, we find in his writings exquisite depictions of experiencing the world
while racked with pain. Phenomenologically speaking, these are model analyses of an
intentional design of the world’ (2003: 209).18 As Safranski (2003: 218–19) comments,
Nietzsche’s ‘phenomenological attentiveness’ to the world of consciousness requires an
52 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

attitude that clashes with the complexities and demands of everyday life and in which
we are sufficiently composed ‘to let the world work its magic’.
From this, it is clear that Nietzschean perspectivism invites a comparison with
Sartre, for whom Nietzsche paved the way with his analyses of consciousness,
prefiguring the intentional structure of consciousness and the concept of ‘outer-
directedness’ that Sartre and other phenomenologists developed further. His emphasis
on instinct and preconscious drives also suggest a form of pre-reflective consciousness
which formed the nucleus of Sartre’s philosophy in Being and Nothingness: ‘All of life
would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror, as in actuality even now
the major part of our life unfolds without this kind of mirroring’ (GS 354). Like in
Sartre’s phenomenological approach, Nietzsche recognizes that ‘we see from the most
particular out’ rather than ‘from the general to the most particular case’ (LN 159).
He insists that knowledge is always shaped by the perspective of its knower against
‘high-altitude thinking’,19 the remote, neutral and objective standpoint of analytical
reason in which ‘we are asked to think an eye which cannot be thought at all, an eye
turned in no direction at all, an eye where the active and interpretative powers are to be
suppressed, absent, but through which seeing still becomes a seeing-something’ (GM
3.12). Contemplation without interest, Nietzsche exclaims, is a ‘nonsensical absurdity’
(GM 3.12).
Nietzsche defines his perspectivism as the ability to multiply our perspectival affects:
‘the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we
can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our “concept” of this thing, our
“objectivity”, be’ (GM 3.12). The free spirit must ‘be able to gaze with many eyes and
consciences from the heights into every distance, from the depths up to every height,
from the corner onto every expanse’ (BGE 211). This he contrasts with ‘Socrates’ one
great Cyclopian eye’ that can only see the world through the optics of rationality and
so is unable to appreciate ‘the lovely madness of artistic enthusiasm’ (BT 14). Affirming
the multiplicity of perspectives reformulates our notion of objectivity in opposition
to the Kantian ‘disinterested spectator’. Nietzsche posits Argos, the hundred-eyed
monster, as a paradigm of perspectivism, a master of interpretation who ‘sets every
thing in the best light and observes it carefully from all sides’ (HH 636). He presents
the ‘new philosopher’ as a ‘manifold plurality’ who

needs to have been a critic and a sceptic and a dogmatic and an historian, and
in addition a poet and collector and traveller and puzzle-solver and moralist and
seer and ‘free spirit’ and nearly all things, so that he can traverse the range of
human values and value-feelings and be able to look with many kinds of eyes and
consciences from the corners into every wide expanse. (BGE 211)

It is clear that Nietzsche’s perspectivism – ‘the ability to control one’s Pro and Con
and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives
and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge’ (GM 3.12) – dovetails with
Sartre’s phenomenology of lived experience, both placing affective moods, drives and
states at the core of embodied consciousness. The notion of ‘aesthetic perspectivism’
has been suggested by Higgins (2000: 52) to capture Nietzsche’s epistemology since
 
Heidegger, Derrida and Metaphysics 53

the term ‘aesthetic’ gets at the root and range of the perspectival variables that are
relevant to a true picture of the situations in which we experience the world. Many
of Nietzsche’s images are drawn from the sphere of art and aesthetics, illuminating
features of life and lived experience that ‘dethrones traditional epistemology from its
queenly place in philosophy in favor of aesthetics, the study of perception and value
within the perceptual sphere’. As Higgins argues, relating perspectivism to aesthetics
brings perspectivism back to its original ground of sensation and perception, which
are key elements, as we will see, in Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s rapturous aesthetic and
ethical vision.
In the next chapter, I look at how these similarities in method between Sartrean
phenomenology and Nietzschean perspectivism crystallized into their parallel thinking
on the decentred, non-egoic, affective self, an emergent aesthetic view of subjectivity that
would in turn greatly influence poststructuralist and posthumanist thinking.
54
 3

The decentred self

What separates me most deeply from the metaphysicians is: I don’t concede that the
‘I’ is what thinks. Instead, I take the I itself to be a construction of thinking . . . in
other words to be only a regulative fiction with the help of which a kind of constancy
and thus ‘knowability’ is inserted into, invented into, a world of becoming. Up to
now belief in grammar, in the linguistic subject, object, in verbs has subjugated the
metaphysicians: I teach the renunciation of this belief.
(Nietzsche, LN 20–1)

There is no lack of confusion when it comes to Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s view of self
and freedom. In Nietzsche’s case, this usually means classifying him as eliminativist
of both self and freedom, denying them altogether as illusory. For Sartre, this means
attributing to him either (or both) absolute freedom (Being and Nothingness) or full-
blooded determinism (the Critique). Such characterizations are a form of metaphysical
parody, tying them to binary divisions and rigid oppositions that in actual fact their
thinking works vehemently against. As we will see, they are both compatibilists and offer
deconstructive and reconstructive poles of explanation that run in tandem.1 Absolute
freedom or hard determinism is anathema to their ‘mediated’ view of consciousness
and world. As Solomon (2003: 181) observes, although Nietzsche’s views on freedom
are ‘complex and confusing’, a ‘paradox of fatalism and self-creation’, we should not
understand fatalism straightforwardly as determinism. This is not a paradox but the
essence of his perspectivism – they are two perspectives on ourselves – like a Kantian
antinomy in which what appears to have two contradictory appearances turns out to
be the expressions of two different standpoints that we often take up one or the other
sequentially (2003: 184–5).
In the quest to create ‘new subjectivities’, Nietzsche puts an end ‘to the superstitions
which have so far flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the
soul’, as well as the doctrine of the will that accompanies it (BGE 12). He rejects the
‘atomistic’ idea of a substantial soul but warns against rejecting ‘new versions and
refinements of the soul hypothesis’, suggesting concepts like the ‘mortal soul’, the ‘soul
as multiplicity of subjects’ and the ‘soul as a society constructed out of drives and
effects’ (BGE 12). Equally, Nietzsche argues, ‘our body is . . . a society constructed out
of many souls’, and it is from this ‘society’ we get the ‘performance’ and ‘successes’ of
willing (BGE 19). Conscious agency is only the directing (not driving) force of action.
56 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

To think otherwise is to mistake ‘the helmsman for the stream’ or the ‘match’ for the
‘powder keg’ (GS 360). Although he firmly debunks the idea of willing as a causa sui,
an incompatibilist stance ‘with a temerity greater than Münchhausen’s, to pull oneself
into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair’ (BGE 21), he does
not dissolve the agential self altogether. As Riccardi (2018: 187) avers, ‘Nietzsche’s take
on the conscious self is not eliminativist but rather profoundly revisionary.’ His ideal
of accomplished selfhood consists in ‘the harmonious . . . relation between one’s bodily
self and one’s (revisionarily understood) conscious self ’. This is linked to a normative
project of sketching and eliciting a harmonious psychological make-up that enables one
to overcome the kind of self-division caused by the internalization of ascetic morality
and the imposition of a certain form of social discipline. This is when the animal that
makes promises can become a ‘free spirit’ or ‘sovereign individual’, an instance of ‘rare
freedom’ and even a ‘master of free will’ (GM 2.2).
Against misreadings of Sartre that view him as a metaphysical thinker of ‘absolute
freedom’ or ‘hard determinism’, it is clear that his dialectical view of freedom and necessity
is consistently compatibilist that, like Nietzsche, he apprehends through a sublimating or
supplementary logic of perspectival difference. Eshleman (2011: 42–4) makes this point
well, identifying two views of freedom and subjectivity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.
According to the first, ‘well-recognized but implausible’ view, freedom is continuous
creation ex nihilo, free of constraint from being-in-itself. The second, ‘unrecognized
but plausible view’, developed later in Being and Nothingness starting from the role that
others play in conditioning my becoming a person (through consciousness of shame),
and, elaborating Sartre’s concomitant notions of self, limit, and project, argues that
‘freedom and power are intertwined’. In Sartre’s ‘considered view’, freedom can only be ‘an
aberrant synthesis of the in-itself and nothingness’, an admixture of social and material
determinants and our free internalization of them (BN 688–9) within an intrinsically
ambiguous process where we ‘make something out of what is made of [us]’ (1974a: 35).
Similarly, the charge of ‘crude materialism’ in the Critique is equally inaccurate.2 In this
work, Sartre develops further his dialectic of freedom and situation that he began in The
Transcendence of the Ego and worked through in Being and Nothingness. Freedom and
necessity are, he consistently argues, dialectically coextensive and mutually implicative
within a process of ‘trans-substantiation’ (CDR 178): ‘man is mediated by things to the
extent that things are mediated by man’ (CDR 82). A true dialectical understanding of
the subject, Sartre insists, must involve ‘the perpetually renewed contradiction between
man-as-producer and man-as-product’ (CDR 158).
Before we look in closer detail at their dialectical view of freedom through the
model of the ‘three ecologies of self ’ (Guattari 2000), it is worthwhile to consider in
brief the Cartesian model of self that they critiqued through their twin notion of the
self as ‘embodied consciousness’.

The bewitched ego

We find ourselves in the midst of a rude fetishism when we call to mind the basic
presuppositions of the metaphysics of language – which is to say, of reason. It is
 
The Decentred Self 57

this which sees everywhere deed and doer; this which believes in will as a cause in
general; this which believes in the ‘ego’, the ego as being, in the ego as substance, and
which projects its belief in the ego-substance on to all things.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 3.5)

Nietzsche acknowledges that philosophers are at last beginning to distance themselves

from the metaphysical view of the Kantian and Cartesian self: ‘Now, with admirable
tenacity and cunning, people are wondering whether they can get out of this net –
wondering whether the reverse might be true: that “think” is the condition and “I” is
the conditioned, in which case “I” would be a synthesis that only gets produced through
thought itself ’ (BGE 54). For Nietzsche, the idealists have got things the wrong way
round: ‘insofar as we are in the habit of overlooking and deceiving ourselves about
this duality by means of the synthetic concept of the “I”, a whole chain of erroneous
conclusions, and, consequently, false evaluations have become attached to the will, –
to such a degree that the one who wills believes, in good faith, that willing suffices
for action’ (BGE 19). Instead of being the cause of willing, the subject is the effect of
it – willing is believed to be ‘an activity and effect of a being who is thought of as a
cause’ (BGE 17). In rejecting standard views of agency, Nietzsche objects to the attempt
to isolate discrete causes of actions: ‘Cause and effect: there is probably never such a
duality; in truth a continuum faces us, from which we isolate a few pieces, just as we
always perceive a moment only as isolated points, i.e. do not really see, but infer’ (GS
112). It is an ‘error of false causality’ in which ‘[w]e believe that we are the cause of
our own will’. The inner world is full of ‘phantoms and illusions’ and, Nietzsche states,
the will is one of them: ‘The will no longer moves anything, hence does not explain
anything – it merely accompanies events; it can even be absent’ (TI 6.3).
Nietzsche conceives the ‘I’ as a synthetic construction, but by posting it behind
actions, as a doer behind the deed, it ‘has become a fairy tale, a fiction, a play on words:
it has stopped thinking, feeling, and willing altogether’ (TI 6.3). This bewitchment
amounts to a ‘rude fetishism’ (TI 3.5) and Descartes is the philosopher most seduced
by this linguistic illusion:

‘There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks’: this is the upshot of
all Descartes’ argumentation. But this means positing as ‘true a priori’ our belief in
the concept of substance: – that when there is thought there has to be something
‘that thinks’ is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer
to every deed. (WP 484)

Even subjective experience is an effect rather than a cause of the will to power that
interprets physiologically without a subject: ‘The will to power interprets . . . it
defines limits, determines degrees, variations of power’ (WP 643) but ‘[t]he mistake
lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject’ (WP 632). For Nietzsche, it is false to
consider consciousness to be indicative of the unity of the organism. Feelings are
spontaneously felt without being articulated and most of our actions are undertaken
without reflection or second-order awareness. It is the act of thinking that gives rise
to the awareness of an ‘I’ and only the confusion of grammar that leads us astray
58 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

to assign a subject as agent. The will is not a fixed unity but rather a swarm of
diverse affections, voices, drives and energies. These are evaluative affectively loaded
dispositions that are proactive, actively seek discharge and have a strong compelling
force. They are in constant tension but form alliances of rank within a hierarchically
structured order that is the driving force behind our acts, feelings and consciousness.
This, Nietzsche argues, demonstrates the fictive and superficiality of the unified
rationalist ego:

It must be shown to what extent everything conscious remains on the surface:

how an action and the image of an action differ, how little one knows of what
precedes an action . . . how essential fiction and imagination are in which we dwell
consciously: how all our words refer to fictions (our affects, also) and how the
bond between man and man depends on the transmission and elaboration of these
fictions. (WP 676)

In a bid to understand the self as an agential capacity capable of forming ‘new

subjectivities’, Nietzsche prioritizes the role of instinct and subconscious physiological
drives over conscious thought, Cartesian transparency and reflection: ‘whatever
becomes conscious becomes by the same token shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general,
sign, herd-signal: all becoming-conscious involves a great and thorough corruption,
falsification, reduction to superficialities, and generalization’ (GS 354).
Although Sartre confessed his own childhood idealism in Words and that he had
been tempted by the idealist teachings of his professors at the Sorbonne, he soon moved
away from Husserl’s philosophy because of its ‘idealist turn’. In The Transcendence of
the Ego, he critiques the idealism of Descartes, Kant and Husserl, arguing that they
transform the real world of objects into the sanctuary of inner life, dissolving it into
nothing but ‘contents of consciousness’. Equating knowledge with consumption, ‘they
ate it with their eyes’ (TE 87–9). In attacking idealism, Sartre develops Nietzsche’s
insights on the superficiality of the ego, portraying the belief in the ego or substantial
self as involving a form of philosophical bewitchment where one reverses the order of
things by deriving consciousness from ego instead of ego from consciousness:

The ego is an object apprehended but also constituted by reflective consciousness.

It is the virtual foyer of unity, and consciousness constitutes it as going in the
reverse direction from that followed by real production. . . . As a consequence,
consciousness projects its own spontaneity into the object Ego so as to confer on
it the creative power that is absolutely necessary to it. However, this spontaneity,
represented and hypostasized in an object, becomes a bastard and degraded
spontaneity, which magically preserves its creative potentiality while becoming
passive. Hence the profound irrationality of the notion of Ego. (TE 34–5)

According to Sartre, the transcendental ego of the idealists is neither necessary nor
desirable (TE 7). The ego is simply the object pole of reflective consciousness and it
is only through a magical reversal that we think it to be the origin or owner of it.
Pre-reflective consciousness has its own synthetic unity without a transcendental
 
The Decentred Self 59

‘I’: it ‘constitutes a synthetic, individual totality . . . and the I can, clearly, be only an
expression (and not a condition)’ (TE 7):

When I run after a tram, when I look at the time, when I become absorbed in the
contemplation of a portrait there is no I. There is a consciousness of the tram-
needing-to-be-caught, etc., and a non-positional consciousness of consciousness.
In fact, I am plunged into the world of objects. (TE 13)

For Sartre, positing the ‘I’ or ‘me’ behind consciousness is obstructive to a true
understanding of consciousness: ‘this superfluous I is actually a hindrance. If it
existed, it would violently separate consciousness from itself; it would divide it, slicing
through each consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death
of consciousness’ (TE 7). Since consciousness is pure activity, a transcending towards
something it is not, to posit the I is to introduce ‘a centre of opacity’ (TE 8).
The I comes to be purely through reflection: ‘The I only ever appears on the occasion
of a reflective act . . . when reflected consciousness becomes the object of the reflecting
consciousness’ (TE 16). It is therefore not originary but a transcendent existent that always
accompanies acts of reflection. Sartre describes how ‘it is in exclusively magical terms
that we have to describe the relations between the me and consciousness’ (TE 26). Magic
arises from ‘impure reflection’ (TE 23) that reverses the real phenomenological order of
things, making primary things derivative and secondary reflected-upon things primary.
My actions are seen to flow from me, whereas in fact my ‘me’ is the reflected synthesis of
my actions. Unlike pure reflection that ‘stays with the given . . . [and] disarms unreflected
consciousness by giving it back its instantaneous character’ (TE 24), impure reflection
effects a magical reversal whereby it carries out ‘an infinitization of the field’ (TE 23),
creating a transcendent object that serves as an imagined origin and cause ‘in the past
and the future’ (TE 23). Thus, for Sartre, reversal and hypostasis signify the bewitching,
magical way of relating to our own ego in which a more elemental, pre-reflective
consciousness imbues its own creation with a pseudo power that allows consciousness
to escape and even suppress aspects of itself. This is a form of pseudo-activity where all
our states, emotions and actions through a relation of ‘creation’ are ‘attached directly (or
indirectly, through quality) to the Ego as to its origin’ (TE 32). Consciousness has no
originary ego or contents within but is ‘a sliding beyond itself ’ and ‘absolute flight’:

Consciousness is purified; it is clear as a strong wind. There is nothing in it but

a movement of fleeing itself, a sliding beyond itself. If, impossible though it may
be, you could enter ‘into’ a consciousness, you would be seized by a whirlwind
and thrown back outside, in the thick of the dust . . . for consciousness has no
‘inside’. Precisely this being-beyond-itself, this absolute flight, this refusal to be a
substance, is what makes it to be a consciousness. (1970: 4)

Against the Cartesian notion of interiority, Sartre emphasizes the ‘public’ nature of
the ego and the fact that there are objective psycho-physiological aspects to ourselves
of which we are most often consciously unaware. The fact that the nature of reflective
consciousness makes itself an object for such consciousness means that, for Sartre, the
60 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

‘I is an other’ (TE 46). We are always obliged to view ourselves from another-person
perspective, even when we use ‘I’. The ego is a public phenomenon, conditioned and
shaped through societal and interpersonal forces. In overemphasizing one’s interiority,
Sartre warns, the I is magically hypostasized which leads to bewitching and ‘impure’
relations with oneself and others. When we encounter the Other, the direction of magic
is reversed in which the world itself ‘reveals itself to consciousness as magical just where
we expect it to be deterministic’ (STE 46). For Sartre, ‘there is an existential structure
of the world which is magical’ (STE 46) because of the Other’s inherent freedom, their
unpredictability inscribed in their language, bodily movements and actions that do
not obey strict causal laws: ‘the category of “magic” governs . . . interpsychic relations
between men in society’ (STE 56). It is in this way we can become affectively captivated
or disgusted by others.
For Sartre, even when psychological bewitchment seems to come ‘wholly’ from
within (e.g. anger) or without (e.g. fright), consciousness and world are always locked
in a fused dynamic. Because a study of the phenomenon requires a transphenomenal
being and because consciousness cannot be ‘constitutive of its object’s being’ (BN
21), there is a demand for a universal ‘plenitude of being’ (BN 22) as a possibility
for both phenomena and consciousness alike. As we have seen, for Sartre the ‘I’ is a
synthetic construct of consciousness in a derivative reflexive mode of becoming, that
which offers itself only ‘through successive, fleeting profiles’ (BN 22). Consciousness
confronts its past and future as facing a self which it is ‘in the mode of not being’
(BN 111), a being that has ‘an infinity of possibilities’ (BN 192). The pour-soi always
‘becomes itself by surpassing’ (BN 179) towards an ever-higher value since emotion
is ‘coexistent’ (BN 182) with the pour-soi and its desires. Value is hence nothing less
than the being of the self (BN 179) and the ‘circuit of ipseity’ (BN 771–2) that we call
the ‘I’ does not stem from any transcendental ego but is simply the projective unity
of ‘the myriad concrete desires which constitute the fabric of our conscious life’ (BN
735–6). In the lived dynamic and concrete synthesis of ‘man in the world’ (BN 34),
consciousness experiences a ‘trinity of ontological affectivity’ – nausea (world), anguish
(consciousness), shame (other) – that relates to the three ecologies or dimensions of
lived experience. For Sartre, affectivity is ‘an existential mode of . . . human reality’
(STE 12). All perception is accompanied by an ‘affective reaction’ (IM 28) to the extent
‘each affective quality is so deeply incorporated in the object that it is impossible to
distinguish between what is felt and what is perceived’ (IM 139). In this way, affectivity
ontologically grounds emotion and carries with it an evaluative charge that can lead
to forms of captivation with ourselves, the world and with others. Anguish is felt as
‘freedom’s reflective self-apprehension’ (BN 79), nausea as our immediate and basic
affective recognition of the ‘original contingency’ (BN 178) of the world, stripped of all
meaning and reason, while shame refers to my loss of transcendence in the presence of
the other when I am no longer the centre of the world.
Many interpretations of Sartre, as O’ Shiel (2019: 101) notes, are ‘rationalistic’, ‘overly
cerebral and reflective’ and overlook the central importance of affectivity and magic
in his phenomenology. The relation of consciousness to things and to others is one of
dialectical interdependence where emotions and affectivity are constitutive components
of this relation. Discussing the concept of possession, Sartre describes this as ‘a magical
 
The Decentred Self 61

bond’ (BN 765) between consciousness and things where there is an ‘impossible synthesis’
(BN 751) of ‘the me and the not-me’ (BN 750). Consciousness and world implicate one
another in a dynamic dyadic (BN 766) within which there is a ‘syncretic movement . . . [of]
the me becoming not-me and the not-me becoming me’ (BN 764). Our experience of the
‘viscous’ (visqueux) particularly illustrates this: ‘the viscous reverses the terms: suddenly
the for-itself is compromised’ (BN 788) by qualities that seem to ‘become animated by a
kind of life’ and ‘turn against me’ (BN 789). This is a ‘symbol of an anti-value’ (BN 791)
where materiality presents such a challenge in which our values are so affected that we
feel strong visceral emotions like disgust. Like Nietzsche, Sartre abandons the idea of a
unified rational subject or ego, immersing the self externally in the social and material
world and multiplying it internally through the pre-reflective interplay of diverse affects,
emotions and states. By dissolving the fictitious ‘hindrance’ of the ego, they both offer
us a form of psychological therapy3 or ‘purifying reflection’ that enables an escape route
from the captivity and magical hold of the emotions only through rare moments where
the subject apprehends her feelings as involving some form of self-deception.

The three ecologies of the self

Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s shared project to theorize ‘new versions and refinements of the
soul hypothesis’ (BGE 12) presents a model of the self as an emergent ‘unity within
a multiplicity’ locked in an interplay of elements with the social and material world.
This is best understood, I suggest, through the trivalent model proposed by Guattari
in Les Trois Ecologies of (i) a material environment in the process of being reinvented,
(ii) a constantly mutating socius and (iii) a nascent subjectivity. Like Guattari (who was
influenced heavily by them both), their affirmative reconstructive project emphasizes
the need to create transversal lines and connections through them within ‘a common
ethico-aesthetic’ viewpoint. Their descriptions of becoming are open-ended and allow
for a notion of the subject that is precarious, shaped by the external world, the social
sphere and the individual’s internal forces and critical reflection. Describing each of these
forces as an ‘ecology’ incorporates the idea of each as a living system that has a dynamism
of its own but which intersects transitively with the other two. The ‘new subjectivity’ that
they advance is a living, evolving triptych of material, social and psychological forces, a
‘psycho-social-somatic unity’ that is able to install itself simultaneously ‘in the realms of
the environment, in the major social and institutional assemblages, and symmetrically
in the landscapes and fantasies of the most intimate spheres of the individual’ (2000:
69). Both philosophers show the formidable weight of material and social forces while
providing the lightness required to elide or direct them through ‘purifying reflection’,
the formation of the ‘intellectual conscience’ and Dionysian ‘flights of escape’.

(i) The body and environment

Body am I through and through and nothing besides.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 1.4)
62 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

In broad terms, Heidegger had a valid point – both Nietzsche and Sartre invert
Platonism to the extent that they privilege the body over any transcendent conception
of mind. In his rejection of ‘soul atomism’ – ‘the belief which regards the soul as
something indestructible, eternal, indivisible, as a monad, as an atomon’ (BGE 112)
– Nietzsche extols the ‘great wisdom’ of the body and debunks the rationality of the
soul. As in Sartre’s ideas of ‘trans-substantiation’ (CDR 182) and ‘connective tissue’
(BN 755), Nietzsche posits an intimate connection of transitive exchange between self
and world, using the guiding metaphors of incorporation and assimilation to explain
this. He conceives the body as a vehicle of assimilation that digests all kinds of material
that are processed and modified into emotions and psychological states. Our character
is susceptible and modifiable through the effects of inheritance, diet, exercise and
environment: ‘These small things – nutrition, location, climate, recreation, the whole
casuistry of selfishness – are inconceivably more important than everything one has
taken to be important so far. Precisely here one must begin to relearn’ (EH 2.10). He
connects environmental and dietary factors directly to certain psychological states. Too
much rice in India leads to a lack of vigour and the nihilism of Buddhism, while the
malaise of the German spirit is a result of poor air and ‘winter sickness’ from spending
too much time indoors in front of burning stoves (GS 134). Conceiving the self as
a ‘psycho-somatic continuum’, Nietzsche telescopes the strong effects of physiology
– ‘life style, nutrition, or digestion, perhaps a deficit or excess of inorganic salts in
their blood and brain; in brief, in their physis’ – on judgements, feelings, moods and
tastes (GS 39). He recommends dietary change and physical labour for psychological
disturbances or ‘distress of the soul’ (D 269). His own physical ailments and sufferings
made him sensitive to the ‘great reason’ of his body and to decipher which foods and
environments were conducive to well-being. He was, as he records in his writings,
preoccupied practically and philosophically with finding ways to improve health and
recover from illness (HH P4).
Reversing the transcendental conception of self of Plato and Descartes as sealed
off from the world, Nietzsche plunges the self into matter: ‘The inorganic determines
us through and through: water, air, earth, the composition of the soil, electricity and
so on. We are plants under such conditions.’ The denial and ignorance of the body
is accompanied by a misplaced arrogance on the part of humanity: ‘How strange
and superior we are towards the dead, the inorganic, and meanwhile we are three
quarters a column of water, and have inorganic salts in us that probably have more
influence on our fortunes than the whole of living society.’4 In Zarathustra, Nietzsche
distinguishes two notions of self proposed by Zarathustra in his famous speech ‘On
the Despisers of the Body’. The Selbst ‘lives in your body . . . is your body’; it’s ‘a great
reason, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, one herd and one shepherd’.
The Ich, by contrast, corresponds to the conscious self and, though worshipped by
the metaphysicians, amounts to little: ‘Your small reason, what you call “spirit” is also
a tool of your body, my brother, a small work and plaything of your great reason.’
Ultimately, the Ich is ruled by the Selbst: ‘The body is inspired, let us keep the “soul”
out of it’ (EH 9.4).
Alongside environment, Nietzsche also includes genetic inheritance as a constituent
feature of Selbst, a fact that has divided scholars over the extent of his Lamarckism.
 
The Decentred Self 63

Discussing the concept of learning in D 540, Nietzsche states, ‘Michelangelo saw in

Raphael study, in himself nature: there learning, here talent . . . For what is talent but a
name for an older piece of learning, experience, practice, appropriation, incorporation,
whether at the stage of our fathers or an even earlier stage!’ In BGE 200 he expresses a
direct correlation between ancestral background and inner drives, skills or emotional
dispositions: ‘Human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that
is . . . drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any
rest.’ The results of ‘racial mixing’ give rise to two different types – those who seek rest
and calm and those rarer types who have ‘inherited and cultivated’ self-control such
as Caesar, Alcibiades and ‘perhaps Leonardo da Vinci’ (BGE 200). This is reinforced in
D 30 where Nietzsche connects race to inner drives that form part of human nature,
such as the drive to cruelty that has become sublimated but not extinguished for
‘we moderns’. In BGE 264 he argues for the generational transfer of traits through
‘corrupted blood’: ‘If one knows something about the parents, an inference about the
child is permissible . . . that sort of thing must as surely be transferred to the child as
corrupted blood; and with the aid of the best education one will at best deceive with
regard to such a heredity.’
While Nietzsche attaches importance to inherited racial and psychological
dispositions, he also connects ‘the cultivation of race’ to a self-perpetuating system of
acculturation. Clark (2013: 287) argues in this respect that when Nietzsche states that
‘a type with few but very strong traits . . . is fixed beyond the changing generations’
and has ‘staying power’ (BGE 262), he does not refer to biologically inherited traits but
uses the notion of breeding (cultivation) as an analogy to show how selective cultural
practices, such as marriage, education, customs and penal laws, have produced human
types with a strong ‘staying power’. In the trivalent model of the three ecologies that
I propose as a framework for understanding the Nietzschean self, all three factors –
body/environment, socius and psychological – form a network of transversal interplay
or a ‘nature-culture continuum’, articulated through Nietzsche’s idea of a ‘transfigured
physis’.5 Although the body is the ‘great reason’ of the self, Nietzsche does not conceive
this in mechanical terms and distinguishes between the body as an object for medicine
(Körper) and the living body as phenomenologically felt (Leib). Central to this is the
notion of ‘affect’ (Affekt) that always plays a role in perception, selecting and avoiding
things (BGE 192) or evaluating what is valuable for the overall growth and health of
the organism (BGE 23). The Selbst, one’s ‘for and against’ (BGE 284), is, for Nietzsche,
an active force whose physiological state, felt through sensory perception and mood,
involves interpretation and the projection of value and, as we will see below, links
closely to Sartre’s notion of embodied consciousness and pre-reflectivity.
Nietzsche’s ‘reason of the body’, as Gerhardt (2006: 73, 85) suggests, has both ‘a
polemical and a systematically foundational sense’. It is polemically opposed to the
dualist Christian-Platonic conception of being and becomes an earthly immanent
replacement for God and also has ontological primacy in defining what a human is
and how its ‘great reason’ functions as a creative physiological intelligence which is
pursued through action in the world. The body is axiological in Nietzsche’s account of
art and in his Dionysian affirmation of life. For Nietzsche, art is a name for a dimension
of physis: ‘Art itself wells up in man as a force of nature and disposes of him, whether he
64 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

wills it or not’ (WP 798). Even ‘creative thought’ is the work of the body and its ancient
wisdom: ‘when they are asked to question how they performed their master stroke and
from what sphere the creative thought came to them . . . hardly do they dare to say, “It
came out of me, it was my hand that threw the dice”’ (WP 659). Central to Nietzsche’s
artistic experience is rausch (rapture), an ‘intoxication of the senses’ and a heightened
physiological state that increases the affective powers of the experiencing subject, felt at
its most intense in the Dionysian force of music which hails the body directly. The body
also figures centrally in Nietzsche’s reconstructive project of ‘giving style to oneself ’
(GS 290) in which he sketches out the contours of a ‘positive asceticism’, a form of self-
discipline based on ‘a powerful “no” and an exuberant “yes”’ lodged between Stoicism
and Epicureanism.6
Sartre’s view of the body, both philosophically and personally, was complex.
Beauvoir (1984: 117) records that he revealed to her, ‘I found it hard to have a body.’
He first became acutely aware of his own body as seen by others when, at the age of
seven, he was taken to have his long flowing locks shorn and experienced a severe
‘narcissistic wound’ as a result. He had been a beautiful baby adored by his mother
but, in the flash of the scissors, ‘I turned as ugly as a frog’ (1983: 12). Alienated by his
own body and his diminutive stature, he would imagine himself to be Pardaillan, a tall
and athletic comic book hero, feeling ‘like a powerful warrior’ as an imaginary ‘kind
of compensation for my shortness’ (1981: 313).7 Up until his final months, Sartre’s
‘imaginary body’ had for all his life turned his interest away from his real body as a
defence against vulnerability. His Stoicism was a form of sadism inflicted on his body
that often turned into masochism: ‘What is the point of good health? I prefer to have
written Critique de la raison dialectique – I say it without pride’ (1976: 153). It was
not until the severities of chronic ill health forced him to take notice in the 1970s
that he grew more in touch with his body and with a more inclusive acceptance of his
feminine side.8
Throughout his writings, Sartre was cognizant of the physical connections and
neurological/pharmacological dimensions of consciousness. Vulgarized descriptions
of the pour-soi of Being and Nothingness as a ‘disembodied consciousness’ or some kind
of ‘Cartesian ghost’ are absurdly misrepresentative and have led many to overlook his
theory of the body. In his early phenomenological works, Sartre describes consciousness
and body as intimately intermingled, such as they form a psychosomatic continuum or
unity.9 He shows how the body is intimately involved in belief. Emotion is conjoined
with physiological changes in the tensing of muscles, sobbing, clenching of fist and
gesticulations: ‘during emotion, it is the body which, directed by consciousness,
changes its relationship with the world so that the world should change its qualities’
(STE 41). To believe in the magical behaviour of emotions we must be physically upset
since our bodies are the ‘instruments of incantation’ through which they are lived out.
In his description of anger, for example, the body is presented as a composite synthetic
totality of life and action:

Doubtless there is a cryptology of the psyche; certain phenomena are ‘hidden’. But
this does not mean at all that the meanings refer to something ‘beyond the body’
[. . .] these frowns, this blushing, this stammer, this slight trembling of the hands,
 
The Decentred Self 65

these sly looks which seem to be at the same time timid and threatening do not
express anger; they are the anger. (BN 462)

For Sartre, there is unequivocally no disembodied ‘pure knowledge’. Consciousness, he

insists, ‘exist[s] its body’ (BN 441) and is body ‘in its entirety’ (BN 412) since the body is
its ‘sensory centre of reference’ (BN 437). Presenting consciousness and body as a living
unity, he argues against the idea that ‘the psyche is united to a body’ since ‘the body is
its substance and its constant condition of possibility’ (BN 452). Invoking the difference
between Leib and Körper, as Nietzsche did, he insists that ‘[t]he body is “lived, and not
known”’ (BN 435). ‘We do not employ this instrument’, he adds, ‘for we are it’ (BN 434).
When there is a world, we are necessarily saying that there is a body (BN 413).
This is not to say, however, that there aren’t any difficulties with his theory of the
body in Being and Nothingness that has been described as ‘puzzling’ and ‘multiply
ambiguous’ as well as ‘groundbreaking’ and ‘pioneering’.10 According to Morris (2020:
233–7), Sartre’s conception of the body is ‘complex and multi-faceted’ with some
lacunae and blind spots but is, in its phenomenological descriptions, ‘remarkable and
insightful’ and in places (e.g. his description of shyness and the caress) unparalleled.
For Morris, Sartre says too little about bodily needs (thirst, hunger, fatigue) and what
he says is ‘somewhat confusing’. By placing the body on the facticity side of facticity/
transcendence, he is unable to appreciate the body as having teloi and desires as in acute
pain when the body ‘emerges as an alien presence that exerts upon us a telic demand’.
This is also the case with modes of bodily ‘dys-appearance’, such as acute pain, which
are affectively felt by the body as negative thematizations of the body demanded by
the body itself which affects an ‘internal disruption’ and ‘spatiotemporal constriction’
(as Sartre recognizes in our being-for-others). This connects with criticisms made
by Howells who, while recognizing that Sartre is resolutely ‘anti-dualist’ and views
the body as an ‘essential condition for consciousness to exist’, asserts that he is still
‘arguably unable to accept all the implications of embodiment’ (2011: 30, 26). For
Howells (2011: 46), Sartre falls short in this respect of Merleau-Ponty in showing fully
how the body is an ‘intrinsic element in the activities of consciousness’ whose examples
of phantom limb pain and of brain damage (compared to Sartre’s anodyne examples
of stomach ache and eye strain) are ‘indicative of the seriousness with which he takes
the body’. If, for Sartre, we can choose how to relate to the sick body, for Merleau-
Ponty ‘it is only through illness that we exist at all’. There is also an inconsistency in
Sartre’s account of bodily states and drives evidenced in the disparate accounts he
gives of hunger and sexual desire. Sexual desire, he states, reveals the indissolubility
of consciousness and body wherein both are reciprocally transformed. Desire reveals
the incarnation of consciousness (BN 516): ‘in desiring, consciousness chooses to exist
its facticity at another level. It no longer flees its facticity, but it attempts to submit
to its own contingency, in so far as it apprehends another body . . . as desirable’ (BN
512–13). This, as Morris (2020: 237) and Howells (2011: 173) note, is very different
to his treatment of hunger, thirst, pain and illness that ‘does not compromise the very
nature of the for-itself ’ (BN 511).
Despite these lacunae, Sartre’s theory of the body in Being and Nothingness contains
many insights that later philosophers, not least Merleau-Ponty himself, incorporated
66 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

into their own view of embodied consciousness. For instance, Sartre anticipates the
notion of ‘habit’ or ‘motor skill’ that Merleau-Ponty utilizes in his own work. Sartre
recognizes that there are socially induced ways of moving the body, ‘techniques of the
body’ or ‘collective techniques’ that ‘determine my membership of communities’ (BN
666). He uses the example of skiing to illustrate how the pour-soi appropriates such
techniques (BN 667) and internalizes them (BN 680) before re-externalizing them in
the form of kinaesthetic bodily movements. Although this was left undeveloped (on a
physiological if not on a social level) by Sartre, it anticipates Merleau-Ponty’s idea in
Phenomenology of Perception that the body has its own ‘intentional arc’ and modes of
‘proprioception’ in which it incorporates the gestures and movements of others (1962:
94). Furthermore, Sartre also introduced the concept of ‘the flesh’ (la chair) integral to
Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy. Although many scholars accuse Sartre of a totally
negative view of the flesh as ‘nauseous’, Morris (2020: 231) notices, for instance, the
seamless mix of phenomenology and ontology in Being and Nothingness where Sartre’s
description of flesh in the sexual caress overflows his other more negative descriptions
of the flesh. His ‘often beautiful descriptions’ of the caress11 show there are various non-
instrumental ways of encountering one’s own body and that of others, including the
aesthetic, the nurturing and the sensuous.
Rather than try to solve the mind–body duality and explain it away in metaphysical
terms of exclusion and separation, Howells (2011: 165–6) highlights how Sartre
brings to light the many conceptual ambiguities and paradoxes bound up with it,
thus resisting a point of certainty or analytic closure. He shows, as did Beauvoir,
how identity and alterity are mutually productive, how transience is constitutive of
experience and how freedom is always already conditioned by necessity. Presenting
the situation as an ambiguous phenomenon in which it is impossible to distinguish the
contribution of freedom from that of the brute existent (BN 662), Sartre demonstrates
how we must assume our ambiguity (as facticity and transcendence) and not flee from
it, thus coming to recognize that one’s ambiguity is the necessary precondition of the
moral life.
Despite some of her reservations about Sartre’s philosophical treatment of the
body in Being and Nothingness, Howells (2011: 33) is careful to observe that his
concept of embodiment develops and expands over the course of his lifetime, his later
work ever more attuned to embodied experiences of desire, suffering and pain and
dispositional states of the subconscious.12 In the Critique, he set about reinterpreting
his philosophical categories by connecting them even firmer to the material world
in order to overcome some of the unresolved ambiguities in Being and Nothingness.
‘Consciousness’ is reinscribed as ‘praxis’, while the idea of ‘lack’ is replaced by the
notion of ‘need’ which, Sartre emphasizes, is ‘the first totalising relation between the
material being, man, and the material ensemble of which he is a part’ (CDR 80). The
category of need overcomes the difficulties that stemmed from the hegemony of the
individual project in Being and Nothingness since it denotes a material relation with
the world that is given independently of the rationalizing project. Faced with hunger,
for instance, the subject totalizes the material field before him as an opening onto a
complex reality and his praxis involves unifying and reorganizing the transcendence of
existing circumstances towards the practical field (CDR 310). It is only by working on
 
The Decentred Self 67

and transforming matter that he can go beyond existing circumstances and overcome
need. Caught in a ‘dialectic of circularity’ (CDR 80), however, praxis preserves what it
totalizes and becomes itself an embodiment of the inert quality of the material world. In
order to transform the material field the individual must introduce into himself features
of that field and make of his body a tool. Thus, in the course of praxis, he undergoes
a profound interior alteration taking on or, in Nietzschean terms, incorporating the
qualities of an object. The living act of his praxis is in turn absorbed into matter and
transformed into an inert material fact. Sartre describes praxis in this way as ‘a passage
from objective to objective through internalisation’ (SM 97). At the heart of praxis
lies the totalizing project which, ‘as the subjective surpassing of objectivity towards
objectivity, and stretched between the objective conditions of the environment and
the objective structures of the field of possibles, represents in itself the moving unity of
subjectivity and objectivity, those cardinal determinants of activity’ (SM 97).
Materiality is viewed by Sartre as the primary bond between the organism and its
environment, but one that can be understood only in conjunction with human praxis.
Materiality and praxis are dialectical coordinates, each contiguous to, and dependent
on, the other. It is the presence of inorganic matter that makes praxis possible and,
in satisfying organic need, praxis finds itself subject to the laws of inorganic matter
even as it negates and totalizes it (CDR 82). For Sartre, this circularity of praxis and
matter always reveals a double element at work: ‘objectification (or man working upon
matter) and objectivity (or totalized matter working upon man)’ (CDR 284). Hence,
a true dialectical understanding of the subject, Sartre states, involves ‘the perpetually
resolved and perpetually renewed contradiction between man-as-producer and man-
as-product’ (CDR 158).

(ii) The mutating socius

The way in which we are educated nowadays, we first acquire a second nature: and
we have it when the world calls us ripe, mature, and useful. Some are snake-like
enough to shed this skin one day when underneath this cover their first nature has
ripened. With most people, the germ has dried up.
(Nietzsche, Daybreak 455)

Throughout his writings, Nietzsche emphasizes the ‘heaviness’13 of our social

conditioning and the way in which social and historical forces produce, penetrate,
assemble and also delimit the individual. His early work presents the individual as
a cipher and singularization of the collective (a ‘Universal Singular’) bound by an
objective spirit which ushers in a horizon of myths that ‘completes and unifies a whole
cultural movement’ (BT 23). The past has layered structures within us, deposited
through language, constituted meaning and memory: ‘the human carries around the
memory of all previous generations’ (PTAG 35) unaware that she is voicing ‘[t]he
spiritual activity of millennia laid down in language’ (PTAG 31). In his ‘middle phase’,
Nietzsche weighs the formidable forces of social acculturation in the formation
of our ‘second skin’, a socially shaped self that enables one to function in the world
68 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

moulded by familial influence, education, interpersonal relationships and one’s social

positioning terms of gender, age, class, ethnicity, ability and occupation (D 455).
Although he puts more emphasis on biological and Lamarckian factors in certain
passages (BGE 264, BGE 200, D 30, D 540), he often views genetic inheritance as
modifiable through socialization. In D 34 he views familial influence more on the level
of modelling and behavioural transmission than genetic inheritance. Moral feelings and
dispositions are passed onto children through observation of their parents and siblings
(GS 95).14 Beyond the family, the force of circumstance and the necessity to survive in
the social world can lead to the desuetude and loss of one’s primary talents and traits:
‘Circumstances do not only conceal and reveal . . . they magnify and diminish’ (D
326). Learned traits and social roles become habituated traits that come to appear as
naturally given. Moreover, people overidentify with their social role and social mores
such that ‘they become victims of their own good performance’: ‘they themselves
have forgotten how much accidents, moods, and caprice disposed of them when the
question of their “vocation” was decided . . . the role has actually become character; and
art, nature’ (GS 356).
Nietzsche links self-consciousness with sociality (D 26), arising paradoxically through
the process of socializing or herding individuals in order to make them conscious of
herd requirements (GS 354). He demonstrates the force of social interpretation and
the power of appearances, the way in which presentation determines the character, the
reputation or name of a thing. This is often arbitrary and inaccurate ‘foreign to their
nature and even to their skin – all this grows from generation unto generation, merely
because people believe in it, until it gradually grows to be part of the thing and turns
into its very body’ (GS 58). The individual is created and directed socially: ‘every man
comes to know himself almost solely in regard to his powers of defiance and attack’
(D 212). The other functions as a mirror and through the other we can learn ‘the art
of staging and watching ourselves’ (GS 78). Nietzsche does not dismiss the possibility
of individuals withdrawing from social roles, ‘to stand alone and give an account of
themselves’ (BGE 210), but considers it a rare occurrence. In words that portend Sartre’s
idea of bad faith and seriality, he concludes that in this conformist social world governed
by herd mentality and social mores, ‘[e]veryone is farthest from himself ’ (GS 335).
Central to the ‘reality of the Other’ as constituent of the self is the phenomenon
of language since consciousness, according to Nietzsche, develops only under ‘the
pressure of the need for communication’ (GS 354). Positing the subject as a mere effect
of linguistic and grammatical codes, he argues that ‘[p]eople used to believe in “the
soul” as they believed in grammar and the grammatical subject’ (BGE 54). But the
subject derives from the outside born out of intersubjective practices and forged out
of collective demands rather than emanating from inside as in the cogito. He thus
theorizes a historical, emergent view of the self that has developed as a societal product
or herd requirement.15 The constituent power of the imagination that lies at the heart of
the conscious self is, first and foremost, an intersubjective thing, a social and historical
act of singularity expressed within and through language:

The development of language and the development of consciousness go hand in

hand. . . . Add to this that language serves not only as a bridge between human
 
The Decentred Self 69

beings, but also as a mien, a pressure, a gesture. . . . The human being inventing
signs is at the same time the human being who becomes ever more conscious of
himself. It was only as a social animal that man acquired consciousness – which he
is still in the process of doing, more and more. (GS 354)

Extending his metaphor of diet and incorporation to a social level, Nietzsche shows
how the will to power absorbs forces from the outside to make its own powers and
values (D 171) influenced and directed by the force of the objective spirit of the culture
where it develops to the extent that it can strongly determine (national) character (BT
23, Z 4.12, BGE 47, TI 6.1).
From his earliest writings, Sartre viewed his self as outwardly dispersed in the Other
and not inwardly generated by any ego or soul:

in vain we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves . . . like a child
who kisses his own shoulder – for everything is finally outside; everything, even
ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not in some hiding-place that
we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd,
a thing among things, a human among humans. (1970: 5)

He writes in his Notebooks from Youth in 1924 (when just 19), ‘I have looked for my
sense of self: I have seen it manifest itself in my relationship to my friends, to nature,
to the women I have loved. I have found in myself a collective soul, a group soul, a
soul of the earth, a soul of books. But my sense of self, as such, outside of human
beings and of things, my real self, unconditioned, I have not found it’ (EJ 471–2). In
his War Diaries, he describes the existential dislocations he would later theorize in
Being and Nothingness through the experience of ‘the look’: ‘I had the impression’, he
records, ‘at every instant, that my friends were reading my innermost self; that they
could see my thoughts forming . . . I could feel their gaze to my very entrails’ (WD
271). As mentioned, it was the syncategorematic or social nature of the Sartrean self
in which we find ‘the structure of the Other’ (2004: 383) that attracted Deleuze to his
early phenomenology. Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness that Kant and Husserl
misunderstood the determining presence of the Other. In their idealist ontology, the
constituting negation is ‘an external negation’, separating me from the Other ‘by a real
or ideal space’ in which the Other is only an ‘indifferent exteriority’ who cannot affect
me in my being (BN 423). Sartre insists that interpersonal relations are, by contrast,
an ‘internal negation’ which posits the original distinction between the Other and
myself as being such that it determines me by means of the Other and determines the
Other by means of me (BN 453). When fixed by the gaze of the Other, this decentres
my world and causes me to experience ‘a new type of intraworldly haemorrhage’ (BN
400) in which all the constituents of my world flow towards the Other. Forms of self-
experience thus depend internally on the constitutive importance of the Other in
which the mediation of the Other throws me ‘out of myself ’ and reveals to me new
dimensions of who I am (BN 337).
In the Critique, Sartre extends his analysis of the Other from a dyadic level to a
collective and institutional level in which he considers larger historical and social
70 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

forces. At the heart of his conceptual apparatus is the ‘practico-inert’ which, as Jameson
(1991: xxiii) describes, is a ‘new concept and a new and durable philosophical term
. . . a more precise way of designating objects which are not mere things and agencies
which are not exactly people either’. For Sartre, the dialectical circularity of praxis
and matter gives rise to contingent social arrangements and relations that, once fixed,
serve to limit and circumscribe the very freedom from which they originate. These
relations form the practico-inert and represent the accretions and the sedimentations
of past action in the form of a network of meanings and demands to be interiorized
by totalizing individuals and groups, referring to the role of human action in the
constitution of an inert social reality that in turn comes to dominate further action.
Sartre describes this process in the following way:

in dissolving the inherited practico-inert, the sovereign and, through him, the
society, interiorize the social structures it conditioned; and the transcendence
of this interiorization, that is, its practical re-exteriorization, has as its outcome,
in a slightly different context, the constitution of another practico-inert that
reconditions men, into personal structures and finally praxis itself. (CDR 2:288)

Like Nietzsche’s ‘memory of all previous generations’ (PTAG 31), the practico-inert is
the sedimentation of past praxes, ‘simply the activity of others in so far as it is sustained
and diverted by inorganic inertia’ (CDR 556). It forms an ‘objective spirit’ which acts
as ‘the medium for the circulation of significations’ (CDR 776) and exerts its force
as a shifting and dynamic ‘quasi-totality’ that conditions modes of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity (CDR 324). In this way, Sartre asserts that ‘a man totalizes his epoch
to the precise degree that he is totalized by it’ (IF 3:426). Social life is composed of
three different ‘modalities of action’ that combine free praxis with practico-inertia –
individual (‘constituting’) praxis, common (‘constituted’) praxis and praxis-process
(unites praxis with otherwise ‘necessary’ social relations). Sartre demonstrates how
impersonal practices populate the social field as ‘full of acts without an author’ (SM
163–4) but, at the same time, are dependent upon human praxis for their genesis and
perpetuation.
As Sartre’s work progresses, the subject becomes increasingly enmeshed in social
and historical forces:

The historical whole determines our powers at any given moment, it prescribes
their limits in our field of action and our real future; it conditions our attitude
toward the possible and the impossible, the real and the imaginary, what is and
what should be, space and time . . . it is history which shows some exits and makes
others cool their heels before closed doors. (1968: 80)

Self-determination is conceived as a process of reworking and integrating an already

sculpted material. Agency is found in this sense only within the limits of our given
psychological, biological and historical influences and not in spite of them. Indeed,
what is perhaps most striking about these texts are Sartre’s numerous concessions
to Freudianism, a theory he had criticized heavily in Being and Nothingness. This
 
The Decentred Self 71

conversion is also evident in Search for a Method where Sartre speaks of psychoanalysis
as the ‘one privileged mediation’ in understanding how a child lives his family
relations inside a given society (SM 61). The examination of the individual within
the family which psychoanalysis undertakes alone enables us, according to Sartre, ‘to
study the process by which a child, groping in the dark, is going to attempt to play,
without understanding it, the social roles which adults impose on him’ (SM 60). In
The Family Idiot, Sartre deepens this Freudian perspective and sets out to show how,
in the case of Flaubert, ‘the structures of [his] family are internalized in attitudes and
re-externalized in practices by which the child makes himself be what others have
made of him’ (FI 3). Tracing this back to the very earliest stages of childhood, he
describes the way in which the infant Gustave is structured by the loving attention or
by the indifference of his mother: ‘To begin with, the baby internalizes the maternal
rhythms and tasks as the lived qualities of his own body. . . . His own mother,
engulfed in the depths of his body, becomes the pathetic structure of his affectivity’
(FI 57–8). The lack of love shown by Gustave’s mother, who was only a ‘mother out
of duty’, formed a deep frustration that ‘penetrates him and becomes within him an
impoverishment of his life – an organic misery and a kind of ingratitude at the core of
experience’ (FI 129–30). Inevitably, Flaubert is pathologically impelled towards art by
damage inflicted by his bourgeois upbringing (where the imaginary was prioritized
above the real and words above things): ‘[t]he prehistoric past comes back to the child
like Destiny’ (FI 55). Sartre shows how the child’s ‘first project’ develops positively or
negatively in relation to the mother’s affection, either creating a sense of self-worth
and value or preventing it. The mother’s tenderness in words and touch leaves the
child with ‘a kind of religious optimism based on the abstract and calm certainty
of his own value’ (FI 129–30). A person’s ability to confront the world around them
with hope and optimism has its foundation in early experience for ‘in order to love
life, to wait each minute for the next with confidence, with hope, one has to have
been able to internalize the Other’s love as a fundamental affirmation of the self ’ (FI
392). The values, passions, goals, prides and prejudices that guide adult experience
are grounded in experiences initially lived ‘in the depth and opaqueness of childhood’
(SM 62). Even individual preferences, talents and interests are the result of societal
and familial forces that inhibit or develop potentiality: ‘the dunce and the prodigy are
both monsters, two victims of the family institution and institutionalized education’
(IF 3:24). The subject is therefore formed predominantly by the opaque forces of
history and family destiny as

a function of the society in which he lives, of the mode of production, of the

technical knowledge available at the time, of the structure of the family, of
antecedent circumstances, of the historic future which reveals itself as his destiny,
but also of the singularity of his own previous history and of his biological
characteristics, inherited or acquired. (IF 3:442)

In his psychoanalytic study of Flaubert, Sartre replaced his earlier idea of the ‘original
project’ to understand the total meaning of as person’s life with the dialectical process
of ‘personalization’, a long and evolving process of assimilating, integrating and
72 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

transcending one’s past, especially childhood (FI 2:6). In the unfolding of a person’s
life, key elements from childhood return in new forms and manifestations. Key stages
are like ‘spirals’ which the person revolves around, the deposited meanings of earlier
experiences always developing, evolving and forming richer aggregates. For Sartre,
dialectical development has a horizontal or a longitudinal dimension of spirals that
unfold over time in an individual’s life as well as a vertical dimension that intersects
with the cultural and historical epoch in which she lives. The self is thus a composite of
the individual factors that conditioned the spirals of an individual’s life (the experiences
of childhood) with the social forces that unfold around them (and how they are
internalized by the individual). As ‘singular universals’, individuals totalize a particular
cultural and historical moment by expressing its values, detotalize it by challenging
certain aspects of it and retotalize it by producing changes that further impact
future time and meaning.16 Where the first two volumes of The Family Idiot establish
Flaubert’s subjective neurosis on the basis of his family origins, his ‘personalization’
through friendships, reading, writing and significant childhood experiences, in the
third Sartre, shows the ‘objective neurosis’ of his times, revealing how the two coincide
in parallel:

Thus the diachronic finitude of an individual is particularized by the finitude of the

social projects which envelop him and give him – by enlarging or shrinking the
field of his possibilities, hence of his choices – his destiny as a finite man and his
particular alienations. (IF 3:440)

The ‘Objective Spirit’ of one’s time circulates as a network of institutional discourses,

ideologies, received truths, cultural significations and mystifications that present or
articulate ‘the totality of imperatives imposed upon a person in a particular society’
(IF 3:48). The articulated knowledge does not determine what one thinks, but it
necessitates that one responds within its given terms like a structural grammar where
to refuse those terms only becomes another concretization of (and accession to) the
imperative of those same terms.17 As Sartre describes this: ‘The individual interiorizes
his social determinations: he interiorizes the relations of production, the family of his
childhood, the historical past, the contemporary institutions, and then re-exteriorizes
these in acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them’ (SM 45).
Through his concepts of ‘Objective Spirit’ and ‘practico-inert’, Sartre follows
Nietzsche in acknowledging the seminal role of language in constituting subjectivity.
His early work defines language as ‘being-for-other from the outset’ (BN 493) that
extends to ‘all expressive phenomena’ (BN 494), including gestures, body language,
mannerisms and dress, but it is in his work after 1945 that he stresses our essential
situatedness in language which he now describes as the ‘objectification of a class, the
reflection of conflicts, latent or declared, and the particular manifestation of alienation’
(SM 113). In Saint Genet, language is said to become Genet’s ‘most inward reality
and the most rigorous expression of his exile’ (SG 276), while, in What Is Literature?,
writing and words are seen as the essential medium for the expression of freedom in
communication with others. By the time of Sartre’s later period, self and language have
become deeply and irrevocably intertwined:
 
The Decentred Self 73

significations come from man and from his project, but they are inscribed
everywhere in things and in the order of things. Everything at every instant is
signifying and significations reveal to us men and relations among men across the
structures of our society. But these significations appear to us only insofar as we
ourselves are signifying. (SM 156)

Sartre’s autobiography can be seen in this light as a deliberate attempt on his part to
theorize this dialectical interdependence of the subject and language by showing how
identity is formed through its expression in words. In Lyotard’s (1986: xii) view,
Sartre is one of the first to grasp the ‘ontological thickness’ of words in this text and to
appreciate their power over the subject who is ‘spoken’ by them. Sartre realized that
‘words could not be dissipated in the transparency of a signifying intention’. His later
texts in particular (that still predate the main wave of poststructuralist texts in the
1960s and 1970s) can be seen in this way to directly anticipate the decentred subject
popularized by poststructuralists. For instance, he accepts Lacan’s interpretation of the
Unconscious as the ‘discourse of the Other’:

As far as I’m concerned, Lacan has clarified the unconscious as a discourse which
separates through language or, if you prefer, as a counterfinality of speech: Verbal
structures are organized as a structure of the practico-inert through the act of
speaking. These structures express or constitute intentions that determine me
without being mine. (1977: 10:97)

In Search for a Method, Sartre reiterates the linguistic encoding of the self, showing
the ways in which language and culture (as constituent features of the practico-inert)
‘are not inside the individual like stamps registered by his nervous system. It is the
individual who is inside culture and inside language (SM 113). ‘Man is for himself and
for others’, he asserts, ‘a signifying being . . . a creator of signs’ (SM 152). He develops
this deconstructive impetus further still in the Critique writing openly of ‘acts without
an author’ (CDR 152) and ‘constructions without a constructor’ (CDR 754).
Although Sartre agrees with Lacan and presages poststructuralist accounts in
recognizing that ‘structure produces behaviour’, he warns that we should not pass over
‘the reverse side of the dialectic in silence’ (1977: 9:86): ‘Man can only “be spoken” to
the extent that he speaks’ (FI 2). Commenting on the rising tide of anti-humanism in
an interview in 1966, he observes that the subject as ‘a sort of substantial I, or central
category, always more or less given . . . has been dead for a long time’. What is missing
in the anti-humanist discourse, however, is how ‘the subject . . . constitutes itself from
a basis anterior to itself by a continual process of interiorization and re-exteriorization’
(1966: 91). Although the self is penetrated and intersected by social and historical
forces, it does not lose its existential signature and trace for it maintains its capacity
to go beyond immediate circumstances and, whatever its limitations are, to ‘make
something out of what is made of [it]’ (1974a: 35):

Totally conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his work, conditioned
in his very feelings and thoughts, it is he [the proletarian] who freely gives to
74 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

the proletariat a future of relentless humiliation or one of conquest and victory,

according as he chooses to be resigned or revolutionary. And it’s for this choice
that he is responsible. (1977: 2:27–8)

(iii) A nascent subjectivity – Nietzschean style and Sartrean

authenticity
Our opinion of ourself, however, which we have arrived at by this erroneous path,
the so-called ego is thenceforth a fellow worker in the construction of our character
and our destiny.
(Nietzsche, Daybreak 115)

Against eliminativist accounts that Nietzsche simply denied the self, it is clear that he
was obsessed with (his) self from a young age. Between the ages of thirteen and twenty-
four, he produced at least six autobiographies, books he wrote in order to discover who
he was in a bid to plot his existence as ‘the sequent development of an autonomous self ’
(Blue 2016: 3). In his final phase, he returned to this autobiographical task of discovery
and projection in Ecce Homo. In notes written in 1867, he assesses the pros and cons
of self-portraiture and self-observation: ‘it deceives . . . [it] inhibits energy: it separates
and breaks apart’; ‘Self-observation as a developmental illness’; ‘Instinct is best’, ‘our
acts must occur unconsciously’, ‘know yourself through actions, not by watching’. The
only advantage he lists for self-observation is as ‘a weapon against outside influences’
(KGW 1.4.489). For Nietzsche, one always invents, imagines or performs a self in a
process of ‘mnemotechnics’ (BGE 68) even as one attempts to remember it accurately.
It is wrong to think that Nietzsche excludes creative agency and the formation of
a ‘revised self ’ from his picture of the individual, for without these, his critique of
moral values and his project of ‘self-overcoming’ makes little sense. However much
our natures are given, we are responsible for cultivating our character, though this,
he recognizes, can be perilously difficult: ‘Giving style to one’s character – a great and
rare art’ (GS 290). Rejecting idealist notions of free will as a human conceit, Nietzsche
envisages us as less the heroic captains of our fate but more like oarsmen, capable of
heroic self-movement but also swept along in a sometimes cruel but glorious sea.18
Although Nietzsche avoids talk of conscious agency regarding intentional action and
describes acts in terms of a ‘quantum of energy’ that discharges itself (GS 360) within
processes, such as ‘instinct’, ‘drive’ or other biological ‘agencies’, he argued against the
mechanization of such processes. He speaks pretentiously in Ecce Homo of his life as a
‘destiny’, but this includes responsibility for realizing our potential and underscores not
only his fatalism but also his existential resolve.19
Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerian injunction to ‘become those we are – human beings
who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves’
(GS 335) involves liberating oneself from circumstances that have limited one’s view
of the world, ‘the musty agreeable nooks into which preference and prejudice, youth,
origin, the accidents of people and books or even exhaustion from wandering seem
to have banished us’ (BGE 44). Nietzsche finds the metaphysical concept of character
 
The Decentred Self 75

as unchanging or constant as implausible because of the constant becoming of our

underlying drives (D 560): ‘you are always another person’ (GS 307). Transformation
is thus a key element of self-overcoming – Zarathustra is transformed into a child (Z
P2), in the chorus in The Birth of Tragedy one sees ‘oneself transformed before one’s
eyes’ (BT 8) and change is the key element in a process of becoming oneself (GS 335).
Nietzsche is in tune with the existentialist notion of the self as something one achieves
or becomes. The self arises from an activity, and since this activity can be lesser or
better performed, it can be more or less adequately formed. As the self is a relation
(like the pour-soi) and not a substance, it arises through self-relation or reflexivity.
This reflexivity develops into more complex structures that are built out of drives both
by biological and historical processes. In ‘giving style to oneself ’ (GS 290), Nietzsche
proposes a next step to this reflexivity of creating ‘one’s own, ownmost ideal’ (GS 335).
Nietzsche’s position on the self, as Richardson (2020: 401) observes, is often
‘unsettled or ambiguous’ as there is a deep ambiguity as to where exactly to locate
the self in the reflexivity he celebrates. This ambiguity plays out in a series of three
oppositions that Nietzsche ‘the therapist’ attempts to resolve and sublimate as a
complex balance and interplay of opposing factors.

Self-affirmation versus self-denial

There is a constant tension in Nietzsche between expressions of self-affirmation and
self-denial. Although he preached evangelically against asceticism, he was himself
prone to its Stoic, self-abnegating logic.20 For Nietzsche, contempt of self is necessary
for self-overcoming since it draws out what is noble in one’s self:

This secret self-ravishment, this artist’s cruelty, this delight in imposing a form
upon oneself as a hard, recalcitrant suffering . . . [is] the womb of all ideal and
imaginative phenomena and perhaps beauty itself. – After all, what would be
‘beautiful’ if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly
had not first said to itself: I am ugly? (GM 2.18)

Disgust can produce positive effects as when Zarathustra admits that there is ‘much
filth in the world’ but ‘nausea itself creates wings and water-divining powers’ (Z
3.12.14). Contempt is a vertical emotion that elevates providing distance and height
and giving the free spirit a ‘bird-like freedom, bird-like exuberance, and a third thing
in which curiosity is united with a tender contempt’ (HH P4).
This is, of course, offset by the affirmation of self that Nietzsche locates in his
positive avatars, the free spirit, Dionysus and the Übermensch, but his search for a
‘curiosity united with a tender contempt’ reveals a sublimating logic at play. This is how
Manschot (2021: 88) interprets Nietzsche in attributing to him a project of ‘positive
asceticism’, a perspective situated between Epicureanism and Stoicism that incorporates
a form of self-discipline based on ‘a powerful “no” and an exuberant “yes”’. Against
pure Epicureanism which can be too idyllic, Arcadian or ‘typically decadent’ (A 30),
Nietzschean Epicureanism is ‘a reflective, refined way of living hedonistically – not
a flat, blind, impulsive hedonism that aimlessly follows impulses but a serene ability
76 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

to be gladdened by life because nature invites you to be so’ (2021: 92). This runs in
conjunction with a Nietzschean Stoicism that adopts certain ascetic practices as an art
of hardening oneself as a protection from external temptations, incorporating a more
rationalistic approach to morality in terms of living in tune with the cosmos.

Multiplicity versus unity

Although Nietzsche was praised by the poststructuralists for multiplying the subject
and for shattering the unity of the transcendental ego, his philosophy plots a complex
dialectic between multiplicity and unity. In the Nachlass, for instance, he argues in
several places for the idea of ‘the subject as multiplicity’: ‘The assumption of one
subject is perhaps not necessary: perhaps it is just as allowable to assume a multiplicity
of subjects, whose interplay and struggle lie at the basis of our thinking and of our
consciousness generally’ (WP 490). He refers to the ‘perspectival illusion’ of unity, even
the ‘guide of the body’, which we think of as a unified organism with a single purpose,
‘shows a tremendous multiplicity’ (WP 518). Elsewhere, by contrast, he conceives of
the body as a self-relating unity (a drive unit). It ‘does not say I but does I’ (Z 1.4), a
unified centre of agency beneath consciousness without words:

If I have anything of a unity within me, it certainly doesn’t lie in the conscious I and
in feeling, willing, thinking, but somewhere else: in the preserving, appropriating,
expelling, watchful prudence of my whole organism, of which my conscious I is
only a tool. (LN 2)

Although, for Nietzsche, ‘[a]ll unity is unity only as organization and interplay’ (WP
561) and ‘[t]he “I” (which is not one with the unitary management of our being!) is
indeed only a conceptual synthesis’ (WP 371), he highlights the necessity of imposing
a ‘single taste’ (GS 290) if only to provide a simplified version of oneself in public as an
instrument of communication (D 182, GS 356). He presents a positive characterization
of the philosopher as comprehensive and multi-perspectival, a ‘wholeness in
multiplicity’ (BGE 212), not as a fragmented dissolution of identity.
Nietzsche’s principal lesson from his fragmentation of the self is not to give up on
unity but to work to make, so far as we can, a single thing out of our multiplicity, albeit
the right kind of unity.21 The philosopher of the future will incorporate all aspects of
his drives into a productive unity, a witness ‘to one will, one health’ (GM P2). Viewing
fragmentation as a problem for the individual (Z 2.20) or for a culture (UM 1.1, Z
2.14), he praises Goethe’s belief that ‘everything is redeemed in the whole’ (TI 9.49) for
it is true that ‘a person is in the context of the whole’ (TI 6.8). Goethe was Nietzsche’s
paradigmatic example of greatness since he organized the multiplicity of his drives
into a whole or form of ‘completeness’: ‘What he willed, was totality; he fought the
separation of reason, sensibility, feeling, will . . . he disciplined himself to wholeness, he
created himself ’ (TI 9.49) Art is not simply the immersion in a world of illusion since
when the artist ‘forgets himself ’ in rapture, it is on the basis of an emergent subjectivity
in the process of articulation immersed in worldly practice: ‘Every artist knows how
far any feeling of letting himself go his most natural state is – the free ordering, placing,
 
The Decentred Self 77

disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration” – and how strictly and subtly he
obeys a thousand laws precisely then’ (BGE 188).
Nietzsche thus does not seek complete disintegration – ‘I sought a new center’
(WP 417) – but a new individuality based on a reflexive understanding of social and
historical practices as well as an ability to recognize and sublimate one’s drives. As
Richardson (2020: 317–22) notes, freedom is an adaptive skill (dunamis) which has
evolved through biological and social processes and which has three principal stages or
phases that map on to Nietzsche’s schema of animal–human–superhuman where each
involves a certain capacity or skill and a conception of itself as free. Animal freedom
can be found in all organisms and amounts to drive unity, whereas human freedom
involves a ‘second-order standpoint’ or self-conception as a ‘sovereign individual’. This,
in Nietzsche’s words, is ‘a true consciousness of power and freedom’ of the individual
as ‘the possessor of a long, unbreakable will’, without which he is but the slave ‘of
momentary affect and desire’ (GM 2.2). The freedom of the Übermensch, ‘freedom
by genealogy’, deploys the wissenschaften of psychology and history as indispensable
tools for a revaluation of our values, a form of demystification for which ‘we need a
knowledge of the conditions and circumstances out of which [our values] have grown,
under which they have developed and shifted’ (GM 6). Exposing controlling forces
makes a new freedom possible. With this knowledge at her disposal, the superhuman
represents, in Richardson’s (2020: 416) words, ‘a new kind of self, crystallized more
fully out, as a full-fledged thing, in the ontological space between its parts – its drives
– and wholes of which it’s a part – the group, the society, the species’.

Centrifugal (instinct) versus centripetal (reason)

In understanding Nietzschean freedom, we should not over-rationalize it and
foreground Apollo at the expense of Nietzsche’s chosen Dionysus, forgetting the central
importance of affect and rapture in his aesthetic alongside the more reflexive pursuit
of the ‘intellectual conscience’ and ‘genealogical history’. Nietzsche wants to advance,
not obviate, freedom by naturalizing (severing it from the metaphysical subject) and
historicizing it, conceptualizing freedom genealogically as a particular historical
phenomenon or development. Our animal freedom has evolved in conjunction with a
conception of how we view ourselves as free subjects, but it is clear that Nietzsche values
this freedom and laments the loss of its vital Dionysian energies under Christianity’s
‘internalization of man’ and its suppressing of instinct. There is a double movement in
Nietzschean freedom of in and out, doing and reflecting, of de-egoization (multiplicity)
and of reflective unity (the intellectual conscience), but Nietzsche makes clear his
preference for instinct over reason. In his attempted sublimation of the two, sensuous
activity enjoys the lion’s share of his attention, with conscious thought conceived as
secondary and derivative: ‘So long as life is ascending, happiness equals instinct’ (TI
2.11). In Ecce Homo, he warns against the conscious adoption of ‘great imperatives’
as an obstacle to self-overcoming: ‘That one becomes, what one is, presupposes that
one is furthest from suspecting what one is . . . One must keep the whole surface of
consciousness – consciousness is a surface – clean of all great imperatives’ (EH 2.9).
Although Nietzsche’s middle phase exudes a more reflexive spirit, he is otherwise fairly
78 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

dismissive of rational reflection of the conscious Ich in relation to the ‘greater wisdom’ of
the bodily Selbst and pre-reflective subconscious desires: ‘Before the judgment occurs,
the process of assimilation must already have been done: thus here too there lies an
intellectual activity that doesn’t enter consciousness’ (WP 532). Nietzsche recognizes
another level of thinking than the conscious, an unconscious and wordless thinking
which accounts for much of what the self is: ‘The entire full deep belief in subject and
predicate or in cause and effect is stuck into every judgment’ (WP 550) and ‘sunk “into
the unconscious”’ (LN 104). We should, he advises, ‘Not wish to see too soon’: ‘As long as
one lives through an experience, one must surrender to the experience and shut one’s
eyes instead of becoming an observer immediately. For that would disturb the good
digestion of the experience: instead of wisdom one would acquire indigestion’ (WS
297). In Humean terms, our ideas are much weaker than our impressions: ‘Thoughts
are the shadows of our sensations – always darker, emptier, simpler than these’ (GS
179). The body remains Nietzsche’s prime focus in the project of self-overcoming and
rapture is the key element in this. For Nietzsche, rapture is a form of self-exceeding,
an affirmative projectivity in which one ‘goes out of himself ’. Nietzsche’s paean to the
Dionysian is a call for the intensification of the affects: ‘In the Dionysian state . . . the
entire affect-system is aroused and heightened’, there is an ‘inability not to react’, one
‘enters into every skin, into every affect’ (TI 9.10). The ecstatic produces the highest
possible intensification of experience in which, in Heidegger’s (1987: 1:14) words, ‘the
entire emotional system is alerted and intensified so that it discharges all its powers
of representation, imitation, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry
and playacting conjointly’. Art is especially important in the production of affects, our
‘greatest natural powers’ (WP 386), and reminds us of our animal vigour: ‘it is . . . a
rousing of the animal function through pictures and wishes of intensified life’ (WP
802).
Although Heidegger charges Nietzsche with an ‘inverted Platonism’ in his
glorification of affect and sensuality, it is more accurate to view this in terms of a
projected sublimation on Nietzsche’s part. His goal of ‘giving style to oneself ’ is
the sublimation of the drives – ‘mastery over the passions, not their weakening or
extirpation’ (WP 933), giving the free play over one’s desires ‘which knows how to take
these magnificent monsters into service’ (WP 933). Nobility embodies a naturalness
(in a non-Stoic sense) of being attuned to one’s drives rather than controlled by reason
(TI 2.5). The free spirit experiences passions as a wild nature and the normal state as
‘tranquilly beautiful’ (D 502), aiming for the ‘spiritualization’ of passion rather than its
extirpation (TI 5.1). Passions can be ‘stupid’, ‘destructive’ or ‘ugly’, Nietzsche warns, like
the passions Wagner influenced (WC 6), or they can be ennobling and sublime, such as
when passion is spiritualized into love (D 27). In line with his deconstructionist logic,
he blends conscious and subconscious together in a shifting and dynamic dialectic.
This consists both in a ‘losing of oneself ’ in rapture and a ‘gathering of oneself ’ within
the more reflective intellectual conscience. This works on a centrifugal more than
centripetal level, though Nietzsche seeks a healthy sublimation of the two in dissolving
metaphysical oppositions – ‘“being conscious” is not in any decisive sense the opposite
of what is instinctive’ (BGE 3) – even if language ‘will not get over its awkwardness and
will continue to talk of opposites where there are only degrees and many subtleties of
 
The Decentred Self 79

graduation’ (BGE 24). The Dionysian and the Apollonian intersect for Nietzsche and,
though he valorizes the ‘greater wisdom of the body’, he does not efface conscious
thought altogether. Genealogical history and the intellectual conscience can, in the
form of a therapeutic praxis, enable us some awareness of the complexities of our
unconscious motivations where emotions deceive us as to their genuine motivation.22
It is, for Nietzsche, a false dichotomy, after all, to separate reason and passion: ‘the
misunderstanding of passion and reason, as if the latter were an independent entity
and not rather a system of relations between various passions and desires; and as if
every passion did not possess its quantum of reason’ (WP 387). He makes it clear that
we cannot survive by looking directly at the Dionysian but must create the Apollonian
veil of the aesthetic. This is the inner contradiction of ‘the terrible joy’ of Dionysian
experience. The self must be lost in Nature but remain intact to have the experience as
a form of comprehension. In gaining itself, the self must somehow lose itself, becoming
submerged but not entirely lost in the Dionysian.23
In short, Nietzsche’s affirmative reconstruction of the ‘soul hypothesis’ (BGE 12)
displays a sublimated Dionysian logic (inversion leading to displacement) that elides
firm differences between reason and passion, conscious and subconscious. This relates
transversally to the other two ecologies of self. Nietzschean freedom works on two
levels in terms of the body and the social.24 To overcome the problem of fragmentation,
Nietzsche finds value in unification, creating a ‘new center’ (WP 417) that orders the
multiple drives and ‘spiritualizes’ them into a healthy configuration or alliance. But
although unification is valuable insofar as it makes a ‘one’ that is greater by virtue of
the many that it unites, it also needs to preserve the difference in that many. Each
part should be not just ‘one more of the same’ but also contribute something its own.25
As we will see in the next chapter, Nietzsche’s idea of ‘wholeness in multiplicity’ (BGE
212) feeds into his wider ontological thinking, which I characterize (following Deleuze
and Guattari) as a ‘monistic pluralism’. His ‘self out of enveloping other’ addresses the
problem of assimilation, that is, the challenge in making a self is to crystallize it out
of the social matrix in which it is originally set. Like Sartre’s observations on seriality,
Nietzsche recognizes that when we merge into the group, we most often lose our
individuality: ‘Nothing is rarer than a personal action. A class, a rank, a Volks-Rasse,
an environment, an accident – all express themselves sooner in as work or deed than
a person’ (WP 886). Cultures and customs make people sick or healthy just like the
environment or food can, and when social mores are restrictive, we become ‘entwined
in an austere shirt of duty’ (BGE 226) and unable to express the creative impulses of
our will to power.
Sartre’s defence of existential authenticity follows many of the same paths of
ambiguity and sublimation as Nietzsche’s did, conceiving freedom not as an ontological
predicate or metaphysical property but as a becoming or activity, something the subject
does more than has:

freedom represents something that doesn’t exist but that gradually creates itself,
something that has always been present in me and that will leave me only when
I die. And I think that all other men are like me, but that the degree of awareness
and the clarity with which this freedom appears to them varies according to the
80 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

circumstances, according to their origins, their development, and their knowledge.

(in Beauvoir 1984: 361)

At the heart of Sartrean freedom lies the imagination which appears as the correlative
of the freedom of human consciousness, and it is this which helps Sartre to link
his interest in art to his overriding preoccupation with human liberty and social
commitment. However, this carries a certain ambiguity: on the one hand, imagination
enables the self to overcome its engulfment in reality and to escape the travails of the
practico-inert, being thus vital to any project of change; yet it can also alienate the very
liberty it makes possible, leading the individual to deny the real and to value fantasy
above reality.26 Imagination is the dynamic force in the process of becoming, allowing
us to see things differently from habituated and encoded significations and to move
beyond static conceptions of ‘being’ or character, but a force that can also lead us away
from the world and the reality of our situation.
As early as the 1920s, Sartre eschewed a dry conceptualism with the appeal to
‘feelings’ and ‘affect’, following very much a Nietzschean course. His phenomenology is
a form of empiricism that accepts and seeks intuitive knowledge.27 Although there are
strong continuities between Sartre’s early and later thinking, there are shifts of emphasis,
however, and this is evident in the idea of self-transparency which was seen as essential
to existential freedom in his early works but fades into the background as his work
progresses.28 In the Critique, Sartre modifies the self-transparency of the pour-soi of
the early phenomenology into a pre-reflective comprehension of ‘the translucidity of
praxis to itself ’ (CDR 74), a ‘totalizing grasp of any praxis in so far as it is intentionally
produced by its author or authors’ (CDR 776). Although his emphasis is now much
more practical than theoretical and so less prone to charges of Cartesian mystification,
he still allows a transparency that is accessible to conscious reflection. This he uses to
access the lived experience of individuals in his existential biographies of Baudelaire,
Mallarmé and Genet, involving a form of comprehension that is holistic, relating whole
to whole which ‘it is possible to comprehend . . . not to explain it. At most one can make
it felt’ (1981b: 1685). Although praxis ‘is self-explanatory and transparent to itself, it is
not necessarily expressible in words’ (CDR 93).
Looking back in an interview in the 1970s, Sartre felt that Being and Nothingness
‘dabbled’ in ‘apparently non-rational processes’ but didn’t analyse them deeply enough:

My early work was a rationalist philosophy of consciousness. It was all very well
for me to dabble in apparently non-rational processes in the individual, the fact
remains that L’Etre et le néant is a monument of rationality. But in the end it
becomes an irrationalism, because it cannot account rationally for those processes
which are ‘below’ consciousness and which are also rational, but lived as irrational.
(1974a: 41)

In his early phenomenology, Sartre suggests that authenticity and freedom of the self
can be found in what he terms ‘purifying reflection’. Whereas impure reflection is
contaminated by the desire to make myself an object, purifying reflection is a form of
reflexivity that can reveal to us our freedom and image of ourselves as if we were seeing
 
The Decentred Self 81

ourselves in a mirror. This is the ‘simple presence’ of the consciousness reflecting to the
consciousness reflected on a kind of ‘reflective “reflection-reflecting”’ (BN 219). The
nothingness that consciousness is cannot be known to pre-reflective consciousness nor
grasped as an object by impure reflection but ‘is accessible only to purifying reflection’
(BN 279), allowing us to grasp all the reflective distortions and mystifications, often
formed in childhood, that keep us mired in patterns of bad faith.
In terms of our emotional life, purifying reflection involves uncovering ‘ulterior
motives’ of various emotions and moral sentiments and their strategic deployment in
negotiating the world around us.29 Emotion, in Sartre’s view, is about transforming the
world. Psychologists studying emotion ‘try to confront their subject as the physicist
confronts his’ (STE 1), working from the essential principle ‘that their enquiries should
begin first of all from facts’ (STE 2). This commits the error of treating consciousness
as a physical thing, falling prey to the bewitchment of the ego and thus losing the
experiential quality, magical nature and phenomenological dynamic of emotion. Sartre
is aware of the need to explain emotional behaviour as involving both a genuine belief
in the projected quality and an awareness of its falsity and allows an escape route from
the captivity and magical hold of the emotions only through rare moments of ‘pure
reflection’ where the subject apprehends her feelings as involving some form of self-
deception. The aim of this purifying reflection, as of Nietzsche’s intellectual conscience,
is to discern whether our captivating emotions are ‘life-enhancing’ or ‘life-stultifying’.
An offer from John Huston in 1958 to write a screenplay about Freud led Sartre to a
deeper appreciation of the unconscious and a reconsideration of Freud’s writings. In his
notion of ‘lived experience’ (le vécu) developed after the 1960s, he acknowledged that
there are elements of psychological life that remain hidden from rational awareness:
‘There is, indeed, an unconscious lodged in the heart of consciousness’ (1988: 83).
They can be understood metaphorically but not ‘named or known’ (1974a: 42). The
introduction of ‘lived experience’, as Sartre describes, was a refinement of pre-reflective
consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness used to
enrich the subconscious and situational aspects of consciousness that were not fully
elaborated in his early work:

What I call le vécu is precisely the whole of the dialectical process of psychic
life, a process that remains opaque to itself for it is a constant totalization, and a
totalization that cannot be conscious of what it is. (1977: 10:108)

As ‘the equivalent of unconscious-conscious’, le vécu no longer shares the self-

transparency of consciousness, Sartre maintains, but involves forgetting, opacity,
unselfconsciousness and a lack of self-knowledge. Even his previous sanctuary of
infallible self-awareness, the pre-reflective cogito, is now opened up to external
influence: ‘presence to self for each of us possesses a rudimentary structure of praxis. . .
. At the very level of nonthetic consciousness, intuition is conditioned by individual
history’ (FI 148).
Sartre’s notion of ‘lived experience’, in Flynn’s (2014: 221, 394, 294) view, denotes ‘a
certain functional equivalent of the unconscious’ and reveals the ‘ambiguous mixture
of equally deep attraction and repulsion’ with the idea of the unconscious within his
82 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

thinking. His growing acknowledgement of a quasi-unconscious dimension to our

lived experience enables him ‘to appeal to “Freudian” concepts without resorting to the
opaque realm of the unconscious’. Striving for a dialectical account of lived experience
as an amalgam of ‘conscious-unconscious’, he presents self-awareness as ‘life aware of
itself ’, without implying any thetic knowledge or consciousness. In the case of Flaubert,
this involves a comprehension of ‘how Flaubert did not know himself and how at the
same time he understood himself admirably’ (1977a: 127–8). In the transition from
consciousness to praxis to lived experience, we witness a certain ‘clouding’ of the
translucency that marked Sartrean consciousness from the outset, as Flynn (2014:
410) notes, but not a full reversal of his early opposition to the unconscious. As Sartre
described his purpose:

I want to give the idea of a whole whose surface is completely conscious, while the
rest is opaque to this consciousness and, without being part of the unconscious,
is hidden from you. . . . For Flaubert, the lived is when he speaks of illuminations
that he has and which suddenly leave him in the dark so that he cannot find his
way. He is in the dark before and after, but there is a moment in which he has seen
or understood something about himself. (1977a: 128–9)

When asked in 1971 if purifying reflection and therefore authenticity were impossible,
Sartre responded, ‘[y]ou know that I never described this kind of reflection, I said that
it could exist, but I only showed examples of accessory reflection. And later I discovered
that nonaccessory reflection was no different from the accessory and immediate way
of looking at things but was the critical work one can do on oneself during one’s entire
life, through praxis’ (1977a: 121–2). Sartre describes this critical undertaking in regard
to oneself guided by ‘praxis’ as a kind of ‘katharsis’ (BN 219) in which we ‘turn back
upon ourselves’ and catch consciousness on the wing without objectifying the ego (BN
222). Like Nietzschean freedom, Sartrean freedom is lived in the main pre-reflectively
gravitating more towards the affective Dionysian than the structuring Apollo but
aiming ultimately towards a sublimation of the two.30 Preontological comprehension is
a valuable source of primitive, infallible awareness for Sartre (like Nietzschean instinct)
that appropriates features of the Freudian unconscious, unveiling an immediate non-
cognitive access to the world. Practices of de-egoization, Sartre attests, must rid
consciousness of any ontological mirage of self, creating an ‘original temporality’ (BN
222) in a unity of experience with the body that, like Nietzschean drives that interpret
and engage in reflexivity, has its own form of wisdom that belongs to the structures of
‘non-thetic self-consciousness’. Purifying or ‘kathartic’ praxis is to be found most of all
in the activity of play which Nietzsche and Sartre place at the centre of their philosophy.

A playful wisdom: Homo Ludens

It is strange to take everything so seriously.
(Nietzsche, KGW 4.1.6)
 
The Decentred Self 83

Nietzsche characterizes gay science as a ‘saturnalia’ of the mind (GS P1). It is a light-
hearted or playful pursuit of truth (GS 382) opposed to the scholarly goal of certainty
(GS 366). Just as the Roman festival of Saturnalia exhibited the contingency of
social mores by temporarily permitting their contravention, Nietzsche opposes the
carnivalesque spirit of The Gay Science to the view of ‘moralities and religions’ that
attempts to ground our practices in timeless, authoritative norms that are independent
of culture and history. For Nietzsche, the world or ‘beautiful chaos of existence’ (GS
277) that was previously taken to be an organized collection of purposes appears as
beautiful precisely because its lacks any intrinsic values or purposes that may constrain
human life. Since many aspects of existence are contingent or transformable, affirming
them means modifying them so that they please us aesthetically: ‘For one thing is
needful: that a human being should attain satisfaction with himself – be it through
this or that poetry or art’ (GS 290). ‘Giving style’ to oneself is a two-way process of
deconstructing and reconstructing. First one has to gain knowledge of everything
that is ‘lawful and necessary’ in nature as well as everything particular and distinctive
in oneself. Hitherto, Nietzsche claims, ‘all valuations and ideals have been built on
ignorance of physics or in contradiction to it’ (GS 335). To construct well requires us
to have knowledge of the materials deployed and it is with such knowledge that we
can take the second step of giving style by shaping it in accordance with an aesthetic
ideal. The end product is less important than the activity or process itself of imagining,
sculpting and transforming: ‘In the end, when the work is complete, it becomes clear
how it was the force of a single taste that ruled and shaped everything great and small
– whether the taste was good or bad means less than one may think; it’s enough that it
was one taste!’ (GS 290).
From his earliest to his final writings, Nietzsche placed play at the centre of his
affirmative thinking. Play is associated directly with creation, a cosmological game in
which the events of the universe occur, like with a child who builds and scatters her
playthings (BT 24). He consistently associates the child with innocence and creativity
(UM 2.1, BGE 57) and urges us to emulate this – in the ‘genuine man, a child is
hidden: it wants to play’ (Z 1.18). The laughter of the child is an antidote to Christian
seriousness, where to ‘live and laugh gaily’ (GS 324) is the mark of one who has
learned to live without ‘metaphysical consolations’ (BT A7).31 In the passage ‘On the
Three Metamorphoses’, Zarathustra exclaims that the child’s play makes possible a
transvaluation of values and a passage to a higher level of moral thinking. Where
the camel could only follow rules given to it (passive nihilism) and the lion was only
capable of saying no (reactive nihilism), the child playfully creates its own values
(active nihilism): ‘The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game,
a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes. For the play of creation, my
brothers, a sacred Yes is needed: the spirit now wills its own will, and he who had been
lost to the world now conquers his own world’ (Z 1.8). Zarathustra himself, as teacher,
is a ‘prelude to better players’ and it is the Übermensch who, as the superior player,
masters the play of forces to give meaning to herself and to the earth (Z 3.12.20).
Although the idea of play plays a lesser role in Nietzsche’s later work and he offers
no explicit typology of it, he draws upon three interrelated concepts of play. First,
Schauspiel involves theatrical play and performance where we are all actors with an
84 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

assortment of masks and where the most highly valued responses are joyful laughter
and dance (HH 34). This takes the place of ‘metaphysical comforts’ in compensating for
the horrors of existence and becoming. Second, Nietzsche conceives play as Weltspiel,
the play of the world, and a play of forces in which nothing stands fast (WP 1067). The
individual is himself a ‘play of forces’ and his task as self-legislator is to create the rules
for this play: ‘It is a measure of the degree of strength of will to what extent one can
do without meaning in things, to what extent one can endure to live in a meaningless
world because one organizes a small portion of it oneself’ (WP 585A). Finally, Kinderspiel
denotes the play of the child, the most important sense of play that animates the other
two. This is ‘serious play’ but a kind of seriousness qualitatively different than that of
the metaphysical comforters who preach salvation. The seriousness of the child is a
form that recognizes the contingency of the world while fully affirming its own play:
‘“Play”, the useless – as the ideal of him who is overfull of strength, as “childlike”, the
“childlikeness” of God, pais paizon’ (WP 797).
In parallel with Nietzsche, the principal aim of Sartre’s existentialism is to abandon
‘the spirit of seriousness’. The spirit of seriousness, he contends, ‘regards values as
transcendent givens that are independent of human subjectivity, and it transfers the
character of being “desirable” from the ontological structure of things to their simple
material constitution’ (BN 809). The theme of role playing and dramaturgy forms
an important element in Sartre’s life, from his childhood days acting out the hero
Pardaillan, to his phenomenological analysis of impersonation, to his descriptions of
inauthentic role playing in his examples of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. In his
play Kean, he addresses what Diderot referred to as ‘the paradox of the actor’ – who is
the person behind the role? To answer this, he distinguishes the actor from the player.
The player returns home after the performance ‘whereas the actor plays himself every
second of his life . . . He is no longer able to recognize himself, no longer knows who
he is. And finally is no one’ (1976: 243). He revisits this question through his analysis
of bad faith in Being and Nothingness. In bad faith, one separates and opposes the two
poles of our ontological and existential condition, facticity and transcendence, whereas
‘[t]hese two aspects of human reality are, in truth – and ought to be – capable of being
validly coordinated’ (BN 99). Authenticity, by contrast, must be understood in terms
that do not collapse or conflate the two poles of facticity and transcendence but take
into consideration the interplay and ‘valid coordination’ between them as a matter of
degree. It embodies celebrating the perpetual and continuous play that is at the heart
of transcendence and facticity and all decision-making.32
In his War Diaries, Sartre repeats Schiller’s remark that ‘man is fully a man only
when he plays’, asking ‘[h]ow can we fail to see that play, by its very nature, excludes
the very idea of seriousness?’ Anticipating his analysis of bad faith, he contrasts play
with the seriousness and analytical reason of the engineer: ‘“game” . . . is the happy
metamorphosis of the contingent into the gratuitous . . . why the assumption of oneself
is itself a game’ (WD 313–14). Play represents, symbolizes and manifests the ‘first
principle’ of human freedom:

It’s not possible to grasp oneself as consciousness without thinking that life is a
game. For what is a game, after all, but an activity of which man is the first origin:
 
The Decentred Self 85

whose principles man himself ordains and which can have consequences only
according to the principles ordained. But as soon as man grasps himself as free,
and wishes to use his freedom, all his activity is a game: he’s its first principle;
he escapes the world by his nature; he himself ordains the value and rules of his
acts, and agrees to pay up only according to the rules he has himself ordained and
defined. Whence the diminished reality of the world and the disappearance of
seriousness. (WD 326)

Towards the end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre suggests there is a way out of bad
faith33 and the contradictory desire to become God through play, an activity in which
we are the ‘first origin’ and in which we set our own rules (BN 753). In the activity of
play

the function of the action is to manifest and presentify to itself the absolute freedom
that is the person’s very being. This particular type of project, which has freedom
for its foundation and its aim, deserves special study. Indeed, it differs radically
from all the others in aiming at a radically different type of being. We ought to
explain in detail its relations with the project to-be-God that we have taken to be
the deep structure of human-reality. But we cannot pursue this study here; in fact
it belongs to an ethics. (BN 754)

Sartre associates play with a kind of purifying praxis that works against seriousness:
‘play, in opposing itself to the spirit of seriousness, seems to be the least possessive
attitude’ (BN 752). The activity of play leads to psychological instants that ‘provide
the clearest and most moving image of our freedom’ (BN 622), moments of ‘a twofold
nihilation’ (BN 572) where past and present, self and world change together in new
directions.
Sartre develops the idea of authenticity further in Notebooks for an Ethics where he
describes it as ‘a conversion from the project to-be-for-itself-in-itself . . . to a project
of unveiling and creation’ (NE 482). The goal of his freedom ethic is that ‘the only
meaningful project is that of doing (not that of being) . . . authenticity consists in
refusing any quest for being’ (NE 475). He reaffirms this just before his death in Hope
Now: ‘I think there is a modality other than the primary modality. . . . It’s the ethical
modality. And the ethical modality implies . . . that we stop wanting to have being as
a goal, we no longer want to be God. . . . We’re looking for something else’ (HN 59).
Hence, Sartrean authenticity is not a serious project but a playful one: ‘Sincerity is
excluded therefore because it bears on what I am. Authenticity has to do with what I
will. Sincerity presents itself as contemplation and an announcement of what I am . . .
[A]uthentic reflection is a willing of what I will’ (NE 479).
The quintessential expression of play is produced through art: ‘the artist is, on the
one hand, the man who chooses really to create imaginary objects, but he is also and
above all (if we place ourselves in the ontological point of view) the man who chooses
to create imaginarily the real world; he is the one for whom perception is already
unreal creation’ (NE 554).34 Sartre suggests that it is only through art and play that
we are able to overcome the separation of subject (pour-soi) and object (en-soi), the
86 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

aesthetic object (e.g. the novel) representing an end product and grand fusion that
is ‘fully myself and fully beyond myself ’ (WL 53). Unlike the psychological freedom
which torments what it lacks (i.e. being), the freedom of art uplifts: ‘[t]he recognition
of freedom by itself is joy’ (WL 52). Art embodies an authentic response to the spirit of
seriousness as a form of ‘serious play’ (akin to Nietzsche’s Kinderspiel) in which the self
is taken up into a transcendent world of immanence and rapture from which a return
to normality, mundanity and seriousness can be crushing:

Aesthetic contemplation is an induced dream and the passage to the real is an

authentic awakening. We often speak of the disappointment that accompanies
the return to reality. . . . In fact the discomfort is simply that of the sleeper on
awakening: a fascinated consciousness, stuck in the imaginary is suddenly freed
by the abrupt ending of the play, of the symphony, and suddenly regains contact
with existence. Nothing more is needed to provoke the nauseous disgust that
characterizes the realizing consciousness. (IM 193)

Although Derrida attributes his concept of ‘play’ to the influence of Nietzsche, it

is also evident, as Sawyer (2015: 34, 38) points out, how Derrida’s concept of ‘play’
operates within Sartre’s analysis of the spirit of seriousness and its relationship to bad
faith. There is a philosophical bridge between the concepts of play in Derrida and
the pour-soi in Sartre – play deconstructs structures, and the pour-soi deconstructs
facticity and the en-soi. Derrida’s Nietzschean affirmation of play is an existential one,
and not merely linguistic. It is akin to the Sartrean affirmation of human freedom.
Furthermore, like Sartre, Derrida highlights the way that freedom and anxiety, play
and structure, facticity and transcendence are all interrelated and interact with each
other. Derrida’s analysis of structure finds its parallel in Sartre’s view that humanity
desires to be God, a desire in which we are both free from external constraints
and completely at one with our identity. As Sartre highlights repeatedly in his
writings, the unavoidable ambiguity endemic to decision-making is what enables
ethical possibilities in the first place, pre-empting Derrida’s idea that decision and
responsibility are not simply calculations and rule following but are shot through with
undecidability. This simultaneously opens up the alterity of the ethical relation with
the Other who is not just the Other who looks at me but one which is unforeseeable,
beyond my grasp, and hence the result of play.

The posthuman self: A Nietzschean/Sartrean hybrid

In deconstructing the self, the French poststructuralists acknowledged their debt
to Nietzsche who was the first philosopher to ‘dissolve man’ (Foucault 1973: 342).
The problematic Nietzsche has left us, in Foucault’s (1977: 42) view, is to plot
‘[t]he breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language that
dispossesses it while multiplying it within a space created by its absence’. In his ‘ethical’
phase, Foucault (1983: 64) also credits Sartre as an influence on his own reconstructive
‘technologies of self ’, sharing his (and Nietzsche’s) idea that self-overcoming and the
 
The Decentred Self 87

practices of freedom that support it should be conceived in aesthetic terms. Foucault’s

later work can be viewed as a form of ‘camouflaged existentialism’ (Flynn 2004) in
which, as Sutton Morris (1997: 544) points out, ‘Foucault not only shares with the early
Sartre the view that there is no fixed original essence of an individual, but also shares
the view that instead of seeking to discover a nonexistent, original, true self, one might
engage in actively forming the self as a work of art’.
Like Nietzsche and Sartre, Foucault conceives of striving ‘to give your existence
the most beautiful form possible’ (1984: 353) and ‘creat[ing] ourselves as a work of
art’ (1984: 321) on the model of the sublimation of Dionysian or centrifugal acts
of de-egoization that take us ‘outside the self ’ conjoined with Apollonian reflective
practices of self-fashioning that act as ‘a weapon against outside influences’ (KGW
1.4.489).35 Whereas, for example, Foucault positions thought in his early ‘archaeological
phase’ as constrained by linguistic conditions to the extent that we cannot even render
an account of the limits a particular thought is constrained in, he suggests later that the
practices of philosophy in reflection are themselves ways to free our thoughts: ‘Thought
is a freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches oneself
from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem’ (1984: 388). In a later
interview, he reinstates philosophy as a form of Sartrean ‘purifying reflection’, arguing
that the role of the philosopher is ‘to make oneself permanently capable of detaching
oneself from oneself [while] altering one’s thought and that of others’ (1988: 263–4).
Centrifugally, Foucault also follows the path of Nietzschean instinct and Sartrean pre-
reflectivity in which a Nietzschean ideal of becoming-multiple is attained through
what he calls ‘transgressive practice’ (1984: 48). This involves particular practices (e.g.
sexual, aesthetic) that deliver us to the limit of our (normalized) identities without
attempting to live securely beyond it. According to Foucault (1991: 31), we should look
for ‘limit experiences’ within experimental practices which tear the subject apart from
itself in an attempt to ‘reach the point of life which lies as close as possible to the
impossibility of living’. He points to the Dionysian realm as a potential repository for
somatic freedom in which we can escape the psychological training of the body and
effect ‘the destruction of the subject as pseudo-sovereign’ (1977: 222).
In his later ‘ethical’ period, Foucault gives particular primacy to aesthetic forms
of self-cultivation as a means of ‘refusing the type of individuality that has been
imposed on us for several centuries’ (1984: 308). Since there is no essential subject,
no self grounded in biological or ontological necessity, ‘there is only one practical
consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art’ (1984: 321). It is through art
that the imagination is nurtured in a realm of possibility, difference, sense experience
and renewal. It is only when we begin to give ourselves style through self-reflective
forms of aesthetic and experimental practice that we are able to withstand the impact
of historical, objectifying forces. If we see ourselves as a ‘work of art’, continually
being made and unmade, we become constant activists for whom it is necessary to
prevent enabling limits from congealing into constraining limitations and to generate
new limits and new forms of subjectivity which constitute selves. Transgressive and
aesthetic practice is vital for the creation of new forms of subjectivity, Foucault (1977:
190–1) argues, because it shakes us out of our usual categories, enabling us to think in
different ways by unifying and differentiating experience in unusual ways. This makes
88 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

possible a form of self-understanding through self-expression that takes us beyond the

‘given’ of our historical, social and linguistic conditioning.
There are also striking similarities, as several scholars have noted,36 between
Sartre’s idea of a non-identical, relational subject and Derrida’s theory of différance.
Like the Derridean sign, Sartrean consciousness differs from itself through a
temporal movement of ‘deferral’ whereby the present can be what it is only through
the mediation of the future. This gives the clue to Sartre’s famous description of
consciousness as ‘being what it is not and not being what it is’ (BN 27). Since all
consciousness is intentional (consciousness of something), it is nothing other than
this activity of directing awareness towards an object. This awareness comes about by
consciousness transcending the immediate appearance of the object and projecting
towards the ‘horizon’ of other possible appearances of the object, the sum of which
define it and which constitute the future consciousnesses of that object. The present
of consciousness (awareness of an object) is thus defined on the basis of a future and
irreal totality of consciousness which is not yet:

The nature of consciousness implies . . . that it project itself in front of itself in the
future; one can understand what it is only through what it will be, it is determined
in its actual being by its own possibilities. (1977: 1:96)

And yet, Sartre maintains, consciousness is unable to fix itself to this future totality
which defines it since consciousness cannot be anything other than consciousness of
its object. The totality that consciousness seeks is something irréalisable: it will never
find it since such a totality would involve the impossible synthesis of pour-soi and
en-soi, openness and completion, transcendence and determinacy. Consequently,
consciousness both is and is not the totality of future consciousnesses through which it
defines itself and suffers the absence of that totality as a ‘lack’ of its own being (BN 207).
This lack must necessarily remain unsatisfied since this totality could only become
closed and completed if consciousness ceased to be intentional and transcendent.
Sartre argues as such that human-reality is perpetually haunted by a totality which it
is without being able to be it, precisely because it cannot attain the in-itself (closure,
identity) without losing itself as for-itself. The Sartrean subject is constituted by a
temporal deferral which means that it ‘has its being outside, in front of and behind itself ’
(BN 184), always caught between a future which is not yet and a ‘never present past’ or
‘original contingency’ (BN 202) that coincides with its facticity and thrownness. The
temporality of consciousness means, for Sartre, that the subject is non-identical and
non-contemporaneous with its present, a relation to self-grounded in self-difference
and self-otherness that is inadequate to itself.
Viewed in this light, Sartrean consciousness can be seen to fit closely Derrida’s
description in Of Grammatology of ‘a self presence that has never been given but
only dreamed of and always split, incapable of appearing to itself except as its own
disappearance’ (1976: 112). In the same way that Sartrean consciousness is separated
from itself by a temporal deferral, in Derrida’s analysis of signification ‘an interval must
separate the present from what it is not in order for the present to be itself ’ and hence
‘this interval that constitutes [the present] as present must . . . divide the present in and
 
The Decentred Self 89

of itself ’ (1982: 13). Derrida draws the conclusion from Saussure’s linguistics that, as a
‘duality-in-unity’ of a material signifier and a conceptual signified, the linguistic sign
‘is never present in itself ’ since it is ‘essentially inscribed in a chain or system within
which it refers to . . . other concepts by the systematic play of differences’ (1982: 140).
Each term is caught up in ‘infinite implication, the indefinite referral of signifier to
signifier’ in which each signified concept ‘always signifies again’ (1978: 25). In this way,
a concept never is what it is since it is constituted by its difference with other concepts
so that what it lacks is constitutive of what it is – it is what it is not (BN 27).
Thus, rather than being an obvious or natural target for Derrida’s critique of
a ‘metaphysics of presence’, Sartre’s early theory of consciousness can be seen to
prefigure it in several respects. Although denounced by Derrida in Glas as ‘the onto-
phenomenologist of freedom’ (1986: 28) who is oblivious to the interminability and
undecidability of signification, Sartre fulfils in Being and Nothingness and elsewhere the
Derridean project of deconstructing the self-identical and self-present metaphysical
subject. His ethical theory of authenticity, like Derrida’s theory of différance, valorizes
an acceptance of ‘distance from self ’, openness, incompletion and contingency, pointing
towards an ideal of a subject which chooses not to reappropriate itself, but to flee itself,
not to coincide with itself, but to be always at a distance from itself. In common with
poststructuralist deconstructions of the subject, Sartre takes the ‘I’ to be no more than
a synthetic construct of consciousness which is impermanent and fluid: ‘the intuition
of the Ego is a perpetually deceptive mirage’ (TE 69). He argues against the idea of an
authentic or ‘deep’ self which is pregiven or original, insisting instead that the pour-
soi is fundamentally a relation (BN 181) or a ‘perpetual deferring’. In his later work,
such as Words and The Family Idiot, this is re-emphasized once more where his own
and Flaubert’s self is theorized throughout as an imaginary construct rather than an
original source.
Deleuze’s and Guattari’s posthumanist self as ‘folded interiority’ can also be viewed
as a Nietzschean–Sartrean composite. In their quest to escape the ‘rigid segmentary
lines’ that construct fixed and normalized identities, they advocate ‘lines of flight’
as full deterritorializing movements away from molar identity where ‘cracks’ grow
into ‘ruptures’ and the subject is ‘shattered’ in a process of becoming-multiple. Lines
of flight constitute full expressions of subjectivity and take place on the plane of
creativity, desire, possibility, experiment, death and destruction (1987: 26–38). The
Nietzschean affirmation of becoming-multiple is reflected in their normative ideal
of the Schizophrenic (in Anti-Oedipus) and of the Nomad (in A Thousand Plateaus).
The ‘Schizo-Subject’ embodies their conception of the subject as multiple, decentred
and fragmented since she does not see her behaviour as belonging to a conscious,
encompassing ‘I’, often referring to herself in the third person and refusing to speak
the word ‘I’. Their ideal of the Nomad is similarly one who is never static, enduring
or fixed but who must ‘keep moving, even in place, never stop moving’ (1987: 159).
In What Is Philosophy?, they reiterate this idea of multiplicity and becoming, calling
for the creation of forms of de-subjectification that involve the exploration of different
forms of consciousness beyond the confines of molar normality. They celebrate the
death of the majoritarian individual subject by invoking experimental modes of
consciousness which are excluded from normalizing reason, such as those esoteric and
90 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Dionysian practices which involve rapture, excess and intoxication (1994: 44). These
are full-fledged lines of flight that combine ‘travel, hallucination, madness, the Indians,
perceptive and mental experimentation, the shifting of frontiers, the rhizome’ (1987:
520).37
In Les Trois Ecologies, Guattari (2000: 59) calls for the ‘praxic opening-out’ of the
three ecologies of body, socius and psychology in the form of radical ‘eco-art’ that
subsumes all existing ways of domesticating existential territories and is concerned with
intimate modes of being and the expansion of alternative experiences ‘centred around
a respect for singularity, and through the continuous production of an autonomizing
subjectivity that can articulate itself appropriately in relation to the rest of society’.
‘Mental ecosophy’, as Guattari terms it, will lead us to reinvent the relation of the subject
‘to the body, to phantasm, to the passage of time, to the “mysteries” of life and death’.
Interiority will establish itself at the crossroads of multiple components, each relatively
autonomous in relation to the other, and, ‘if need be, in open conflict’, configuring
a self that is ‘intersectional’ and ‘polyvocal’, operating on a plane incorporating the
real ‘territorialized existential territories’ and the real that is virtual ‘deterritorialized
incorporeal universes’ (2000: 35, 36). From this, there will emerge a collective and
individual subjectivity that ‘completely exceeds the limits of individualization,
stagnation, identificatory closure’ and that inhabits ‘new aesthetic worlds’ as well as ‘a
new “pre-personal” understanding of time, of the body, of sexuality’ (2000: 68).
Anticipating Guattari’s three existential territories, Nietzsche and Sartre theorize
a dynamic trivalent model of the self in which body, socius and psyche confront
us as ‘not given, as an in-itself, closed in on itself, but instead as a for-itself that is
precarious, finite, finalized, singular, singularized, capable of bifurcating into stratified
and deathly repetitions or of opening up processually from a praxis that enables it
to be “habitable” by a human project’ (2000: 53). Furthermore, their quest for ‘new
versions of the soul hypothesis’ promotes the depersonalization of subjectivity such
that the subject identifies with the multiplicity while at the same time inventing and
experimenting with re-singularizing subjectifications. In the next two chapters, we will
see in ontological and ethical terms how Nietzsche and Sartre theorize their revised
deconstructed self in concrete relation to the Other and the natural world.
 4

Smooth ontology

a play of energies and waves of energy at the same time one and many, increasing
here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of energies flowing and rushing
together, eternally moving, eternally flooding back . . . with an ebb and a flood of its
forms; out of the simplest form striving towards the most complex, out of the stillest,
most rigid, coldest form towards the hottest, most turbulent.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power 1067)

In this chapter, I look at the ontologies of Nietzsche and Sartre and examine them in
the light of the distinction made by Deleuze and Guattari (1987) between ‘smooth’ and
‘striated’ space. In Nietzsche’s case, this involves reconstructing his ontological scheme
as outlined primarily in his Nachlass and, in Sartre’s, through a close examination
of his two main philosophical treatises, Being and Nothingness and the Critique. I
argue that Nietzsche and Sartre present a dialectical and relational ontology of forces,
best described as a ‘pluralistic monism’, that surpasses the disjunctive approaches of
methodological individualism (atomism) and holism in the search of a ternary or
supplementary mode of comprehension.

Smooth and striated

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between (postmodern)
smooth space and (modern) striated space: ‘in striated space, one closes off a surface
and “allocates” it according to determinate intervals, assigned breaks; in the smooth,
one distributes oneself in an open space’ (1987: 481). Following the ‘grand compromise’
of Spinoza, they argue that the immanence of nature demonstrates both the unity of
things (univocity of being) and their endless differentiation (multiplicity of beings):

A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same
Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings. (1994: 36)

This they encapsulate in their ‘magic formula’ of ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ (1987: 20).
Deleuze, in particular, criticizes the ‘logic of identity’ that lies at the heart of Hegelian
rationalism in which what is deemed other to reason (desire, emotion, the body, the
92 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

mad, the feminine) is subsumed under a reconciliation of differences within a totality

that leads to totalitarian thinking. Against this, Deleuze finds in Nietzsche a ‘logic
of difference’ that affirms difference in itself rather than subordinating differences
to a logic of identity. Nietzsche’s will to power represents a monistic ‘differential of
forces’ from the perspective of a ‘pluralist or polyvalent monism’ in which becoming-
Übermensch denotes an active process of assembling rather than the hypostatization
of an endpoint to be assembled.1 Despite the clear antipathy he shows in Nietzsche and
Philosophy to the Hegelian ‘logic of identity’, Deleuze does not seek simply to refute
all versions of dialectical thinking but refers to the long history of the distortion of
the dialectic (1994: 268).2 Deleuze and Guattari, as Schrift (1995: 257) notes, follow
Nietzsche in their willingness to utilize binary concepts strategically, seeking to
multiply rather than dissolve dualistic concepts in a non-oppositional way. Deleuze
replaces the old dualisms of his early work (active/reactive, master/slave) with a whole
new series of dualisms (rhizome/tree, nomadic/sedentary, molar/molecular) but these
are not used in a straightforward way. Instead, they are woven into complex webs of
interconnections. The rhizome, for instance, is heterogeneous, a multiplicity or plateau
on whose surface intensities are in a state of constant variation. In their tactic of
multiplying difference, each dualism is always broken down into a complex series of
overlapping terms that are made to do new work. Rhizomatic thought, proposed by
Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 220), is a kind of thought that proceeds by connections,
bringing things together in proximity through deterritorialized flows that boost one
another, accelerate their shared escape and augment their quanta. Dualistic thought, by
contrast, involves ‘the conjugation of these same flows, indicates their relative stoppage,
like a point of accumulation that plugs or seals the lines of flight, performs a general
reterritorialization, and brings the flows under the dominance of a single flow capable
of overcoding them’. As we will see, the tactic of exploding dualisms rhizomatically
through their strategic deployment in order to ‘make them work’ in proper dialectical
fashion is one that forms the core of Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s philosophy.

The will to power: Nietzsche’s relational ontology

every centre of force adopts a perspective toward the entire remainder
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power 567)

Nietzsche traces his ontological conception of the will to power back to Heraclitean
philosophy. In his analysis of becoming, he frequently alludes to Heraclitus’ example
of the changing river (Z 2.12), opposing the dynamic process of becoming to the static
metaphysical idea of being that presents things and values as unchanging. Following
Heraclitus, he posits cosmic history as a collection of processes that interact to
produce temporary forms that then dissolve only to reconfigure and form new ones
(UM 2.9). Within the dynamic of becoming, all unities are multiplicities that are in
a state of constant change and development in relation to themselves and to others.
The cosmos is, for Heraclitus, a constant process of becoming, governed by a law of
 
Smooth Ontology 93

cyclical creation and destruction, a law that constitutes the cosmos as a process of
eternal and interconnected creation and destruction that just is. Nietzsche connects
this cosmology with children’s play (Kinderspiel), a theme he further links to the artistic
drive to creation. The significance of both the child and the artist, for Nietzsche, is that
they engage in processes of creation and destruction that are removed from moralism
and from teleology. In his lecture on Heraclitus in The Pre-Platonic Philosophers, he
writes:

only in the play of the child (or that of the artist) does there exist a Becoming
and Passing Away without any moralistic calculations. [Heraclitus] conceives
of the play of children as that of spontaneous human beings: here is innocence
and yet coming into being and destruction. We find here a purely aesthetic view
of the world. We must exclude even more any moralistic tendencies to think
teleologically here. (PP 70)

The tragic wisdom of Heraclitus, in Nietzsche’s view, resides in his embrace of non-
oppositional thought. While dualistic thought arose with Socrates and Plato, the thought
which reigned in the tragic age of the Greeks, that of the pre-Platonic philosophers,
was one which thought in terms of co-compositional forces. Tragic thought involves a
kind of duality and opposition, but one which recognizes in the opposite of a thing the
condition for that thing, and thus sees opposite tendencies as necessary. Tragic wisdom
presents the world as justified in its dualistic and contrary forces, which involve both
creation and destruction, and that it is justified precisely as an aesthetic phenomenon.
Nietzsche credits Heraclitus with repudiating both the appearance-reality distinction
that emerged with Anaximander and the notion of being. The nature of reality is
nothing other than its effects (PTAG 5). He claims that science will dispense of the
thing in itself which is empty of significance and ‘worthy of Homeric laughter’ (HH
16). Things are fabricated beings, ‘unities which do not exist’ and instead of thinking
a thing is a material substratum, the ‘whole procedure of science has pursued the
task of resolving everything thing-like (material) in motions’ (HH 19). Metaphysical
philosophy strictly divides opposites, demanding separability of them, and claiming
that phenomena emerge from things in themselves, ‘assuming for the more highly
valued thing a miraculous source in the very kernel and being of the “thing in itself ”’
(HH 1). Unlike metaphysical philosophy, Nietzsche’s historical philosophy follows
Heraclitean principles in denying ‘the duality of totally diverse worlds’ (PTAG 5) and
discovering ‘that there are no opposites’ (HH 1) but only differences of degree: ‘There
are no opposites: only from those of logic do we derive the concept of the opposite –
and from them falsely transfer it to things’ (WP 552). For Nietzsche, absolute reality
and being-in-itself are contradictions: ‘In a world of becoming, “reality” is always only
a simplification for practical ends, or a deception through the coarseness of organs, or
a variation in the tempo of becoming’ (WP 580). Even the laws of logic, identity and
contradiction are not ‘forms of knowledge at all! They are regulative articles of belief ’
(WP 530).
Another way that Nietzsche denies opposite values is by insisting that values are
never instantiated purely or completely.3 This involves seeing the ‘reverse side’ of
94 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

good and bad things (WP 1015) since opposite values are mixed together in things
bivalently. No person is purely good or bad, and this also applies to experiences and
actions that often contain a mixture of motives and a psychic economy of competing
drives that motivate them. Opposite values are comparative and scalar rather than
intrinsic to things and bifurcated. Good contains bad and it is incoherence to think
one could exist without the other since creating includes destroying (Z 2.12) and
affirming means negating: ‘negating and destroying are conditions of Yes-saying’ (EH
4.4). Nietzsche argues that the law of non-contradiction might have limited application
in the field of logic but does not apply to value or to truth in general where opposites
evolve out of prior evaluations, such as evil out of the noble concept of good and truth
out of error. There is a key sense in which he doesn’t deny ‘opposites’ but indeed affirms
and promotes them as real and as valuable if considered non-metaphysically. As with
Deleuze and Guattari, certain opposites play a strategic role in Nietzsche’s analysis.
Apollonian and Dionysian are described as opposites (BT 1–2) but he conceives the
relationship of them as co-compositional since both of these artistic drives are required
to unfold their energies in reciprocal proportion. They are ‘necessarily interdependent’
and ‘Apollo could not live without Dionysus’ (BT 4). He describes himself and Dionysus
as opposite to Christ and Christianity (EH 4.9), and he praises new philosophers as
the stimuli for ‘opposite values’ (BGE 203). Denouncing the ‘hemiplegia’ of the ‘good
human’ who separates off one side of a dualism and insists on it alone, teaching ‘that
it is a higher thing to be efficient on only one side’ (WP 351), he proclaims that the
greatest are those like Zarathustra who combine opposites (EH 3Z6).
In terms of Nietzsche’s wider ontology, Richardson (2020: 356) notes how
Nietzsche’s simultaneous decrying and celebration of oppositional thinking opens up
a ‘great tension’ or ‘apparent contradiction’ in his thinking. On the one hand, he is ‘a
vigorous opponent of dualism’4 but he is ‘repeatedly pulled back from this monism
to dualist views at seeming odds with it’. Pulled in both directions, it is part of his
philosophical method to give free play to these countervailing impulses and not
subject them to a finished theory or consummation, keeping them in dialectical
tension and avoiding metaphysical closure. Nietzsche’s sine qua non for creative power
is ‘the vehement struggle’ of ‘deep feelings with their opposites’ into a sublimation of
a harmonious whole (KSW 9.6.207). Although one must be ‘rich in oppositions’ (TI
5.3), this is conceived in a strategic way as an ‘inverse ideal’ (BGE 56) to metaphysics
in generating a productive ‘scalar logic’ of difference, ‘containment’ and ‘gradation’
(Richardson 2020: 372).

Relationality
For Nietzsche, events are not constituted by items but by the interaction of things. To
view things discretely in isolation from their relations to other things is a philosophical
error. As we saw with the self in Chapter 3, for example, individual consciousness is the
product of linguistic forces and not their origin (GS 354). This relationality is developed
further in Nietzsche’s broader ontology in which he defines a thing as ‘the sum of its
effects, united by a concept, an image’ (WP 551). If one removes other things, an object
 
Smooth Ontology 95

has no properties therefore ‘there is no things without other things’ and no ‘things-in-
themselves’ (WP 557). Since independently existing things are inventions ‘owing to the
requirements of logic’ (WP 558), if everything we projected onto the world in order
to make it intelligible were eliminated, ‘no things remain but only dynamic quanta,
in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta: their essence lies in their relation
to all other quanta, in their “effect” upon the same’ (WP 635). The world is therefore
‘essentially a world of relationships’ (WP 568).
In his unpublished lectures from the early 1870s, Nietzsche draws upon the work
of von Helmholtz to argue that the natural sciences of his day confirm the Heraclitean
precept that everything is in flux: ‘nowhere does an absolute persistence exist, because
we always come in the final analysis to forces’ (PP 60). In the 1880s, he endorses a
relational ontology of force by appealing to the authority of the mathematician and
physicist Roger Boscovich. In a letter to Köselitz (1882), Nietzsche writes, ‘[s]ince him,
there is no longer any matter – except as a popular simplification. He has thought
the atomistic theory through to its end. Gravity is most certainly not a “property of
matter”, simply because there is no matter. Gravity is, just like vis inertiae, certainly
an appearance of force (simply because there is nothing else other than force!)’ (KSB
6.213).
Nietzsche’s relational ontology of forces based on the precept that the world is will
to power ‘and nothing else besides’ (WP 1067) positions him, according to Meyer
(2018: 370, 375–6), as ‘a forerunner to Ontic Structural Realism’ because he inflates
the ontological priority of structure and relations and takes these structures to be
real and discernible by science. Responding to criticisms that Nietzsche’s relationism
and his elimination of individual ‘things in themselves’ is incoherent for it violates
the claim that relations require relata and leads to a circularity of regress in defining
what a thing is, Meyer argues that Nietzsche agrees that a relational ontology is
conceptually incoherent. He acknowledges that Heraclitus’ unity of opposites doctrine
violates Aristotle’s principle of the law of non-contradiction (PTAG 5), a reason why
Parmenides rejects Heraclitus’ relational ontology (PTAG 10). However, ‘Parmenides’
prejudice’ assumes that there is a neat conformity between how we think the world to
be and how it actually is, positing an isomorphism between thinking and being, and
falling prey to the vanities of anthropomorphism by forcing us to believe the little ‘it’
of logicians (BGE 17). For Meyer (2018: 378), although some might try to avoid this
Nietzschean scepticism by rethinking our comprehension of relations and relata, they
are fighting against what Nietzsche calls a ‘logical anthropomorphism’ (KSW 7.19) that
cognitively predisposes us to think that relations need independently existing relata
endowed with some intrinsic properties.
While Meyer is right to highlight the importance of relationality in Nietzsche’s
ontology and his scepticism concerning our ‘logical anthropomorphism’, Nietzsche is
best understood as keeping open the tension between relata and relations and resisting
metaphysical closure. The subject is a relational entity ‘designated by the effect it produces
and that which it resists’ (WP 634). Will to power is productive, not something the subject
‘has’, but the productive force of interpretation of which the delimited subject is an effect.
As Schrift (1996: 341) argues, Nietzsche sought to keep the will to power multiple so
that it might appear in multiple forms, ‘at once producer and product, a monism and
96 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

a pluralism’. In his attempt to think difference differently, Nietzsche’s recasting was not
reductive, nor should it be seen as privileging exclusively one analytic framework. Instead,
‘the monistic framework of will to power supports Nietzsche’s pluralist response to the
privileging of oppositional thinking’ (1996: 345). In Nietzsche’s philosophy of ‘originary
multiplicity’, things are derivative from a complex and rich multiplicity of forces:

All unity is only as organization and interplay unity: not

otherwise than how a human community is a unity: so,
opposite of atomistic anarchy; therewith a complex of rule, which
signifies One, but is not one. (KSW 12.2.104)

For ‘the human being as multiplicity’, physiology ‘gives only an imitation of an

astounding intercourse among this multiplicity and subordination and integration of
parts into a whole. But it would be false to conclude from a state the necessity of an
absolute monarch (the unity of the subject)’ (KSW 11.27.276). In this way, Nietzsche’s
concept of unity is equidistant from an originary unity on one side and from atomistic
chaos on the other. Self-organization is an emergent play among constituents, all seeking
out the resistance of antagonists in order to overpower (subordinate and integrate, or
functionalize) them.5 Nietzsche’s idea of the subject as emergent represents a striving to
think post-metaphysically. By conceiving of multiplicities and unities in conjunction as
evolving and ephemeral but not as mutually exclusive, his position aligns closely with
Sartre and with philosophical posthumanism.6 In a tactic of sublimation, the atom/
subject is inverted by a logic of relationality and then displaced in a new configuration
where it is recast as emergent, generated by certain confluences of the creative will to
power into a unity or ‘detotalized totality’. For Nietzsche, life is a combination of forces
that seeks assimilation, incorporation and expansion, ‘the feeling of increased power’
(BGE 230). The will to power is in this sense an assemblage both individually (in terms
of inner drives) and collectively (in terms of its relation to other things), a variable and
relational multiplicity that is kept together ‘by an “organization” understood in the
sense of a verb and not a noun since it is in continual movement, always reorganizing’
(Aydin 2007: 30). Following Plank (1998: 395, 14), we may conceive this as a process
of ‘aleatory and recurrent cyclical patterns of the Will to Power as non-teleologically
locally maximized centers of the configurations of energy discharges’, a series of
recombinative particles/energy centres/entities that are immanent in the system, not
transcendent to it. In Nietzsche’s ontology of ‘dissipative systems’ (1998: 433) there
is no need for hidden variables or metaphysical postulations since reality is simply
a process of combination, recombination, alignment and dissonance between energy
centres.

Sartre’s dialectic with holes: A ternary logic

Despite the fact that Sartre was an adherent of the Cartesian method of systematic
doubt, we should definitely not stray too far down the Cartesian path in interpreting
 
Smooth Ontology 97

him, for, as Mary Warnock warned with good reason more than thirty years ago,
‘[t]here is no more determining factor in [his] thought than the rejection of Cartesian
dualism’ (1989: 15).7 In Sartre’s own view (1981a), his method became consciously
and fully dialectical only after Being and Nothingness but Sartre was a dialectician
from his early years, evident in both his ontology and his social philosophy.8 His
philosophical trajectory is most fruitfully read in this light as a thesis of ‘enrichment
within continuity’. This accords with Sartre’s thoughts expressed in an interview just
before his death that ‘I myself think that my contradictions mattered little, that despite
everything I have always remained on a continuous line’ (1980: 92).
Despite Sartre’s own preference for the Critique, Being and Nothingness is still the
most discussed and celebrated of his two grand philosophical treatises but also the
most divisive among Sartrean scholars. Many see it as a thoroughly Cartesian tract
wrapped in dualistic thinking (McCann 2011; Solomon 1988; Grene 1993), but this
view is now increasingly in decline as a ‘vulgarization’ superseded by a more nuanced
perspective that follows Warnock’s anti-dualist reading in opening up new pathways of
understanding his philosophy. As Gardner felicitously describes the situation:

All great structures of thought in the history of philosophy achieve a kind of

pictorial, visionary force, and consequently allow themselves to be reduced for
purposes of rapid reference to a cluster of images and bold slogans. B[eing] &
N[othingness] is no exception, and in the course of its reception and the conversion
of existentialism into a diffuse cultural movement Sartre’s early philosophy has
been subjected to exceptional simplification, not to say vulgarization. (2009a: 36)

Part of the difficulty in understanding Being and Nothingness is the text itself, which
has been variously described down the years as ‘a thankless task’, ‘endlessly repetitive’,
‘full of ugly neologisms’, ‘in places quite unintelligible’ (Olafson 1958: 276), as well
as ‘a rambling work’, ‘demonstrably in need of editing’ and ‘often inconsistent’
(Richmond 2013: 101). It is perhaps due to these factors that it has been so variously
interpreted since, as Richmond (2013: 101) states, ‘a question remains as to whether
some cogent position . . . can be extracted from what Sartre says.’ Nonetheless, the
time is propitious for a radical revaluation of Sartre’s ontology and, as Heldt (2020: vii)
suggests, to give his ‘early ontological idiom . . . a good shake’. This means, for example,
foregrounding neglected terms such as ‘multiplicity’, ‘virtuality’, ‘actuality’, ‘Gestaltic’,
‘egological’, ‘complicity’, ‘totalization’ and ‘(non-)thetic’. These are conceptions that
have traditionally been dwarfed in the literature by the usual classical terminology
associated with Being and Nothingness (e.g. pour-soi/en-soi, facticity/transcendence)
often bent by interpreters into a Cartesian shape. Sarah Richmond’s recent new
translation of this seminal text into English in 2018 can be viewed in part as a response
to this reinterpretation process, clearing up some of the locutionary, terminological
and conceptual misunderstandings that might have arisen from Hazel Barnes’
1956 translation. It is symbolic of a fresh attempt among many Sartre scholars to view
this work with different eyes, to rethink some of its central categories and distinctions,
to amend hasty and simplified conclusions and to reposition it in the trajectory and
development of Sartre’s thinking.9
98 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

It is ironic and ‘a curious twist of fate’, as Ally (2017: 82–4) remarks, that Sartre was
squarely accused of dualism as he was ‘unequivocal on the matter of his monism’, a
philosophy in which ‘world and body and consciousness are ontologically one’.10 Near
the beginning of Being and Nothingness, Sartre insists that we must ‘explain how these
two regions of being can be placed under the same heading . . . it is clear that we
will not be able genuinely to apprehend the meaning of either of them until we have
established their real relations with the notion of being in general, and the relations that
link them’ (BN 25). The internal coherence of Sartre’s monism is revealed through the
logical structure of Being and Nothingness that runs from the abstract to the concrete,
starting with consciousness as a procedural method and moving on to the body, world
and others. To avoid significant misunderstandings, it is thus essential to treat Being
and Nothingness as a whole with the ‘simple imperative of interpretative holism’ due
to its ‘precisely calibrated internal logic’ (Ally 2017: 66). As Eshleman (2020a: 144–5)
explains, the text is comprised of a horizontal axis that moves from the analysis of
highly abstract simples to increasingly concrete, complex wholes based around his
cardinal ontological distinction between being-for-itself and being-in-itself. Following
Husserl’s part/whole method as laid out in Logical Investigations, Sartre decomposes
concrete wholes into increasingly abstract parts until he reaches the simplest points
possible. Thus, his distinction between pour-soi as free and temporal and en-soi as
‘massive’, ‘full positivity’, ‘escapes temporality’, ‘has no secret’ and ‘alterity is unknown to
it’ (BN 28) reaches a conclusion that is only ‘provisional’ (BN 25). The second part, by
contrast, follows Heidegger and gives priority to wholes. In the case of human-reality,
this is lived as an internally related, synthetic totality whose sum comprises more than
its parts and not just a compilation of externally related, independent pieces. It is the
introduction of discussion of others in part 3 that leads Sartre to abandon the abstract
unconditional theory of freedom since freedom is now lost and finds its limit in the
free objectifying power of Others.11
Sartre makes it clear that body and consciousness are two aspects of the ambiguity
of lived experience that cannot be separated until after the event: ‘We know that there
is not, on the one hand, a for-itself and, on the other, a world, as two closed wholes,
whose means of communication it is necessary afterwards to seek. Rather, the for-
itself is by itself a relation to the world’ (BN 413). As ‘a duality that is a unity’ (BN
125), or as Gardner (2009a: 97) calls it, a ‘duality-in-unity’, body and consciousness
represent two abstract poles and Sartre’s method can be seen as a ‘rheostatic gyration’
between these poles, ‘a relentlessly recursive logic’ that goes forward and backward.12
Being and Nothingness is replete with phenomenological descriptions that highlight
‘the difficulties encountered by the Cartesian theory of substance’ (BN 766), and Sartre
is clear from the outset that he is eschewing dualistic thinking, insisting that there is
no way of separating appearances from the thing itself: ‘That is why we can, in the
end, also reject the dualism of appearance and essence. Appearance does not hide
essence, but reveals it; it is the essence’ (BN 3). Sartre’s method proceeds analytically
from abstract and simple concepts to a concrete and complex whole. As his analysis
develops, he significantly revises abstract claims made early in the text and abandons
all claims to the unlimited (and unconditioned) nature of freedom in the second half.
We misunderstand his phenomenological ontology if we ignore this progression of
 
Smooth Ontology 99

analysis in which he weaves the ontic facts of our current existence into the more
generalized ontological structures of existence.13 In the conclusion to Being and
Nothingness, Sartre is unequivocal: ‘we have just shown that the in-itself and the for-
itself are not juxtaposed. Quite to the contrary, the for-itself without the in-itself is
something like an abstraction: it can no more exist than a colour without a shape, or a
sound without a pitch and a timbre’ (BN 803).
This method continues and intensifies as his work progresses. In his later
philosophy, his focus shifts from a largely dyadic perspective to a collective analysis
that takes account of wider groups, multiplicities and historical structures. He defines
comprehension as ‘nothing other than my real life; it is the totalizing movement which
gathers together my neighbor, myself, and the environment in the synthetic unity of an
objectification in process’ (SM 155) and sets out philosophically, or ‘mereologically’, to
understand the part in the whole and the whole in the part. To achieve comprehension,
Sartre explains, ‘two dialectical procedures are possible’, one centripetal and the other
centrifugal: ‘On the one hand, a procedure of decompressive expansion which starts
off from the object to arrive at everything, following the order of significations. . . . On
the other hand, a procedure of totalizing compression which, by contrast, grasps the
centripetal movement of all the significations attracted and condensed in the event
or in the object’ (CDR 2:49). Sartre employs both of these procedures and ends up
with a ‘mediated’ account that maintains ‘the relative irreducibility of social fields’ (SM
82), which are real but still remain dependent or ‘parasitic’ on free organic praxis (SM
77). Hence, in Sartre’s social ontology we find a relentless tug of war or boxing match
between Kierkegaard the ‘Singular Universal’ and Hegel the ‘Universal Singular’ (BN
330).14 Although Kierkegaard marks progress towards realism since he insists above
all on the primacy of the specifically real over thought (SM 12), for Sartre, ‘Hegel’s
brilliant intuition is to make me depend on the Other in my being’ (BN 328).
In a footnote in What Is Literature?, Sartre signals his interest in the development of
dialectical history, an area that his earlier phenomenology had left untouched: ‘Some
day I am going to try to describe that strange reality History, which is neither objective,
nor ever quite subjective, in which the dialectic is contested, penetrated, and corroded
by a kind of antidialectic, but which is still a dialectic’ (WL 333–4). He continues this
dialectical search in Notebooks for an Ethics where he proposes an ‘existential dialectic’
or a ‘dialectic with holes in it’ (NE 449), a historical process where individual agency and
moral responsibility can produce ‘an irrational leap into another dimension of being, a
new dialectic and a new leap’ (NE 458).15 As Badiou (2009: 43) describes it, the Critique
was Sartre’s attempt to provide a dialectical comprehension of history composed ‘as a
symphony in two movements’, a regressive movement (a theory of practical ensembles)
and a progressive movement (a rational reconstruction of history as a ‘totalization
without a totalizer’). Out of this symphony crystallizes Sartre’s version of the dialectic
which, according to Badiou (2009: 167–8), ‘is not the synthetic neutralization of two
pre-existing but contradictory terms, but the discovery of the articulation that deploys
the dimension along which they suddenly emerge as “sides”’. It designates ‘the active
unity of an operation as a preliminary to any determination of a duality’. The dialectic is
hence ‘never a dualized sequence of concepts . . . [but] is the polarization of a space that
is articulated’. In the Sartrean dialectic, we find an ‘index of complementarity’ between
100 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

opposing pairs, as Ally (2020: 373) contends, that requires a ternary or sublimating
logic of comprehension in which ‘[c]ontradictions abound, and paradox lurks in the
nearby ternary shadows’. Following the threefold stages of ‘contradictions, surpassing
and totalization’ (SM 34), Sartre’s dialectical method offers a way out of metaphysical
dualism and protection against analytical closure by transforming opposing pairs
into a displaced or sublimated third in the same way Nietzsche sought to. Within his
surpassing of opposites, for example, real-imaginary becomes possible, pour-soi/en-soi
becomes for others, praxis-practico inertia becomes praxis-process, totality-totalization
becomes totalization of envelopment and need-scarcity is sublimated into abundance. As
Ally (2020: 365) explains, in Sartre’s thought ternary logic continually infuses binary
logic: ‘We might call this the immanent imminence of the ternary, both immanent and
imminent. The third is always coming and always nearby and always already there.
When we think with Sartre, if we look for a Third, we will find one.’
For Sartre, ‘reciprocal ternary relations are the basis of all relations between men
whatever form they take’ (CDR 111). Ternary reciprocities ground and mediate all
abstract dualities and form a bond of sociality: ‘a ternary relation, as the mediation
of man amongst men, is the basis on which reciprocity becomes aware of itself as a
reciprocal connection’ (CDR 109). In explaining totality and multiplicity by this
ternary logic, Sartre demonstrates a sensitivity to parts and wholes that is missing
from atomistic or holistic accounts. A totality is never fixed or static but is always in
motion and always in process. Totalization hence relates to becoming as an activity of
an intentional, integrative and open-ended development. It ‘delineates a practical field
[and] attempts the most rigorous synthesis of the most differentiated multiplicity’ (SM
46). As individuals or collectivities, we are never completed totalities but ‘detotalized
totalities’ that are both constituted and dissolved by the transcendence towards future
possibilities (NE 543). Hegel’s dialectic assumes the viewpoint of the whole or Absolute
with no respect to particular determinations or individual instances, but ‘no totalitarian
and unifying synthesis of ‘Others’ is possible’ (NE 339). The group is dispersed by
contingency into a plurality of beings who nonetheless mutually determine each other,
a ‘detotalized totality’ (NE 17). Thus, Sartre’s ontology reveals an intrinsic relationality
or interconnectedness – ‘[e]verything is always revealed as united to everything’ (CDR
360) – in a kind of feedback system of mutually constitutive parts that also accounts
for singularity and individuality:

Humans are singular beings who belong to historical ensembles. They cannot be
compared to atoms or body cells. United? Separated? They are both. There is no
separation that is not at the same time a mode of presence, nor a bond so intimate
that it does not incorporate a secret absence. (1977: 6:197)

Emergent interactionism
Although the ‘old Sartre’ is classically seen as ‘the ultimate individualist’ who subscribes
to a social ontology of methodological individualism,16 this is now commonly seen
 
Smooth Ontology 101

as a misrepresentation of his complex dialectical position. As far back as the 1930s,

Sartre preached against social atomism, attributing it to the bourgeois analytical point
of view that, as he would later argue in the Critique, is incapable of grasping collective
realities or synthetic wholes such as social class, as opposed to synthetic or dialectical
reason, which is totalizing and ‘thinks in terms of solidarity’ (CDR 375, 468). This
difference ‘expresses itself as a conflict of rationalities’ (CDR 802). Analytical reason,
which constitutes bonds between individuals only ‘in the milieu of exteriority’, forms
the basis of capitalist hegemony, he contends, by reinforcing the ‘absolute separation
between people which is so crucial to the continuing domination of the individualistic
bourgeoisie’ (CDR 285, 297).
Unlike methodological individualism, Sartre’s social theory of ‘emergent
interactionism’ (Farrell Fox 2020) or ‘Dialectical Nominalism’ (Flynn 2010) recognizes
the synthetic enrichment of social phenomena and their irreducibility to their parts.
Viewing subjectivity and intersubjectivity as emergent explains how a higher order
is founded on a lower one and in a sense contains it but at the same time takes it
over and integrates it into new structures which cannot be explained by those that are
taken over. This is not just a simple mixing of elements but more a chemical reaction
that yields a new substance with different qualities from its constituents. For Sartre,
consciousness emerges on the intersubjective level as an ongoing totalization between
subjectivities that becomes a ‘totality’ but is always open to detotalization (CDR 404).
Community is not a simple collection of discrete individuals but is informed by a
unity of existence that penetrates and transcends their private worlds. A totality is thus
defined

as a being which, while radically distinct from the sum of its parts, is present in its
entirety, in one form or another, in each of these parts, and which relates to itself
either through its relation to one or more of its parts or through its relation to the
relations between all or some of them. (SM 45)

When two or more for-itselfs enter into relationship, as Flynn (1992: 216) observes,
‘there is a reciprocity that is an existential modification of each’ that forms an inter-
individual reality which transforms individual praxis. This accords broadly with a
Spinozean ontologico-ethical position, articulating an ethico-political subjectivity that
is elaborated neither in terms of a monadic individual nor of a collective entity but of an
essentially self-creating, internally related multiplicity of singularities that interrelate
according to intrinsic, spontaneous movements. When they move towards common
ends, the singularities give rise to ontological dislocations – that is, the formation of
more complex singularities in ‘constellations of reciprocities’ (CDR 367). All of reality
is a congregation of individual singularities freely configuring and reconfiguring
themselves according to different, spontaneous modalities.17 Sartre’s ‘pluralistic
monism’ is thus kaleidoscopic composed of singularities in constant becoming that
coalesce and merge together in the production and creation of a composite whole.
Free praxis becomes constituent power in this process and it is within this continuous
movement of becoming that the multitude or group discovers itself as subject. This
gives us a rationality that goes beyond the dualisms of modernity, outlining a new form
102 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

of thinking that represents itself in a logic of the singularities in process, in fusion and
in continual surpassing.
Throughout his writings, Sartre makes clear his intention to steer a path between
the metaphysics of idealists who ‘reduce matter to mind’ and the materialist who
‘reduces mind to matter’ (1995a: 204). As Flynn (2014: 250) notes, Sartre holds
an ‘emergentist’ form of materialism where mind develops from matter but is
irreducible to matter in its distinctive features, the chief of which is intentionality
which Sartre consistently takes to be the defining characteristic of the mental. In
the Critique, he defines his ontological position as a ‘monism of materiality’ (CDR
29) and as a ‘realistic materialism’ (CDR 181). A person is ‘wholly matter’ (CDR
180), an organism symbiotically related to its environment through need, and
engaged in a reciprocal dialectical process of ‘trans-substantiation’ (CDR 178). It is
this material process of exchange that establishes our interconnectedness: ‘[when
something] has taken on the character of materiality it enters into relation with the
entire Universe’ (CDR 163). This is continuous with Being and Nothingness where
Sartre refers to the distinction between en-soi and pour-soi as an ‘abstraction’ and
seeks a ‘concrete ontology’ instantiated in the world. As Eshleman (2011: 33) points
out, his philosophy never talks about different kinds or types of being but always
different modes of being:

In Sartre’s considered view, the universe contains only one kind of being that can
be divided into different modal categories. When understood in this way, Sartre
subscribes to a version of substance monism (materialism) conjoined with a modal
pluralism (in a way perhaps distantly influenced by Spinoza).

This Spinozian heritage aligns Sartre’s ontology with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s magic
formula of ‘PLURALISM = MONISM’ (1987: 20) and their general ontology of the
‘intermezzo’ (1987: 277).18 Although linking Sartre’s dialectical ontology with ‘anti-
dialectical’ Deleuzian thinking may seem like a false move, as we have seen, Deleuze
does not condemn all dialectical thinking and the strategic use of dualisms,19 merely
those uses that lead to ‘dialectical exclusion’ (1992: 67) or to ‘the distortion of the
dialectic’ (1994: 268). Sartre’s dialectic is not a Hegelian one based on exclusion
or identity but is rather an open-ended ‘decapitated dialectic’ (Flynn 2010: 28),
a ‘dialectic with holes in it’ (NE 449). For Sartre, dialectical enrichment lies in the
transition from the abstract to the concrete, that is, from elementary concepts to
notions of greater and greater richness. This movement of the dialectic is the reverse
of the dialectic of (Cartesian) science and the analytic spirit. The latter is blind to
totalization, ignores the existence of socioeconomic classes and is individualist in
its metaphysics and ethics. Sartre’s dialectical reason is opposed to the stance of
the de-situated experimenter that perpetuates analytical reason as the model of
intelligibility in the ‘milieu of exteriority’ (CDR 285). The Sartrean dialectic, by
contrast, as ‘the living logic of action’, is invisible to a contemplative reason. It appears
in the course of praxis as a necessary moment of it and is created anew in each action:
‘man must be controlled by the dialectic insofar as he creates it, and create it insofar as
he is controlled by it’ (CDR 35).
 
Smooth Ontology 103

Nietzsche’s gay science

An absolutely burning thirst took hold of me: from then on I actually pursued noth-
ing more than physiology, medicine, and the natural sciences.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 3HH3)

Nietzsche’s writings manifest a great deal of ambiguity concerning the status of science.
In the early works, it is cast as primarily negative, engendering a cold rationalism that
leads to the Socratic degradation of life, an epitome of seriousness that destroyed the
‘tragic wisdom’ of the Greeks and their instinctive ability ‘to play around life with lies’
(EH 3BT1). The spirit of science is the belief, which first came to light in the person
of Socrates, ‘that the depths of nature can be fathomed and that knowledge can heal
all ills’ (BT 82). But ‘[w]hat is science for at all’, asks Nietzsche, ‘if it has no time for
culture?’ (UM 1.8). Disenchantment with Wagner in late 1870s, however, precipitated
a reconsideration in which Nietzsche looked to science as a weapon against the
prejudicial illusions of romanticism, religion and morality, praising the scientific spirit
of neutrality and autonomy (D 36, GS 293). In the middle works, he esteems science
and draws heavily on the natural sciences in explaining moral sentiments and human
psychology:

Long live physics! . . . We, however, want to become who we are – human beings who
are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves!
To that end we must become the best students and discoverers of everything lawful
and necessary in the world: we must become physicists in order to be creators in
this sense – while hitherto all valuations and ideals have been built on ignorance
of physics or in contradiction to it. So, long live physics! And even more long live
what compels us to it – our honesty! (GS 335)

In his final period, his view shifts again to a more nuanced position. Zarathustra marks
the transition to a more mythic and poetic mode of philosophy, the third phase of
his thinking towards science which is one of overall scepticism based on a critique of
its metaphysical foundations. Whereas in The Gay Science he had viewed science as
an opportunity, valuing the scientific spirit for its honesty and critical potential (GS
7), in Beyond Good and Evil he now sees it more as a danger for engendering a form
of religious nihilism (BGE 204). Despite its pretensions of objectivity, science is not
immune from morality and its belief in truth makes it the spiritual descendant of the
ascetic ideal and not its opponent (GM 3.23–4). In seeking detachment and objectivity,
the scientist falls victim to ‘the dangerous old conceptual fiction’ of a ‘pure, will-less,
painless, timeless knowing subject’ (GM 3.26) who sees a faithful ‘mirror’ of events:
‘The objective man is an instrument, a precious, easily injured and clouded instrument
for measuring and, as an arrangement of mirrors, an artistic triumph that deserves
care and honour; but he is no goal, no conclusion and sunrise . . . still less a beginning’
(BGE 207). For Nietzsche, modern science involves a flight from the actual, for it relies
on ideal fictions, such as number, atom, substance, pure observation and law (Z P3)
104 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

and has filled the vacuum of nihilism with a timid, sterile conformity to law (BGE 30).
He talks of the ‘fictions of logic’ and the ‘purely invented world of the unconditional
and the self-identical’ (BGE 5) created by conceptual thought. There is a gulf between
our rational understanding and our primal experience, between ‘pale, cold, gray
concept nets’ and ‘the motley whirl of the senses’ (BGE 14). People have wrongly taken
concepts for the world as it really is and consequently we have created a symbol world
of cause, sequence, relativity, number which ‘we project and mix . . . into things as if
it existed “in itself ”’ (BGE 21). He questions the adequacy of reason and concepts to
reality and identifies Socrates and Plato as ‘symptoms of decay’, ‘conceptual mummies’
who sacrificed instinct to ‘the daylight of reason’ (TI 2.10).
Although critical of modern science in its Socratic-Platonic form, Nietzsche’s
thought becomes increasingly naturalistic, however, as it evolves into his later
philosophy. Friedrich Albert Lange’s The history of materialism and critique
of its meaning for the present (which he read in 1862 while at Pforta) was a major
influence on Nietzsche’s turn to naturalism, but he had also long held an interest in
the scientific thinking of the Presocratic Greek philosophers.20 Alongside Heraclitus,
it was Democritus who led Nietzsche towards the natural sciences, breaking away
from anthropomorphism by extracting all moral projections and any form of
teleology or meaning from the indifferent and random universe. Contrary to the
Platonic worldview, Democritus’ ‘disenchantment of being’ grasped the world in its
contingency as entirely without reason or telos.21 In the 1870s and 1880s, Nietzsche
drew upon the naturalism of Darwinism and Lamarckism in forming an evolutionary
perspective. In line with Darwin, he believed that humans evolved from other forms
of animal life and adopted a non-teleological view of nature as a blind play of forces
or accidental process. However, he criticized Darwin’s idea of an organism’s passive
adaptation to the environment and Darwin’s ‘will to life’, preferring instead the concept
of will to power as an internal creative force (which Lamarck allowed for in his theory).
Nietzsche’s criticism of Darwin’s theory of ‘passive adaptation’ to external forces fed
into his wider criticism of modern (Newtonian) science that he charged with being too
mechanistic and failing to incorporate intentional directedness into its framework of
understanding: ‘“Mechanistic interpretation”: desires nothing but quantities; but force
is to be found in quality. Mechanistic theory can therefore only describe processes,
not explain them’ (WP 660). Despite these criticisms, Nietzsche prides himself on his
realism, his ‘courage before reality’ (TI 10.2), and embarks upon a ‘re-aiming of science’
to give us power over our own values. His attacks against science are directed only
against ‘science so far’ and he projects a ‘new science’ that acquires a ‘new charm’ after
the removal of morality (WP 594). In his 1888 Notebooks, he opens up a dichotomy
between ‘old’ and ‘new’ science. Where the old science is mechanistic and only explains
things from the outside, ignoring their inner will in which their qualities reside (WP
625), the new science will rid itself of metaphysical fictions and constitute reality as a
play of forces with intentionality and directedness: ‘The victorious concept “force” . . .
still needs a completion: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as “will
to power”’ (WP 619).
For some scholars, Nietzsche’s ‘new science’ finds its home in the principles of
quantum physics. Megill (1985: 38), for instance, draws a comparison between the
 
Smooth Ontology 105

duality of Apollo and Dionysus and that of particle and wave in quantum physics.
Where Apollo (particle) seeks to grant form to individual being by drawing boundaries
around them, Dionysus (wave) can break these ‘little circles’ when Apollonian
tendencies ‘congeal the form to Egyptian rigidity and coldness’ (BT 9). This reflects in
the visual bias of Apollo, ‘the shining one’ and ‘the deity of light’ and the non-imagistic
bias of Dionysus, the musical one (BT 1). In Plank’s (1998: 65, 508) view, there are
striking similarities in Nietzsche’s ontology of ‘dissipative systems’ and quantum
mechanics. Nietzsche’s relational will to power and rejection of idealist metaphysics
finds a consonance in the holism of quantum mechanics and its rejection of classical
accounts of reality. Nietzsche ‘had a primitive quantum theory of force’ as early as
the 1880s, describing the will to power as a quantum state in which observer and
observed form an inseparable system (BGE 36) and anticipating Bohm’s panpsychism
of ‘somasignificant’ or ‘signasomatic’ events where there are different levels of mind but
where all particles have some state of mind and awareness.
In general, Nietzsche is strongly inconsistent in regard to the Socratic spirit, viewing
the will to truth as both poison and medicine. On the one hand he stresses repeatedly
how it can be bad for us to uncover the truth about values – how it is leading to the
loss of values, nihilism, the great problem of the modern age. But, on the other hand,
and seemingly contrary to that advice, he is also constantly thrusting upon us stark
and pressing insights about our values, thus forcing these truths to our attention. This
can be viewed in the light of the ‘tragic wisdom’ he extols in The Birth of Tragedy and
the gay science he advocates later. The figurehead of Nietzsche’s tragic wisdom is the
‘musical Socrates’ (BT 15) who represents a synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian
drives. We cannot just eliminate the Socratic drive for knowledge and science, in
Nietzsche’s sublimated view, but must complement it with the qualities of the artist
in whom Heraclitean tragic cosmology is manifest (PTAG 62). In Human, All Too
Human, Nietzsche talks of ‘two chambers of the brain, as it were, one to experience
science and the other nonscience’ (HH 251) and searches for a harmonious interplay
of the two, an aesthetic morality based on the physics of the body and its sensorial
apparatus (GS 33). He envisages a time when science is not abandoned but is cross-
fertilized with art into a gay science in which ‘artistic energies and the practical wisdom
of life will join the scientific thinking to form a higher organic system’ (GS 113).

Sartre’s dialectical science

While it is slightly hyperbolic to charge Sartre with being ‘incapable of science’ (Plank
1998: 493), it is fair to say that he is not known for his refined scientific sensibilities
and love of lab coats. According to Beauvoir (1983: 39), ‘he flatly refused to believe
in science’, going so far as to maintain ‘that microbes and other animalculae invisible
to the naked eye simply didn’t exist at all’. Taking psychology as his example, he
complains that psychologists who seek to establish a science in attending solely to
the facts prefer ‘the accident to the essential, the contingent to the necessary, disorder
to order’. They do not notice ‘that it is just as impossible to attain the essence by
heaping up the accidents as it is to arrive at unity by the indefinite addition of figures
106 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

to the right of 0.99’ (STE 4). The task of existential psychoanalysis, Sartre insists, is
hermeneutical (BN 810). He calls us to ‘abandon the primacy of knowledge’ (BN 9)
that leads philosophers to consider existential relationships as epistemological ones
(e.g. the existence of other minds). Conceptual knowledge is secondary to intuition:
‘Deduction and discourse, which are incorrectly labelled as “knowledge”, are only
instruments leading to intuition’ (BN 246). Generally, Sartre held science at a distance,
openly acknowledging its considerable explanatory power but criticizing its ‘concept
of absolute objectivity’ (BN 414) and its analytic/positivistic character (CDR 32).
Beguiled by ‘objective relations’ and sunken in ‘the world of objects’ (BN 419), science
aims at establishing relations of ‘pure externality’ (BN 414). The scientist posits herself
as ‘a de-situated investigator’ (CDR 2:2), but the point of view of pure knowledge is
contradictory for the known is never separated from the knower: ‘the only point of
view is that of committed knowledge’ (BN 415). Modern science, as Sartre perceived
it, was simply an instantiation of analytical reason, a positivist reason that views the
world dispassionately as a set of objects for neutral observation presupposing an all-
seeing, knowing subject who stands outside of the domain she investigates. Such a
position masks the ideological construction of reality and the fact that ‘we are up to our
eyebrows’ (1977a: 77) in history, always in a situation rather than above or beyond it.
Against the analytic gaze of the modern scientist, Sartre counterposes dialectical
reason that recognizes itself as situated and begins with an embodied and situated
perspective, ‘the life, the objective being of the investigator, in the world of Others’
(CDR 51). Dialectical reason starts at the most abstract point possible with an
investigation of praxis as a purely individual undertaking: ‘Critical investigation
will set out from . . . the individual fulfilling himself in his abstract praxis, so as to
rediscover, through deeper and deeper conditionings, the totality of his practical bonds
with others and, thereby, the structures of the various practical multiplicities’ (CDR
52). Dialectical enrichment lies in ‘the transition from the abstract to the concrete,
that is, from elementary concepts to notions of greater and greater richness’ (1995:
209) spreading out to ever-widening spirals of analysis of connections in exteriority
with social and historical forces, thus demonstrating that ‘there is no such thing as an
isolated individual’ (CDR 677).
As Ally (2017: 158) observes, despite his misgivings about modern science,
‘the prospect of a better science seems always to have lurked in the back of Sartre’s
porous mind’. In Being and Nothingness, he obliquely shares Husserl’s classification
of philosophy as a rigorous science and in the Critique, he drives towards a deeper
form of scientific understanding based on an open-ended integrativity (CDR 31–2). A
few pages later, he invokes the prospect of ‘the existence of dialectical connections in
inanimate Nature’ but quickly qualifies it: ‘in the present state of knowledge . . . we are
[not] in a position to affirm or deny it’ (CDR 33). This equivocation stands in contrast
to his unequivocal and forthright criticisms of Engels’ Dialectic of Nature elsewhere
in the text (e.g. CDR 33). He concludes that ‘at present, the absolute principle that
“Nature is dialectical” is not open to verification at all’ (CDR 28) but entertains the
idea that a future science might fulfil the conditions of dialectical intelligibility: ‘We
shall accept the idea that man is a material being among material beings and, as such
does not have a privileged statute; we shall even refuse to reject a priori the possibility
 
Smooth Ontology 107

that a concrete dialectics of Nature will one day be discovered’ (CDR 34). He suggests
that if science were to progress from its positivistic methodology, then a dialectics of
nature becomes feasible:

It may be said that the metaphysical hypothesis of a dialectic of Nature becomes

more interesting when it is used to explain the passage from inorganic matter to
organic bodies, and the evolution of life on earth. This is true. But it should be
noted that this formal interpretation of life and evolution will never be more than
a pious dream as long as scientists have no way of using ‘totality’ and ‘totalization’
as a guiding hypothesis. . . . For the present, biology, in its actual research,
remains positivistic and analytical. It is possible that a deeper knowledge of its
object, through its contradictions, will force biology to consider the organism in
its totality, that is to say, dialectically, and to consider all biological facts in their
relation of interiority. This is possible, but not certain. (CDR 34n16)

Through its dialectical innovations, in Ally’s (2017: 162–3) view, Sartre’s philosophy
‘obliquely anticipated’ new forms of scientific explanation. His dialectical lexicon of
praxis, praxis-process and practico-inertia is rich in philosophical significance and
could be used to confound the linear analytical positivism of conventional (Newtonian)
science. In principle, a natural science could include all life and non-living matter
within its dialectical intelligibility into ‘the real movement of a unity in the process
of being made’ (SM 69). Sartre’s dialectical ontology thus connects productively with
several strands of the ‘new sciences of life and complexity’. Kauffman’s molecular
biology, for instance, follows Sartre’s emergent interactionism in demonstrating the
emergent order in complex systems and the origins of autonomy where complexity
refers to a system of interacting units that displays global properties not present at
the lower level, for example, ant colonies, schools of fish. Patterns emerge through
interactions internal to the system involving information exchange, an autonomous and
spontaneous activity leading to self-organization.22 Sartre’s dialectical mereology also
anticipates the anti-Cartesian science advocated in The Dialectical Biologist by Levins
and Lewontin. Criticizing analytical reason that fails to take account of numerous
mediations and assemblages, they advance a dialectical worldview of parts and wholes
remarkably close to Sartre’s in the Critique:

‘Part’ and ‘whole’ have a special relationship to each other, in that one cannot
exist without the other, any more than ‘up’ can exist without ‘down’. What
constitutes the parts is defined by the whole that is being considered. Moreover,
parts acquire properties by virtue of being parts of a particular whole, properties
they do not have in isolation or as parts of another whole. It is not that the whole
is more than the sum of its parts, but that the parts acquire new properties. But
as the parts acquire properties by being together, they impart to the whole new
properties, which are reflected in changes in the parts, and so on. Parts and
wholes evolve in consequence of their relationship, and the relationship itself
evolves. These are the properties of things we call dialectical: that one cannot exist
without the other, that one acquires its properties from its relation to the other,
108 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

that the properties of both evolve as a consequence of their interpenetration.

(1985: 3)

In Sartre’s ontology, the world is a dynamic, open-ended, integrative web of

irreducible active connections and totalizations, a ‘totalization without a totalizer’.
The dialectic is ‘not the study, not even the “functional” and “dynamic” study, of a
unity already made’ but ‘the real movement of a unity in the process of being made’ (SM
69), just like Nietzsche’s will to power: ‘If totalization is really an ongoing process,
it operates everywhere. This means both that there is a dialectical meaning of the
practical ensemble – whether it is planetary, or has to become even interplanetary –
and that each individual event totalizes in itself this ensemble in the infinite richness of
its individuality’ (CDR 2:17). In the opening page of Principles of Biological Autonomy,
Varela quotes Sartre’s footnote cited above (CDR 34n16) in its entirety. His principle
of ‘living systems as cognitive systems’, in Ally’s (2017: 167) view, ‘is arguably an effort
to fulfil some, if not all, of Sartre’s demands, or more generally to render theoretical
biology explicitly dialectical’. Central to Varela’s and Maturana’s dialectical system
is the concept of autopoiesis that explains the intentional directedness of individual
organisms and collective systems in symbiosis with the rest of nature. Sartre’s dialectical
comprehension captures ‘autopoiesis in a nutshell’ (2017: 444), where he describes ‘the
wealth of the organism’ (CDR 404) and its reciprocal transformative connections to
the rest of nature: ‘For the organism, unity is the perpetual restoration of unity . . . [Its]
functions, moreover, ceaselessly turn back upon themselves in a circularity that is only
the first temporalization of permanence, since their tasks are always similar and always
conditioned by the same “feedback”’ (CDR 2:344–5).23 Just as in Sartre’s emergent
interactionism, in Earth System Science (inspired by the ‘Santiago School’ of Varela
and Maturana, as well as Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’), the earth has an identity as a
whole, an adaptable and plastic unity acquired through time in a dynamic partnership
of circularity between life and its terrestrial environment. As a self-organizing
unity, it is a relational and mediational process collectively generated by the various
components (geosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere) and the networks of
interconnections and feedback relations between them.
Alongside chemistry and biology, Sartre’s idea of a ‘new science’ (based on the
principles of dialectical totalization and emergent interactionism) can be cross-
fertilized with many of the principles of quantum physics, such as interrelatedness,
indeterminacy, ambiguity, emergence, organization, reversibility, unity, plurality and
situatedness. Unlike Nietzsche’s will to power, Sartre’s relational ontology has yet to
be firmly linked with quantum physics,24 but they are very much continuous. First of
all, both critique the standpoint theory of neutral observation and replace it with the
importance of ‘observer-participancy’. Indeed, Sartre appeals explicitly to a ‘truth of
microphysics [that] the experimenter is part of the experimental system’ (SM 32), ‘a
practical organism producing Knowledge as a moment of its praxis’ (SM 179).
Second, viewing subjectivity and intersubjectivity as emergent explains how a higher
order is founded on a lower one and contains it but at the same time takes it over and
integrates it into new structures which cannot be explained by those that are taken over.
This is used in quantum physics, for instance, to show how higher consciousness or
 
Smooth Ontology 109

capabilities come into existence through the concatenation and organization of lower-
level parts. A whole is not identical with the sum of its parts but is something new,
and all its properties differ from those displayed by the parts of which it is composed.
Association is in this way a productive phenomenon in itself, consisting in bringing to
external relation established facts and formed properties.25
In quantum physics, as in Sartre’s middle path ‘between atomism and organicism’
(1981a: 357–8), neither individuality nor relationship is lost, for neither has exclusive
ontological primacy. A whole created through a quantum relation is a new thing in
itself greater than the sum of its parts and, although there is no end to the process
of quantum integration of particles into new wholes, each particle maintains facets
of its identity (as fermions never merge completely).26 Furthermore, in its dynamic
transformation from one state to another, Sartre’s emergent interactionism exhibits
what quantum physics calls ‘reversibility’. In the recursive movement from seriality to
fusion, groups undergo a modal change, a ‘constant transformation of energy’ (CDR
549) from less energy and vibration to a greater amount of intensity and cohesion (just
as electrons can move in any direction in the transition from a higher energy state to
a lower one). In terms of Sartre’s social ethic, a parallel can also be drawn between his
dichotomy of fusion and seriality and Von Foerster’s theory of quantum interaction
(used originally to describe the behaviour of cybernetic systems that achieve internal,
homeostatic control through the free exchange of information between the parts): ‘The
more [rigidly] connected are the elements of a system, the less influence they will have
on the system as a whole. [. . .] The more [rigid] the connections, the more each element
of the system will exhibit a greater degree of “alienation” from the whole.’27 Quantum
systems are delicately poised between order and chaos and so embrace ambiguity. Too
static and they run down, too chaotic and they break apart like dissipative systems or
Sartrean totalities.
As thoroughly relational, quantum and Sartrean consciousness elicit a social
ontology that inverts the atomistic logic of Cartesian individualism and Newtonian
physics. In the Newtonian universe, individuals are like indivisible billiard balls
attracting, repelling and colliding in externality. By contrast, because wave functions
can overlap and become entangled, quantum systems can ‘get inside’ each other and
‘form a creative, internal relationship’ through which they further evolve (Zohar
1991: 59). Sartre, as we have seen, argues along similar lines in Being and Nothingness,
insisting that interpersonal relations are an ‘internal negation’. When fixed by the
gaze of the Other, this decentres my world and causes me to experience ‘a new type
of intraworldly haemorrhage’ in which all the constituents of my world flow towards
the Other (BN 400). In an interview with Michel Sicard shortly before his death, Sartre
focuses on the issue of interconnectedness and entanglement28 and takes a ‘quantum
view’ by positing the existence of an internal ontological bond between human beings:

Ontologically, consciousnesses are not isolated, there are planes where they
enter into one another – planes common to two or to n consciousnesses
. . . [Humans’] perceptions or their thought are in relation one with others,
not only by exposure to the other, but because there are penetrations between
consciousnesses. (1979a: 15)
110 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Consciousness and free will are seen as inseparable in quantum physics, reflecting
the self-organizing capacity of living organisms to take unstructured, inert or chaotic
matter from the surrounding environment and draw it into a dynamic, creative
dialogue. Quantum indeterminacy arises from the ‘creative thinking’ of matter. Just as
an electron sends out ‘virtual feelers of possibility’ in determining its motion, so does
consciousness in deciding its course of action through imagining things differently or
by running through different choices. Quantum indeterminism is based in this way on
creative thinking when a person states or depicts ‘what in fact does not exist’, reflecting
the inherent creativity in all self-organizing systems (Zohar 1991: 62, 172). This is akin
to the creative power of the imagination in Sartre’s terms and to the pour-soi whose
spontaneous upsurge and decisionism is a ‘pure event in the heart of being’. Just as in
Sartre’s idea of ‘a duality that is a unity’ (BN 125), the quantum worldview transcends
the dichotomy between mind and body, inner and outer, showing that the building
blocks of mind (bosons) and matter (fermions) arise out of a common substrate and
share a mutually creative dialogue.

Assimilation and hodological space

Drawing on the work of Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, Sartre describes ‘the real
space of the world’ as ‘hodological space’ (BN 415). For Lewin, hodological space
denotes the dynamic relation between agent and environment. Through goal-directed
purposive activity, the individual delineates a world in which objects function as
‘valences’ that can be either positive and attractive or negative and unappealing. As
we move towards or away from the valenced objects, we trace a path or ‘vectors’ that
are a function of the strength or direction of the agent. These valences fluctuate and
shift during the normal process of experience as the agent’s goals change, and so
vectors are constantly modified relative to changing valences. In this way, the subject
generates a constantly fluctuating ‘field of force’ in the course of interacting with the
environment.29 As Sartre explains, ‘around the other, an entire space is grouped, and
this space is made with my space; it is a regrouping, at which I am present, and which
escapes me, of all the objects that populate my universe’ (BN 350). Space is thus not
striated with strict divisions and boundaries but an open smooth space in which
forces converge and coalesce, causing ontological dislocations in individuals through
a state of transfer: ‘Originally, space is a qualitative and magnetic field, because it
is traversed, because one pursues there, because one flees there, and one is always
on the plane . . . of the unveiling of the new’ (NE 361). Unlike Euclidean space that
has fixed coordinates, hodological space is generated relative to each subject and is
constantly fluid. Space is not merely an anatomical entity possessing clearly delineable
boundaries but is coextensive with one’s range of possibilities and field of force: ‘my
body is . . . everywhere . . . [it] is always extended through the tool that it utilizes . . .
my body is at the end of the stick on which I leaning . . . it is at the end of the telescope
which shows me the stars; it is . . . in the entire house, because it is my adaptation to
these tools’ (BN 436).
 
Smooth Ontology 111

In his rich phenomenological descriptions, Sartre describes a reality in which

en-soi and pour-soi share a depth or ‘fusion of ends’: ‘the for-itself ’s absorption by the
in-itself, [is] like ink by blotting paper’ (BN 790). In describing the action of sliding
in the snow, for instance, Sartre refers to the continuity of the pour-soi/en-soi as ‘a
synthesis of depth’ (BN 757). Action reveals to us a ‘relation between being and being
which, even though the physicist apprehends it externally, is neither pure externality
nor immanence, but which refers us to the Gestaltist notion of figure’ (BN 808). There
is ‘a tactile fascination’ in the viscous where the ‘suction of the viscous that I can feel
on my hands is the beginning of a continuity between the viscous substance and
myself ’ (BN 789).30 For Sartre, my relation to objects is not just an instrumental and
detached one like that of the analytical scientist, since possession is a ‘magical relation’:
‘I am these objects that I possess, but outside and in confrontation with myself ’ (BN
767). He describes how emotions ‘feed’ or are ‘nurtured’ on objects as objects take on
affective textures or moods; evocative qualities appear at the heart of objects in such
a way that the affected subject and the affective objective are bound in an indissoluble
synthesis. Perception has an affective coloration that reveals a union of the psychic and
physiological and the point at which their boundaries run into each other:

When feeling is directed on at [sic] a real thing, currently perceived, the thing
sends back to it, like a screen, the light that it receives from it. And so, by a game of
back and forth, the feeling is constantly enriched, at the same time that the object
imbibes affective qualities [. . .] each affective quality is so deeply incorporated
in the object that it is impossible to distinguish between what is felt and what is
perceived. (IM 139)

This ‘connective tissue’ (BN 755) between objects and subjects in Sartre’s ontology
shares a close bond with posthumanist eco-aesthetics. Böhme (1995: 119), for
instance, elaborates a form of biosemiotics where things in the environment are in
communication with each other, a form of ‘being-in-communication’ in which beings
‘tincture’ the environment in which they are perceived. The universe is thus conceived
as dialogically composed of a series of inter-animating relationships that emphasize
multiplicities rather than individual subjects. Relata do not pre-exist relations but
emerge through specific intra-actions in a world that unfolds indeterminately as
a complicated tissue of events in which connections of different kinds overlap or
combine and thereby form the texture of the whole.
Sartrean hodological space develops Nietzschean insights of assimilation and
incorporation and configures reality as ‘a play of energies and waves of energy at the
same time one and many’ (WP 1067), demonstrating ‘the relational character of all
occurrence’ (KSW 11.26.157). As we will see in further detail in the next chapter, this
aligns Nietzschean and Sartrean ontology very closely with several philosophical strands
in contemporary posthumanist thinking, such as philosophical posthumanism, vibrant
materialism, object-oriented ontology and eco-phenomenology that follow Nietzsche and
Sartre in emphasizing the view of the radical interconnection of the human, non-human
and Other-than-human. Central to posthumanist thinking is the concept of ‘autopoiesis’
which, as we have seen, was prefigured in Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s ‘new science’ to
112 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

explain the ability of a system/organism to creatively maintain and reproduce itself.31

Philosophical posthumanism also follows Nietzsche (explicitly) and Sartre (implicitly)
in rejecting standpoint theory in favour of a situated and pluralistic perspectivism
where ‘[i]t is our needs that interpret the world’ (WP 267). Additionally, posthumanism
incorporates a Nietzschean–Sartrean model of the self as a ‘relational, embodied,
affective and accountable entity’, engendering a ‘mind-body continuum’ sedimented
within a ‘nature-culture continuum’ (Ferrando 2020: 154, 139). This recognizes ‘the
ontological inseparability of intra-acting agencies’ and ‘a posthumanist performative
account of material bodies (both human and nonhuman)’ (2020: 155, 136).
As Barad (2003: 801) complains, some of the constructive radicalizations of late
postmodernity somehow lost track of the material: ‘Language matters. Discourse
matters, Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that
does not seem to matter anymore is matter.’ In this sense, Nietzschean and Sartrean
ontology can be considered an improvement on Derrida’s all-consuming textuality
and phonocentrism. For Sartre, it is matter that connects us to all other beings (CDR
163), but matter is not something passive, fixed and inert to be shaped by some
external force. Rather, it is a process of ‘materialization’ which is dynamic, shifting,
entangled, diffractional and performative, always, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987:
451) describe it, ‘matter in movement, in flux, in variation, matter as a conveyor of
singularities and traits of expression’.32 Indeed, Sartre’s analysis of practico-inertia and
counter-finality in the Critique gives us a vivid illustration of how, in Bennett’s (2017:
447) words, ‘non-human things and forces actively shape the bodies they encounter,
including the humans’. In the form of the practico-inert, worked matter emerges as
a shifting and transformative quasi-totality that surrounds and conditions us (CDR
324). In his example of the effects of deforestation in China, Sartre demonstrates how
the farmer experiences a form of ‘practical destiny’ constituted by the ‘magical field
of counterfinality’ (CDR 224). The material field, synthesized by ‘the serial infinity of
human acts’ (CDR 219), becomes ‘a strange and living being’ (CDR 169). Continuing
the theme of ‘magical possession’ (BN 767), in the Critique matter is conceived as a
‘magical field’ (CDR 224) full of ‘vampire objects’ (CDR 169) that soak up the lifeblood
of praxis: ‘All of us spend our lives engraving our maleficent image into things, and
this image fascinates and bewilders us if we try to understand ourselves through it,
even though we are nothing other than the totalizing movement which results in this
particular objectification’ (CDR 227, trans. modified). Illustrating the phenomenon of
‘trans-substantiation’ (CDR 178), in his example of female factory workers he shows
how machine and the worker form a relationship of perfect symbiosis, each hosting
the other. Through the free movement of her project, the worker becomes a machine of
the machine bringing to the machine her experience and creativity, even the fantasies,
which its mechanisms demand. The machine then dialectically shapes the experience
she invests within it to the point that even her sexual reveries are subjected to the
rhythms of the machine: ‘The machine demands and creates in the worker an inverted
semi-automatism which complements it’ (CDR 233). From the dialectical mediation of
the practico-inert comes the emergence of the ‘homme-machine’ (CDR 191), a hybrid
form of being definitively non-human but not inhuman either, rather a composite
or assemblage of ‘the totalizing movement which gathers together my neighbor,
 
Smooth Ontology 113

myself, and the environment in the synthetic unity of an objectification in process’

(SM 155). In this way, Sartre depicts socio-material reality as one of shifting, mutually
transgressive contexts that challenges any straightforward differentiation between
humanity and the worked-upon material that surrounds it in the practical field. In the
Critique, freedom no longer refers to a ‘choice’ among possibles but to the necessity
of totalization and praxis in response to external exigencies and demands within a
network of intra-actions or transversal exchange of forces between different agencies.
Within this relational assemblage, he posits only a small space for creativity within the
singularity that marks my making of being what has been made of me (CDR 330), akin
to an existential signature or trace.
In summary, Nietzschean and Sartrean relational ontology expands upon a
‘Spinozian-Deleuzian genealogy’, conforming to posthumanist thinking by recognizing
itself as ‘a monistic pluralist (or a pluralistic monist) form of becoming’ (Ferrando 2020:
167) that avoids dualism as a metaphysical postulate but uses dualisms strategically
within a ternary or sublimating dialectical logic. Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s innovative
mereology shows that neither monism nor pluralism by themselves could be feasible
to sustain a proper ontology. In thinking posthumanistically, we should thus follow
Nietzsche and Sartre and deconstruct the either/or of the one/many binarism and avoid
searching for priority or origin: ‘The one is necessarily and constantly differentiating
and so it (they) is (are), at the same time, many’ (2020: 167). In Nietzsche’s ‘terra-
sophy’ and Sartre’s ‘hodological space’, we find a rich affective dialectic and a magical,
‘sympoietic’ view of nature akin to ‘the enchanting realm of physics’ described by
quantum physicists in which there is a reciprocal movement between consciousness
and its noematic correlate where each affective quality is so deeply incorporated
in the object ‘that it is impossible to distinguish between what is felt and what is
perceived’ (IM 139). In Chapter 6, I delve deeper into this affective dialectic as I look
at their posthumanist innovations in relation to their theorization of nature, animals,
technology, ecology and the future.
114
 5

A creative ethics and agonistic politics

[S]upposing the recommendation appealed to mankind, it could in pursuit of it also

impose upon itself a moral law, likewise at its own discretion. But up to now the
moral law has supposed to stand above our own likes and dislikes: one did not actu-
ally want to impose this law upon oneself, one wanted to take it from somewhere or
discover it somewhere or have it commanded to one from somewhere.
(Nietzsche, Daybreak 108)

In this chapter, I look at Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s ethical theories as they progress from
the early to their later work and examine how their ‘creative ethics’1 connects to their
political writings. While, ethically speaking, they share much common ground in their
respect for individual autonomy and in their endeavour to construct an affirmative
ethics in the wake of the death of God, in a political sense, the elitist, aristocratic
Nietzsche and the democratic, egalitarian Sartre prima facie seem diametrically at
odds. This is so particularly in regard to Nietzsche’s final period of ‘Grand Politics’
in which he proposes a radically aristocratic political vision predicated on a ‘pathos
of distance’ (GM 2.18) and relations of exploitation between the ‘higher type’ and the
‘herd’ (WP 936). Despite Nietzsche’s lurch towards aristocratism in his final period,
however, scholars find a very different political philosopher in his middle writings
and locate many resources for a radical form of democratic practice.2 In the final part,
I take a reconstructive approach to Nietzschean political thinking in the light of his
middle writings and suggest common ground between Nietzsche and Sartre in the
form of a politics of ‘positive agonism’ or ‘pluralist anarchism’ that grounds freedom in
an open, emergent dialectic of self and Other, taking its momentum from his relational
ontology of forces, from his perspectival notion of truth and from his genealogical
deconstruction of power.

Sartre’s unfinished Nietzschean ethics

One of the most mysterious texts by Sartre and one that it seems nobody has really read
(it is not yet found and is probably lost) is a long study on Nietzsche that he began in
the period of Notebooks for an Ethics (1947–8) and which, according to Sartre, was a
part of his ethical research (EJ 194). Apart, that is, from Beauvoir who did read it (as
116 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

she read all of Sartre’s works before he published them) and refers to it in Adieux as ‘a
work on ethics’, ‘the book in which you wrote an important, long, and very fine study
of Nietzsche’ (1984: 180).3 Whatever Sartre wrote about Nietzsche in his ethical study
would likely have been concerned with the question of nihilism and the creation of new
values following the death of God as he indicates in the following passage:

Monsieur Bataille is a survivor of the death of God. And, when one thinks about
it, it would seem that our entire age is surviving that death, which he experienced,
suffered, and survived. God is dead. We should not understand by that that He
does not exist, nor even that he no longer exists. He is dead: he used to speak to us
and he has fallen silent, we now touch only his corpse. (2010: 234)

The death of God, announced for the first time in Nietzsche’s work by the madman
(GS 125), marked a situation in which ‘the highest values devalue themselves’ (WP 9),
a ‘pathological transitional stage’ (WP 13) and ‘the recognition of the long waste of
strength’ (WP 12A) invested in the ascetic Christian worldview. In Derrida’s (1981:
70) view, nihilism functions for Nietzsche as a kind of ‘pharmakon’ which ‘acts as
both remedy and poison . . . can be – alternatively or simultaneously – beneficent
or maleficent’. The term plays ambiguously between poles and exposes the limit of
metaphysical thinking, for its movement cannot proceed as an opposed binarism. It is
a conjunctive ‘both . . . and . . .’ rather than disjunctive ‘either . . . or . . .’ Nihilism is thus
poison (in its Christian-Platonic form), the expression of a decadent and sickly will to
power, but also a remedy: ‘nihilism, as the denial of a truthful world, of being, might
be a divine way of thinking’ (WP 15). For Nietzsche, despair in the absence of a goal
constitutes ‘passive nihilism’ – ‘a decline and recession of the power of the spirit’ – in
contrast to the active nihilism he affirms that represents ‘a sign of increased power of
the spirit’ (WP 22). The passive nihilism of the ‘last man’ who ‘makes everything small’,
invents happiness and ‘blinks’ is contrasted to the ‘self-overcoming creature’ who gives
‘birth to a star’ (Z P5). Nietzsche’s ‘active nihilism’ is based on the premise that there
are goals, but no single goal: ‘Can we remove the idea of a goal from the process and
then affirm the process in spite of this?’ (WP 55). ‘The formula of my happiness’, he
writes, is ‘a Yes, a No, a straight arrow, a goal’ (TI 1.44).
In Daigle’s (2009: 56, 67) view, the crux of the connection between Nietzsche and
Sartre is their diagnosis of nihilism (the loss of meaning that accompanies the death
of God) and the reconstructive ethical programme (‘an immanent humanistic ethics’)
they propose as a solution to it. We can view them in this light as ‘two optimists’ (2009:
61) replacing God by giving life a new meaning in a world with no intrinsic meaning
through an aesthetic justification. Their ethics are humanistic insofar as they both
focus on the individual and her flourishing. This is a humanism ‘more demanding’
than the humanism they criticize in that it requires no constraints to be put upon the
individual in terms of moral or religious objectivity (2009: 63). In Notebooks for an
Ethics, Sartre argues that the death of God means not only the death of transcendence
but also ‘the opening of the infinite’ (NE 34), that is, the infinity of human possibilities:
‘In this way, man finds himself the heir of the mission of the dead God: to draw
Being from its perpetual collapse into the absolute indistinctness of night. An infinite
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 117

mission’ (NE 494). For Daigle (2009: 66–70), the figure of the Übermensch must be
understood in terms of a moral ideal. It is meant as an emulative figure that illustrates
human potential in the form of ‘a constant striving’ or activity of becoming just like
Sartre’s theory of consciousness and freedom: ‘the Overman is essentially a Sartrean
authentic person and vice versa.’ Although Sartre is very close to Nietzsche in his
dealings with the question of the meaning of life, there is a political separation in
their respective ethics. Nietzsche’s influence wanes on Sartre as his preoccupations
become more political since Nietzsche’s humanistic ethics ‘remains individualistic’. In
Nietzsche, there is no appeal to the Other’, unlike Sartre, who presents an ‘opening to
the Other’. For Daigle (2009: 63), Nietzsche’s ‘virtue ethics’ needs to become a ‘virtue
politics’ in which flourishing is seen as important for all the group. This, as we will see,
presents a problem in aligning Nietzsche and Sartre politically (if we take Nietzsche’s
aristocratism of his later works as his final word) but does not debar a rapprochement
with a more dialectical reading of his view of the relation between self (individual)
and Other (herd) evident in his relational ontology of agonistic forces and his more
democratic writings of the middle period which do show ‘an opening to the Other’.

Nietzsche’s revaluation of values

The loss of a centre of gravity, resistance to natural instincts, in a word ‘selflessness’
– this is what has been called ‘morality’ so far . . . In Daybreak I took up the fight
against the morality of ‘unselfing’.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 3D2)

Although there are differences between the three periods of Nietzsche’s ethical thinking,
there are many strands of continuity that form a consistent core. First, Nietzsche takes
ethical values to be cultural constructions and adopts a historical/genealogical approach
in which a critique of moral values depends on ‘a knowledge of the conditions and
circumstances out of which they have grown, under which they have developed and
shifted’ (GM 6). What appears virtuous in one time or place can be perceived as vice
elsewhere: ‘only something which has no history can be defined’ (GM 2.13).4 Second,
Nietzsche’s rethinking of morality aims to go beyond the binary thinking of Good and
Evil to articulate a ternary level of ethical conception based on the sublimation rather
than the disjunction of the opposed terms.5 He condemns totalitarian thinking linked
to universalizing morality (BGE 202) in opposition to Roman tolerance (BGE 46), for
instance, but criticizes relativism (no moral idea is binding) as ‘equally childish’ (GS
345) since it jumps to a nihilistic conclusion and assumes the possibility of having
values from the outside or having no values at all. Third, Nietzschean ethics holds a
deep concern for the self-determination and autonomy of the individual but a form of
individuality conceived in relational/dialectical terms with the collective.
Nietzsche’s general view on ethics is encapsulated in his narrative ‘Of the three
Metamorphoses’ in Zarathustra. The three figures of the camel, the lion and the child
represent three evolving stages in the development of morality. The camel personifies
118 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

traditional and customary morality and obediently carries the burden and weight
of their duties and dictates. The lion represents a no-saying stage in human history
where individuals question and destroy the existing tablets of morality in the name
of freedom. The overcoming of these two disparate positions is represented by the
figure of the child who negates the spirit of gravity and seriousness through play and
affirmative projects of self-cultivation. Nietzsche’s ethical views undergo both subtle
transformations and dramatic shifts as we move between his three transitions. In
his early writings, his moral sense is collective, aimed at bringing into existence a
vibrant and noble moral culture based on, but not atavistically returning to, the Greek
culture of tragedy. His moral paragon of the middle writings is the ‘free spirit’, a more
individualist conception, but one of a liberal kind whose ‘Epicurean garden’ is a ‘lovely,
peaceful, self-enclosed garden . . . with high walls to protect against the dangers and
dust of the roadway, but with a hospitable gate as well’ (D 174). In the later writings, his
individualism turns into one of an illiberal kind and forms the bedrock of his radical
aristocratism. This is the bloody Nietzsche, or ‘fire-and-brimstone moralist’ (Solomon
2003: 62) whose rejection of bourgeois morality values the excellence of a noble few
over the well-being of the multitudinous masses. Standing as the ‘opponent of the
disgraceful modern softening of feeling’ (GM 6), this is very much a stoical Nietzsche
who emphasizes suffering and struggle: ‘do you know that only this discipline has
created all enhancements of human so far?’ (BGE 225). Alongside creation, there must
also be the ‘agony of the child-bearer’ (TI 10.4): ‘Creating . . . requires suffering and
much transformation’ (Z 2.2). What is common throughout Nietzsche’s ethical outlook
is his rejection of justificatory foundationalist theories. Philosophers, he comments,
‘make one laugh’ with their quest for a rational foundation for morality (BGE 186).
Throughout his writings, Nietzsche vehemently rejects universalism and endorses
plurality. He praises the Hindu Laws of Manu for dividing individuals into different
castes and maintaining that different ethical claims pertain to different castes (A 56–7).
In the absence of any ethical universality in modern societies, it is foolish to impose
the demands of a single morality on people: ‘what is fair for one cannot by any means
for that reason alone also be fair for others . . . the demand of one morality for all is
detrimental to the higher men’ (BGE 228).
The principal target of Nietzsche’s ‘revaluation of values’ is customary morality
which he views as inimical to the emergence of the ‘free spirit’. For Nietzsche, ‘[w]e are
entwined in an austere shirt of duty’ (BGE 226) and so the free spirit must be hostile
towards what ‘is familiar, traditional, hallowed’ (GS 297). Customary morality defends
conformity to the ‘sanctity’ and ‘inscrutability’ of tradition (D 19), an ‘inexplicable,
indeterminate power’ behind our thinking that lies ‘beyond the personal’ (D 9). It
requires a regime of habit and obedience that turns humanity into a self-undermining
‘perpetual sacrifice’ (D 18) and is motivated by a mood of fear of transgression that
may result in revenge, resentment or punishment. A fearful person is never alone but
intuits an enemy to be ‘always standing behind his chair’ (D 249). The deleterious
effects of customary morality, driven by revenge and resentment, sicken the remaining
ones who, to remain as free spirits, should seek solitude (D 323). Nietzsche urges
them to be courageous and take responsibility for their health on both an individual
psychophysical and a cultural level:
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 119

The number of these little revenge addicts, not to mention that of their little
revenge-acts, is immense; the whole air is constantly buzzing from the arrows and
darts launched by their malice such that the sun and the sky of life are darkened
by it – not just for them but even more so for us, the others, the remaining ones:
which is worse than the all too frequent barbs which pierce our hide and heart.
(D 323)

Nietzsche recommends that we should take a gardener’s approach to our multifarious

competing drives and cultivate new moral values and virtues that we already find
ourselves beginning to express (D 566). He lists the ‘good four’ ethical virtues that
require us to be ‘[h]onest towards ourselves and whatever else is our friend; courageous
towards the enemy; magnanimous towards the defeated; polite: always’ (D 556) but also
invites us to wonder about the creation of new values ‘of purple-glowing galaxies and
whole Milky Ways of the beautiful’ where we can become ‘astronomers of the ideal’ (D
551).6 He presents the image of creatures in flight, ‘aeronauts of the spirit’, who fly higher
and further away with all of our ‘great mentors and precursors’ who cannot fly any
further. There still remains a ‘vast and prodigious trajectory’ to explore, and despite the
fatigue of some including ourselves, we can take comfort in the knowledge that ‘[o]ther
birds will fly further!’ (D 573). To become a free spirit one must constantly engage in
an art of self-overcoming that requires transformation and renewal as contained in the
message of the phoenix:

‘Poet and bird’. – The bird Phoenix showed the poet a flaming scroll turning to
ashes. ‘Do not be terrified!’ it said, ‘it is your work! It does not possess the spirit of
the times and still less the spirit of those who are against the times: consequently
it has to be burned. But this is a good sign. There are many types of dawn’. (D 568)

For all living organisms, change is necessary for their health. Snakes that do not
shed their skin perish, as do free spirits who never change their opinions (D 573).
In the pursuit of health and flourishing held out in the possibility of a new ethic,
we should experiment by engaging in ‘tiny deviant actions’ (D 149), diverse ways of
‘novel experiments’ in our ‘ways of life’ and ‘modes of society’ to reinforce imaginative
resistances to customary morality. The ‘numerous novel experiments . . . made in ways
of life and modes of society’ (D 164) will create free spirits who engage imaginatively
and creatively with ethical problems in the affirmation of a new ethic. To be free,
one must experiment with conflicting beliefs, be prepared to suffer and renounce
valued things and show ‘a tenacious will to health’ (HH P4). He exhorts his readers
to experiment with different kinds of life-affirming practices (D 453) and test out
new types of morality (D 164). To avoid indoctrination by collective and conformist
systems of values, we must become drawn to what is strange and unknown and try out
multiple perspectives (GS P3).
Broadly speaking, Nietzsche proposes what can be described as ‘an ethical
eudaimonism based on “experimentally” generated knowledge’ (Ure 2015: 166). A
strong ‘Epicurean mood’ pervades the middle writings, including a sense of moderation,
tolerance and yearning for companionship. Unfortunately, this has led to a certain
120 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

neglect of the middle writings as they fit uncomfortably with ‘the bloody Nietzsche’ of
the late period who performs cold rationality and who, through prolonged suffering,
grows ‘a hard Stoic hedgehog skin’ (GS 306). His later writings replace the ‘free spirit’
with the figure of Zarathustra and the Übermensch and take on a more prophetic tone
in the anticipation of a new human being. The target of his ethical critique is ‘the last
man’ who has reacted to the death of God and the commercialization of society through
life-denying practices based on uniform values, sedated emotions, easy options and
wretched contentment, a form of escapism and weak nihilism (Z P5). But who or what
is the Übermensch, the antidote to the last man? In describing the ‘new philosopher’ in
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche gives us a clue:

a human being who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes, and
dreams extraordinary things . . . struck by his own thoughts as from outside . . . as
by lightning bolts . . . himself a storm pregnant with new lightnings; a fatal human
being around whom there are constant rumblings and growlings . . . uncanny
doings. (BGE 292)

For Nietzsche, bad conscience, slave morality and ‘the internalization of man’ (GM
2.16) have made possible a strange leap in human evolution transforming humanity
from a limited animal of instinct into an animal with tremendous possibilities
for development. Thus, bad conscience is an illness inasmuch as pregnancy can be
regarded as an illness:

From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky
throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’ ‘great child’, be he called Zeus or chance;
he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if something
were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an
episode, a bridge, a great promise. (GM 2.16)

He speculates about the appearance on earth of ‘the earliest race of contemplative

human beings’ from which the philosopher and a more complicated kind of human
will eventually emerge (GM 3.10) whose awareness of historical and psychological
conditioning, love of freedom and will to know the world marks a decisive shift in
humankind: ‘Tremendous self-examination: becoming conscious of oneself, not as
individuals but as mankind. Let us reflect, let us think back; let us follow the highways
and byways!’ (WP 585). Affirmation is conditional upon a ‘no-saying’ insofar as the
dominant values one has internalized have to be overturned if an affirmative form of
life is possible (EH 4.4). Nietzsche describes the overtaking of life by scientific history
as a form of self-mummification (TI 3.1) and looks forward to a future ‘that gives back
to the earth its goal and to the human its hope’ (GM 2.24).
In Conway’s (1989: 212) view, we should not construe the Übermensch as a ‘world-
historical figure’ with undue haste since Nietzsche is being ironic when he speaks of
the ‘man of the future’ and the ‘great redeemer from nothingness and God’ (GM 2.24).
The Übermensch ideal is only posited in the first two parts of Zarathustra and, in
the second half, he renounces the ideal of perfection and a future redemption but
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 121

sets out to replace pedagogy with self-creation through exemplification, replacing

the universalist prescription for humanity with the idea of a ‘local rebellion’ against
nihilism and pursuing the path of a ‘quiet’ Übermensch. Against this view, though, many
attribute a more universalist perspective to Nietzsche’s later ethics. For Siemens (2018:
319–20), ‘[w]hile his perfectionism refers to individual “impulses, deeds and works”, it
is important not to isolate it (as a concern for a few select individuals) from a generic
orientation towards “humanity” and its growth, enhancement or intensification’.
Nietzsche’s perfectionism is a concern to extend the range of human capabilities
and possibilities that enlarge the species or concept ‘human’. His later ethics are an
appeal, not to annul the concept of humanity ‘but to rethink it by reapportioning and
transvaluating the conscious and unconscious, purposive and affective determinants
of human agency’ in which humanity and nature are ‘inseparably entwined’. In Ure’s
(2015: 169, 171) view, Nietzsche’s ethical thinking changes in its later stages from
‘ethical perfection to bio-political transformation’. In Daybreak, Nietzsche attacks the
‘weakening and abolition of the individual’ and her sacrifice to the whole or some
larger group (D 132), asserting the right to self-determination (D 107), but argues
for a radical commitment to the Enlightenment ideal of truth at any cost (D 429,
D 45). In his later writings, he replaces the service to knowledge with the idea of
species-enhancement, engaging a neo-Stoic therapy to eliminate any compassion or
pity that might obstruct his political program of producing higher types. He radically
transforms his political therapy to maximize flourishing, no longer offering it to
all but only to those select few with the biological potential to facilitate the species’
potential. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche uses the example of the Sipo Matador
(‘Murdering Creeper’), the parasitic Javanese vines that ‘so often enclasp an oak tree
with their tendrils until eventually, high above it but supported by it, they can unfold
their crowns in the open light and display their happiness’ (BGE 258), to justify
exploitation and sacrifice of the masses for the essential characteristic of a good and
healthy aristocracy. As we will see, for many scholars, the aristocratic declarations of
his later texts betray the revolutionary promise of his critical project and, particularly,
the more democratic or pluralistic ethos of his middle period, by falling back into the
masculinist hope for Christian redemption and reinstating Platonic conceptions of
political classes and the state.

Sartre’s three ethics: Authenticity, reciprocity and the gift

Sartre never produced a full-fledged ethical theory, only provisional sketches for what a
theory might contain. Although it is often thought that his ethics not only falls into two
distinct periods but entails two discrete theories, the line of demarcation separating the
first ethics from the second is sometimes difficult to discern, since, as Sartre indicates,
‘the Critique is Being and Nothingness, and it is not possible to understand one without
the other’ (in Beauvoir 1984: 422). To complicate matters, some scholars demarcate a
third ethics (an ethics of ‘the WE’) that Sartre formulated after the Critique in the late
1960s and 1970s. Although these demarcations are useful in mapping the changes of
emphasis and perspective in his thinking as it developed, my general approach is to
122 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

view Sartre’s oeuvre as a process of ‘diachronic enrichment’. There is no doubt that

his understanding of intersubjectivity and collectivity deepens as his work progresses,
but the seeds of his later ethical thinking are present, if sometimes subdued or not
fully adumbrated, in his early phenomenology.7 Simple characterizations of Sartre’s
early social ontology as that of an unshakeable negativism where ‘hell is other people’
tell only a fraction of the story, neglecting significant aspects of his thinking. Unlike
Christian hell which is everlasting, one always has the possibility of freely choosing
to leave the hell of Huis Clos as the door always remains unlocked.8 Although he later
described Being and Nothingness as his ‘eidetic of bad faith’ (1964a: 196), he lodges
a promissory escape from bad faith in a footnote that ‘would require corrupted
being to reclaim itself. We will call this authenticity: its description does not belong
here’ (BN 117n27). Moreover, there are moments in gestate where Sartre suggests
forms of intersubjectivity he would develop to a higher sophistication, outlining a
‘We-Subject’ where a plurality of subjectivities recognize one another as transcending-
subjectivities: ‘In the “we” subject, nobody is an object. The we encompasses a plurality
of subjectivities, each of whom recognizes the others as subjectivities’ (BN 544). He
returns to this later in the text, describing ‘the experience of the We-subject’ as a kind
of ‘collective rhythm’ (BN 559). This provides a valuable sketch of authentic relations
based on recognition and reciprocity9 later developed in Notebooks for an Ethics and
the Critique.
Towards the end of the 1940s, Sartre embarked on a theory of ‘committed ethics’,
declaring that the writer aims towards ‘action by disclosure’: ‘What aspect of the world
do you want to disclose? What change do you want to bring into the world by this
disclosure?’ (WL 37). The work of art, he argues, is both a gift and an exigence, ‘an act
of confidence in the freedom of men’ (WL 67) and ‘a task proposed to human freedom’
(WL 65). Proposing a ‘literature of production’ to counter the bourgeois ‘literature
of consumption’ (WL 119), Sartre cements the link between art and ethics: ‘at the
heart of the aesthetic imperative we discern a moral imperative’ (WL 67). He likens
moral choice to constructing a work of art but cautions, ‘[w]e are not espousing an
aesthetic morality’ (EH 45), a warning he would later repeat in The Family Idiot when
criticizing the bourgeois idea of l’art pour l’art. In this period, Sartre confronts ‘the
present paradox of ethics’ (WL 221) of acting morally in an immoral world: ‘Ethics
is for us inevitable and at the same time impossible’ (SG 185). As it is impossible
to treat people as ends in the present society, the task of the artist is to exhibit this
paradox of means and ends (illustrated vividly in his play The Devil and The Good
Lord).10 His Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre’s attempt to work through this problem
and formulate a ‘morality of deliverance and salvation’ (BN 543n34) to which in
Being and Nothingness he promised he would ‘devote a future work’ (BN 811). This he
arrives at through the notion of authenticity that lies in the unveiling of being through
non-being, through doing rather than being. It consists ‘in renouncing the category
of appropriation’ in order ‘to introduce into the internal relation of the Person the
relation of solidarity, which will subsequently be modified into solidarity with others’.
At the same time ‘it realizes a type of unity peculiar to the existent, which is an ethical
unity brought about by calling things into question and a contractual agreement with
oneself ’ (NE 479).
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 123

As Sartre later commented (1974b: 171), it was the perceived ‘bourgeois

individualism’ of Notebooks for an Ethics that led him to abandon it. The second
‘dialectical ethics’ that he formulates in the 1950s and 1960s heralds a more collective
orientation that goes beyond the dyad of self and Other and extends to wider
groups and ensembles. The defining features of his dialectical ethics in the Critique
are, as Flynn (2014: 311–12) notes, moral indignation, spontaneity, camaraderie, a
heightened sense of disalienation, the distrust of party politics, confidence in ‘direct
action’, a visceral dislike of authority and the ever-presence of violence in the form of
‘fraternity-terror’. Like Nietzsche, Sartre identifies ‘norms’ with customary morality,
a function of the practico-inert that restricts spontaneity and creative moral praxis,
producing inauthenticity and patterns of bad faith. The inert structure of social life
can be found in the serial group. Seriality involves a certain ordering of people that
‘becomes a negative principle of unity and of determining everyone’s fate as other by
every Other as Other’ (CDR 261). The series constitutes a negative unity of inertia, a
reified totalization maintained by ‘hexis’ (habit) in which, rather than transforming
a situation, individuals instead merely endure it. In this serial group, they are bound
together from without by an object they do not control: ‘The series represents the
use of alterity as a bond among men under the passive action of an object’ (CDR
266). Serial existence is a common feature of social life that can be found wherever
individuals are brought together ‘horizontally’ in alterity under the directing force of
the practico-inert, through which their relations become structured. My individual
characteristics are inessential in the series since, as just ‘one other’ to the others, I am
instantly replaceable by anyone else who might come along: ‘In the series everyone
becomes himself (as Other than self) in so far as he is Other than the Others, and in so
far as the Others are Other than him’ (CDR 262).
After describing the alienating experience of the series, Sartre counterbalances
its negative gravity with a positive analysis of the fusing group (groupe-en-fusion).11
Where inertia forms the basis of the serial group, praxis is the constituent feature of
the fusing group: ‘Praxis is the only real unity of the fused groups: it is praxis which
creates the group, and which maintains it and introduces its first internal changes into
it’ (CDR 418). In place of the alienating or objectifying third, Sartre introduces the
‘mediating third’ that describes free organic praxis as constituting the fusing group in
a network of reciprocity. In the fusing group, no individual sacrifices his freedom to
the social whole since individual will coincides with the general will and each finds
a confirmation of his own act in the actions of others. As a result, all signs of alterity
between individuals dissolve: ‘everyone continued to see himself in the Other, but saw
himself there as himself . . . everyone sees his own future in the Other’ (CDR 354). The
fusing group represents a state of genuine organic community since it encompasses
‘the individual discovery of common action as the sole means of reaching the common
objective’ (CDR 387). Since no praxis in the group serves to violate or to obstruct any
other, but only to enrich it, ‘the essential character of the group-in-fusion is the abrupt
resurrection of liberty’ (CDR 401).
While the fusing group becomes the prototype for authentic social relations, its
existence is ephemeral and precarious. From the moment of its inception, the free
praxis of the group ‘carries a destiny of seriality’ (CDR 679). Since the group emerges
124 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

as a defensive reaction against fear and imminent threat, once this is removed, the
group falls into dissipation since the practical basis of its unity no longer exists. In
order to stop this process of fragmentation, the group must impose stability by other
means. This happens through the introduction of ‘fraternity-terror’ that incorporates
organization, function and the division of labour in addition to a pledge taken by the
group for reciprocal protection against the relapse into seriality, alterity and indifference
(CDR 422). In the 1970s, after the events of 1968, Sartre sketches out a third ‘dialogical
ethics’ in the course of a series of interviews. Continuing the direction of the fusing
group, he speaks in 1976 of the establishment of a non-hierarchical society in which
‘a new form of freedom is established, which is the freedom of reciprocal relations of
persons in the form of a we’ (1980: 233). In other respects, however, he changes course
and returns to concepts formulated in his earliest thinking: ‘And I am trying to close
the circle, to link my first thoughts with my latest, by giving up some of my ideas from
BN and CDR’ (1980: 234). Key to this was the development of a form of fraternity no
longer based on violence and terror but on reciprocal connection, ‘integral humanity’
and the ‘interpenetration of consciousnesses’, continuing the process of de-egoization
and an ‘ethics of the gift’ that Sartre had initiated in Notebooks for an Ethics but then put
on hold in the Critique. A new era of ‘integral humanity’ will replace the ‘subhumans’
of the present deformed by the systematic processes and constitutive structures of
capitalist society. Returning to the liberating power of the imagination to ‘surpass the
real’ (I 186), his final period of interviews represents Sartre’s attempt to construct a new
collective ethics in order to bring this change about: ‘Morality cannot be imposed from
above. In fact, morality is not possible in a world of individuals . . . man’s fulfilment is
collective’ (in Gerassi 2009: 120–1).

Nietzsche’s grand politics

The great health – Being new, nameless, hard to understand, we premature births
of an as yet unproven future need for a new goal also a new means – namely, a new
health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious, and gayer than any previ-
ous health.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 382)

There is perhaps no other philosopher one can think of whose philosophy has been
appropriated by such a diverse range of ideologies as Nietzsche’s, a spectrum that
seems to encompass just about every conceivable political alternative. This is despite
the fact (or maybe because of it) that nowhere in his writings does Nietzsche present a
systematic account of his political thinking but merely different sketches that emerge
in different periods.12
Raised in a conservative and religious household, when he came of age politically
in the 1860s, Nietzsche’s views were strongly royalist, extolling a deep respect for
the grand heroes of history and the great nation. Once the war was underway with
Austria in 1866, he supported the Prussian military machine, serving two stints in the
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 125

army (as a soldier and medical orderly). In the 1870s, his ‘Bismarckianism’ expressed
itself as an aloof disdain towards party politics, demanding a cultural rebirth
inspired by Greek culture, the music of Wagner and the pessimism of Schopenhauer.
Developing Schopenhauer’s aristocratism and calling for tragic greatness in culture
as the aspiration of the political state, Nietzsche argued that some political theories
(e.g. Rousseau and Socialism) are unduly sentimental and fail to recognize that
each culture must accept the necessity of slavery (BT 18) in order for great art to
prosper.13 He celebrated Schopenhauer initially as the philosopher of a regenerated
Germany who became a cultural figurehead for his generation as Hegel had been for
his in the 1830s. Although he later rejected his mentor, Nietzsche was attracted to
his anti-orthodoxy, his aestheticism and his rousing call to follow our consciences,
resist absorption into the masses and ‘[b]e your self! All you are now doing, thinking,
desiring, is not you yourself!’ (UM 3.127). Unlike ‘we moderns’ who glorify ‘the
dignity of man’ and ‘the dignity of labour’, the Greeks understood that a life devoted
to toil made it impossible to become an artist. The ‘need for art’ rests upon ‘a terrible
basis’: ‘In order that there may be a broad, deep, and fruitful soil for the development
of art, the enormous majority must, in the service of a minority, be slavishly subjected
to life’s struggle, to a greater degree than their own wants necessitate’ (G.S 6). In his
essay ‘The Greek State’, Nietzsche laments the ‘drone-like individuals’ of the modern
masses where culture and state are reduced to the furtherance of the wishes of egoistic
individuals, propelling the ‘deviation of the state tendency into a money-tendency’
(G.S 7, 15). Modern humans are no longer political animals in the Greek sense, for we
are unwilling to organize ourselves as ‘material for society’. He advocates war in order
to reinstate the collective purpose and body of the state: ‘although it comes along like
the night, war is nevertheless Apollo, the true divinity for consecrating and purifying
the state’ (G.S 15).
In the early 1880s, Nietzsche’s political views underwent a decisive transformation.
He became an earnest critic of modern German politics, viewing the Bismarckian
state as a philistine enforcer of racist, nationalist and statist policies. This mirrors his
split with Wagner who turned from libertarian revolutionary to the favourite of the
king of Bavaria and a reconciled supporter of the Reich. His break with Wagner is
equally a break with the political idealism and cultural romanticism of his youth. In
this middle period, a ‘milder Nietzsche’ emerges, one who believes that ‘democratic
politics can promote and further culture, not that it necessarily has to destroy it,
or that it is synonymous with decadence and degeneration’ (Ansell-Pearson 1994:
95). What is needed to cure social ills, Nietzsche now suggests, ‘is not a forcible
redistribution of property but a gradual transformation of mind: the sense of justice
must grow greater in everyone and the instinct for violence weaker’ (HH 452). In
Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche regards democracy differently than he had done
in ‘The Greek State’. It does not necessarily mean the death of culture but can offer
the best protection of culture if it is kept separate from politics. He declares that ‘the
democratization of Europe is irresistible’ (WS 275) and argues for a future ‘democracy
as something yet to come’ (WS 293), which will overcome polarities of wealth and
power and render obsolete the dangerous ideologies of nationalism and socialism.
He even suggests an enlightened labour policy that will guarantee workers’ protection
126 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

against injustice and exploitation and secure the contentment of body and soul (WS
286). A strong pan-Europeanism and hope for a new European humanity is proposed
as an alternative to nationalism:

the separation of nations through the production of national hostilities . . . is

in its essence a forcibly imposed state of siege and self-defence inflicted on the
many by the few and requires cunning, force and falsehood to maintain a front
of respectability. It is not the interests of the many (the peoples), as is no doubt
claimed, but above all the interests of certain princely dynasties and of certain
classes of business and society, that impel to this nationalism; once one has
recognized this fact, one should not be afraid to proclaim oneself simply a good
European and actively work for the amalgamation of nations. (HH 475)

In considering the question of how we prevent and guard against tyrannical

concentrations of power, Nietzsche suggests democracy as a site of pluralism that
incorporates resistance to, and emancipation from, tyrannical forces. From around
1880 onwards, however, he increasingly links democracy with tyranny in the form of
popular sovereignty, the promotion of uniformity and the elimination of qualitative
diversity. In the texts of his middle period, he recognizes the archaic nature of
hierarchical social structures and traditional feelings of subordination but throws
this out of the window and reverses direction in his mature aristocratic politics. He
replaces the idea of social and moral change taking place through a process of liberal
recommendation with a process of aristocratic legislation. In his mature political
thinking, Nietzsche accepts a ‘Machiavellianism’ (WP 304) which, in the thought of
his middle period, he associates with the despotism of socialism and clearly rejects
because of its reliance on force, obedience and deception.14 In the mid- and late 1880s,
his middle insights fade away and he reverts back to the collective viewpoint of his
early work, viewing people as pawns in the service of greatness, but viewed this time in
more evolutionary/physiological terms than in cultural ones. In Beyond Good and Evil,
Nietzsche asserts that every enhancement of the human type is the work of a society
based on an order of rank and differences of value between humans. Society ‘needs
slavery in some sense’ as ‘scaffolding’ (BGE 258) for some individuals to achieve ‘the
highest value’ and ‘deepest significance’. High culture requires a pyramid structure for
the elevation of its highest specimens:

The essential characteristic of a good and healthy aristocracy is that it experiences

itself not as a function (whether of the monarchy or of the commonwealth)
but as their meaning and highest justification – that it therefore accepts with
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)

The order of castes, order of rank, only formulates the supreme law of life itself;
the separation of the three types is necessary for the preservation of society, for
making possible higher and higher types. (A 57)
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 127

In the Nachlass, Nietzsche considered a political application of ‘the eternal return of the
same’ that will lead to the ‘foundation of an oligarchy over peoples and their interests:
education to a universally human politics’. This will introduce a ‘new Enlightenment’
and a new order of rank (KSW 11.212–3). In The Gay Science, he talks of the ‘children
of the future’ who are neither liberals working for progress nor ‘socialists’ who dream of
equal rights and the abolition of slavery but ‘conquerors’ who love danger and war and
who realize that every enhancement of the human requires a new kind of enslavement
(GS 377).15 Nietzsche justifies aristocratic rule by drawing on the notion of will to
power that seeks to enhance its power, grow and become predominant: ‘Exploitation
does not pertain to a corrupt or imperfect or primitive society: it pertains to the
essence of the living thing as a fundamental organic function; it is a consequence of the
intrinsic will to power, which is precisely the will of life’ (BGE 259). The exploitation
of one group or individual by another, Nietzsche asserts, is ‘the primordial fact of all
history’ (BGE 259).
Nietzsche’s affinity with Fascism relates to his ‘Machiavellianism’, his advocacy of
elitism, struggle, suffering and cruelty to achieve political ends, as well as his criticisms
of compassion and pity. It was the popularity of his writings in Germany during the
First World War that allowed the Nazis to exploit him as an ideological ally during
the interwar period. Nietzsche gave the Nazis intellectual credence and substance,
helped along by his literary executrix, Elisabeth, who presented him as a philosopher
of German imperialism and militarism, even inviting Hitler to visit the Nietzsche
Archive and, on one occasion, presenting him with her brother’s walking stick.
Academic philosophers, such as Baeumler and Rosenberg, were enlisted with the task
of propagating Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Baeumler’s 1931 Nietzsche as Philosopher
and Politician, Nietzsche is the philosopher of the Nordic race and his attacks on the
German people were directed towards those non-Germanic elements of the German
people, such as Christians and Jews. Other works reinforced this militaristic message
of Nietzsche as the true philosopher of National Socialism, such as Härtle’s Nietzsche
and National Socialism and Oehler’s Nietzsche and the Future of Germany. While
eschewing these Nazi vulgarizations of Nietzsche, modern scholars often focus upon
his elitism and his promotion of ‘pathos of distance’ (based on contempt and disgust) as
a virtue, showing, in Alfano’s (2018: 122) words, ‘the bleak prospects for a Nietzschean
democratic ethos’.
On the Left, the dissemination of his work after his mental collapse in 1889 was
quickly taken up by socialists, anarchists and feminists who were inspired by his
quest for individual self-realization and creative personality, highlighting his atheism
and anti-nationalism that alienated him from German conservatism. Progressives
see in Nietzsche the ‘unmasking trope’, his ironic stance to the modern world and
his genealogical deconstruction of power, providing the material for the development
of a new progressive politics, a ‘radicalized liberalism’ (Connolly 1988) or ‘liberalism
with teeth’ (Hunt 1993). Connolly (1988: 136) privileges a ‘Nietzschean perspective’
for understanding modernity that ‘insists upon thinking dangerously during a time of
danger’. Those things, such as madness, irrationality, chaos, disorder, perversity that are
deemed beyond the control of political and instrumental technologies are delimited as
‘forms of otherness’ in need of normalization. For Connolly (1988: 140), Nietzsche’s
128 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

genealogical thought ‘eschews all transcendental and teleological justifications of the

present and confronts history in all its contingency’. It does not contain within it a single
theory of politics but ‘a diverse set of ethical and political possibilities’. We need a ‘post-
Nietzschean’ political theory made up of Nietzsche’s counter-ontology of otherness that
would ‘turn the genealogist of resentment on his head by exploring democratic politics
as a medium through which to expose resentment and to encourage the struggle
against it’ (1988: 175). Although Nietzsche’s final phase of political thinking is ‘deeply
metaphysical’ with ‘regressive dimensions’ that contravenes his earlier pluralistic logic
(Ansell-Pearson 1994: 161), some view his advocacy of a pan-European plurality
(BGE 241) and his ‘ecological turn’ as progressive aspects of his later ‘grand politics’.
As the central meaning of a future politics, he posits the question, ‘[h]ow shall the
earth as a whole be governed? To what end shall “man” as a whole – and no longer
as a people or a race – be raised and trained?’ (WP 957). Furthermore, his ‘politics
of domination’ is offset by another dimension in his thinking where he envisages
the possibility of a peaceful coexistence among different human types in which the
former pursue practices of artistic self-creation and others preoccupy themselves with
quotidian pursuits and material interests. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch will exist free
of political power and prestigious economic wealth. The goal is ‘not to conceive of the
latter as masters of the former’, but rather ‘two types . . . are to exist side by side’ (KSW
10.244). In a dialectical relation of mutual enhancement, ‘[t]he same conditions that
hasten the evolution of the herd animal also hasten the evolution of the leader animal’
(WP 956).

Positive agonism
The will to power can manifest itself only against obstacles; it therefore goes in search
of what resists it.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power 656)

Influenced by Heraclitus’ notion of strife as the basic motor behind change and
becoming, as well as by his idea the cosmos as a battle of opposed forces, the concept
of agonism lies at the explanatory heart of Nietzsche’s social ontology. Just as trees in a
jungle fight each other for power (WP 704), the will to power ‘seeks that which resists it’
(WP 656). In Ancient Greece, the agon represented freedom of mind in antiquity in the
form of ‘a measured discharge for the forces of nature’ (Siemens 2018: 319), not their
annihilation or negation. The Greek state was the watchdog of productive agonism,
harnessing the agon to guarantee that the instinct for struggle is not discharged in a
deleterious way that may threaten the polis. In the Greek agon (contest), Nietzsche
identifies the socially binding force of myth that curbs the excesses of unidentified
egoism by ‘placing it in the service of the whole’: ‘For the ancients the goal of agonal
education was the welfare of the whole, the state society’ (KSW 1.7). For Nietzsche,
agonism is productive when among relative equals it recognizes differences rather than
collapses them. This he applies to Apollo and Dionysus (BT 1), cultural advancement
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 129

(HH 158, 170), scientific advancement (HH 634), friendship (D 192), gender (BGE
238), self-overcoming (Z 2.7, 2.12) and the need to order competing drives (HH 141).
As Siemens (2018: 329, 326) notes, Nietzsche’s concept of the agon reminds us
that ‘the individualistic pathos of his texts notwithstanding, he is a profoundly social
thinker who addresses fundamental ethical questions in relational terms’. The medial
or relational sense of the agon presents a ‘social ontology of tension’ in which ‘[e]very
gift must unfold through contestation’ (KSW 1.789). In the agon, the relations of
tension define the relata – each capacity, force and subject needs agonistic relations
with another in order to become what it is. The resistance offered by others compels me
to assert myself and, since the resistance I encounter is unpredictable, continuous and
contingent in origin, who I am and what I can do turns out to be highly dynamic and
contingent. The community is constitutive of individual agency at the affective level of
drives in sharp contrast to the capitalist society of possessive individuals who compete
through egoistic drives. The meeting of forces gives rise to a process of assimilation,
incorporation and expansion that aims towards ‘the feeling of increased power’ (BGE
230). A dominant organization attempts to incorporate a suppressed organization
but must bring itself closer and accommodate it in order to do so. The process of
incorporation is not a simple submission but is instead a shared becoming where each
organization bends to form something new. This is to be understood not in dualistic
terms of submission and dominance but instead as an agonistic model of transformation
where striving between different and multiple forces allows intermingling and change
to occur in each drive irrespective of which one is the incorporator.16
In Hatab’s (1995: 68) view, Nietzsche opens up the possibility of reinscribing
democratic practices in non-metaphysical terms that allows us to dispense with the
notion of equality and replace it with the concept of agonistic respect or indebtedness
in which the other is an indispensable part of my self-development, the annulment
of whom would be like annihilating part of myself. Within relations of agonistic
indebtedness, the other does not constitute a disabling threat to my identity but
provides an alternative and enriching perspective through which I am able to grasp my
own limits. Respect for others is based accordingly on a notion of indebtedness to those
who prevent limits from congealing by sustaining contest between different ideas and
identities. Through ‘a cultivation of care for difference’ (Connolly 1991: 64), we are able
to respect others by seeing them as embodying and living out some of the possibilities
and richness of life that we had to forego in order to be who we are. For Siemens
(2015: 93), however, liberal notions of indebtedness tend to take only the positive
aspects of Nietzschean antagonism and disregard Nietzschean hatred, assimilation,
nourishment and ‘pathos of distance’. In Nietzsche’s ‘spiritualization of enmity’ (TI 5.3),
one has to hate one’s enemies and share in their power by rejoicing in their strength
(Z 1.10). Hatred provokes a reciprocal dynamic of affirmation, stimulation and self-
empowerment, a nuanced phenomenology of agonism where hatred is bound up with
love just as friend and enemy are entwined. It is important not to confuse the concept
of equality presupposed by the agon with the kind of equality Nietzsche criticizes
so vehemently in the context of modern democracy (TI 9.37). For one, it concerns
equal forces or capacities, not equal rights or equality as an ideal. Second, it does not
exclude qualitative diversity in favour of uniformity. Siemens (2015: 95) concludes
130 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

in this respect that Nietzsche’s ontology of power culminates not in tyranny but in
affirmative ideals that exclude domination, subjection and incorporation in favour of
an approximate equality/equilibrium of powers that is compatible with a democratic
politics of identity. This is why Nietzschean agonism opposes tyranny (which collapses
power into a single individual) and state socialism (which tries to efface agonism and
difference).
As we saw in Chapter 4, Sartre shares with Nietzsche a relational ontology of forces
in which ‘[e]verything is always revealed as united to everything’ (CDR 360). Sartre’s
ontology of forces constitutes a similar theory of positive agonism in his social ethics.
In Sartre’s phenomenological account of hodological space (BN 415), the valences of
my field of force are directly affected by the presence of the other as an undermining
or confirming presence who generates their own alien spatiality and valences: ‘We are
dealing with a relation . . . within which a spatiality that is not my spatiality unfolds
because, rather than being a grouping of objects towards me, we have an orientation
that flees me’ (BN 349). The Other ‘unfolds its own distances around it’ (BN 350),
which can disintegrate my spatiality and precipitate an ‘intraworldly haemorrhage’
in my consciousness. As an embodied consciousness, what I am at any instant is my
pre-reflective interaction with the other as a field of force which is a function not of
my interiority but of the other’s presence. The Other directly shapes my embodied
consciousness, whether her presence results in my field of force imploding, becoming
decentralized or being challenged and supported. For Mirvish (1996: 67), Sartre’s
elucidation of ‘conflict as a positive phenomenon’ accords perfectly with details worked
out later about the nature of authenticity in Notebooks for an Ethics, ‘a positive analysis
of interpersonal relations’ that can ‘be found early in Sartre’s oeuvre and shown to rest
on his ontology’. An example Sartre gives of positive conflict resulting from authentic
relations is that of helping a man onto a bus by extending my hand out to him as he
chases after the bus:

Help . . . is opposition overcome, that is, makes use of the conflict between
freedoms. You never help to help by letting yourself be helped, but – on the
corporeal plane – by grasping this help. . . . If someone has to help me, I have to
pull on the person pulling me, that is, I go in the opposite direction – the form of
a struggle overcome. (NE 288)

Here, I relate to the Other as ‘an alien freedom which is in difficulty’ (NE 279). In
hodological terms, I generate a field of force that has a dominant, positive valence on
the other’s goal that intersects and overlaps to generate new possibilities of force. As
well as acting negatively when one oppresses another, intersections of force can also
generate positive conflict. Sartre illustrates this in terms of a ‘loved other’, invoking
a distinction between Annie the woman I love and her image which is a substitute
in her absence. Unlike the real Annie, the image of her contains no real surprises:
‘In every person we love, and for the very reason of its inexhaustible wealth, there is
something that surpasses us, an independence, an imperviousness which exacts ever
renewed efforts of approximation’ whereas ‘tenderness does not rebound on the unreal
object; it has not just fed on the inexhaustible depths of the real: it remains cut off from
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 131

the object, suspended’ (IM 208, 204). With the real Annie there is a sudden tension
and restructuring of my field of force as it intersects with her own. Empirically, this
may well cause conflict as our choices and predilections differ, but this conflict can be
positive: ‘Help . . . is opposition overcome, that is, makes use of the conflict between
freedoms’ (NE 288).
As Mirvish (1996: 78) notes, Sartre begins to develop the ‘creative and challenging’
aspect of conflict in his account of authentic sexual desire in Being and Nothingness,
although he only develops this fully in Notebooks for an Ethics. As a ‘sublimation
of passion’, love involves treasuring and ‘finding precious’ the independence and
spontaneity of the Other and their irreducible alterity. For Sartre, authenticity
encompasses a ‘certain kind of interpenetration of freedoms’ (NE 290) where ‘each
freedom is wholly in the other one’ (NE 288). Relations of this kind occur in authentic
love and friendship, incorporating a ‘unity of diversity’ or a ‘sameness’ that both respects
the other free individual and overcomes radical separation and otherness (NE 81).
This involves the processes of assimilation and incorporation and a shared becoming
but not coincidence or complete dissolution of individual singularity. Commenting
on Sartre’s rejection of the idea of coincidence as he describes the love between Eve
and Pierre in The Chips are Down, Bell sums this up well: ‘Human relationships
that strive in a positive, authentic way for perfect coincidence, perfect confidence.
Such coincidence . . . cannot be achieved. Ambiguity and a tension of opposites are
ineradicably part of the human condition; yet the effort to harmonize and unify the
inharmonious and disparate may well be vital to . . . authentic striving’ (1989: 164–5).
For Sartre, reciprocity lies in no generic essence but emerges through praxis and the
transformation of the material field whether through mutual antagonism or reciprocal
solidarity: ‘It cannot be based on a universal abstract bond, like Christian “charity”; nor
on an a priori willingness to treat the human person . . . as an absolute end; nor on a
purely contemplative intuition revealing “Humanity” to everyone as the essence of his
fellows’ (CDR 109–10).

Self and Other: A dialectical exchange

Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine!
. . . Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey;
I need hands outstretched to take it.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra P1)

There is a certain paradox about Nietzsche and Sartre in that they are simultaneously
heralded as both individualist and relational thinkers. As Ansell-Pearson (1994:
87) remarks, ‘the widely held view of Nietzsche as an extreme individualist solely
preoccupied with the nature of an asocial, isolated individual, is profoundly
misleading’. Nietzsche’s political thought is characterized from beginning to end by a
desire to transcend the atomistic basis of modern societies and its narrow, ‘bourgeois’,
individualism. The privatization of society, for Nietzsche, ‘means the end of society’.
132 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

He understands his politics as being neither individualistic nor collectivistic since the
former ‘does not recognize order of rank’ and the latter fails to generate a notion of
individual greatness (WP 859). Along with Sartre, his ethics and politics can be viewed
as an attempt to square this circle through a dialectical analysis of the various ways and
means by which individuality and intersubjectivity mutually implicate and reinforce
(or diminish) each other, forming richer or weaker expressions of subjectivity.
In Daigle’s (2009: 70) view, what separates Nietzsche and Sartre is the German
philosopher’s inability to progress from an ‘ethics of virtue’ to a ‘politics of virtue’
due to his ‘closure to the Other’ and his distaste for the herd. There is in this sense
a disjunction between Nietzsche’s social ontology and his aristocratic politics. While
recognizing the ontological entwinement of self and Other, his politics seem to separate
them, imagining the Übermensch as distinct from and superior to the herd. For all this
talk of ‘wholeness’, Nietzsche is not seriously concerned to envisage a whole society. He
envisages the whole individual, but he shows insufficient interest in the social patterns
that would facilitate and sustain his wholeness. His concern for the creative individual
and the social needs of his creative individuality is gained at the expense of society’s
other members. Richardson (2020: 468, 443) refers to this as Nietzsche’s ‘predatory
stance’ towards the herd which surfaces in certain passages in his writings and raises
the worry of whether Nietzsche cares at all about the herd given his insistence on ‘rank-
order’: ‘My danger is disgust with people’ (EH 4.6). He often insists that he speaks only
for a select few: ‘let Zarathustra not talk to the people, but to companions! Zarathustra
shall not become shepherd and dog to a herd!’ (Z 1.9).17 The fear is that Nietzsche is
completely indifferent to the herd or, worse still, views it entirely as a slavish instrument
for the elite (BGE 188, 239, GS 377) to the point of immolation, imagining a large cleft
between the highest and lowest types (WP 886, 953).
As Richardson (2020: 224) notes, however, the common trend in Nietzsche’s
thinking is towards a more nuanced understanding of self and Other in which the
operation of the common stands ‘in a certain dialectical relation to the individual’.
This relation changes from his early work where the Apollonian is seen as a principle
of individuation inferior to the generality of the Dionysian (where we lose our identity
as ‘belonging to a higher community’ (BT 1)) to his later judgement that seems quite
the reverse when the common falls into disfavour and becomes ‘the herd’: ‘Basic error:
to place the goal in the herd and not in the single individuals! The herd is means,
not more!’ (WP 766). Despite his positive attitude towards solitude and individuality
as ‘lone wolf ’ and ‘outsider’, however, Nietzsche does not want to cast off his social
identity and argues for the indispensability of individual and herd: ‘one should not
evaluate the solitary type by the herdish, nor the herdish by the solitary . . . both are
necessary; equally their antagonism is necessary’ (WP 886). For Richardson (2020:
444, 447), rather than the inverse relation that Nietzsche’s ‘predatory’ passages suggest,
he thinks that progress depends on ‘herds and individuals ascending together by a
dialectic’. This denotes an ‘intimate relation’ between individual and herd comprised
of mutual involvements in which even the most exceptional individual is still really a
mixture of herd and individual traits. The herd establishes the ground out of which the
individual can flourish or flounder since intersubjective practices or common culture
are the essential springboard for individual singularity and excellence. The higher the
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 133

herd, the more able the individual is to ascend even higher as their advances are in turn
incorporated or absorbed into shared practices. There is ‘a dialectical interplay between
herd and individuals’ (2020: 448) in which individuals, through their disenchantment
and movement beyond the ethic of custom, generate new values and abilities that are
in turn absorbed by the herd as new norms. Exceptional individuals are ‘the seed-
bearers of the future, the authors of spiritual colonizing and new-founding of states
and communities’ (GS 23). The herd in itself, in Nietzsche’s view, exerts a gravitational
pull towards the ordinary and mediocre – ‘the tendency of the herd is towards stasis
and preservation, there is nothing creative in it’ (WP 285). It simply longs for comfort,
lack of danger, alleviation of suffering and the state of ‘green meadow happiness’ (BGE
44).
This Nietzschean dialectic is sometimes conceived on a species level – ‘My task,
preparing for humanity’s moment of highest self-reflection, a great noon when it will
look back and look out, when it will escape from the mastery by chance and priests
and for the first time pose the questions of why? and what for? as a whole’ (EH
3D2) – but also in terms of the single transformative individual – ‘this antichrist and
antinihilist; this conqueror of god and of the nothing – he must one day come’ (GM
2.24). For Nietzsche, as Richardson (2020: 232–8) observes, the individual’s ‘contempt’
for the common is aimed at ‘instituting a new common’ by changing and improving
the common, within and against it, rather than opting out of it. Revisionary work is
carried out in solitude since an active stance towards the common requires periodic
estrangement from it. The purifying turn towards oneself is contained within an overall
will to improve the community or group. After leaving his hermitage, Zarathustra
looks for a new community in order to make his ‘individualized meanings’ into a
new common and a new language. Equally, free spirits are the work of high culture.
They cannot be reduced to individual egocentric endeavours but are concerned with
‘humanity’ and are interventions within a culture. Their stance against the group is
just another way of serving it. By means of her ‘individualizing turn’ the individual
is a device of the common to improve itself. All individual spirituality belongs to a
collective spirit: ‘artists . . . as well as orators, preachers, writers . . . come at the end
of a long chain’ (GS 354). Stendhal and Bizet have achieved ‘greatness’ by embodying
the ‘inventive nobility’ (BGE 253) of free spirituality, but this greatness is essentially
a contribution to the ‘France of the Spirit’ (BGE 254), to the ‘European soul’ (BGE
245) and ‘European consciousness’ (BGE 259), not an individual concern. Humans
have, in Nietzsche’s view, a deep allegiance to their species, the closest in kind of all
living things: ‘nothing in us is older, stronger, more relentless and insuperable than
this instinct’ (GS 1). Each of us is an exemplar or representative of humankind, sharing
a common link. The individual ‘is an error: he is nothing for himself, no atom, no
“link in the chain”, no mere inheritance from the past, – he is the whole single line
human up through himself ’ (TI 9.33). The human is not just an individual ‘but the
living organic totality in one particular line’ (WP 678): ‘the kind is everything, the one
is always nothing’ (GS 1).
In highlighting Nietzsche’s individualism, it is easy to overlook the importance of
wholeness in his philosophy and treat his thinking undialectically (metaphysically).
The duties of the ‘sovereign individual’, he tells us, ‘are not the duties of a solitary; on the
134 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

contrary, they set one in the midst of a mighty community held together, not by external
forms and regulations, but by a fundamental idea. It is the idea of culture, insofar as
it sets for each one of us but one task: to promote the production of the philosopher,
the artist and the saint within us and without us and thereby to work at the perfecting
of nature’ (UM 3.5). ‘Humanity’ is a constitutive feature of the practical standpoint
itself that we come to inhabit in our role as agents, lending a certain coherence and
imperishability to our individual lives by making them part of a collective project that
is perpetually in the making and by means of which we become necessarily connected
to each other:18 ‘our thoughts, our values, our yes’s and no’s and if ’s and whether’s grow
out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears its fruit – all these things are related
and interconnected as the testimony to One Will, One Health. One Soil, One Sun’
(GM P2). For Nietzsche, great experimenters realize a perfectionist demand that has a
general orientation beyond the individual towards humankind.19
Nietzsche ‘individualizes individuality’ by aspiring to show us how to be an
individual in a new way, a fuller and better way that can be incorporated into ongoing
practice within groups.20 He recognizes that in groups with shared social practices
and norms we become a superorganism, ‘masters of the earth’ in which each member
feels himself amplified by belonging to this greater power and ‘communal power-
feeling’ numbs the individual’s discontent with himself (GM 3.19). Reading Nietzsche
dialectically within a framework of positive agonism gives a grounding for a more
dynamic conception of self and Other that brings him closer to Sartre and to a more
democratic political orientation. Even his advocacy of ‘strong selfishness’ as ‘the deepest
necessity for flourishing’ (EH 4.7) is not simply self-absorption but rather a form of
storing up for the purpose of enhancing expressive capacities and sharing them with
others. In the ‘right ideal selfishness’ we ‘care and watch for the benefit of all’ (D 552),
setting a model for all to come as a pioneer for the whole type. There are, he argues,
many kinds of selfishness that are ‘despicable’ (UM 2.7), such as the ‘phantom’ ego (D
105), the idea that one’s self should become a universal law (GS 335) and the ‘tidal
waves of selfishness’ found in previous ages (BGE 212). Noble selfishness, by contrast,
is entwined with magnanimity (GS 49), love and friendship (GS 14) and an extended
sense of self for the growth of humanity (D 547), like the love and selfishness of a
mother caring for her child (EH 2.9, D 552). Whether selfishness is ‘strong’ or ‘weak’
depends on if it represents the ‘ascending or the descending line of life’ (TI 9.33).
So, what examples of positive intersubjectivity (akin to fusion in Sartre’s) can we
find in Nietzsche’s writings? First, his early thinking in The Birth of Tragedy provides us
with a prototype of the collectivist self based on the participatory model of tragic art
and Dionysian rapture. The intoxication of the participants is transformative; they are
seized by moods and insights so powerful that they are liberated from the dominion of
concepts and all the divisions between one human being and another, giving way to the
overwhelming feeling of unity and ‘the destruction of the principium individuationis’
(BT 2). Dionysian ‘affirmative effects’ enable us to grasp the constitutive links between
individual and whole where the redemption of existence is dependent upon the
individual being able to attain the perspective of the will, itself expressed by the wisdom
of the chorus. Nietzsche returns to this idea in his later writings in his ‘Dionysian
affirmation of the world as it is’ (WP 536), which gives the sense of the wider whole of
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 135

which one is a part. This is an affirmation of life from the viewpoint of an individual,
but ‘an individual drawn out of himself ’, ‘an ecstatic affirmation of the total character
of life’ (WP 539). Greatness does not issue from the individual but from the power of
the whole manifesting itself through the individuals: ‘[O]ne belongs to the whole, one
is the whole . . . nothing exists apart from the whole!’ (TI 6.8).
Second, some scholars point to Nietzsche’s theorization of friendship in his
middle and later writings as a positive model of social relations (in microcosm)
that can be developed as a ‘practical ethics of reciprocity’ against ‘the revenge of
institutions and rationalism’ (Stauth and Turner 1988: 14). In Verkerk’s (2020: 2)
view, his ‘ethics of friendship’ provides a positive model of sociality that complicates
a simple characterization of him as an individualist thinker and delineates other
modes of interaction beyond that of agonism alone. He encourages free spirits who
seek ‘one’s own way’ to separate themselves from society and to ‘live in seclusion’
but also encourages them to have friends and help others (GS 338). Within the three
types of friendship Nietzsche outlines (joyful friendship, agonistic friendship and
bestowing friendship), he promotes the virtues of shared experiences and mutual
becomings. Joyful friendship is a healing balm from pity and suffering ‘to share not
suffering but joy’ (GS 338). Friends can provide a kind of meta-perspective on oneself
that challenges beliefs and ingrained habits (GS 355), enabling a vital means for self-
overcoming, a ‘secret path’ to expose parts of oneself of which one is unaware: ‘The
actual fortress is inaccessible, even invisible to him, unless his friends and enemies play
the traitor and conduct him in by a secret path’ (HH 491). As a mirror of recognition,
friendship can provide a form of illuminating external critique that helps us to shed a
skin and renew ourselves (GS 307).21 Demonstrating the compatibility of egoism and
friendship, agonistic friendship involves a form of ‘spiritualized enmity’ that provides
the opportunity for self-examination and growth through cooperative competition:
‘In one’s friend one should have one’s best enemy. You should be closest to him in
your heart when you strive against him’ (Z 1.14). Enmity is transformed into a tool for
mutual growth and self-overcoming where friends engender qualities that we hope to
accrue through mutual endeavour and striving. Nietzsche places the highest worth of
all on the bestowing friendship: ‘the highest virtue is a bestowing virtue’ (Z 1.22.1). The
bestowing friend offers potential and wisdom to others to use for their own growth,
believing that ‘to give is more blessed than to have’ (WS 320). Her own capabilities,
attributes and wisdom are offered in the form of a gift to others who in turn reciprocate
their own bestowing:22 ‘I teach you the friend and his overfull heart . . . in whom the
world stands complete, a vessel of goodness – the creating friend, who always has a
complete world to bestow’ (Z 1.17). When Zarathustra declares, ‘[n]ot the neighbour
do I teach you but the friend’ (Z 1.14), he is making a distinction between positive and
negative forms of sociality.
The ‘herd’, like many of Nietzsche’s terms, carries different force and connotation
in different places but is more generally equated with a will to obey moral norms or
an ‘ethics of custom’ (BGE 199) and, akin to the Sartrean serial group, is viewed as
promoting an annihilation rather than enhancement of individuality. As we have seen,
his view of intersubjectivity ‘contains both enabling and disabling aspects’ (Ansell-
Pearson 1994: 157). His ‘politics of domination’ is offset by another dimension in his
136 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

thinking where he envisages the possibility of a peaceful coexistence among different

human types. Here, in this more dialectical scenario, the Übermensch is not viewed as a
master of the herd but rather the ‘two types . . . are to exist side by side’ (KSW 10.244).
In Safranski’s (2003: 297) view, Nietzsche doesn’t really develop this dimension of
his thinking sufficiently and was ultimately ‘incapable of reconciling the ideas of
self-enhancement and solidarity, or at least allowing them to coexist’. Although he
recognizes the alienation of solitude (Z 4.13), he remains a paragon of independence,
keeping a ‘pathos of distance’ with his fellow human being. It is indicative that in the
final book, Zarathustra leaves the cave when visited by the ‘higher men’, disgusted by
the human smell, preferring the company of his animals untouched by rules, mores
and regulations. In the absence of any community, as Solomon (2003: 127) contends,
Nietzsche turned his own personal suffering into a heroic campaign and ended up
defending a crude notion of self-assertion, ‘generalized to all nature as “the will to
power”’, reducing the notion of his later aristocratic ethics ‘to a combination of
aggressive banality and energetic self-indulgence’ and turning his back on the insights
and openings of his middle works.
In his dialectical view of individual and herd, his Dionysian affirmation of life and
his ethics of friendship, Nietzsche began to explore the intersubjective conditions of
self-cultivation, but this is something that Sartre’s philosophy develops significantly,
particularly his theory of groups which is one of the main sociological innovations
of his philosophical legacy.23 Connecting selves rather than constituting the self is
something Sartre thinks through more than Nietzsche. Prior to the 1940s, it is thought
that Sartre valorized the Nietzschean ideal of the lone intellectual who stands aloof from
society, embracing individualism and non-conformity while maintaining a relatively
indifferent attitude towards political matters. Although his apoliticism in the 1930s may
be overstated – Beauvoir notes their many political discussions and the fact that Sartre
considered joining the Communist Party before 193924 – he nonetheless describes his
political consciousness at this time as ‘petit bourgeois, individualistic and democratic’
(Gerassi 2009: 120) and as a ‘morality of complaisance’ (1983a: 385). Despite its many
insights on the syncategorematic nature of the self in which, as Deleuze commented,
‘Sartre . . . is the first to have considered the Other as a real structure’ (2004: 373), Being
and Nothingness had left intersubjectivity relatively unexplored in his own view: ‘What
is particularly bad in L’Etre et le néant is the specifically social chapters, on the “we”,
compared to the chapters on the “you” and “others”’ (1981a: 13).
It was Sartre’s experience as a prisoner of war that taught him solidarity, brought
about, as much as anything, by being in the ‘absolute proximity’ (1964a: 348) of
others: ‘I have seen crowds of all kinds, but the only other time I have witnessed that
nakedness, that sense of everyone’s direct relationship to everyone else, that waking
dream, that dim consciousness of the danger of being a man, was in 1940 in Stalag XII
D’ (W 121).25 Presenting space as an affective terrain of competing, overlapping and
assimilating forces with others, he describes entering a café after his release from the
Stalag:

I was lost, the few drinkers that were there seemed more distant than stars; each of
them claimed a wide space on the banquette, a whole marble table to themselves,
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 137

and to touch them I would have to cross the ‘polished floor’ which separated me
from them. If they seemed inaccessible to me, these twinkling human stars, quite
at ease in their atmospheres of rarefied gas, it was because I no longer had the
right to put a hand on their shoulder or thigh, nor to call them ‘little one’; I had
found bourgeois society again, and I had to relearn a life of ‘respectful distance’;
my sudden agoraphobia betrayed a vague sense of regret for the unanimous life
from which I had just been forever rescued.(1964b: 348–9)

For Sartre, political ideologies are inscribed or embodied in the phenomenological

experiences of different spaces. This is shown in his contrast of the ceremonial and
hierarchical theatre with the maternal informal space of the cinema, a ‘chambre
obscure’ or dark room removed from paternal vigilance and surveillance. Where the
theatre is composed of rituals and rites that separate bodies and social groups from
each other in order to prevent violent conflict kept at bay through distance and
ceremony, the cinema is popular and democratic like a form of detoxication or a point
of entry into a new space and a hitherto undiscovered form of sociality. This new space,
as ffrench (2013: 39) describes, is ‘a space of desire, pregnant with the possibility of
affective contact’, an ‘urban dark’ in which the body’s freedom is generated enabling
a form of togetherness based not on violence but on proximity and ‘adherence’ where
nothing now regulates the distance of one from another. Sartre’s thinking fixes upon
the emergent and shifting dialectic between self and Other that can be ‘either positive
or negative’ (CDR 113) depending on its unfolding within the practico-inert. In his
dialectical analysis, he demonstrates how the fate of the individual is bound up with
the structure and dynamic of the group. His main target of critique is the institution
which he interprets as the group’s most inert and degraded form. For Sartre, the
passive seriality of the institution differs from the social inertia of the series in that it
is the result of a collective operation, ‘a systematic self-domestication of man by man’
(CDR 606) in favour of a common regulative practice. Also, the vertical otherness of
the institution differs from the horizontal otherness of the serial group in that, in the
latter, each is united to the others from without via a collective object, whereas, in
the former, each is united to the others primarily through a bond of interiority, the
command-obedience relation. This relation is founded upon a network of authority,
the acceptance of which involves the ‘interiorization of the impossibility of resisting it’
(CDR 630). The sanctions of this authority can range from minor rebuke to physical
torture and death, but in each case, the authoritarian structure will inevitably produce
‘internal anxieties’ for those who wish to resist it. If an individual does rebel through
radical conscience or through the demand for creative praxis, his acts are treated as the
acts of ‘the alien, the suspect, the trouble-maker’ (CDR 656). The vertical otherness of
the institution is thus structured in a way that guarantees ‘the mineralization of man at
every level, except the highest’ (CDR 658).
Despite the constraints and alienations of social ensembles, Sartre does not lapse
into Nietzschean solitude and lose sight of the intersubjective conditions for individual
freedom and creative praxis: ‘I think that an individual in the group, even if he is a
little bit terrorized, is nonetheless better than an individual alone and considering
separation. I don’t think that an individual alone can accomplish anything’ (1974b:
138 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

171). Charting the passage from alienation to fusion (and back again), Sartre shows
how connections in exteriority can transform into ‘interior connections’ within
the fusing group when the ‘mediating third’ constitutes a potential regulatory third
without becoming a transcendent other to the group and all are seen as co-sovereigns
and as organizers of a common project. It represents the archetype of a genuinely free,
egalitarian and reciprocal community which has managed to overcome alienation
and serial existence and effect ‘a transition from the Other to the same’ (CDR 612).
Within the reciprocal exchanges of the group, the other no longer signifies the one who
objectifies and steals my world but one who enables, confirms, reflects and enlarges my
possibilities as a partner in common action. Presaging ‘the beginning of the existence
of men who live for each other’ (HN 110), Sartre’s later thinking of the ‘WE’ pays
testament to the ‘ontological interdependence of consciousnesses’ and the ‘singularity
of the individual’, illuminating, in political terms, the complex and ambiguous dialectic
of self and Other. His goal was to find a political creed that went beyond Marxism,
deploying its heuristic apparatus while avoiding its recodification of authority and the
institution (as in Stalinist Communism). This would recapture a beatific feeling he first
felt as a child at the Lycée in 1915 when he experienced fusion while playing with a
small group of friends, running and shouting in the Place du Panthéon: ‘Without aim,
end, or hierarchy, our society wavered between complete fusion and juxtaposition’ (W
139). The Other is, for Sartre, a source of enrichment and collective becoming and not
just the alienating and objectifying Other who condemns our freedom to dissolution
under the tropes of bad faith: ‘Through the Other I am enriched in a new dimension of
Being: through the Other I come to exist in the dimension of Being, through the Other
I become an object’ (NE 499).

Anarchism, freedom and plurality

a hitherto shy and unavowed species of ‘beautiful soul’, the species anarchistica
(Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 3.26)

Curiously, although his writings pervade a strongly anarchistic ethos,26 many of

Nietzsche’s direct comments on anarchism were overtly critical. He charges anarchism
with purporting to be different to other ideologies like democracy, equality or
socialism but is really of the same kind as it is founded on ressentiment and reaction
(GS 370, GM 2.11), expressing a desire for pity and the herd (BGE 202). Anarchists
can be individuals of great power but this can express itself in self-denial and simple
destruction (D 184, GS 370). The anarchism Nietzsche had primarily in mind when
denunciating it was nineteenth-century Russian anarchism. Anarchists like Kropotkin
were deluded, he thought, in believing that there could be a quick and painless transition
to a world of mutual cooperation. Revolutionary anarchists (such as Bakunin who was
Wagner’s ally in 1848) were nihilists whose violence and terrorism were fuelled by
a raging ressentiment. Their activities would only encourage the state to intensify its
own violence and declare states of exception. Despite his mainly negative comments,
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 139

however, it is arguable that Nietzsche’s political view finds its home most readily in
some form of anarchistic viewpoint or variant of ‘the species anarchistica’ (GM 3.26).
His critique of the state, his defence of plurality and individual freedom, as well as his
recognition of the importance of intersubjective practices for the cultivation of that
freedom, would seem to support a broadly anarchist position.
Nietzsche’s writings are laced with a dark image of the modern state moving towards
a form of ‘nomad thought’ (Deleuze 1977) that is broadly anarchist, calling for a new
form of democracy yet to come (WS 293). Rejecting contractarian narratives, he makes
no bones about the fact that the state was formed through blood and conquest and not
consensus:

blond beasts, 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. . . . He who can
command, he who is by nature ‘master’, he who is violent in act and bearing – what
has he to do with contracts! (GM 2.17)

The oldest state thus appeared as ‘a fearful tyranny, as an oppressive and remorseless
machine, and went on working until this raw material of people and semi-animals
was at last not only thoroughly kneaded and pliant but also formed’ (GM 2.17). Its
existence is predicated on a form of ‘organized immorality’: ‘internally: as police,
penal law, classes, commerce, family; externally: as will to power, to war, to conquest,
to revenge’ (WP 717). Nietzsche’s middle writings mark the beginning of him posing
the question of the state’s legitimacy, its nationalist ideological fervour and noise, its
aversion to nomadism and its reactive security hysteria. He recognizes how the state
uses exaggerated emergencies to beguile the public with ‘investigations, undertakings,
reorganizations’ (HH 448, D 179). In the face of democratic forces, rulers ‘cling with
their teeth to their dignity as warlords: for this they require wars, that is to say states
of exception in which that slow constitutional pressure of the forces of democracy
lets up’ (WS 281). The state is incompatible with great culture as education becomes
corrupted, turning citizens into state functionaries and wasting the talent of exceptional
individuals (HH 481): ‘Culture and the state – one should not deceive oneself about this
– are antagonists. . . . All great ages of culture are ages of political decline: what is great
culturally has always been unpolitical, even antipolitical’ (TI 8.4). Most importantly,
the state is bound up with political theology: ‘The belief in a divine order in the realm
of politics, in a sacred mystery in the existence of the state, is of religious origin: if
religion disappears the state will unavoidably lose its ancient Isis veil and cease to excite
reverence’ (HH 472). He briefly entertains an alternative vision of a reformed state that
employs religion as a mythical instrument (HH 472) and is founded on a meritocracy
(HH 2.318), but without the buttress of a political theology, ‘a later generation will see
the state to shrink to insignificance in various parts of the earth’ (HH 472). Over time,
the state will dissolve and some other ‘organizing power’ will emerge just as the state
superseded previous forms of association, such as the clan, family or polis.
Nietzsche brings his critique of the state to a crescendo in Zarathustra, viewing it
as the enforcer of a slow euthanasia for its people: ‘State I call it where all are poison
140 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

drinkers, the good and the base; state, where all can lose themselves, the good and the
base; state, where the slow suicide of all is called – “life”’ (Z 1.11). While staying in
his rented room in Sorrento, Nietzsche could see two islands from his window – the
‘blessed isle’ (the island of Ischia, bathed in the light of the sun) and next to it the ‘Fire
Hound Isle’ (the volcano Vesuvius, full of smoke, lava, noxious emissions and explosive
violence).27 In Zarathustra, the state is symbolized by the ‘Fire Hound Isle’:

At best I could regard you as the ventriloquist of the earth. . . . You’ve learned more
than enough about bringing mud to the boil. . . . Like you yourself the state is a
hypocrite hound; like you it likes to speak with smoke and bellowing – to make
believe, like you, that it speaks from the belly of things. For it wants absolutely to
be the most important animal on earth, this state; and people believe it, too. (Z
2.18)

The ‘hypocrite hound’ is the engine of an ‘Infernal Racket’ that signals the violent changes
it forces through, although these are not a change of values but ones of expediency (Z
2.18). As ‘the coldest of all cold monsters’ (Z 1.11), the state enacts its violence through
the ‘scarlet judges’ who cruelly enjoy sending the criminal to his death (Z 1.6). Despite
the ‘Fire Hound’, however, in Zarathustra the undertone is of hope and comfort, of
courage and confidence, despite the seriousness of the situation since Zarathustra has
embarked on a journey towards ‘the great health’ that ‘makes the will free again, which
gives earth its purpose and man his hope again’ (GM 24). Zarathustra is, in many ways,
the anarchist par excellence. He seeks out friends to share joy and agonistic tension
with but finds only disciples. At the end of the first part, he leaves his companions
because they have become followers instead of believing in themselves: ‘Now I bid you
lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have denied me I will return to you’ (Z
1.22.3). He seeks equals, creators, harvesters and celebrants: ‘Companions the creator
seeks and not corpses, not herds or believers either. Fellow creators the creator seeks,
those who inscribe new values on new tablets’ (Z P9). Against the scarlet judges of
the state, Zarathustra endorses an anarchistic community of self-policing autonomous
individuals: ‘Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your
own will over yourself as a law? Can you be your own judge and avenger of your law?’
(Z 1.17).
As a community grows stronger and more self-confident, its penal law becomes
more lenient: ‘It is not impossible to imagine society so conscious of its power that it
could allow itself the noblest luxury available to it, – that of letting its malefactors go
unpunished’ (GM 2.10). This would be a society in which the individual ‘calls himself
to account and publicly dictates his own punishment’ (D 187).28 Someday, ‘we will no
longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and punishment,
whether practiced individually or socially’ (WS 183). For Nietzsche, lives should be
lived from the inside, for an individual is ‘entitled to determine what they understand
by an endurable life’ (HH 438). This is in opposition to the (socialist) state which
‘outbids all the despotisms of the past’ and aims at the ‘annihilation of the individual’
by reducing her to an ‘organ of the community’ (HH 473). True justice originates
between parties of approximately equal power ‘where there is no clearly recognizable
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 141

superiority of force’: ‘Justice is thus requital and exchange under the presupposition of
an approximately equal power position’ (HH 92). Against the expedient warmongering
of the state, he champions the values of peace and cooperation, describing the wisdom
of neighbouring chieftains who came to the recognition ‘how each could even assist
and rescue the other in times of need instead of exploiting and augmenting this need
of his neighbour as heretofore’ (WS 190).
In Warren’s (1991: 74) view, Nietzsche’s political thinking suggests an alternative
to statist politics, one ‘reminiscent of the anarchism of Godwin’. Foreshadowing the
objections of later anarchists, such as Emma Goldman, against Marxists, ‘Nietzsche
believed that revolutionaries harbor a “reactionary” desire to reassert the power of
the state over the individual’ (1991: 222).29 The problem Nietzsche acknowledges, but
leaves unresolved, is how to institute a society with a shared ethical life which allows for
the recognition of otherness and the affirmation of difference. He recognizes collective
culture as a horizon for self-constituting practices – ‘collective self-esteem is the great
preparatory school for personal sovereignty’ (WP 773) – and fully acknowledges the
deep interdependence of the individual and society even while he speaks on behalf of
the individual. Although he does suggest these might coincide (in his more dialectical
moments), he is so taken by the opposition between the individual qua existential
agent and the ‘herd’ tendencies of society that he sees it as a permanent and tragic
feature of the human condition. In particular, his later aristocratic politics undermine
the pluralistic implications of his philosophy of truth, following instead the ancient
aristocratic idea that ‘the best should rule, and that the best should also want to rule’.
Thus, his later thinking in many respects misunderstands the innovative implications
of his philosophy and of his middle writings, which, in Warren’s (1991: 223) words,
‘suggest that all politically hierarchies . . . are inconsistent with the intersubjective
space of individuation’. This is ‘to think with Nietzsche against Nietzsche’ (Ferry and
Renaut 1997: vii), using the wider logic of his thinking to critique the irresponsibility,
irrationalism and anti-democratic sentiment (as well as the unquestioning acceptance
of tradition and authority) of his aristocratic phase. Nietzsche’s will to power (as an
organized capacity for action) is not inconsistent with social and political equality
simply because the universal motive identified by the concept of the will to power is
not domination but self-constitution. His future vision of strength is not Caesar but
‘Caesar with Christ’s Soul’ (WP 983).
Despite his diatribes against socialism, Nietzsche displays a sensitivity to the worker
and the oppressed, decrying how in modern society, ‘man is in ruins and scattered over
a battlefield’. Zarathustra laments the death of peoples unified ‘by tablets of the good’
and the birth of ‘the new idol’, the state that tells ‘lies in all the tongues of good and evil’
(Z 1.11). Nietzsche criticizes the diminution of man in commercial society, of ‘turning
humanity into sand!’ (D 174) by grating off the rough edges of life in a collective
drive towards timidity and uniformity. The capitalist work ethic is self-destructive,
and work a mere ‘mechanical activity’, resulting in ‘absolute regularity, punctilious
and unthinking obedience, a mode of life fixed once and for all, fully occupied time,
a certain permission, indeed training for “impersonality”, for self-forgetfulness, for
incuria sui [lack of care for the self]’ (GM 3.18). This is a process of collective loss in
which ‘man is diminished’ (WP 866). Modern workers are perhaps, even though this
142 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

is ‘slavery in a higher sense’ (A 54), worse off in some ways than slaves (HH 457) since
factory work robs the worker of his artisanal craft and obliterates individuality (D
173). Moreover, industriousness infects all aspects of life in modern capitalism from
science and art (UM 1.8), religion (BGE 58) and relations between women and men
(BGE 239).
Hatab (1995: 70) joins Warren’s defence of a pluralistic democratic Nietzsche,
pointing to his idea of agonism as an alternative to the idea of equality as a basis for
democracy, emphasizing difference above sameness. Nietzsche’s perspectivism lends
itself to an ethic that subverts normalization and allows ‘space for difference to be’,
undermining traditional and aristocratic justifications that invoke timeless truths and
historical necessity: ‘Aristocracies and authoritarian regimes have historically defended
their right to dominance and unchecked power by way of confident knowledge claims
about the nature and order of things.’ In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche defends the
right of the masses to determine their own existence and government:

if the purpose of all politic really is to make life endurable for as many as possible,
then these as-many-as-possible are entitled to determine what they understand by
an endurable life; if they trust to their intellect also to discover the right means of
attaining this goal, what good is there in doubting it? (HH 438)

Nietzsche defines democracy as the form of political organization that ‘wants to create
and guarantee as much independence as possible: independence of opinion, of mode
of life and of employment’ and speaks of a new form of democracy ‘as of something
yet to come’, characterized by the independence of opinion and new modes of life
and employment: ‘That which now calls itself democracy differs from older forms
of government solely in that it drives with new horses: the streets are still the same
old streets, and the wheels are likewise the same old wheels’ (WS 293). He praises
democracy as a provisional instrument for overcoming militarized nationalism (WS
275) and for breaking up rigid class hierarchies and liberating individual ambition (GS
348, 356). The ‘new democracy’ is one that will allow ‘a plurality of norms’, honour ‘the
right of individuals’ and avoid the ‘rigid consequence of the teaching of one normal-
human’ (GS 143). Even in Beyond Good and Evil, while arguing that moral notions
of equality and democracy have created a mixture of cultural and biological types
that causes new problems (BGE 208), he also thinks that this creates new possibilities
and opportunities (BGE 223–4). Races are constantly evolving and it is possible for a
people over time to define itself as a race (BGE 200).
In his conjecture of a society in which ‘politics will have a different meaning’
(WP 960), Nietzsche is primarily opposed to statist thinking based on the erasure of
individuality in the name of a uniform and homogenous identity and on the fixing
of sharp boundaries between inside and out in the form of national territorialism. In
Shapiro’s (2016: 138) view, beyond the boundaries of political power blocs and across
lines drawn by nation states, Nietzsche’s perspective calls for new forms of kinship and
solidarity. This is signalled in his notion of ‘Menge’ (BGE 256) that, as ‘a multitude of
diverse individuals’ (GS 149), represents a more positive view of groups in Nietzsche’s
philosophy than that of the ‘herd’. Often wrongfully translated as ‘masses’ (which
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 143

conveys the sense of homogeneity), it denotes rather a ‘multitude’ or a hybrid nomadic

and diverse grouping. Nietzsche is never derogatory about the Menge ‘with its duties
and virtues’ (BGE 213), although he does set himself apart from it. The multitude
is not read as a territorial or political unit but more as an audience who impose a
form of selectivity in their desires, as opposed to the herd and masses. He associates
this with Europe which has become a spawning ground for spiritual hybridity (BGE
251) and those who see ‘the wretched ephemeral chatter of politics and national
egoism beneath themselves’ (A 1). As Shapiro (2016: 92) notes, the concept of Menge
denotes people as ‘multitudes’ full of ‘productive possibilities’ and though Nietzsche’s
concept is much more theatrical (as a group of spectators) rather than revolutionary
or active (as in the ‘multitude’ of Spinoza or Negri), it formulates the idea of an
inclusive affective community. Like Deleuze, Shapiro (2015: 132) points to Nietzsche’s
‘spiritual nomadism’ (HH 2.11, D 452) in which he heralds a ‘new politics’ of nomadic
thought that decodifies the state without recodifying it (1977: 149). Bringing together
Nietzsche’s ecologism and anarchism, Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 102) identify this
along political lines as Nietzsche’s ‘geophilosophy’, an approach that avoids teleology
and statism, emphasizing a plurality of forms of human habitation, including nomadic
and other non-state groupings in which seas, deserts, caves and mountainous terrains
all become forms of smooth space, fields of unconstrained movement of bodies and
thought.
As his mother described him, Sartre was ‘a nice little anarchist surrounded by his
books’ (1983b: 129). In a 1975 New York Review of Books interview, he acknowledges
himself an anarchist his entire life: ‘I have never accepted any power over me, and I have
always thought that anarchy, which is to say a society without powers, must be brought
about’ (1975). Of course, he is well known as a Marxist (and heavily criticized as a
‘fellow-traveller’ with the French Communist Party (PCF) in the 1950s), but this was a
label he rejected in his later years. Whereas in 1957 he had declared that Marxism was
the unsurpassable ‘philosophy of our time’ (SM 31), describing it as ‘simultaneously
a totalization of knowledge, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and a
community of language’ (SM 6), in a 1975 interview with Michel Rybalka, he answered
‘no’ to the question of whether he was still a Marxist. In other interviews, he continued
to distance himself from Marxism and associate his thinking with anarchism: ‘I
was always more of an anarchist than a Marxist. . . . [My] anarchism . . . was really
an expression of freedom, the freedom I described earlier, the freedom of a writer’
(Gerassi 2009: 44). ‘I was an anarchist without knowing it when I wrote Nausea’, he
affirmed, and ‘I have always thought that anarchy – which is to say, a society without
powers – must be brought about’ (1977a: 389).
As Betschart (2020: 29) notes, Sartre’s alliances with the Communists (France
1952–6, Soviet 1954–6, Algerian rebels 1955–62, Castro’s Cuba 1960–1 and the ‘Maoist’
New Left groups 1970–3) were not ideological partnerships but rather ‘cases of tactical
cooperation’. Sartre was faithful only to his own values, to his ‘big four no’s to militarism,
colonialism, racism, and bourgeois morality’. He was, for instance, an early supporter
of Russian dissidents against Stalinism (by 1963 Les Temps Modernes had already
published three of Solzhenitsyn’s novels). After 1968, Sartre and Beauvoir became ‘the
godparents’ of the political movements of individual freedom based around gender,
144 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

ethnicity and sexual orientation, articulating a politics which, in Aronson’s (1995: 34)
words, is ‘feminist, pro-gay liberation, anti-racist and ecological’. Showing a concern
for individual freedom, autonomy and subjectivity, like Nietzsche, Sartre feared the
totalistic, state-centric varieties of socialism. Many scholars now acknowledge that
Marxism was a heuristic tool in his thinking and a springboard towards a more refined
political trajectory that he identified as anarchism.30 Sartre’s anarchism is suspicious
of all social groups, appealing directly to the power of artistic self-development and
individual authenticity in and against a social world of oppression and conformity.
He conceives society not as an organic whole but as a complex collection of separate
individuals and assemblages and is consistently anti-Hegelian in arguing against
organicism, preferring to see society as a ‘detotalized totality’. This, in Heter’s (2020:
532) view, makes Sartre a ‘syndicalist’, both fearful and in awe of the transformative
power of group being. This places him at a distance from individualists (such as
Stirner) and collectivists (such as Hegel).31 Like the social anarchists, he imagines
a socialist alternative to the capitalist state, but he values collectivity as a process of
freely configuring or pluralistic emergent assemblages that enable the kaleidoscopic
expression of individualities as opposed to degraded serial forms of social existence
that inhibit it.32
Sartre’s view of the state as a totalized monolith very much runs in parallel with
Nietzsche’s, expressing a ‘nomadic’ wish, in Deleuze’s terms, to decodify its apparatus.
He discards the liberal idea that democratic states express a social contract among
equals since citizens obey the law not by choice but as a result of mystification and
violence. The state is not a neutral arbitrator that mediates the interests of smaller
groups or communities but operates through ruses or ‘traps’, especially voting, where
the ruling class creates the spectacle of a collective will. Society is not a genuine group
but an atomized mass forming the ‘container’ and ‘battlefield’ for competing groups:
‘Thus it would be wrong to see the State either as the concrete reality of society (as
Hegel apparently wished or believed), or as a pure, epiphenomenal abstraction’ (CDR
639). For Sartre, ‘[t]he state can never be regarded as the product or expression of
the totality of social individuals’ (CDR 636) since it is characterized by seriality
and ‘other-directedness’ (CDR 646): ‘the relation of the State to concrete society
can never, even in the best of circumstances, transcend other-direction’ (CDR
654). In the 1970s, he wrote two essays, ‘Election: A Trap for Fools’ and ‘Justice and
the State’, in which he appeals to the ideal of non-oppression to reject both thick
and thin justifications of the state: ‘State Justice was created precisely in order to
perpetuate exploitation’ (1977a: 175).33 Political representation is but ‘a falsification
of the popular will’ (1977a: 176), a type of ‘blackmail’ that creates inert gatherings
of people who ‘cannot resist the State’ (CDR 636). Sartre illustrates this through the
phenomenology of the secret ballot and its other-directedness: ‘No one can see you,
you have only yourself to look to; you are going to be completely isolated when you
make your decision’ (1977a: 200). For Sartre, ‘[u]niversal suffrage is an institution
and therefore a collective which atomizes or serializes individual men. It addresses
the abstract entities within them – the citizens, who are defined by a set of political
rights and duties, or in other words by the relation to the state and its institutions’
(1977a: 202).
 
A Creative Ethics and Agonistic Politics 145

Although Sartre states in the conclusion to Being and Nothingness, ‘[o]ntology

itself is unable to formulate moral prescriptions’, it does allow us, he concedes, ‘to
glimpse what an ethics that took up its responsibilities by confronting a human
reality in situation might be’ (BN 809). In looking to a future beyond the state,
Sartre’s anarchist syndicalism, exemplified by his prototype of the fusing group, is
an expression of his ontology of emergent interactionism, offered as a sublimation
of multiplicity and unity, self and other. He describes his vision of ‘a flourishing
humanity’ as an individual adventure in the dimension of the universal shot through
with possibilities: ‘But my destiny is me coming to myself as an image. What is
more, humanity is an individual adventure that takes place in the dimension of the
universal. The individual coming to himself in terms of the features of the universal,
this is humanity’s destiny’ (NE 422). Key to this are the notions of intersubjectivity
and reciprocity: ‘we can conceive of an absolute conversion to intersubjectivity. This
conversion is ethical. It presupposes a political and social conjuncture (suppression of
classes and the State) as its necessary condition, but this suppression is not sufficient
by itself ’ (NE 407). In building and forging a flourishing humanity, we pass from the
particular to the universal, thereby transcending the old society and the old History.
In a classless society where there is no oppression that ‘breaks apart intersubjective
solidarity’ (NE 427), it ‘can also be love, that is, the project undertaken confident that
freedoms evaluated as such and willed as such will take up and transform my work
and therefore my Ego, which will thus lose itself in the absolute dimension of freedom’
(NE 418). Flourishing humanity will not be marked by division and hierarchy but
by integration and love, a new phase of existence based on the model of the festival
which we must work for:

it is a break with the spirit of seriousness, expenditure, nihilation, passage to the

festival. Indeed, the festival is liberation from the spirit of seriousness, the end of
economies, the overthrowing of hierarchy, and the absorption of the Other by the
Same, of the objective by intersubjectivity, of order by disorder. This will turn out
to be the apocalypse as one of the extreme types of interhuman relations. (NE 374)

In interviews in the 1970s, he conceives democracy not merely as a type of government

but as a form of life where (a post-Critique conception of) fraternity forms the bond of
relationships between people in society: ‘our goal is to arrive at a genuinely constituent
body in which each person would be a human being and collectives would be equally
human’ (HN 67). In Sartre’s final ethics, the future ‘is a pure future beyond the system’
that has ‘to be created – not by building a system (not even a socialist system) but by
destroying every system’ (1974a: 251). This would be a witnessing of ‘what Malraux,
in Days of Hope, called the Apocalypse, that is to say, the dissolution of the series into
a group-in-fusion. And this group, though still unstructured, that is to say, entirely
amorphous, is characterized by being the direct opposite of alterity’ (SG 357). Fired
by the imagination and realized through praxis, ‘humanity’ is an evolving notion
designating a power of political transformation and invention: ‘The essential moment
therefore is that of creation, that is, the moment of the imaginary, of invention. . . .
And naturally the negative moment is essentially bound to the imaginary since man
146 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

chooses to illuminate what is, in the light of what is not’ (NE 464). Sartre’s anarchistic
political vision would in years to come prove important as a philosophical resource for
poststructuralists, such as Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari, who drew heavily
on key Sartrean ideas, particularly his theory of commitment and seminal analysis of
the fusing group.34
 6

Posthuman progenitors

A new world view is settling itself into the minds of humanity. It goes about like
a virus.
(Carl Fortlage, 1857 cited in Blue 2016: 237)

I know my fate. One day my name will be associated with the recollection of some-
thing tremendous – of a crisis such as there has never been on earth, of the most
profound collision of conscience, of a decision evoked counter to everything that had
hitherto been believed, demanded, hallowed.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 4.1)

Posthumanism and transhumanism

Inspired by Derridean deconstruction, the Deleuzian critique of ‘oppositional thinking’

and Foucault’s wake-up call to release us from our ‘anthropological sleep’ (1973: 370),
posthumanists have embraced a new direction in philosophical thinking that addresses
itself to the pressing ecological and ethical issues of the Anthropocene.1 Although
there are different variants of posthumanism (as the word has become somewhat
of an umbrella term), I refer to Ferrando’s ‘philosophical posthumanism’ (2020)
as a statement of the philosophical thinking that derives most closely from French
poststructuralism and, in turn, from the philosophical insights of Nietzsche and Sartre.
This can be contrasted, for the sake of illustration, with transhumanism that, although
it shares common features with posthumanism, can be seen in some important
respects as antithetical to it in philosophical form. According to Ferrando (2020: 118),
philosophical posthumanism is a ‘non-hierarchical system of thought’ in which alterity
(human and non-human) is embraced as ‘an open and constantly evolving frame, not
as the undisciplinable chaos to be normalized, otherized, or divinized’. It adopts an
onto-epistemological approach, as well as an ethical one, ‘manifesting as a philosophy
of mediation, which discharges any confrontational dualisms and hierarchical legacies
. . . approached as a post-humanism, a post-anthropocentrism, and a post-dualism’
(2020: 22). The type of dualism deconstructed by philosophical posthumanism is a
strict, rigid and absolute metaphysical form of dualism, and not the liquid, shifting and
intra-changing form of duality – ‘an explicit duality expressing an implicit unity’ (2020:
60). Although it cannot be assimilated to it completely, philosophical posthumanism
148 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

continues the postmodernist quest for proliferating difference and acknowledging

‘the voices of the subjectivities which have been historically reduced to the realm of
the “Other”’ (2020: 24). By contrast, transhumanism (as derived from Julian Huxley)
can be characterized as ‘anthropocentric’ and based on human exceptionalism with
its roots in the Enlightenment, valorizing progress, linearity, science, technology and
rationality, a form of ‘ultra-humanism’ (2020: 35). Transhumanists endorse the coming
of the posthuman condition brought about through a rapid technological and scientific
acceleration, including computing, information and media technologies, genetic
engineering, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence, virtual realities, prosthetic
enhancements, robotics and space colonization as common themes. Transhumanists
hope for enhancements in all aspects of human beings, eliminating pain and suffering
and enhancing pleasure and experiences.2
Scholars have placed Nietzsche on both sides of the posthumanism–transhumanism
debate, and there is no doubt he displays some ambiguity in his writings regarding the
status of the Übermensch, his superhuman prototype of the future, influenced to a large
extent by the varying attitudes he adopts towards science during the three phases of his
thinking. Sorgner (2009: 38), for example, claims Nietzsche as an ally and precursor
of transhumanism since he proposes a dynamic view of nature and values in which
the cosmos undergoes endless change as well as a revaluation of all values in which
a scientific form of thinking replaces the religious and the imperative to enhance
human values and capacities: ‘The overhuman comes about via an evolutionary step
which originates from the group of higher humans. Nietzsche does not exclude the
possibility that technological means bring about the evolutionary step.’ In Mellamphy’s
(2015: 143) view, the overhuman should be read ‘physiologically’ (as the choreographic
motor of a transhuman chthonic machine which directs life’s form – giving activities
by way of a-signifying forces) rather than juridically (as a framework of morals or
ideals to be followed). In support of this, Zarathustra hints at the biologistic contents
of the Übermensch, while in the Nachlass, Nietzsche suggests a strongly physiological/
biological vision of the Übermensch: ‘I write for a species of man that does not yet exist’
(WP 958). The ‘goal’ of the higher human, he states, was the ‘evolution of the entire
body and not just of the brain’ (KSW 10.506). In the spirit of experimentation and
adventure trumpeted by transhumanists, Nietzsche exhorts us to take chances and to
‘live dangerously!’ (HH 283, BGE 224).3
However, in Ecce Homo Nietzsche is keen to strip the Übermensch of any Darwinian
or idealist conceptions (EH 3.1) and elsewhere in his writings justifies his future
philosophy in juridical terms of (aesthetic) values.4 Furthermore, as Ansell-Pearson
(1997: 3) argues, it is wrong to view the Übermensch as involving a systematic
effacement of all supposed anachronistic traces of our past. Nietzsche looked back to
the Renaissance and the past to find those ‘exemplars’ of humanity and – who embodied
the desire and will to power of the prospective Übermensch, such as Goethe, who
manifested greatness and wholeness (TI 9.49). Although there is a certain temporal
ambiguity in the superhuman insofar as he sometimes futurizes it (not even his hero
of the past Goethe can achieve it) as a new species or epoch (WP 958), elsewhere he
uses the term to apply to past heroes (A 4) and the present as an existential imperative,
asking ‘not what will replace humanity in the sequence of beings’ but ‘what type of
 
Posthuman Progenitors 149

human one shall breed, shall will, as of higher value, more worthy of life, surer of a
future’ (A 3). In Zarathustra, Nietzsche emphasizes the continuity between past,
present and future that overlap and interlink. The humanity of today are the parents of
tomorrow, ‘fragments of the future’ (Z 2.20), since the power of their self-realization
will one day ‘ignite the light of the future’ (Z 3.16.1). Humanity ‘should be a bridge, and
not a purpose’ (Z P4).
Guided by Nietzsche’s sublimating logic, it could be said that the Übermensch
is a new type the human grows into which both is and isn’t ‘human’.5 Whereas the
‘[h]uman is nonanimal and superanimal’, the higher human ‘is nonhuman and
superhuman: they belong together’ (WP 1027). Becoming übermenschlich involves
a state of being called ‘post-metaphysical’ (Ansell-Pearson 1997: 1),6 embodying a
spiritualized physics that incorporates the truth and complexes of our natural drives
and affects as well as sharable practices that affirm human capacities and promote new
forms of individuality. For Ansell-Pearson (1997: 144), ‘Nietzsche does not think this
overcoming in terms of the abolition of the human but rather only in terms of the
destruction of its anthropocentric determination as the superior point of evolution’.
The transhuman condition ‘is not about the transcendence of the human being but
concerns its non-teleological becoming in an immanent process of “anthropological
deregulation”’ (1997: 163). The transhumanist overemphasis on technology often
results in a technocentric transcendence of biology that ignores the situated aspect
of the body, obscuring difference and plurality.7 Pursuing radical life extension and
immortality, transhumanist technologism takes on the character of a religion in the
form of an other-worldly striving for transcendence and salvation. From a Nietzschean
perspective, transhumanism has become transformed into a ‘classic expression of an
ancient ideal’: ‘it is no longer Christianity fulfilling the role of Platonism for the people,
but rather a cyberspace cult’ (1997: 2). By projecting a redemptive future and an ascetic
ideal to overcome suffering, transhumanism takes the form of religious nihilism: ‘All
that which Nietzsche regarded as providing fertile soil for an immanent process of
continual self-overcoming is here treated as a condition that is to be escaped from’
(1997: 32–3). In contrast to philosophical posthumanism, transhumanism employs
simple dichotomies that Nietzsche’s thought problematizes (human/posthuman,
organic/technological) and involves anthropomorphic projections onto nature: ‘The
positing of themselves as the meaning and measure of evolution is the anthropocentric
conceit of humans that is exposed with the advent of nihilism’ (1997: 161). Evolution is
conceived by Nietzsche as non-teleological and appears to be a highly contingent and
random process, but in some forms of transhumanism, has become a grand narrative
taking the form of ‘a facile quasi-Hegelianism in which the rise of the machine is
construed in linear and perfectionist terms’ (1997: 4).
Stiegler (2015) echoes Ansell-Pearson’s concerns about annexing Nietzsche’s
thinking to a transhumanist grand narrative. He criticizes transhumanism for being
complicit with, and serving as an ideological support for, capitalism and imperialism
which are seen as the culmination of a historical process geared towards progress, a
‘natural selection’ of evolutionary processes. Contemporary information technologies
– ‘big data’ and the algorithms that control it – bring nihilism to completion faster
than Nietzsche prophesied because of the levelling effect. Such technologies function
150 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

in conjunction with capitalism in a way that simultaneously targets individuals more

comprehensively than ever before possible, shaping their thoughts and desires in
conformity with statistical averages, producing a domesticated ‘quantified’ or ‘data’
self. In his critique of the ‘last man’ for which the Übermensch is his proposed antidote/
solution, Nietzsche’s principal target is the reactionary individualism of the calculating
utilitarian shopkeeper parodied by Napoleon. For Nietzsche, people have become
slaves in the worship of the ‘god of machines and crucibles’ (BT 18), constrained within
the ‘spider’s web of reason’ and enslaved to labour under a ‘servitude of purpose’ (Z
3.4). Like Marx, he recognized the hardship of those subjected to the mechanical
grind and indignities of the labour market and condemned the hypocrisy of the
‘pale religions’ offered as a palliative to the slaves (BT 18). In Stiegler’s (2015: 45–8)
view, transhumanism is nothing but a wholesale embrace of this form of calculative
rationality and thus a justificatory ideology for ‘cognitive capitalism’. It seeks to
reengineer the human being so that only averages are possible, and exceptions – those
which escape algorithmic control – are eliminated. Since we are constituted by our
technologies that condition our existence and our nature as human, technologies are
paramount when considering what the human race is becoming. While the effect of
technology is to reinvent and bring about changes in the function of human organisms
that would otherwise risk enslavement to biological drives, Stiegler repeatedly refers
to ‘the ambivalent therapy – toxicity of the technological object’, both cure and poison,
wherein the very technologies that ‘liberate’, or ‘disautomate’, us can also induce
regression to pathological modes of automation.
This Nietzschean critique of the levelling effects of cognitive capitalism can also
be found in Sartre’s philosophy. As his analysis of the ‘homme–machine’ (CDR 191)
illustrates, neotechnic and prosthetic technologies form a continuum with the human
‘body-machine’ alongside a domain of virtuality and incorporeality that offers a
‘potential space’ involving interrelations, interfaces and autonomous becomings or,
conversely, mystifications and impoverishments. Sartre’s thinking points towards a
view (consistent with posthumanism’s ‘Precautionary Principle’)8 of the dangers of
our ‘machinic becomings’ (Guattari 2000: 38) for human projects of freedom. This
signals a move away from a Faustian view of technology as a form of ultra-humanistic
control to one of undecidability and non-calculability in relation to both our machinic
enslavement and technics of becoming. As Sartre shows, our captivation by the
practico-inert can often take the form of ‘dark magic’ as in psychopathology and
addiction. As technology advances in a digital society, the captivating powers of the
image have intensified through advertising and consumer capitalism in a semiotic
system of simulacra and hyperreal objects.9 Sartre touches upon this in his early work
on the imagination, where he writes about the ‘statics of the image’ (IM 16) and its
poverty compared to the real-life inexhaustibility of things, their peculiar ‘flesh’ or
‘intimate texture’ (IM 16). Synaesthetic perception and the inexhaustibility of the
real is always more powerful than the imaginary and the one-dimensionality of the
reproduced image (IM 144–5).10
Perhaps we should not get too carried away with the Übermensch in interpreting
Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future since it is but one among several ideals or ‘masks’
that Nietzsche adopts. Although the Übermensch is used in Zarathustra and does
 
Posthuman Progenitors 151

not disappear (A 4, TI 9.37, EH 3.1), it is in general rarely employed by Nietzsche

who also projects the ideal of Dionysus (BT, EH Z6), ‘free spirits’ (D, HH, GS), ‘new
philosophers’ (BGE 2) or ‘experimenters’ (BGE 42) and Zarathustra (GS 342, TI 4,
EH Z1). Another paragon he suggests for a new mode of thinking that goes beyond
metaphysical humanism is the figure of the musical Socrates (BT 15). Nietzsche recalls
in the Phaedo that Socrates, waiting for his execution, regrets he had never made music.
He realizes his previous mistake that the theoretical attitude cannot redeem existence,
and an aesthetic attitude is superior and necessary. This figure also symbolizes, for
Nietzsche, one of the reasons he believes that tragic myth is ready for a rebirth in the
form of the self-critique of the theoretical attitude in the contemporary era. Nietzsche
does not propose an eradication of the theoretical tendency and a return to the double-
intuitive tendencies of Apollo and Dionysus. Socrates and Dionysus are the modern
tendencies which should be brought into a kind of harmonious relation in tension, a
co-constitution which would combine science and art. Through the ‘musical Socrates’,
Nietzsche suggests that art can be accompanied by a science that involves a self-critique
of its own limits. It denotes the advent of the posthuman as an aesthetic space in which
values, and knowledge as well, are reflected on and critiqued, as well as constructed
through the activity of creative play.
In his writings, Nietzsche does not mention technology (and technological promise)
very much, but his allusions to it tend to the phobic, complaining about typewriters,
the empty repetitive soulless ‘music’ of a barrel organ or decrying the enslavement
of the worker to machines under capitalism. It was nature that attracted Nietzsche
where he found solace from the technological buzz and noise of the city and where he
found creativity all around him as well as the symbiotic communion with the senses
that he craved within his idyll of the ‘Epicurean Garden’. The central question for
his philosophy of the future, as several scholars have highlighted,11 is an aesthetico-
politico-ecological one – ‘how shall the earth as a whole be governed?’ (WP 947), a
question that runs through Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s symphonic paean to nature.

Nietzsche’s nature
Remain faithful to the earth
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra 1.22.3)

Nietzsche had a deep love for nature and its transformative, generative powers. Aged
eight, he felt happiness, companionship and a sense of fusion when out hiking in
the countryside on school field trips singing patriotic songs and playing humorous
games.12 Later in life, he walked in the mountains near Nice for seven or eight hours
at a time, joyful among the cypresses and cistuses and Nature’s abundant gifts to
the senses. He likened his solitary treks in the mountains to Zarathustra’s ascent, a
‘wandering exile’ looking down from the summit like in Caspar David Friedrich’s
painting ‘The Wanderer above the Mist’. Influenced strongly by Ralph Waldo Emerson
152 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

whose essay ‘History’ in praise of ‘spiritual nomadism’ he copied into his notebooks
during his adolescence, he was fascinated by the intimate connection between self and
environment and how one’s habitat can warp or mould desires and mood. Emerson
also alerted him to the importance of instinct and the fact that the self operates beyond
the reach of consciousness. Many of Nietzsche’s early literary compositions celebrated
nature, harking back to the pastoral setting of his childhood at Röcken. In 1861, he
wrote an anthropological essay ‘Hunters and Fishers’ where he sought a naturalistic
rather than religious explanation for the development of human civilization. He posits
the self as ‘a repository of tendencies’ that environmental factors rouse or repress just
as the vagaries of weather affect the growth of a plant: ‘Only now do I recognize how
many experiences have affected my development, and how heart and intellect have
been formed under the influence of surrounding circumstances’ (KGW 1.2.258).
In 1863, he returns in his writings to the comparison of human beings with plants,
finding comfort in the exigencies of genus and species, the way vegetation expresses
and develops into the plant it was born to be (KGW 1.3.193–6).
Nature is woven into Nietzsche’s writings. His concept of the free spirit was inspired
by the coast of Sorrento which he observed from his rented room watching the
fathomless sea and the rushing of the waves, ‘the sea, with its rippling snake-skin and
beast-of-prey beauty’ (HH 49). For Nietzsche, our relation to the environment is one
of incorporation and assimilation, a transfer of energies and forces between things.
In determining who we are, ‘nutrition, place, climate’, he writes, ‘are inconceivably
more important than everything one has taken to be important so far . . . [i.e.] “God”,
“soul”, “virtue”, “sin”, “beyond”, “truth”, “eternal life”’ (EH 2.10). As Manschot (2021:
151) notes, Nietzsche is a ‘philosopher of atmospherics’ and a phenomenologist
of nature by delineating space as an affective medium of interchange and transfer.
From 1880 onwards, he became fascinated with the metabolic processes that take
place between people and the environment. On 6 August 1881, he experienced his
transformative moment of eternal return in front of a pyramid-shaped boulder
on his way to the mountain lake at Silvaplana-Surlej, a region he described as ‘the
sweetest corner of the earth’. This was a moment that marked his decisive step to his
‘naturalization’ as he called it. His years of wandering were a process of healing of
body and mind. Out of a sick and degenerate situation ‘one returns newborn, having
shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with
a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous
innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever
been before’ (GS P4).
For Nietzsche, all things are dependent on the environment for their flourishing and
the expansion of their creative will to power: ‘Every living thing needs to be surrounded
by an atmosphere, a mysterious circle of mist: if one robs it of this veil, if one condemns
a religion, an art, a genius to orbit as a star without an atmosphere: then one should
not wonder about its becoming withered, hard, and barren’ (UM 2.7). His affective
sensitivity to the environment provides an ecological logic that warns against pollutants,
whether they be chemical or social, alerting us to the ‘atmoterrorism’ (Manschot 2021:
152) of polluted cities, concrete jungles, drone warfare, aerial bombardment, nuclear
radiation, radio waves and microwave toxicity – ‘I need solitude . . . the breath of a free,
 
Posthuman Progenitors 153

playful air’ (EH 1.8). His pagan encomium to nature in Zarathustra is woven around
Zarathustra’s injunction to ‘[r]emain faithful to the earth’ (Z 1.22.3) and is Nietzsche’s
attempt to develop a new philosophy in which the earth would be central rather than
the instrumental designs of humankind. As Zarathustra marvels, nature not only
provides food for nourishment but does so in an aesthetic way, with beautiful and
beckoning colours, tastes and aromas. However, human despoliation of the earth has
caused it to suffer through exploitation and pollution: ‘The earth has a skin; and this
skin has diseases. One of these diseases for example is called “human being”’ (Z 2.18).
It is the ‘last man’, in particular, who threatens environmental health: ‘For the earth has
now become small, and upon it hops the last man, who makes everything small’ (Z P5).
However much the earth is despoiled and polluted, Zarathustra declares that it still
retains tremendous possibilities for growth and renewal as ‘the heart of the earth is of
gold’ (Z 2.19). In his more optimistic moments, he imagines the earth as a vast health
resort and gigantic tree of life (WS 188–9) but voices apprehension for the ‘Menschen-
Erde’ (human earth) that can manifest itself as a hell or a garden.13
A significant metaphor for encapsulating Nietzsche’s ecology is that of the garden.
Convalescing from his ‘abysmal thought’ of eternal return, Zarathustra is cheered
by his animals’ news that the world is awaiting him as a garden (Z 3.13) before he
concludes the third part with ‘The Seven Seals’, his celebratory song of the earth (Z
3.16). In Nietzsche’s aesthetic-political vision of earth’s transformation, gardens are sites
of becoming that offer aesthetic and multisensory stimulation, earthly experiments
that are responsive to variations in their surrounding environment and which offer a
diversity of possibilities. Gardens are not just empty spaces but distinctive places like
Foucauldian heterotopias with pervasive affective qualities that can nurture or block
creativity. They represent the perfect metaphor for human inventiveness and creativity,
an experiment and conversation with nature in the form of a nature-culture hybrid.14
Nietzsche extends the metaphor of gardening also to the care of one’s self in which we
sculpt and impose aesthetic order on natural forces: ‘One can dispose of one’s drives
like a gardener and, though few know it, cultivate the shoots of anger, pity, curiosity,
vanity as productively and profitably as a beautiful fruit tree on a trellis’ (D 560). The
interplay of passions and drives do not create beauty by themselves but need care and
cultivation:

Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us,
conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not
how, and they gaze upon us, morose and grey. Woe to the thinker who is not the
gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him! (D 382)

In advice to the ‘good Europeans’, ‘free spirits’ and ‘philosophers of the future’,
Nietzsche sounds an ecological plea: ‘please don’t forget the garden, the garden with
the golden trellises!’ (BGE 25). In Shapiro’s (2016: 136) view, Nietzsche’s idea of the
earth as garden(s) is his attempt ‘to sketch an aesthetic politics of the human-earth or a
geoaesthetics and geopolitics of the Anthropocene’. He offers an ‘earth-centred reversal’
of biblical themes, from the innocence of the Garden to the terror of the Apocalypse
and Antichrist in which his correlation of garden-happiness with sensuality reverses
154 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

the biblical garden story where Eve and Adam feel shame in the discovery of their
nakedness and sensuality. In a sublimating movement, he puts forward the garden as a
perfect nature-culture continuum, subscribing not fully to Emersonian wilderness but
favouring the flourishing of style ‘within a half wild environment’ (KSW 9.256).15 For
Manschot (2021: 75), Nietzsche’s overhuman who ‘speaks from the heart of the earth’
(Z 2.18) and the free spirits whom he urges to take on the task of the management ‘of
the earth as a whole’ (HH 24–5) herald ‘a new direction in philosophical cosmology
that makes the relationship between humans and the earth the central concern of
our twenty-first century understanding of ourselves’. This he terms ‘terrasophy’, a
philosophical viewpoint that takes the earth ‘as not an object but a partner’ and
recognizes the will to power as a universal and abundant creative force in nature and
in things, transforming our relationship to Gaia from one of a furious and vengeful
goddess to the face of a caring mother (2021: 131). Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 102)
identify this along political lines as Nietzsche’s ‘geophilosophy’, an approach that avoids
teleology and statism, emphasizing a plurality of forms of human habitation, including
nomadic and other non-state groupings within fields of the unconstrained movement
of bodies and thought.
Contra Heidegger, an ecological reading of Nietzsche’s philosophy dispels the view
that his will to power involves the domination and ‘enframing’ of the earth by humans.
Instead, it recognizes Nietzsche’s view of the will to power as a universal creative force
in nature, traces his relational ontology of assimilating and incorporating forces and
follows his numerous injunctions to remain true to the earth, establishing it as an
Epicurean garden of ‘free air’ that offers solitude, creativity, play and satiates (what
Plank (1998: 102) refers to as) his ‘Sensism’:

The most spiritual men feel the stimulus and the charm of sensuous things in a
way that other men – those with ‘fleshy hearts’ cannot possibly imagine. . . . The
strength and power of the senses – this is the essential thing in a well-constituted
and complete man: the splendid ‘animal’ must be given first. (WP 1045)

Animals
Of all modern philosophers, Nietzsche mentions the largest number of animals in
his writings, a diverse array of no fewer than 120, some encountered on his walks in
nature and others discovered in his reading.16 Throughout his writings, animals were
vital sources of nourishment for his philosophical thinking, and no more so than in
Zarathustra. When Zarathustra is discontent and lost in the human world, animals
enable him to find the right track towards happiness. After leaving the ugliest human
being, he is cold and lonely but feels ‘warm and lively’ when he stumbles across a herd
of cows huddled together on a knoll, finding a beggar in the midst of them who is there
‘to learn from these cows’ (Z 4.8). The cows teach him to ‘chew the cud’, to ingest food
slowly and gather his thoughts gradually rather than be dazzled by a superabundance
of impressions as in life in the city. During the course of conversation with his animals,
 
Posthuman Progenitors 155

Zarathustra learns much from them, including the central truth of Heraclitean wisdom
which they speak to him: ‘Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being
rolls eternally. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs
eternally’ (Z 3.13). Significantly, after conversing with the ‘higher men’ in his cave, he
chooses to slip outside to talk to his animals: ‘Tell me, my animals: these higher men all
together – do they perhaps not smell good. Oh clean fragrances around me! Only now
do I know and feel how I love you, my animals’ (Z 4.14.1). As the Übermensch appears
only on the distant horizon, Zarathustra can only feel at home with his animals who
provide him with philosophical solace. The eagle and the snake accompany him at all
times. The eagle represents a view from above, seeing what’s ahead, ‘the tree called
future’ with its clear vision and sharp eyes, while the snake, ‘the wisest animal under
the sun’, symbolizes the eternal return and the circularity of time, keeping its body
close to the earth.
Alongside Darwin, Nietzsche was a stentorian voice of the nineteenth century in
eliding the Christian or Enlightenment distinction between humans (as possessors of
souls or rationality) and animals (as creatures of pre-programmed instinct and desire).
The will to power is conceived as a natural motivation or creative force that applies
to all organisms: ‘every animal . . . instinctively strives for an optimum of favourable
conditions under which it can expend all its strength and achieve its maximum feeling
of power’ (GM 3.7). ‘To understand what life is’, Nietzsche writes, ‘the formula must
apply to trees and plants as well as to animals’ (WP 704) and ‘for each of these there is a
small corner from which it measures, is aware, sees and doesn’t see’ (LN 129). Indeed,
he insists, ‘[t]he organic process constantly presupposes interpretations’ (WP 643). All
organisms have ‘a biological intentionality or perspectivity’, a minimal consciousness
that forms ‘the foundation of the affects’ (BGE 258). He even extends this beyond
animals and plants to include all organic and inorganic things: ‘the will to power . . .
guides the inorganic world as well. Or rather, that there is no inorganic world’ (LN 15).
In Nietzsche’s view, it is erroneous to think that we are different to other animals. What
we think of as the protocols of ‘social morality’ can be found everywhere in a simple
form ‘even down to the deepest depths of the animal world’ (D 26). This includes the
drive to truth as well as other values that we think to be quintessentially and uniquely
human, such as morality: ‘The beginnings of justice, as well as of prudence, moderation,
valor – in short, of all we designate as the Socratic virtues, are animal in nature . . . it is
not improper to describe the entire phenomenon of morality as animal’ (D 26). Like
humans, animals have self-consciousness motivated by sociality. The animal ‘observes
the effects it produces upon the representing of other animals, from this it learns to
look back upon itself, to take itself “objectively”, it has its degree of self-knowledge’
(D 26). They can show ‘sympathy’ or ‘empathy’ and are capable of representing what
another is experiencing (e.g. in the predator’s interpretation of the prey), making
animals capable of pity or cruelty (HH 2.62). This also gives them a sense of cause and
effect, the ability to see ‘intentions in all happening’ (WP 550). Indeed, Nietzsche talks
of ‘the sagacity of plants’ (WP 660) and attributes memory to all organisms due to the
intelligence and intentionality of their drives: ‘memory is older than consciousness.
E.g., we have memory in the mimosa [tree], but no consciousness. Memory naturally
without picture, in the plant.’ This, he elaborates, is a kind of muscle memory or bodily
156 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

intentionality found in its ‘reflex-movements’ (KSW 72-3.19). Finding the power of

recognizing and concluding as common to all organisms, he even finds the origin of
logic in the protoplasm which ‘makes what it appropriates equal to itself and fits it
into its own forms and files’ (WP 510). As Solomon (2003: 37) remarks, Nietzsche
would be very sympathetic to charges of speciesism when defining universal principles
of humanity for, like Darwin, he sees humans and other organisms as continuous in
exhibiting similar qualities. When speaking of becoming, this applies to all biological
forms of the will to power, to become what one is rather than who one is. This connects
to his perspectivism and his ‘interpretative pluralism’ in which he engages with a
‘plurality of gazes’ by viewing the human perspective from the outside, imagining what
animals actually think about humans: ‘Humanity’. – We do not regard the animals as
moral beings. But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? – An animal
that could speak said: ‘Humanity is a prejudice of which we animals at least are free’
(D 333).17 Humanity, he surmises, must appear very strange indeed to the rest of the
animal kingdom:

I fear that the animals regard man as a creature of their own kind which has in a
highly dangerous fashion lost its healthy animal reason – as the mad animal, as the
laughing animal, as the weeping animal, as the unhappy animal. (GS 224)

And yet, Nietzsche, of course, does not avoid ambiguity or contradiction altogether
on the matter for there are metaphysical residues in his thinking that surface in
places displaying an anthropometric or humanist bias that Heidegger identified but
exaggerated. Although in the Nachlass Nietzsche ascribes memory to all organisms,
elsewhere he takes memory of the past as a capacity that distinguishes humans from
animals: ‘Human . . . braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what
is past’ (UM 2.1). This requires a separation of the self from immediate experience
which allows him to consciously will: ‘this mastery over himself also necessarily
gives him mastery over circumstances, over nature, and over more short-willed and
unreliable creatures’ (UM 2.1). The animal lives unhistorically, its existence consumed
by the present moment and the satisfaction of its immediate desires and needs. It
cannot dissimulate for ‘it conceals nothing and at every instant it appears as wholly as it
is’. With humans, however, the knowledge of the past ‘pushes him down and bends him
sideways’ and shows him the cruelty, suffering and imperfection of his life (UM 2.1.61).
Nietzsche argues that the memory of the past emerged through the primitive relation
between ‘buyer and seller, creditor and debtor’ that preceded societal organizations
and norms. Over time, the community became the creditor to whom the individual
owed a ‘moral debt’ internalized through common values and the human became ‘the
creature who measures values, who values and measures, as the “calculating animal
in itself ”’ (GM 2.8). It is as the ‘esteeming animal’ that humans have become the
‘undetermined animal’ (BGE 62) since they are able to gain some latitude from the play
of their biological drives in accordance with created and assumed values. In certain
passages, Nietzsche seems to adopt an exclusivism in regard to humans that elsewhere
he is quick to reject. This is evident in the following passage from Daybreak where he
considers the viewpoint of a butterfly:
 
Posthuman Progenitors 157

In the meantime I have come to look with new eyes on the secret and solitary
fluttering of a butterfly high on the rocky seacoast where many fine plants are
growing: it flies about unconcerned that it has but one day more to live and that
the night will be too cold for its winged fragility. For it too a philosophy could no
doubt be found: though it would no doubt not be mine. (D 553)

Here Nietzsche emphasizes discontinuity between humans and other creatures while
acknowledging the butterfly worthy of a philosophy of its own. We may question,
however, why he should assume the butterfly to be ‘unconcerned that it has but one
day more to live and that the night will be too cold for its winged fragility’. Surely
such existential concerns pertaining to survival, life and death are common to
butterflies as much as to beavers or viruses and are evident within their intentions,
actions and interpretations. In perhaps Nietzsche’s worst humanist faux pas, he agrees
with Schopenhauer that humans suffer more than animals – ‘the human is the most
suffering creature’ (WP 990) – and thinks that the difference is so great as to constitute
a vast difference in kind. Suffering is a key (exclusive) feature of our psychic economy,
Nietzsche claims, such that the sufferings of all animals undergoing vivisection don’t
compare to ‘one painful night of a single hysterical educated female’ (GM 2.7). Even
in Zarathustra, among all of Zarathustra’s close connections with his beloved animals,
there is to be found a certain bias contained in the hierarchical symbolism of his
ape-human-Übermensch compound: ‘What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock
or a painful embarrassment. And this is exactly what the human should be to the
Übermensch: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment’ (Z P3).
Nietzsche identifies humanity as the bearer of a multiplicity of drives that have
been created through historical existence: ‘Human has, in contrast to the animal,
bred large in himself an abundance of opposite drives and impulses; by this synthesis
he is master of the earth’ (WP 966). The human creation of ‘bad conscience’ within
Christianity is a dramatic turn in animal development, ‘an animal soul turning
against itself ’, internalizing a morality based on guilt before God for one’s biological
drives, body and earthly existence: ‘Oh this insane, pathetic beast – man! What
ideas he has, what unnaturalness, what paroxysms of nonsense, what bestiality of
thought erupts as soon as he is prevented just a little from being a beast in deed!’ (GM
2.23). This has made humanity into ‘the sick animal human’ in painful denial of its
animalistic and biological nature: ‘human is sicker, less certain, more changing, more
unsettled than any other animal. Of this there is no doubt – he is the sick animal’
(GM 3.13). There is hence an ambiguous sense in which Nietzsche makes a distinct
place for humanity while simultaneously animalizing it, revealing the human as
pharmakon – both poison and cure. Characteristically, he tries to deflate our pride in
these human values and suggests they are less reliable guides than our animal drives
and affects. However, he also sees the possibility for change, conceiving the human as
a (rickety) bridge that threatens to disintegrate in modernity18 but which at the same
time ‘could transform itself from a moral to a wise humanity’ (HH 107), forming a
link of evolution in terms of the historical configuration of the will to power from
the past into the future. Whatever differences Nietzsche suggests in his writings, it
is clear that the general thrust of his thinking is towards effacing or diminishing
158 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

these differences for which he always gives a genealogical rather than metaphysical
explanation:

For to translate man back into nature; to master the many vain and fanciful
interpretations and secondary meanings which have been hitherto scribbled and
daubed over that eternal basic text homo natura; to confront man henceforth
with man in the way in which, hardened by the discipline of science, man today
confronts the rest of nature, with dauntless Oedipus eyes and stopped-up Odysseus
ears, deaf to the siren songs of old metaphysical bird-catchers who have all too long
been piping to him ‘you are more! you are higher! you are of a different origin!’
(BGE 230)

Posthumanism has drawn heavily on Nietzsche’s insights in eliding strict alterities

or separations between humanity and the rest of nature (conceived autopoietically).
Developing Nietzsche’s notion of affectivity, Massumi (2015: 8–9) compares
animal instinct to how a musician plays improvisational variations on a theme as ‘a
spontaneous excess of creative self-consistency’, a force not of impulsion or compulsion
but of ‘affective propulsion’. Following vitalist biologist Jacob von Uexküll, as well as
Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 185) propose ‘a melodic, polyphonic and
contrapuntal conception of nature’, emphasizing the musical character of complex
evolution. This replaces a teleological conception of nature with a melodic one in
which the boundary between art and natural technique is an arbitrary one. They point
to relations of ‘counterpoint’ in nature, such as that of the hermit crab and the shell
of the dead mollusc, which join planes together as ‘a double articulation’ (1987: 51)
and form blocs of sensation and longitudinal and latitudinal lines of becoming (1994:
185). To view the world in this way is to construct ‘[n]ature as music’ (1987: 314) and
to recognize that artifice is fully a part of nature.19 Such a rhizomatic or involutionary
perspective, they claim, carries not ‘the slightest risk of anthropomorphism’ (1987:
318). This, of course, is fully in accord with Nietzsche’s observations in WP 808 where
he also conceives nature as an aesthetic network of becoming:

Art does more than merely imagine; it even transposes values. And it is not only
that it transposes the feeling of values. . . . In animals, this condition produces new
weapons, pigments, colours, and forms; above all, new movements, new rhythms,
new love-calls and seductions. It is no different with man.

As Ansell-Pearson (1997: 117, 163) argues, Nietzsche’s speculations on the becoming

of the animal ‘contain a radical and far-reaching overturning of anthropocentric
naivety’. Moreover, his vision of the future for humanity is necessarily bound up with
the non-human, prefiguring a posthuman subject as, in Deleuze’s (2004: 107) words,
a ‘free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants
and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their
personality’. What Nietzsche’s relationism and ‘atmospherics’ tell us is that a lifeform
is never separable from its rapport with the world. For Nietzsche, the organism is not
to be reified as a monadic entity but rather as a ‘complex of systems struggling for an
 
Posthuman Progenitors 159

increase in the feeling of power’ (WP 703). Symbiosis in nature teaches us that the
human is an integrated colony of amoeboid beings just as they are integrated colonies
of bacteria. Biological cells in our bodies can evolve only through the acquisition
of bacterial symbionts and in this way we can say, with some literal sense, that each
individual is ‘a tremendous multiplicity’ (WP 518) with an infinity of living individuals
inside.20

Sartre in Naturabilis
Sartre’s personal aversion to nature is no secret, thanks in the main to Beauvoir,
who describes how the efflorescence and rugged power of the natural world did not
provision any great joy for him: ‘More than the pure air of the mountain peaks or
the open sea, he enjoys an atmosphere full of tobacco smoke and warmed by human
breath.’ She likens his attitude to nature to Roquentin’s aversions to it:

Roquentin’s crisis reaches its paroxysm in a public park, and nowhere does the
presence of things show itself with more indiscretion than in the heart of nature.
Sartre detests the country, with its proliferation of plants and swarms of insects. At
most, he tolerates the level sea, the smooth desert sands, or the mineral coldness
of mountain peaks, but he is really happy only in cities, at the heart of a universe
constructed and populated with fabricated objects. (2004: 230)

In the light of these comments, many scholars cursorily condemn Sartre for holding a
jaundiced view of nature, often pointing to Nausea as a prime example of his literary
distaste for all things composed of matter, vegetation and flesh. Kohak sums this
up when he writes that, for Sartre, ‘the nonhuman appears as also inhuman, absurd
and nauseating’. According to Kohak (1984: 4, 76–7), ‘his descriptions of the natural
world . . . stress its repugnant absurdity’, leading him to adopt a ‘mechanistic nature-
construct’ in which he posits a ‘radical difference . . . between the being en-soi of nature
and the pour-soi of humans’. Kirsner (1985: 225) expands this view, claiming that ‘[i]n
his personal and philosophical refusal of surrender, Sartre wants consciously directed
activity to dominate the body and nature’, thus repeating the view of the body and the
world that has enshrined the project of Western civilization for many centuries. ‘This is
the logic of domination’, Kirsner states, ‘which views the world as there to be subdued
and controlled and uses an instrumental, managerial form of rationality that regards
oneself, others and the environment as objects to be quantified and manipulated.’
Although scholars are not altogether incorrect in pointing, along with Thody (1992:
31), to the fact that Sartre’s literary writings ‘come back again and again to the same
images of sickness and discomfort, of the plethoric unpleasantness of nature’, this tells
only half the story for he also presents nature in a very dynamic way, as a vibrant
network of overlapping energetic forces and living phantasmagoria. It is true, of course,
many of his descriptions border on the unpleasant or grotesque. Stricken by a state of
metaphysical nausea, for instance, Roquentin sees the natural world seeping through
the flesh of others. Hands become white worms and crabs; woman’s sex becomes ants,
160 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

centipedes and ringworm. When he picks up a pebble, this causes a ‘sweetish sickness’
and ‘nausea in the hands’. The sea from which the pebble emerges holds no relief
from this nausea as the ‘real sea is cold and black, full of animals; it crawls under this
thin green film which is designed to deceive people’ (N 179). As Mussett (2020: 518)
observes, Roquentin experiences ‘a melding of the organic, inorganic and human’ in
which ‘things behave like living organisms, seething, growing, threatening him by their
mere presence’. He is sunken in phenomenology, experiencing a rich affective dialectic
with the outside world that gets inside consciousness and the body ‘penetrating me
all over, through the eyes, through the nose, through the mouth’ (N 181): ‘everywhere
blossomings, hatching out, my ears buzzed with existence, my very flesh throbbed and
opened, abandoned itself to the universal burgeoning’ (W 133). Objects and bodies
are far from dead lifeless matter but are alive with their own intentionalities, qualities
and dynamic uprisings, ‘every now and then objects start existing in your hand’ (N
176), ‘[t]hings have broken free from their names. They are there, grotesque, stubborn,
gigantic’ (N 180).21 In his Dionysian experience of the chestnut tree, Roquentin is not
an active agent but the passive recipient of sensation: ‘The chestnut tree pressed itself
against my eyes. . . . The soft sound of the water in the Masqueret Fountain flowed into
my ears and made a nest there, filling them with sighs; my nostrils overflowed with
a green, putrid smell’ (N 183). Objects carry their own agency – ‘A tree is scratching
the earth under my feet with a black nail’ (N 181) – and place Roquentin under their
influence: ‘I was inside; the black stump did not pass, it stayed there, in my eyes, just
as a lump of food sticks in a windpipe’ (N 188–9). Things themselves are the carriers
of sensation – ‘they will feel something gently brushing against their bodies’ (N 226)
– and the body itself has its own motility or ‘motor intentionality’ irrespective of
consciousness: ‘My body turns very gently towards the east, wobbles slightly and starts
walking’ (N 227); ‘the arm trembles, the nail scratches, scratches, the mouth smiles
under the staring eyes and the man endures without noticing it this little existence
which is swelling his right side, which has borrowed his right arm and his right cheek
to fulfil itself ’ (N 181):

Objects ought not to touch, since they are not alive. You use them, you put them
back in place, you live among them: they are useful, nothing more. But they touch
me, it’s unbearable. I am afraid of entering into contact with them, just as if they
were living animals. . . . Now I see; I remember better what I felt the other day on
the sea-shore when I was holding that pebble. It was a sort of sweet disgust. How
unpleasant it was! And it came from the pebble, I’m sure of that, it passed from the
pebble into my hands. (N 22)

In dissociating Sartre from Nietzsche, scholars often mention the passage where
Roquentin alludes to the frailty of existence in contrast to what some refer to as the
vitality of the will to power, but elsewhere in the text, he emphasizes its vibrancy and
vigour:

My eyes never met anything but repletion. There were swarms of existences at the
end of the branches, existences which constantly renewed themselves and were
 
Posthuman Progenitors 161

never born. The existing wind came and settled on the tree like a big fly; and the
tree shivered . . . a thing-shiver flowed into the tree, took possession of it, shook it,
and suddenly abandoned it. (N 190)

More importantly, Roquentin sees himself as continuous with nature (though he finds
it repugnant) for ‘[his] body is co-extensive with the world, spread right through things’
(BN 428), sharing a common existence of superfluity and contingency: ‘Superfluous:
that was the only connexion I could establish between those trees, those gates, those
pebbles. . . . And I – weak, languid, obscene, digesting, tossing about dismal thoughts
– I too was superfluous’ (N 184). His fate, he concludes towards the end of the novel, is
to ‘[e]xist slowly, gently, like these trees, like a puddle of water, like the red seat in the
tram’ (N 223).
Of all those who have discerned a nascent ecological logic in Sartre’s dialectical
philosophy,22 Ally’s Ecology and Existence is by far the most systematic investigation in
both a deconstructive sense (of interpreting his range of writings) and a reconstructive
manner (of seeing through some of his blind spots and developing his fledgling ecology
to the full). Ally shows how Sartre’s philosophy is rife with ambiguity where nature is
concerned but far from the purely negative view many scholars all too readily ascribe
to him through a superficial and simplified reading. If we scan the range of his writings,
we can find a multivalent formulation of nature (as threat, as ‘Feminized Other’, as
escape and cradle of retreat, as rapture) and a burgeoning ecological perspective from
which it is possible to articulate ‘the broad contours of a new socioecological imaginary’
(2017: 323).23 On the negative side, Ally addresses the four theoretical charges brought
against Sartre in addition to ad hominem (he personally disliked nature) and ad usum
arguments (he neglected the ecological narrative throughout his work). These are
‘reflexive anthropocentrism’, ‘heuristic exceptionalism’, ‘categorical exclusivism’ and
‘naïve instrumentalism’ (2017: 26). These factors wax and wane throughout his writings
(and sometimes even within the same passage!) but are not essential, in Ally’s (2017:
360–1) view, to the structure of his wider ontological thinking. Although none of them
is easily dismissed, we should be careful of ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’.
Instead, a reconstructive reading of his oeuvre shows that nothing of his fourfold flaw
– failing, fallacy, error, lacuna – is foundational for his wider ontology. Furthermore,
criticisms of Sartre often overlook the subtlety and nuance of his thinking and ‘obscure
the interpretive latitude that is the hallmark of his manner of thinking things through’
(2017: 385). It is in the nature of Sartre’s methodologico-substantive apparatus ‘to leave
itself open to further development’ and of his philosophizing that is always open to ‘the
integration of new insights and pathways’ (2017: 25).
As we saw in Chapter 4, Sartre’s descriptions of the en-soi as brute Being, opacity,
inertia, pure exteriority and raw passivity – ‘[i]t is what it is’ (BN 28) – are considered
by him in the wider denouement of Being and Nothingness as ‘provisional’ and
‘abstract’ and give way to a dialectical view of the relation between pour-soi and
en-soi as one of ‘connective tissue’ (BN 755) as his investigation proceeds. On this
point, Sartre is unequivocal: ‘Man and world are relative beings, and relation is the
principle of their being’ (BN 415). Mediation is at the very heart of Sartre’s ontology
as the phenomenological and dialectical condition of experience and history. In
162 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Search for a Method onwards, Sartre’s treatment of nature also matures in a similar
manner to his developments with freedom. In elucidating his notion of history, he
introduces the concepts of material need and scarcity as key explanatory factors:
‘Whatever men and events are, they certainly appear within the compass of scarcity;
that is, in a society still incapable of emancipating itself from its needs – hence from
nature’ (SM 132).
Doubtlessly, Sartre’s writings display a great deal of ambiguity insofar as he both
uproots us from Nature and roots us in it. In Materialism and Revolution, for instance,
he presents us as trapped in a hostile adversarial nature:

It is not true, then, that man is outside Nature and the world, as the idealist has it,
or that he is only up to his ankles in it, baulking like a bather having a dip while
her head is in the clouds. He is completely in Nature’s clutches, and at any moment
Nature can crush him and annihilate him, body and soul. (1977)

When asked about ecology and class in interview in the 1970s, however, he argues in
opposition to this:

The development of the human species has placed it in conditions that are no
longer natural; but it nevertheless retains relations to Nature. The real problem of
the human species today, the problems of class, capital, and so on, are problems that
have no relation to Nature. They are posed by the human species in its historical
movement, and that leaves Nature outside of them. (1981a: 29)

This ambivalence increases further when we bear in mind what he had previously
stated in the same interview: ‘I raise the class question, the social question, starting
from being, which is wider than class, since it is also a question that concerns animals
and inanimate objects’ (1981a: 14). As Ally (2017: 361) observes, however, although
Sartre’s ambivalence ripened and never completely went away, he made better sense of
it over time as his dialectical view developed through the Critiques.
While it is true that the four charges levelled against Sartre do relate to certain
assumptions that surface in his writings, they are often overstated or neglect other
elements that work against such readings. The charge of instrumentalism, for instance,
in many ways misreads his wider philosophical orientation. Although he writes, ‘[m]y
surroundings are the implement-things that surround me’ (BN 657) and ‘[e]very praxis,
whatever else it may be, is first an instrumentalization of material reality’ (CDR 161
– translation modified), it is grounded as a real dimension of the relational nature of
lived experience and does not vitiate the core substance of his thought. What scholars
often miss is that he also writes in Being and Nothingness of an open-ended, integrative
orientation towards instrumentality, describing instrumentality as a ‘categorial
classification’ (BN 60). His aim is phenomenological not metaphysical – to describe
the structure of instrumentality not to posit it as our only means of relating to the
world.24 Indeed, he highlights the pitfalls of an ‘instrumentalist humanism’, insisting
that relations of modification and subjection are just one aspect of our multifaceted
relationality to the world (CDR 2:316).
 
Posthuman Progenitors 163

Equally, it might be said that Sartre’s exclusivism is one of degree, not one of kind,
despite the fact that it returns as a ‘bad habit’ or as ‘a cognitive spasm’ in his thinking
(Ally 2017: 363). It is often noted how Sartre configures praxis in exclusivist terms as
a distinctly human activity.25 In his lecture ‘morale et histoire’, he discusses a monkey
in terms of its being an actor and rearranging its environment in a purposeful way in
order to satisfy a need but doesn’t call this praxis. He reiterates this viewpoint in the
Critique:

The whole complex of behavior patterns of certain insects and mammals may be
called action or activity. It can even be noted that activity on earth begins with
single-celled creatures themselves. At all events, the questions posed by such
activity have nothing in common with those . . . posed by the existence of practical
multiplicities . . . equal or superior to our own. (CDR 2:384)

For Sartre, the distinguishing human feature of praxis is ‘constituent interiority’,

the ‘motive force of everything’ (CDR 322). This, he states, is ‘phenomenologically
temporalizing’, ‘dialectically totalizing’ and uniquely human: ‘We affirm the specificity
of the human act, which cuts across the social milieu while still holding on to its
determinations, and which transforms the world on the basis of given conditions. For
man is characterized above all by his going beyond a situation, and by what he succeeds
in making of what he has been made’ (SM 91). His transitional essay of the 1940s
‘Materialism and Revolution’ explicitly rejects Engels’ dialectic of nature and argues for
the specificity of human acts: ‘it is obvious that the notion of natural history is absurd
. . . only human history is possible’ (1995: 192). Adopting an analytical viewpoint
(that, ironically, he trenchantly criticizes in the Critique), he argues that biological
change across time is ‘of a mechanical and not dialectical order’ (1995: 192–3). In
Search for a Method, this exclusivism is still, albeit more subtly, at play in his thinking:
‘What we call freedom is the irreducibility of the cultural order to the natural order’
(SM 152). Considering only Anthropos as relevant for his social ontology, he poses
the fundamental question, ‘[d]o we have today the means to constitute a structural
and historical anthropology?’ (SM xxxiv). As Ally (2017: 153, 224) observes, despite
Sartre’s increasingly dialectical sensibilities, his propositions ‘carry the burden of a
familiar supposition that humankind and nature are somehow radically distinct from
each other – even if they are, and at the same time, fundamentally wrapped up with
one another’. His reflex position is to ascribe value singularly to human beings, and
his ‘anthropogenesis of the ought’ is evident throughout all of his scattered ethical
writings: ‘Sartre’s anthropogenic axiology and humanist metaethics provide some of
the best evidence of the deep continuity of his thought.’
In other passages and parts of his writings, however, Sartre’s view is more nuanced,
parenthetical and ambiguous, suggesting more of a continuum with the rest of nature
rather than a separation from it.26 In the Critique, he defines his ‘monism of materiality’
as ‘the only monism which makes man neither a molecular dispersal nor a being apart,
the only one which starts by defining him by his praxis in the general milieu of animal
life, and which can transcend the following two true but contradictory propositions: all
existence in the universe is material; everything in the world of man is human’ (CDR
164 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

180-1). The Rome Lectures (1964) marks something new in Sartre’s thinking where he
takes up our animality not simply as an ontological structure but as a positive region
of ethical investigation. The bond between our lived animality and our lived moral
experience is, he argues, felt need, something common to all living organisms. When
commenting directly on animals in 1943, he takes a resolutely anti-Cartesian view: ‘I
do think that animals exist as consciousness, and as such, nihilate. . . . I am not at all
Cartesian on this point, I’ve always believed in the intelligence and passions of animals’
(2014). He returned to this theme in interview in the 1970s:

Nature is not exclusively in-itself. A plant that is growing is no longer altogether

in-itself. It is more complex. It is alive. (1981a: 40)

I think animals have consciousness. In fact I have always thought so. (1981a: 28)

Although it was left to others, such as Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Derrida, to fully
confront the notion of animal psychism and human animality from a posthumanist
perspective, Sartre’s ‘existential limno-phenomenology’ suggests and illustrates it with
some phenomenological richness.27 In some passages, Sartre takes a Dionysian view
of nature alluding to its manifold secrets and a forgotten sense of its abundance and
beauty: ‘man is everywhere crisscrossed by Nature. He himself is a natural being, to
the extent that Nature is magic’ (NE 352). In Words, he associates closeness to nature
with a pre-reflective sapience or comprehension: ‘truth flows from the mouths of
babes and sucklings. Still close to Nature, they are cousins of the wind and the sea:
their stammerings offer broad and vague teachings to him who can hear them’ (W
28–9). He repeats this magical conception of nature in his essay ‘Black Orpheus’ as a
creative power, a kind of Mother Goddess, ‘an enormous perpetual birth’ (1964a: 40).
In the final phase of his thinking, he re-imagines this celebratory pagan conception,
formulating the concept of the ‘mother-matrix’ that he hoped to develop into a
philosophy of ‘Mother Earth’ (HN 90).28
In Ally’s (2017: 154–5) view, Sartre’s account of nature rides on a thin ambiguous
line, a ‘line without thickness’ (CDR 2:329), of keeping the human and non-human
heuristically apart while insisting that ‘they are ontologically cut from the same
metaphysical cloth’. This functions as a ‘lived contradiction’ in his schematic philosophy
that his dialectical approach illuminates. By decoupling his errors from the best of his
insights, however, it is possible ‘to naturalize or . . . ecologize’ (2017: 214) his ethics
and ontology in the service of an ‘existential ecology’ that yields a ‘hybrid existential-
ecological axiom’ of ‘existence precedes essence because it’s all related’ (2017: 506).
Sartre can be viewed in this light as a thinker who stands on the cusp of the ‘Holocene-
Anthropocene transit’ between a waxing Earth and a waning world (2017: 353).
His designation of the Earth as ‘the Elsewhere of Elsewheres’ as absolute Otherness
(CDR 323–4) signifies just the tragic underside of late-Holocene thinking since, as he
recognizes in Saint Genet, the environment is all around us: ‘We rapidly cart away the
dead, we stealthily recover waste, every day we mask, in the name of cleaning up, the
destruction of the day before. We conceal the pillaging of the planet’ (SG 24). Despite
the fact that Sartre did not make more explicit his parenthetical self and was guilty
 
Posthuman Progenitors 165

of some elements of anthropocentrism, if we look past his professed intentions and

expectations for his time, it is possible, as Ally contends (2017: 371–3), to see new
meanings for ours. Reading through the late-Holocene denotations of the Critique we
can read above them and beyond them.
If we explore Sartre’s work deeply enough, it is thus possible to discover an ‘ecology
of intelligibility’, ‘a vital community of logics’ and ‘an inferential ecosystem of sorts’
peppered with ‘emergent ecological sensibilities and earthly sensitivities’ (2017: 364,
392) that can illuminate our present Anthropocene predicament. In just four pages out
of over a thousand in the Critique in which he describes the ‘destructive apparatus’ of
the Chinese peasant and the practice of deforestation (CDR 162), he demonstrates how
worked-over matter takes on an alien presence, resisting us through passive action
and confronting us as a counter-finality that can have disastrous consequences. Matter
is conceived in these terms as an actant within a human/non-human assemblage
and far from the ‘passive unity’ of the inert en-soi that scholars hastily take to be his
overriding viewpoint. In the Critiques, he recognizes our Anthropocene collective
fragility, both in terms of our self-induced suicide through ecological despoliation or
atomic annihilation (CDR 2:306) in the face of planetary contingencies, such as ‘some
sidereal catastrophe’ (CDR 2:310) or some ‘cosmic cataclysm’ (CDR 2:321) that might
‘exterminate our species’ (CDR 2:326).

Eco-phenomenologists
The work of Sartre’s friend and erstwhile colleague, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is
scriptural for many eco-phenomenologists29 and is often viewed as a philosophical
bridge between existentialist phenomenology and poststructuralism. Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty became good friends in their university days at the ENS, co-edited
the journal Les Temps Modernes together, but parted ways over ideological issues in
the 1950s not long before Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961. In his obituary ‘Merleau-
Ponty vivant’, Sartre spoke warmly of his former friend and heralded the contemporary
resonance of his philosophy: ‘Merleau-Ponty is still too much alive for anyone to be
able to describe him’ (1961). Merleau-Ponty’s writings on Sartre’s philosophy were an
admixture of the positive and negative. In his review of The Flies published in 1943, he
commends Sartre’s conception of freedom – ‘flaw in the world’s diamond, splinter in
nature’s skin’ – as comparable to Nietzsche who showed ‘the basis of terror and cruelty
on which the Greeks made freedom appear’ (1997: 63–4). In the second issue of Les
Temps Modernes in November 1945, he defends Being and Nothingness against those
who view it as a ‘poison’ against which is needed a ‘quarantine’ (1964a: 71), arguing it
posits neither a materialism nor a ‘residual idealism’ (1964a: 77), since Sartre’s central
concern is ‘man’s relationship to his natural or social surroundings’ and ‘our corporeal
and social ties’ (1964a: 71, 72).
Despite this recognition, elsewhere Merleau-Ponty is highly critical of Sartre’s ‘flat
ontology’ of pour-soi and en-soi, charging him of conceiving of nature as being ‘is what
it is’, a plenum of undifferentiated full positivity: ‘Sartre speaks of a world that is . . . in
itself, that is, flat, and for a nothingness that is absolute abyss. In the end, for him, depth
166 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

does not exist, because it is bottomless’ (1968: 237). Ontological space, Merleau-Ponty
argues, is unified as space of disparate unity in which both sides of Being implicate
each other, intermingle and share a depth of flesh between them. For Sartre, however,
the two sides are faced off against each other in incommensurable opposition and lack
a ‘between space’ (1968: 75). In ‘the look’, for instance, the Other is perceived negatively
as a ‘not-me’ who apprehends an aspect of me that I myself cannot, but according to
Merleau-Ponty (1968: 82), the phenomenological expressivity of the embodied other
comes before the conflictual relations evinced by ‘the look’: ‘we are not two nihilations
installed in two universes of the in-itself, incomparable, but two entries to the same
Being, each accessible to but one of us.’ Failing to recognize this, Sartre lacks an
interworld: ‘[i]n Sartre, there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity. . . . The
world and history are no longer a system with several points of entry but a sheaf of
irreconcilable perspectives which never coexist and which are held together only by
the hopeless heroism of the I’ (1973: 205).
As Beauvoir pointed out in the 1950s in her essay ‘Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-
sartrisme’ (1955) written in response to Merleau-Ponty’s criticisms of Sartre, Merleau-
Ponty presents a false image of Sartre as an idealist who disregards the body and lacks
a theory of intersubjectivity. Not only does he vulgarize Sartre’s ontology in Being
and Nothingness as being one of exclusion and ‘abstract removedness’, it is wrong
to say also that he fails to supply a concept of ‘objective possibility’ as the negative
dimension, as a mediation of the negation of the negation (1973: 122).30 Furthermore,
Beauvoir accuses Merleau-Ponty of acting in bad faith because he knew Sartre was in
the process of developing his social ontology in the Critique. In this vein, Caeymaex
and Cormann (2020: 476) accuse Merleau-Ponty of criticizing Sartre for his own gain,
‘thinking about himself through a Sartrean lens, exploiting for himself the tensions
that create difficulties in Sartre’s thinking’. Throughout his works, Merleau-Ponty did
not stop testing out his own theories in the light of Sartre’s, ‘in an explicit dialogue,
admiring and critical at once’ (2020: 478). Hyppolite and Saint-Aubert concur with
this. According to Hyppolite (1991: 719), ‘the difference that separated these two men
. . . sometimes allowed them to switch positions with the other’. Up until his death in
1961, Merleau-Ponty ‘exploited . . . the fecundity of the tension that inhabited Sartre’s
philosophy from the beginning’, a ‘living and uninterrupted dialogue’ (1991: 687). In
Saint-Aubert’s (2011: 60) view, Merleau-Ponty secretly ate away at Sartre’s ontology and
anthropology under the appearance of camaraderie, involving a strategy of turning
Beauvoir against Sartre by playing on ‘what still remains non-Sartrean in Beauvoir’.
More than this, he borrows heavily from Sartre as he ‘disguises, wears costumes, and
willingly attributes to others what he himself has done on the pretence that he is
interpreting others’ work according to his own intuitions . . . even Sartre, sometimes
re-clothed in the least expected clothing’.
There are three clear areas – reflection, the body and intersubjectivity – in which
Merleau-Ponty can be said to have stolen Sartre’s clothes, even though he developed,
refined and enlarged them to fit a larger frame. First of all, in Phenomenology of
Perception he follows Sartre’s idea of the pre-reflective cogito, which he defines as a
‘glimpse of myself ’, a ‘tacit awareness’ and ‘inarticulate grasp’ that precedes knowledge
and speech (1962: 404). Dismissing the ‘view from above’ (1968: 69) as Sartre had
 
Posthuman Progenitors 167

done in relation to lived experience, he posits the pre-reflective cogito as an immanent

modification of lived experience. Establishing a ‘living link’ between the I and world,
and exploring preferentially the zones of experience ‘in which being and consciousness
coincide’ (1962: 492), Merleau-Ponty proposes a form of embodied philosophizing or
‘true reflection’ (1962: 452) that bears close similarity to Sartre’s ‘purifying reflection’
and ‘comprehension’. This is a form of reflection that recognizes its own contingency and
dependence on the pre-reflective givenness of the world prior to Cartesian separation
and mechanistic determination, ‘a creative operation which itself participates in the
facticity of that [unreflective] experience’ from which philosophy springs (1962: 61–3).
Philosophy provides us with an indissoluble bond between our openness to a world
that remains resolutely other and our reflective return to ourselves, an intertwining
of immanence and freedom. ‘[T]rue philosophy’ thus involves ‘leaving oneself ’ and
‘retiring into oneself ’ (1968: 49, 199), a ‘double movement of perspectivism’ (centrifugal
and centripetal) that, as we saw in Chapter 3, is intrinsic to Sartre’s (and Nietzsche’s)
therapeutic psychology.
Just as Merleau-Ponty draws heavily on Sartrean ideas, the same can be said in
reverse. Their thinking is best conceived in this sense as involving ‘relations of reciprocal
influence’ (Churchill and Reynolds (2013: 222)). In many ways, Sartre’s focus became
more Merleau-Pontyian in his later phase of thinking that evolved after his friend’s
death. In his final years, for instance, he became more celebratory of nature and attuned
to Merleau-Ponty’s ‘chiasmic thought’ (1968: 141). According to Colombel, Sartre had
been discussing the concept of ‘le matriciel’ (the mother as ‘matrix’) with him for three
years. He also told Sicard that he was writing a work that was to transform completely
what he had previously thought in philosophy based on the ‘interpenetration of
consciousnesses’ (1979b: 15).31 This echoes passages in Hope Now where Sartre refers
to a tribal view of totemism for a model of human interconnection by recapturing the
sense of the Mother Goddess as a totem: ‘When I see man, I think: he has the same
origin as myself, like me he comes from Mother Humanity, let’s say, Mother Earth as
Socrates says, Mother’ (HN 90).
Although deeply intersubjective in its positing of the self as syncategorematic,
Sartre still thought that the section on ‘being-for-others’ in Being and Nothingness was
the weakest one: ‘What is particularly bad in L’Etre et le néant is the specifically social
chapters, on the “we”, compared to the chapters on the “you” and “others”’ (1981a:
13). No doubt influenced by Beauvoir’s concept of the ‘social Other’ and by Merleau-
Ponty, Sartre buttressed his concept of intersubjectivity in the Critique to move fully
beyond a dyadic level of explanation. His concept of the practico-inert (and ‘objective
spirit’) bears similarity to Merleau-Ponty’s idea of an interworld of mediations woven
by intercorporeality and language (1962: 354) This was developed by Merleau-Ponty
into the ‘flesh of the world’, a dense multilayered field of relationships, ‘intermundane
spaces’ and forces, a ‘pell-mell ensemble of bodies and minds, promiscuity of visages,
words, actions, with, between them all, that cohesion which cannot be denied them
since they are all differences, extreme divergences of one same something’ (1968: 84).
Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty (1968: 214) views subjectivity as emergent, arising from
the inter-corporeal exchange between self and others. Perceptibility is diacritical
and reversible, a doubling up of seen/being-seen, uttering/being-heard, a ‘relation of
168 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

reciprocity in which neither of the relata is intelligible apart from the other’ (1968:
264). Emotions, for instance, are not felt within the subject but acquire meaning
intersubjectively in a ‘between space’ or ‘interworld’. In the case of anger, ‘the location
of my anger . . . is in the space we both share’ (2004: 84). Following Sartre, he theorizes
emotions as bound up with corporeal articulations, an ‘expressive space’ in which our
body is thought to be ‘comparable to a work of art’ (1962: 151). Merleau-Ponty’s idea
of bodily expressivity and the direct perception of others in conceiving the body as a
synthetic totality of life and action draws upon Sartrean insights regarding the idea of
the body as a ‘nexus of living meanings’ (BN 462). Mirroring Sartre’s emphasis on the
‘connective tissue’ (BN 755) between pour-soi/en-soi, Merleau-Ponty theorizes subject
and object as ‘not two opposed domains to be somehow united, they are both aspects
of the same flesh: the flesh seeing itself, turned upon itself, overlapping itself, folded
upon itself, reversible’ (1968: 111). There is, he argues, ‘incipient significance’ in the
living body: ‘our gaze, prompted by the experience of our own body, will discover in all
other “objects” the miracle of expression’ (1962: 197). Just as in Sartre’s theory of sexual
desire and ‘the caress’ (BN 508), he shows how eroticism reveals the force of desire and
the blind bodily links that ‘cross over’ from one person to another (1968: 264). In the
conveyance of emotional meaning, it is ‘as if the other person’s intention inhabited my
body and mine his’ (1962: 185). Experience is transitive – what happens in me can pass
over into the other – arising from an early affective ‘spatiality of adherence’ based on an
‘internal linkage’ between the child’s body and the mother’s expression in which their
intentional encroachments and emotional apprehension overlap. This, of course, was a
topic Sartre would later investigate in depth in his study of Flaubert.

Vibrant matter
[I]t is not dead but lives. For in it and conforming to its outer and inner organs,
a thousand living, manifold forces are at work. The more we learn about matter,
the more forces we discover in it, so that the empty conception of a dead extension
completely disappears.
(Johann von Herder, ‘God: Some Conversations’)

Although poststructuralism showed how social constructs can take on a negative life
of their own, by placing everything inside the text some forms of poststructuralism
have taken a retrograde step by ignoring matter. This is not true, however, of all
poststructuralists. In his essay ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, for instance, Foucault
discusses the ‘incorporeal’ dimension of bodies. He recalls the Epicurean idea of
simulacra, the thin sheet of atoms continually being shed from the thicker and slower
compound of atoms. These filmy sheathes are the stimuli to human perception, mobile
floaters that hit our sense apparatus and give us notice of an outside. For Foucault
(1977: 169–70), they are a strange kind of matter, all surface and no depth – ‘emissions’
that rise like ‘the wisps of a fog’, a materiality that ‘dissipate[s] the density of matter’.
 
Posthuman Progenitors 169

They are incorporeal in that they are not quite a discrete body or substantial corpus
but a kind of mobile activity that remains immanent to matter and incorporeality.
Taking their lead from Spinoza’s distinction between natura naturata (passive matter
organized into an order of Creation) and natura naturans (the uncaused causality that
constantly generates new forms), Deleuze and Guattari conceive nature as generativity,
a productive power or ‘continuous stream of occurrence’ suspended and quenched in
its products. Unlike Bergson’s élan vital, matter needs no animating accessory since
it is figured as itself animate, the ‘active principle’. Nature is ‘an immense abstract
machine’ of productivity, whose pieces ‘are the various assemblages and individuals,
each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more
or less interconnected relations’ (1987: 254). As in Nietzschean and Sartrean ontology,
this operates not for a pregiven end but for the sake of the process in itself and also
expresses itself as a pluralistic monism: ‘ontologically one, formally diverse’ (Deleuze
1992: 67). Deleuze’s and Guattari’s (1987: 449) notion of active and expressive ‘matter-
movement’ or ‘matter-energy’ that ‘enters assemblages and leaves them’ reveals the
positive or productive power of things to draw other bodies near and conjoin powers:
‘Each phylum has its own singularities and operations . . . the flow of matter in
continuous variation, conveying singularities and traits of expression’ (1987: 454). Just
as Sartre describes the affectivity of objects as ‘a game of back and forth’ of constant
enrichment between feeling and object to the extent that ‘each affective quality is so
deeply incorporated in the object that it is impossible to distinguish between what is
felt and what is perceived’ (IM 139), Deleuze notes in Cinema 1 how affectivity is a
quality of things as well as people: ‘And why is expression not available to things? . . .
The Stoics showed that things themselves were bearers of ideal events which did not
exactly coincide with their properties, their actions and reactions’ (1986: 118).
Nietzsche’s will to power and Sartre’s ‘protean connectionism’32 do justice both
to systems and things, acknowledging the stubborn reality of individuation and the
distributive quality of their affectivity. This was a point acknowledged by Deleuze
who interpreted Nietzsche’s will to power as a ‘monistic differential of forces’ and
viewed Sartre’s thought as a call to ‘make its totalities anew, like a power that is at
once collective and private’. ‘This is why’, he concludes, ‘Sartre remains my teacher’
(1987: 79). In this respect, we can trace a lineage from Nietzsche and Sartre to recent
posthumanist theory, such as philosophical posthumanism, vibrant materialism and
object-oriented ontology.33 In Bennett’s vibrant materialism, for instance, bodies
enhance their power as a heterogeneous assemblage. Agency is distributed across an
ontologically heterogeneous field rather than being localized in a single or collective
human body, ‘an animal-vegetable-mineral-sonority cluster with a particular degree
and duration of power’ (2010: 23). As in Nietzsche’s idea of ‘multiplicity-as-unity’ and
Sartre’s notion of a ‘detotalized totality’, assemblages are not governed by any central
head. No one materiality can determine consistently the trajectory or the impact of the
group because each member-actant has an energetic pulse slightly off from that of the
assemblage. An assemblage is never a static block but an open-ended collective, a ‘non-
totalizable sum’, with a history of formation and finite lifespan (2010: 24). As a process
of Nietzschean dissipative systems, the universe ‘is a turbulent, immanent field in which
various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate’.
170 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Within this field of ‘events’, an actant is a human or non-human source of action which
has efficacy and can produce effects – ‘any entity . . . modifies another entity’ – although
some things are proto-actants in the sense that their performances or energies are too
small or fast to be ‘things’ (2010: xi). Alongside and inside singular human agents,
there exists a heterogeneous series of actants with partial, overlapping and conflicting
degrees of power and effect. Causality is emergent rather than efficient, arising from
the process where ‘the new effects become infused into the very . . . organization of the
second level . . . such . . . that the cause cannot be said to be fully different from the
effect engendered’ (2010: 33). Bennett uses the concept of shi to describe this: ‘Shi is the
style, energy, propensity, trajectory, or élan inherent to a specific arrangement of things
. . . the dynamic force emanating from a spatio-temporal configuration rather than
from any particular element within it’ (2010: 35). The shi of an assemblage is vibratory:
‘it is the mood or style of an open whole in which both the membership changes
over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration.’ As in Deleuze’s
idea of ‘adsorbsion’, each individual possesses emergent qualities that are capable of
independent variation and therefore the possibility of being in phase or out of phase
with one another. This is a gathering of elements in a way that both forms a coalition,
or an ‘excess’ irreducible to the particular bodies involved, and yet preserves something
of the agential impetus of each element (2010: 35).
In Bennett’s (2010: 30) view, vibrant materialism ‘continues the radical displacement
of the human subject’ that phenomenology had installed (though she credits Merleau-
Ponty with moving in this direction in his unfinished Visible and Invisible). But, as
we have seen, this is also true of Sartre whose phenomenology ‘is absolutely distinct
from the idealist return to consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: x) and, as Deleuze
(2004) noted, a genuine attempt, within a philosophy of immanence, to get back ‘to
the things themselves’ as Husserl had defined as phenomenology’s true purpose. As we
saw in Chapter 3, Sartre’s valorization of ‘pre-reflectivity’ and Nietzsche’s championing
of ‘instinct’ connect with Bennett’s (2010: 127) contention that there are many forms
of feeling or thought intermediate between the purely physical stage and the stage of
conscious intellectual operations. Nietzschean and Sartrean philosophy both point to
the need to maintain an ‘open, pluralistic image of thought’ and avoid the mistake
of rigorously dividing sapience from sentience and consigning everything that is not
purely rational and abstract into the category of causal deterministic mechanisms. As
their ontology of forces show, most interactions between entities involve no conscious
knowledge at all when we are touched or affected by things without necessarily
understanding them. This finds expression in Nietzsche’s ‘sensism’ that goes beyond
ocularcentric/anthropocentric conceptions of ‘knowledge’ to a more synaesthetic
conception of ‘comprehension’.34 In line with vital materialism, Nietzsche and Sartre
propose a notion of freedom not tied to the emergence of reason, the phonocentric
capacity for reflection or to some inherent quality of the human but situate it in the
world of affective transfer.
In some ways in opposition to Deleuzian assemblages, but in agreement with
its posthumanist standpoint, object-oriented ontologists have been attracted to
Heidegger’s focus in his later essays on the object’s negative power, its persistent
incalculability and withdrawal from any attempt to know it. Although they turn to
 
Posthuman Progenitors 171

Heidegger, they could just have easily have plundered Sartre’s literary phenomenology
for inspiration. In Meillassoux’s (2008: 63) view, we need to break our correlationist
habit where we superimpose our own concepts on ‘the great outdoors, the eternal
in-itself, whose being is indifferent to whether or not it is thought’. Instead, we need
to appreciate ‘the strangeness of things’, including the things we have made ourselves
which possess ‘their own bizarre and independent existence’. Harman argues that an
object can never be equated with, or reduced to, our knowledge of it: ‘Let’s imagine
that we were able to gain exhaustive knowledge of all properties of a tree. . . . It
should go without saying that even such knowledge would not itself be a tree. Our
knowledge would not grow roots or bear fruit or shed leaves, at least not in a literal
sense’ (2010: 788).35 Thus, an object cannot touch or know another object completely:
‘one object never affects another directly, since the cotton and fire both fail to exhaust
one another’s reality’ (2005: 188). When something fails to function then its excess
of being is revealed to us. There is ‘an uprising of distinct elements . . . a surge of
minerals and battle flags and tropical cats into the field of life, where each object
bears a certain demeanor and seduces us in a specific way, bombarding us with its
energies like a miniature neutron star’ (2002: 47). Harman calls this the ‘allure’ of
objects, the sense of an object’s existence apart from and over and above its own
qualities in which it ‘invites us toward another level of reality’. Such an encounter
alters the parameters of the world, tearing apart ‘the contexture of meaning’ (2005:
179).
Although objects are withdrawn epistemologically from others and are never
exhausted by our knowledge of them, they are not ‘barricaded behind firewalls’ (2005:
188) and are ontologically, aesthetically and sensually intertwined with others through
allure or vicarious causation. Allure means that one object calls to another from a
distance. A ‘fusion’ takes place but one that ‘remains only partial, encrusted with
residual accidents’. In this indirect way, ‘two objects . . . touch without touching’ (2007:
204) with the effect that we are emotionally moved by objects (through affect) even
if we cannot cognize them. This is not the ‘efficient causation’ described by physical
science (2007: 174) but is a vicarious process that involves a kind of substitution,
translation or transfer from a distance, a kind of occult influence. Contact is never
literal but a metaphor, a ‘transfer’ or ‘carrying across’ (2005: 124), and causation is
‘strangely akin to the allure of aesthetic experience’, an occult process of influence, a
sort of touching that involves ‘a secret content that is never presentable’ (2005: 124).
Arguing against human exceptionalism and in line with Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s idea
of the doubleness of privacy and relation as a condition of all entities in the universe,
Harman (2007: 189) contends that ‘intentionality is not a special human property at
all, but an ontological feature of objects in general’.

A pair of posthumanist humanists

I teach you the superman. Man is something that should be overcome.
(Nietzsche, Zarathustra P3)
172 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Nietzsche’s relation to humanism is not straightforward, swinging between a Lutheran

anti-humanist contempt and the Renaissance promissory faith in human perfectibility,
of a Goethian god-in-the-making. Deflating human conceit and arrogance, he
conceives of humanity as both an unfortunate aberration of nature and as a creature
of unparalleled possibilities and becomings. He forges an ambiguous humanism that
stresses our continuation with the rest of nature while both lamenting and celebrating
our distancing ourselves from it as an emergent evolutionary bundle of values,
experiments and self-overcoming. This conveys a certain love–hate relationship,
a mixture of adulation and contempt that mirrors his self-relationship as one of
affirmation and denial.36 The danger of metaphysical thinking as religion, state or
science is always ever ready to deform humanity and turn its will to power into a
reactive force against itself and others. Turned against its animal instincts and drives,
‘the human is the sick animal’ (GM 3.13) tormented by its own self-consciousness.
Even its finest notions, such as reason, are ‘a mere idiosyncrasy of a certain species of
animal, and one among many’ (WP 515). For Nietzsche, ‘[r]eligion has debased the
concept ‘human’ by placing all that is good in the realm of God’ (WP 136). This has
diminished the human condition for ‘[t]here is not enough love and goodness in the
world for us to be permitted to give any of it away to imaginary things’ (HH 129).
However, Nietzsche holds the comfort that ‘above the steam and filth of human
lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity’ (WP 993). To replace the humanism of
the ‘last man’ who has learnt ‘to perceive all diversity as immoral’, Nietzsche proposes
a ‘radical humanism’ in which the Übermensch ‘radicalizes humanist principles’ and
avoids nihilistic cul-de-sacs (Manschot 2021: 145). This is to think the human but also
to think beyond the human – from the inside and the outside – within a theory of
action and responsibility that crosses the human–non-human divide. Throughout his
writings, he offers several paragons to fit this ‘radical’ or ‘posthumanist’ humanism –
‘musical Socrates’ (BT 15), a productive synthesis of Dionysian art and science, the
‘free spirit’ wandering lonely beyond statist thought and boundaries, Zarathustra,
connected and true to the Earth, the ‘Genius of culture’ who ‘is a centaur, half animal,
half human, and even has angel’s wings on his head’ (HH 241), Dionysus the god of
masks, intoxication, rapture and wholeness, and the Übermensch, the re-evaluator
of all values no longer bound by restrictive social mores and resentment who drags
humanity by the coat-tails into a new dawn.
Like Nietzsche’s moments of contempt, Sartre’s early work is also liberally laced
with anti-humanist sentiment. Roquentin dryly lists the many types of humanists
he has known – the radical humanist, the Communist humanist, Catholic humanist
among them who all hate each other ‘as individuals, naturally, not as men’ (N 117). He
voices his ‘theoretical opposition to humanism’ (WD 87) and warns against the idea
of a human nature or essence as a universalized ‘species’ ‘whose destiny is to conquer
and order the world. . . . The religion of man conceived as a natural species: the error
of 1848, the worst error, the humanitarian error . . . . The notion of human species has
made incredible ravages’ (WD 21–2). In Mallarmé, he describes humanity poetically
as no more than ‘[a] volatile illusion flittering over matter in movement’ (1988: 135).
Like Nietzsche, Sartre’s antipathy towards humanism stems from its tendency to
homogenize human plurality and ignore individuality, evident in his early Nietzschean
 
Posthuman Progenitors 173

celebration of the ‘lone hero’. As Beauvoir (1983: 433) recounts, however, after the
war she and Sartre renounced their individualistic anti-humanism and ‘learned the
value of solidarity’. During this period, Sartre alludes to a number of possible radical
humanisms that might replace the abstract humanism of Enlightenment thinking37
and give the term a ‘modern meaning’ (WD 25). He refers variously to a ‘humanism
of work’, a ‘humanism of need’ and, in his final years, to a ‘flourishing humanity’
while simultaneously rejecting bourgeois humanism since ‘humanism is shit’ (EM
32): ‘[h]umanity is not and corresponds diachronically to no concept’ (IF 3:346). In
Merleau-Ponty’s (2016: 239) view, Sartre’s thinking shifted from the anti-humanism
on display in Nausea to a ‘difficult’ humanism38 in his subsequent writings and it is
true that, like Nietzsche, he displays some ambivalence on the topic, lamenting what
humanity has made of itself in its present historical condition but holding on to
the promise of what it can become under a different system of values and collective
existential orientation. In plain terms, for Sartre humanity is as humanity does: ‘We
experience humanism only as what is best in us, in other words, our striving to live
beyond ourselves in a society of human beings. We can prefigure people in that way
through our best acts’ (HN 69). Like Nietzsche’s ‘Yes and No’, Sartre conceives ethics
as simultaneously creative and destructive: ‘man chooses to illuminate what is, in the
light of what is not’ (NE 464). The essential question is, what sort of human shall we
choose to project and invent in a world already historically constructed by humans?
Each person is an individual adventure in the dimension of the universal shot through
with possibilities: ‘[b]ut my destiny is me coming to myself as an image. What is
more, humanity is an individual adventure that takes place in the dimension of the
universal. The individual coming to himself in terms of the features of the universal,
this is humanity’s destiny’ (NE 422). In his ethical vision of ‘a flourishing humanity’, he
equates moral growth with intersubjectivity and reciprocity (NE 407). In Hope Now, he
considers a ‘post-humanist view of society’:

We are struggling to establish human relations and arrive at a definition of what

is human. At this moment we are in the thick of the battle, and no doubt it will go
on for many years. But one must define the battle: we are seeking to live together
like human beings, and to be human beings so it’s by means of searching for this
definition in this action of a truly humankind – beyond humanism, of course –
that we will be able to consider our effort and our end. In other words, our goal is
to arrive at a genuinely constituent body in which each person would be a human
being and collectives would be equally human. (HN 67)

Although a dialectical thinker, Sartre leaves the dialectic open and recognizes, along
with Nietzsche, that ‘[i]f the world had a goal, it must have been reached’ (WP 1062),
but ‘there is no final state’ (WP 1064). Ethics is bound up with the possibility of failure,
circumscribed by material and factitious limitations and the potential lapse into bad
faith: ‘Tomorrow, after my death, some may decide to set up Fascism, and the others
may be cowardly and muddled enough to let them do it. Fascism will then be the
human reality, so much the worse for us’ (EH 31). There is ‘a hidden immorality of
the world’ (hidden by the cover of respectability) just as there is a ‘hidden irrationality
174 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

of nature’ in the form of cyclones, floods and tsunami (NE 13). Moreover, society
generally prefers the familiar to the unfamiliar and order to disorder: ‘Society as a
whole is suspicious about creation. For it quickly appears as an overturning and
negation of what is’ (NE 511). In the Critique, Sartre leaves history as a series of ‘broken
sequences’, each in relation dialectically to the prior ones, leaving open the possibility
that history might end badly.
In broad terms, we can characterize Nietzsche and Sartre as ‘posthumanist humanists’
(Butterfield 2012). Extending their sublimating logic, they walk a via media between
anti-humanism and humanism, establishing a ‘progressive-regressive’ perspective
that moves from inside to outside and back again, identifying the ‘distinctly human’
in scalar or modal terms with the rest of nature. While it is possible to identify some
humanist/metaphysical residues in their thinking, as we have seen, these generally run
against the grain of their overall philosophical perspective and do not bring down the
structure. In Ally’s (2017: 385) words, ‘[t]he building still stands and can be further
improved’. Unlike Foucault whose ‘Death of Man’ hypothesis was caesural, Derrida, for
instance, believes humanism cannot simply be erased or avoided. A complete break is
impossible since ‘the end of Man’ is bound to be written in the language of Man. There
is no pure outside to which ‘we’ can leap for to oppose humanism by claiming to have
left it behind is to overlook the very way that opposition is articulated (Badmington
2000: 9). It does not follow, however, that this means confirming the status quo, for
Derrida’s work repeatedly shows how systems are always self-contradictory, forever
deconstructing themselves from within. Nietzsche and Sartre do not erase human
agency but deconstruct its onto-epistemological primacy and present it in a relational
form. They present the human, not as something to be taken for a static notion, but to
‘be accessed as a process and as a verb (humanizing), for its dynamic, and also reiterative
and performative, modes of proceeding’ (Ferrando 2020: 52). It therefore points
towards what it will become as praxis. This gives us a conception of posthumanity no
longer as the rational species but as a ‘transversal entity encompassing the human, our
genetic neighbours the animals and the earth as a whole’ (Braidotti 2013: 82) since, in
Sartre’s words, ‘[e]verything is always revealed as united to everything’ (CDR 360). As
we will see further in the next chapter when examining their views on religion, while
recognizing the ultimate ‘necessity of contingency’, they propose an affirmation of
existence and earthly-becoming (conceived as ‘will to power’ or as ‘totalizing praxis’)
that celebrates nature in a bid to overcome passive nihilism.
 7

Lebensphilosophie

The product of the philosopher is his life (first, before his works). That is his work
of art.
(Nietzsche, KSW 7.712)

There is ‘nothing whatever impersonal’ about the philosopher (BGE 6), as Nietzsche
wrote, or, as Sartre contended, you have to take into account the life of people who write
as ‘it is projected in the writing in one way or another’ (1979: 26). Both philosophers
stand as exemplars of the intertwining of philosophy and life, a Lebensphilosophie
in which comprehension, experimentation and praxis go hand in hand. Nietzsche
proposes an experimental type of critique (UM 3.8) and describes the philosopher of
the future as a ‘critic in body and soul’ (BGE 210). His later work is generally disparaging
towards academic scholars, viewing scholarship as an extension of industry (BGE 58),
and the ascetic ideal (GM 3.23). Overly specialized and cramped into a little ‘corner’
(GS 366), scholars are generally unable to grasp the whole and provide a comprehensive
view (BGE 204). What both philosophers lament more than all is the separation of life
and philosophy, the detached view of the ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing
subject’ who supposedly sees a faithful ‘mirror’ of events (GM 3.26).
Philosophy aside, when you delve beneath the surface, there are a surprising
number of incidental biographical similarities in the lives of these two philosophers.
Both men were brought up without a father; were sickly children visually impaired
from a young age; suffered from chronic ill health throughout their adulthood; were
itinerant writers who lived propertyless with few material possessions in a succession
of rented rooms and apartments (but whose books enriched others materially); both
were unmarried and childless (though Sartre adopted Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre later in
life) despite proposing marriage to Mathilde Trampedach and Lou Salomé (Nietzsche)
and Simone de Beauvoir (Sartre); both were independent philosophers not beholden
to institutions and institutional thinking; both served two stints in the army (though
they could probably have avoided this due to their poor eyesight); finally, both were
beset by melancholia at several stages of their lives, ending their days in the throes of
madness and dementia cared for and tended by female hands.
Perhaps the major difference between them, however, was the lack of partnership in
Nietzsche’s life and a feeling of solitude that burns through the pages of his books. Whereas
Sartre had Beauvoir (and his extended ‘family’), whose thinking he wove indelibly into his
176 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

own and who propelled him towards a more collectivist perspective, Nietzsche was, after
abandoning his professorship at Basel, a solitary philosopher cut adrift in his thoughts
(apart from his epistolary communications with friends). In a letter to Overbeck in March
1882, complaining about his failing eyesight and a defective typewriter, he wrote: ‘I need
a young person around me who is intelligent and educated enough to be able to work
with me’ (KSB 6.180). Four months later, he wrote in anticipation in a letter to Malwida
von Meysenbug that with Salomé he had forged a ‘fast friendship’ and viewed her as a
possible ‘disciple . . . heir and successor’ (KSB 6.223). After Salomé had broken free of him
and abandoned him, however, his hope of an intellectual and amorous partnership soon
evaporated, leading him to declare in despair to Overbeck: ‘Now I am facing my task all
alone. . . . I need a bulwark against the unendurable’ (KSB 6.306).
In this final chapter, I set out to connect the thinking of Nietzsche and Sartre to its
biographical moorings, showing, in certain facets of their lives, how these two thinkers
lived out their contradictions of self and Other as ‘a play of instincts that conflict
powerfully . . . but are controlled’ (WP 966), and how these became fertile points of
overcoming in their thinking in relation to four key areas that were significant in their
life trajectories: religion, feminism, music and madness.

Religious atheists
There are no philosophers more readily associated with a diehard atheism than Nietzsche
and Sartre.1 ‘[U]nconditional honest atheism’, the German philosopher wrote, is ‘the only
air we breathe’ (GM 3.27). Above all, they both viewed the existence of a Christian God as
incompatible with a creative ethics, human freedom and the fundamental contingency
of the world. And yet, as several scholars have attested, their atheism is not entirely
uncomplicated and beyond ambiguity, for if we survey their writings, we see that they
are replete with biblical imagery and bristling with religious themes. On the evidence of
this explicit religiosity, Nietzsche and Sartre have been described as ‘secret’, ‘crypto’ or
‘closet’ Christians.2 However, though influenced by biblical themes, assigning a Christian
orientation to Nietzsche and Sartre is, I suggest, a false move. Their religiosity, as their
writings attest, is conceived firmly within an ethico-political ‘terrasophical’ framework
and not a transcendental, other-worldly Christian one. The ‘new religion’ they espouse
to escape moral nihilism is, to all intents and purposes, a pagan one that is consistent
with the main facets of their philosophical thinking, including their pluralistic ethics
and politics, their physiological aesthetics of rapture, their phenomenology of affect and
their Heraclitean ontology of relationality and becoming.

Nietzsche’s pagan Gods

Pagan-Christian. The affirmation of the natural, the sense of innocence in the natu-
ral, ‘naturalness’, is pagan. The denial of the natural, the sense of degradation in the
natural, unnaturalness, is Christian.
(Nietzsche, The Will to Power 147)
 
Lebensphilosophie 177

Incense – Buddha said: ‘Do not flatter your benefactor!’ Repeat this saying in a
Christian church – and it at once purifies the air of everything Christian.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 142)

There is a poignant irony about Nietzsche’s funeral. Interred on 25 August 1900 next to
his father in the pastoral village of Röcken, the author of Der Antichrist was buried in a
coffin embossed with an ornate silver cross to the sound of church bells and the village
choir singing Christian hymns. One might have expected a pagan ceremony with the
choral chanting of dithyrambs and dancing full of excess led by the flute of Dionysus,
but by this time his sister had gained full autonomy over her brother’s destiny. Solemn
Christian respectability was now the prescribed order of the day and there would no
sybaritic indulgence or Zarathustrian celebration. Nietzsche, ‘the little pastor’ and ‘a
plant, born near the churchyard’ (as he described himself, aged twelve), was returned
to the earth with full Christian rites and august sobriety where he had playfully taken
his first steps fifty years or so previously.3
It is true to say that he had some difficulty forsaking his God, but once disturbed,
the sediments of Nietzsche’s pious religious inculcation would from then on settle into
the alternative image of a pagan God, Dionysus, a persona he repeatedly invoked in
his work and supplanted only in his final writings by that of the Antichrist. Nietzsche’s
apostasy from Christianity is probably best viewed as a steady erosion or gradual
weaning beginning in earnest at school, aged seventeen, when he read and was deeply
influenced by the writings of Emerson and later, Lange’s History of Materialism which
precipitated his ‘naturalist turn’.4 Whereas in his autobiography of 1858, for instance,
he had written, ‘God has led me safely through it all as does a father his weak little
child’ (KGW 1.1.310), he strikes a more naturalist note in 1863, remarking that ‘events
have up to now led me along like a child’ (KGW 1.3.193 – my emphasis). In a similar
turn away from theological horizons, in 1861 he abandoned the composition of an
oratorio dealing with the birth of Christ and worked instead on a composition ‘Pain is
the keynote of nature’. It was clear that from now on religion was just one competing
voice among many and had lost its primacy. After graduating from Pforta, at first he
acceded to his mother’s wishes to become a pastor in his father’s footsteps but broke off
his study of theology at the University of Bonn after a single term and moved over to the
exclusive study of classical philology. This was a symbolic move away from Christianity
into the pagan world of the Ancient Greeks, exchanging the study of monotheistic
theological texts for the philological analysis of classical ones populated by many gods.
When he returned to Naumburg in 1865 during the first-semester break, Franziska was
horrified to see her son demonstratively refusing to take communion. In a declaration
of his growing dissatisfaction with Christianity, he wrote to his sister on 11 June of that
year: ‘If you want to attain peace of mind and happiness, then you should have faith; if
you want to be a disciple of truth, then you should probe’ (KSB 2.61).
Once the doubts had crept in, there was no placating them for the once-pious
Nietzsche and, as his life progressed, his writings became increasingly scarifying
towards the metaphysical and moral claims of Christianity, reaching fever pitch in his
final works, particularly The Antichrist: A Curse on Christianity (1888). He condemned
178 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Christianity chiefly for its devaluation of existence and hatred of the body (odium
corporis), for being ‘a monstrous mode of valuation’ that has produced an ‘ascetic
planet’, a ‘nook of disgruntled, arrogant, and offensive creatures filled with a profound
disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life, who inflict as much pain on themselves
as they possibly can out of pleasure of inflicting pain’ (GM 3.11). Christianity is bound
up with tradition, slavish morality and ressentiment against life: ‘the individual is tied
to them almost automatically and moves with the regularity of a pendulum’ (HH
111). Moreover, it introduced a new Platonic dualism between Good and Evil into our
understanding of the world: ‘It was Christianity which first painted the Devil on the
world’s walls; it was Christianity which first brought sin into the world’ (WS 78). He
ranks Christianity as among the most pernicious of all religions: ‘The Christian idea of
God – God as a god of the sick, God as spider, God as spirit – is one of the most corrupt
conceptions of God the world has ever seen’ (A 18).
However, it should be noted that within his vitriol, it is only certain forms of
Christianity that Nietzsche excoriates. His sympathetic attitude towards Jesus is very
different, for instance, than his critical view of Paul. Jesus, who ‘could be called a
“free spirit”, using the phrase somewhat loosely’ (A 32), is included in his examples
of the ‘higher type’ of humanity who provide prophetic imitations of what might be.
Nietzsche makes a strong connection between the mythmaking projects of Jesus and
Zarathustra (A 32), praising Jesus, above all, for his rejection of two key features of
nihilism – transcendence and ressentiment. By bringing heaven down to earth, Jesus
demonstrates how ‘[t]he “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart – not something
lying “above the earth” or coming “after death”’ (A 34). The crucifixion represents
‘the exemplary character of dying in this way, the freedom, the superiority over every
feeling of ressentiment’ (A 40). Nietzsche’s only objection against Jesus was that he
wanted people to follow his example rather than creating their own. Unfortunately,
Jesus’ ‘good news’ died on the cross and was corrupted into a creed of slavish morality
by his followers: ‘there have never been any Christians’ (A 39). Paul was ‘the genius
in hatred’ (A 42) and ‘the greatest of all apostles of revenge’ (A 45) who reversed
Jesus’ message by choosing a slave morality in revenge against the strong. Pauline
Christianity preached a pernicious anti-naturalism and inaugurated a hatred of the
body and sensuality (A 21).5
Despite his searing attacks on Christianity for its life-denying metaphysics,
its ‘ontology of decline’, its slave morality and its other-worldly illusions, the idea
that Nietzsche should be read as a religious thinker goes back to the earliest years
of his reception. In Salomé’s (1988: 24) view, ‘[o]f all [Nietzsche’s] great intellectual
dispositions, none is bound more profoundly and unremittingly to his whole intellectual
being than his religious genius’. The existentialist theologian Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
remarked in a similar vein that ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, the famous atheist and ardent
enemy of religion and Christianity, knew more about the power of the idea of God
than many faithful Christians’ (2001: 174). For Tillich, the Übermensch resurrects
Nietzsche’s belief in God in secular form, reconfiguring God as a figure of ethical
concern. Other religious existentialist theologians, such as Karl Barth (1886–1968)
and Martin Buber (1878–1965), also took inspiration from Nietzsche while seeking
to overcome some of the shortcomings of his thinking as they perceived it. Nietzsche’s
 
Lebensphilosophie 179

distinction between slave morality and master morality was a clear influence on
Buber’s typology of ‘I-It’ relations (slave morality that relates to others as objects to be
manipulated) and ‘I-Thou’ relations (reciprocal relation of self-actualization through
respect and dialogue that belong to master morality).6 Nietzsche, in Megill’s (1985:
315) view, exhibits ‘a post-Christian rather than an anti-Christian’ viewpoint, drawing
heavily on the Christian notions of radical creativity, apocalypse and crisis (the City of
Man giving way to the City of God). Apollo and Dionysus are insufficient to embrace
Nietzsche’s perspective: ‘On the contrary, the pastor’s son tries to save Christianity even
as he destroys it, imputing to the Overman those qualities that he is no longer willing
to see embodied in the Godhead’ (1985: 347). Despite his avowed celebration of the
materiality of the earth, the real direction of his thought is often the sky and ascent.7
But while it may be right to identify Nietzsche as ‘deeply religious by temperament
. . . terrified of where nihilism could lead’ (Hayman 1982: 8), and point to the prevalence
of quasi-religious images and invocations in his work, he looks to the future for a source
of spirituality or ‘new religion’ to replace Christianity rather than resurrect it. Indeed, if
we are to look into the past, others view Nietzsche’s spirituality as aligning much closer
to Eastern thought (e.g. Taoism and Buddhism) than it does to Western Christianity.8
Parkes (1996: 373), for instance, emphasizes Nietzsche’s ontology of impermanence and
becoming, his anti-metaphysical and atheistic tendencies, his denial of any substantial
self or ego viewed as a conventional unity of ‘energy-aggregates’ and his celebration of
the ‘lived body’. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche describes Buddhism as ‘a hundred times
more realistic than Christianity’ (A 20), while in Twilight of the Idols he follows the
Buddhist notion that the individual is an error: ‘he is nothing in himself, not an atom,
not a “link in the chain”, not something merely inherited from the past – he is the entire
chain of humanity all the way up to himself ’ (TI 9.33). As we saw in Chapters 5 and
6, Nietzschean wholeness and intersubjectivity are often overlooked by attributing to
him an undialectical and dichotomous view of self and Other, individual and group.
One easily forgets Zarathustra’s ‘great love’ for his fellow human beings, which only
comes if one loves and despises oneself first. Zarathustra’s almost fatal nausea at the
prospect of the eternal recurrence of the rabble, as Parkes (1996: 375) observes, is thus
‘prompted as much by the rabble within his own most comprehensive soul as by the
“other”’. Like the Japanese Nietzscheans, such as Keiji Nishitani, who emphasized the
religious aspect of Nietzsche, viewing it as embodying a form of Dionysian pantheism
in a fully creative affirmation of life, others align Nietzsche with a strongly pantheistic
viewpoint.9 Nietzsche’s affirmation of life, as Richardson (2020: 363) argues, brings
him ‘into harmony with certain mysticisms and pantheisms’. The Dionysian is, as
Nietzsche describes it, ‘the great pantheistic sharing of joy and suffering that calls good
and sanctifies even the most terrible and questionable qualities of life’ (WP 1050), a
rapturous ‘religious affirmation of life, life whole and not denied or in part’ (WP 1052).
It is a ‘deification’ (WP 534), ‘sanctification’ (WP 539), ‘an ecstatic affirmation of the
total character of life’ (WP 539) that ‘replenishes and gilds . . . life’ (WP 534), enabling
us to grasp the constitutive links between individual and whole and recognize that
‘there is no thing without other things’ (WP 557).
Nietzsche’s pantheism is most evident in Zarathustra that proclaims in poetic
form his erotic love of life and the living vitality of the earth. In Zarathustra’s two
180 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

‘dance-songs’ (Z 2.10, Z 3.15), life is personified as a woman whom he loves in a

sexual way, culminating in Zarathustra’s marriage to life with the ring of eternal
return. As Richardson (2020: 483) notes, there is an ambiguity in Zarathustra’s
atheism – ‘[h]e seems on the whole quite anti-god’ and yet the book’s overall
view of gods is ‘complex and ambiguous’. In the Third book, he pronounces ‘God
is dead’ (Z 3.5) and, in the Fourth, embraces the title ‘Zarathustra, the godless’ (Z
4.6), having declared in the First, ‘I would only believe in a god that knew how to
dance’ and his feeling of possession in which ‘a god dances through me’ (Z 1.7).10
This possession is marked by the power of affect or rapture, a bodily condition of
excitement, intoxication and transient joy in which one feels the presence of eternal
harmony. Erotic love is an affirmation of life that ‘reshapes and elevates the beloved’
and provides a ‘tremendous energy of greatness’ that allows us ‘not to perish of the
suffering one creates’ (WP 506). Through his emphasis on religious pathos and
the feeling of rapture, Nietzsche hopes to aestheticize religion. Gods are now the
imaginary or fictive objects of an aesthetic play: ‘[t]he wealth of religious feeling,
grown to a torrent, breaks out ever again and wants to conquer new realms’ (HH
150). His highly damning condemnations of religion are interlaced with an embrace
of his own god, Dionysus, and with a favourable view of religious sentiment based on
the primacy of affectivity. In turn, his main concepts – eternal return, amor fati and
the Universal Yes – carry an emotional weight and strong religious force as forms of
an ethical imaginary.11
Gods exist for Nietzsche as ‘metaphor’ for love, affective possession and spiritual
power: ‘The only possibility of maintaining a meaning for the concept of “god” would
be: god not as driving force but as maximal state’ (WP 639). As the creation of an
aesthetic and ethical imaginary, they multiply the feeling of the greatest heightening of
power through the inspiration of an indwelling, collaborating god. This is a terrestrial
religion of affectivity and pathos, the inexplicable surplus of divine communication
or attunement. It is a pantheistic religion that embraces and participates in the
universal joy of becoming and the Heraclitean play of forces, leading to the elevation
of power: ‘What is essential in such Rausch is the feeling of increased strength and
fullness’ (TI 9.8). To fill the spiritual and ethical void left by the death of the Christian
God,12 ‘everything will be divine’ (Richardson 2020: 495). This expresses in religious
form Nietzsche’s ontological schema of pluralistic monism that all is connected as
one, expressing itself differently in the many. This in turn lends itself to a pluralistic
ethical and political imaginary. As ‘the last disciple and initiate of the god Dionysus’
(BGE 296), the deity of many masks, Nietzsche pluralizes the divine, condemning
Christianity for its monotheism and praising the Greeks’ relation of ‘free-spiritedness’
towards their many gods. Unlike monotheism’s ‘rage for generalization’ and edicts of
a universalizing morality to impose a single worldview (BGE 202), he favours Roman
tolerance and pagan plurality (BGE 46):

Polytheism was a prefigurement of free-spiritedness and multi-spiritedness: the

power to create new and personal eyes for oneself and again and again new and
even more personal ones: so that for man alone of all the animals there is no
eternally fixed horizon and perspectives. (GS 143)
 
Lebensphilosophie 181

Atheism (akin to nihilism) is viewed by Nietzsche as a transitional stage – in itself, it is

ascetic in its will to truth (GM 3.27). Although he abandons belief in a transcendent God
that he views as a forward step culturally (D 96), he modifies atheism with his commitment
to the Dionysian ideal (BGE 295). The free spirit is not identified with atheism per se since
atheism is a kind of dead negation blissfully unaware of the implications of the death of
God (GS 125). For Nietzsche, the fact that the Christian God is such a bad communicator
(Z 4.6, BGE 53) has led to scepticism and atheism. Monotheism crushed the concept
of humanity underneath an impossible ideal and caused the ‘premature stagnation’ of
human development (GS 143, TI 3.1). By contrast, the Greek gods were an ‘artistic middle
world’ developed to both view and veil the horrors of existence – they were the ‘ideal
image’ of the Greek way of life (BT 3). Nietzsche disavows founding a religion (EH 4.1,
D 542) but proposes a form of piety towards an ideal that satiates the religious instinct
without a theism (BGE 53). Indeed, holiness is a constant theme Nietzsche employs to
describe a powerful and healthy will to power (Z 1.20). Free spirits, he advises, can use
religion for ethical ends in order to serve the development of humanity (BGE 61).
Nietzsche’s ‘new religion’ is that of Dionysus (BGE 295, EH P2), a god who is
inside the world and changing rather than outside it: ‘Even the gods philosophise’
(BGE 295). Raised in a cave by nymphs, represented as kind and generous, though
cruel to his enemies, Dionysus is in some tales torn apart and then reborn. He has
a strong association with natural and mythic animals, with the wearing of different
masks, and is presented as a mythic god or personification who tempts or seduces
humanity to growth and health in the future. Above all, it is Dionysus’ association with
joy, ecstasy, wholeness and the release from care that attracts Nietzsche. The Dionysian
state is a total stimulation of the affective system, transforming itself through and into
those affects and constituting a movement to ‘redeem reality’ by immersion in and
identification with it (TI 9.10). Religious fervour is identified by Nietzsche as a kind
of delirium (folie circulaire), an alternation of feelings between ecstatic redemption
and severe penitence (EH 4.8, A 51). It is Dionysus who captures the feeling of ecstatic
redemption or rapturous intoxication13 in which ‘I am the eternally creative primordial
mother’ and, ‘by the mystical triumphant cry of Dionysus the spell of individuation
is broken, and the way lies open to the Mothers of Being, to the innermost heart of
things’ (BT 16).

Sartre, the voodoo child

Like Nietzsche, as a child Sartre was steeped in Christianity but soon threw off its
conceptual shackles while remaining aware of the power of religious faith and
iconography to inspire and communicate. The philosopher, who infamously followed
the ‘consequences of a coherent atheistic position’ (EH 51), casually describes the
genesis of his atheism; when aged twelve, he encountered a sudden loss of faith in God
while standing on the street waiting for friends:

One morning, in 1917, at La Rochelle, I was waiting for some companions who
were supposed to accompany me to the lycée; they were late. Soon I could think of
182 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

nothing more to distract myself, and I decided to think about the Almighty. He at
once tumbled down into the blue sky and vanished without explanation: He does
not exist, I said to myself, in polite astonishment, and I thought the matter was
settled. In one sense it was, because I have never since had the least temptation to
revive Him. But the Other, the Invisible, the Holy Ghost, he who guaranteed my
mandate and dominated my life through great, anonymous, and sacred forces, he
remained. (W 155–6)

God was ‘an old flame’ that took root and then died in his heart: ‘I needed God, he was
given to me, and I received him without understanding what I was looking for. Unable
to take root in my heart, he vegetated in me for a while and then died’ (W 65).
From then on, he would devote his childhood instead to the ‘religion of letters’
of his grandfather, searching for salvation through writing rather than prayer
or religious observance. He began to harbour a dislike for Christianity when his
relatives, split between the dual traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism, would
argue at the dinner table. According to Sartre, ‘I was the prey of two opposing
mystical theologies, but I adapted myself very well to their contradictions’
(W 108). As a ‘weed on the compost of Catholicity, my roots sucked up its juices and
I changed them into sap’ (W 157). Unlike Beauvoir, whose hostility to her Catholic
upbringing became a generalized rejection of all religion, Sartre’s atheism was
directed at a particular model of the Christian deity and should not be construed,
as Charmé (1999: 302) warns, as ‘an automatic rejection of alternative models of the
divine or religious symbolism in general’.14 Despite his youthful rejection of God, his
autobiography makes clear the affinities between his own thought and religion. Just
as Nietzsche’s work bore the stigmata of Christianity’s influence even as he sought to
cleanse himself from its markings, Sartre imbued his atheism with a deep focus on
the divine, regularly invoking religious themes and imagery in his plays, novels and
philosophical works. As he wrote:

God is dead but man has not, for all that, become atheistic. Today, as yesterday,
this silence of the transcendent, combined with modern man’s enduring religious
need, is the great question of the age. (2010: 235)

For Gillespie (2013: 83, 85), Sartre’s ‘exultant atheism’ is, at the same time, a ‘limited’
one. For Sartre, ‘[the existence of] God is, paradoxically both absent and present’ – his
writings ‘both reject it and incorporate it’. Citing Dostoevsky’s dictum that ‘[i]f God
didn’t exist, everything would be permitted’ and presenting it as ‘existentialism’s starting
point’ (EH 22), God’s absence poses a problem for Sartre’s moral concerns. Although
philosophically he had no time for Christianity as a body of metaphysical thought
and doctrine, like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he glimpsed the existential power of
religious faith.15 While a prisoner of war in 1940, he wrote and produced the first of
his eleven plays, Bariona, and described the experience of performing it as a moment
of religious discovery: ‘As I addressed my comrades across the footlights . . . I realized
what theatre ought to be: a great, collective, religious phenomenon . . . a theatre of
myths’ (1992a: 63–4).
 
Lebensphilosophie 183

Along with Gillespie (2013, 2014), other scholars highlight the importance of
religious themes in Sartre’s philosophy, running through his early philosophy in Being
and Nothingness, his expression of the messianic role and qualities of the writer in
What Is Literature?, to his final thoughts about Judaism and eschatology in Hope Now.
For Howells (1981: 550), for instance, ‘the parallels between the mystical conception of
God and the transcendent néant of Sartrean consciousness are striking’. In Richmond’s
(2018: xlviii) view, Sartre’s frequent use of theological vocabulary – incarnation,
deliverance, salvation, emanation, grace and passion – reveals his Christian framework
of understanding in spite of his professed atheism and relates to the fact that ‘for Sartre
the concept of God is philosophically necessary, even if He does not exist’. Kirkpatrick
(2017a: 1) reiterates Sartre’s connection to Christian thinking, arguing that his early
philosophy retained a recognizable inheritance from the Christian doctrine of original
sin. In his discussion of shame, Sartre explicitly refers to Genesis and introduces the
theological idiom of sin into his phenomenology (BN 312, 431) linking it to the
theme of physical ‘nakedness’ (BN 392). For Kirkpatrick (2017a: 13, 188), Being and
Nothingness can be read as an anti-theodicy and presents a ‘hermeneutics of despair’:
‘The conclusion of Being and Nothingness – for all its promises of an ethics – is bleak.’
Sartre’s atheism is thus ambiguous or, even, ‘duplicitous’ for advancing sublimated
theological ideas at the same time that he professes the death of God (2017a: 4, 8).
While scholars are right in identifying Sartre’s ‘theological horizons’, there is a
significant difference between following a religion and being fascinated by its images,
themes and metaphors as a body of intellectual interest. Like Nietzsche, Sartre had no
time for Western Christianity in philosophical terms or, indeed, as an ethical system of
values: ‘liberty is freedom without God’ (EM 558). God’s absence is a golden gift: ‘God’s
absence is no longer closure: it is an opening out to the infinite. God’s absence is greater
and more divine than God’ (1983: 40). God is a non-sequitur of existential freedom
since the road to freedom and authenticity ‘leads from the belief in God to atheism,
from an abstract morality divorced from time and time to concrete commitment’
(1976: 228). He also investigates the idea of God as creator as a myth of inversion for
it is God who is dependent on humankind to create Him. He describes God as an old-
fashioned concept (EM 776) and a human construct – ‘God is an image prefabricated
by man’ (EM 559) – and engages with the concept of God by initially equating belief
in a personal God and the attempt to gain his favour with self-centredness: ‘Morality
should surpass itself towards a goal that is not . . . . It should be a choice of the world,
not of oneself ’ (NE 11). Like Nietzsche’s ‘superhumanity’, it is ‘integral humanity’ that
can fill God’s absence: ‘I don’t need God to love my neighbour’ (EM 558).
Sartre’s final encounter with theism in Hope Now is part of his long-term
engagement with the divine, but although Sartre does not become a theist at the end,
his position both rejects and incorporates a sense of divinity. Just as Nietzsche viewed
atheism as potentially a dead negation leading to passive nihilism, Sartre describes it
as a ‘cruel, long-term business’ (W 157). He complains that materialistic atheism is
hard to sustain as an existential creed: ‘I don’t feel myself to be like a speck of dust that
has appeared in the world, but a being who is expected, provoked, prefigured’ (EM
551). The figure of God furnishes us with a vague sense of destiny without which it is
easy to succumb to the nausea of superfluity, of being simply de trop. Sartre also notes
184 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

the link between God and Absolute morality. Even without God, moral activity must
be, in some sense, ‘an absolute in the relative’ (EM 552). Like Nietzsche, he displaces
this moral imperative onto humanity, holding an affirmative view of fraternity as the
culmination of the evolution of humanity towards achieving the best in humanity.
Sartre takes the force of the divine and transposes it onto the group in the Critique
which can be ‘heavenly’ when it is fusing and autonomous but ‘hellish’ when serialized
or subordinated. In answer to the question of Sartre’s purported deathbed conversion
to Judaism, it is clear that, even though there are parallels between a Jewish messianic
resurrection and his eschatological approach to ethics, he does not accept the ethical
laws of the Torah or Christian metaphysical schema. Instead, it is distinctly a secular
morality that he advocates as capable of launching revolutionary change. Above all,
Sartre recognized that religious images and themes emerge from a certain historical
situation. He presents Greco-Roman religion (as depicted in The Flies and The Trojan
Woman) as a religion of conquest and oppression. Zeus/Jupiter is a vengeful and cruel
God who terrorizes humanity and keeps them in ignorance. Submission to such gods
can only take place as an act of bad faith, and Orestes heroically expresses his freedom
by acting against their repressive values and customs.
So then, where does Sartre sense the divine, one might ask, if not in Christianity or
classical antiquity? For a religion to be viable as an ethical scaffold for Sartre, it would
have to be ‘committed’ and contain the same perspective that he found appealing as
a messianic theme in Judaism, envisioning a new social order to replace the existing
apparatus of oppression. Moreover, it must be a terrestrial religion, like Nietzsche’s,
that dispenses with ‘the illusion of backworlds’ (BN 2) and forms of slavish morality.
Scanning through his writings, Sartre’s strongest overtures of warm embrace towards
religion can be found in two pieces – in his essay ‘Black Orpheus’ (1964) and in a
journalistic interview ‘Haiti vu par J.- P. Sartre’ (1949). In ‘Black Orpheus’, Sartre raises
his interest in African spirituality. He warns that European civilization had developed a
purely technological and mechanical relation towards nature that had become lifeless.
The white man, consequently, is alienated from nature and remains only on the surface
of things, like an engineer, ‘unaware of life’ (1964: 38). The black man, by contrast,
understands nature as a creative power, a kind of Mother Goddess, ‘an enormous
perpetual birth; the world is flesh and the son of flesh; on the sea and in the sky, on the
dunes, on the rocks in the wind, the Negro finds the softness of human skin, he rubs
himself against the sand’s belly, against the sky’s loins’ (1964: 40). This, Sartre argues,
demonstrates a vital, carnal and androgynous connection to nature: ‘the dynamic
feeling of being an erect phallus, and the more deaf, more patient, more feminine
one of being a growing plant’ (1964: 40). He pays homage to black spiritual poetry
for its deconstructive, transgressive qualities that challenges the binary hierarchies of
dualistic Christian thinking, using negritude as a means of positing ‘a secret blackness
in white, a secret whiteness in black’ (1964: 28). These insights build upon Sartre’s
observations on the voodoo religion of Haiti in an interview with Georges Altman in
1949 in which he expresses a great fascination with ‘Envoutement vaudou’ (voodoo
bewitchment). Driven by the rhythm of the voodoo drum, like the one he had
imagined as a child (W 79), Sartre was impressed how the religious devotees became
entranced in a ‘religion of possession’ centred on the expressive dance of the body.
 
Lebensphilosophie 185

In this form of rapturous spirituality, he recognized the possibility of a completely

different cosmology and ontology, ‘a certain affective attitude toward the world’ (1964:
36) that forms the imaginary of a terrestrial religion which can be counterposed to the
Christian ‘Seriousness’ of the white man.
As Neppi (1995: 16) comments, for Sartre, ‘man and nature are not opposed in
an irreducible manner. Their separation is not an ontological structure, but only a
moment in the process of being.’ Like Nietzsche’s, Sartre’s thinking evinces a form of
pantheism expressed through his affective dialectic, his views on animal consciousness
and his ontological relationality. Although he continued to look forward into the
future for the realization of a new society based on a new form of morality (much
as the biblical prophets did), he turned back to a pagan prebiblical period, to a
tribal view of totemism for a model of human interconnection by recapturing the
sense of the Mother Goddess as a totem: ‘When I see man, I think: he has the same
origin as myself, like me he comes from Mother Humanity, let’s say, Mother Earth as
Socrates says, Mother’ (HN 90). From this shared belonging, he develops an idea of
‘fraternity’:16

To belong to the same species is, in a way, to have the same parents. In that sense
we are brothers . . . the great concept of the clan, its womb-like unity – starting with
an animal, for example, that is supposed to have engendered them all – is what
we must rediscover today, for that was true fraternity. In a sense it was a myth, no
doubt about it, but it was also a truth. (HN 87–8)

These passages reveal a ‘proud pagan’ Sartre17 whose interest in mysticism and
Dionysian religious experience runs from his earliest writings, resurfaces sporadically
in his middle period and climaxes in his final thinking. Thus, despite attempts to read
them as inveterate atheists or as closet Christians, it is fairer to say that, though strongly
atheistic in terms of metaphysical speculation, Sartre and Nietzsche were really neither.
Instead, both openly embraced a form of ‘imaginative divinity’, a ‘new religion’ of the
earth based on an affective spirituality of existence, Being and becoming, in order to fill
the void of nihilism that circumscribes the modern condition of humankind following
the death of what they saw as a defunct Christian God: ‘Inaccessible to the sacred,
I adored magic’ (W 77). This should be viewed as a quintessentially posthumanist
religion that signals the transition beyond the ‘political theology’ (Shapiro 2016: 79)
of Christianity. Broadly speaking, Nietzschean and Sartrean divinity display a ternary
deconstructive logic of inversion and displacement. They invert the life-denying
metaphysics of Christianity with a ‘cruel atheism’ that ultimately leads to a displaced
third orientation that attempts to fill the ethical void ‘where everything is permissible
if God does not exist’ (EH 22). This is a life-affirming celebration of existence and
‘new religion’, expressing the plurality found in the diversity of nature and human
individuality. Sartrean and Nietzschean ethics represent the search for a new earthly
Good and Bad based on the dynamic dialectical interplay of self and Other, a form
of ‘an absolute in the relative’ (EM 552). This engenders, in a mythic terrestrial form,
a spiritual replacement for the Christian God that captures their aesthetic-ethical,
pluralistic imaginary. Sartre’s religious (re)turn towards mysticism and Mother Earth
186 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

propels him towards a feminine economy, which, as we will see in the next section,
becomes a dominant theme of his later thinking.18

Gentle Nietzsche and feminine Sartre

I want to proceed as Raphael did and never paint another image of torture. There
are enough sublime things so that one does not have to look for the sublime where
it dwells in sisterly association with cruelty; and my ambition also could never find
satisfaction if I became a sublime assistant at torture.
(Nietzsche, The Gay Science 313)

Were Nietzsche and Sartre guilty of an anti-feminist bias or does their thinking lend
itself to the philosophical promotion of the feminine, as in their valorization of ‘the
eternally creative primordial mother’ (BT 16) and ‘Mother Earth’ (HN 90)? Scholars
are divided over the relationship of their philosophy to feminism and to the depictions
of ‘the feminine’ in their work, taking the attitude of either a rejectionist, refusalist
or retrievalist approach.19 In this section, I take a retrievalist route, looking at some
of the contradictions in their writings, but demonstrating how, in the wider arc of
their thinking, they move towards a multiplying or sublimating logic that, through
the category of the androgynous, challenges the bivalent logic of man and woman as a
dualistic metaphysical category.

Lost and found: Nietzsche’s ‘missing’ mother

The good fortune of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: I am, to
express it in the form of a riddle, already dead as my father, while as my mother I am
still living and becoming old.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 1.1)

After the death of his father, young ‘Fritz’ fell firmly under the influence of the women
who controlled his household, in particular, his mother Franziska, his grandmother
Erdmuthe and his aunt Rosalie. He was known for being pedantic in his inordinate
following of rules, including ‘the Fourth Commandment’ – do as Franziska wished.20
His main adult male influence was his grandfather David Oehler who introduced
the precocious young bibliophile to his library (with a range and depth of books far
wider than the narrow selection of religious texts belonging to Erdmuthe back home
in Naumburg) when Franziska visited her family at Pobles. At school, Nietzsche
was propelled into a ring of male hierarchy and violence, teased and bullied by his
schoolmates at the Gymnasium for his seriousness and his withdrawn character, as
well as for his zealous following of rules. At the age of fourteen, he left the family
home in Naumburg for the elite boarding school Pforta which was a conservative
 
Lebensphilosophie 187

factory of masculine values, ‘a fusion of monastic austerity and Prussian militarism’

(Blue 2016: 100). Nietzsche’s ‘toughening up’ continued into his university years. He
competed in a fraternity duelling contest while at the University of Bonn (despite his
athletic deficiencies) from which he subsequently bore a small scar on his nose. After
conscription into the army in 1867 for military service, he learnt how to fire canons
and ride horses but was disbanded a year later after a serious riding accident. ‘My
career as warrior’, he wrote with some chagrin, ‘has not set the stage on fire’ (KSB
2.292).21 Despite this masculine and pugilistic posturing, however, he was well known
for his gentleness and effeminacy (a fact that Wagner liked to spread through gossip
and scandalizing as Nietzsche found out with some annoyance after the composer’s
death).
This same mixture of the masculine and feminine can also be found in Nietzsche’s
writings. Displaying the contours of a ‘divided self ’, even within the same text, he is
apt to present divergent perspectives. It is hard to decide when reading Ecce Homo, for
instance, whether he wishes to present himself as a hawk or a dove (or just a confusing
farrago of warring and peaceful instincts). Juxtaposing his professed bellicosity as
an ‘annihilator’ (EH 4.2) near the beginning of the book – ‘I am warlike by nature.
Attacking is one of my instincts’ (EH 1.7) – with his peaceful declaration towards
the end – ‘It is part of my nature to be gentle and benevolent toward everybody’ (EH
3.10.4), we are left with a Nietzsche wrought with opposing tendencies and conflicting
drives. Solomon (2003: 7) picks up on this paradox of war and peace in his life and
work, contrasting the ‘Nasty Nietzsche’ – the immoralist and Antichrist, the ‘mad-
dog foaming at the moustache’ – with the ‘Gentle Nietzsche’ – a ‘quite respectable and
house-trained lapdog, a defender of Good Things and an advocate of, among other
things, self-reliance, intellectual courage and honesty, creativity, democracy, feminism,
animal rights, naturalism, the scientific method, aesthetic appreciation, wit and irony,
hermeneutics, pragmatism, humanism and a good night’s sleep’. The same man who
was a ‘literary megalomaniac’ and who took some pride in a review that spoke of his
attempt ‘to abolish all decent feelings’ was also a decent human being disposed to
politeness who exuded feminine gentleness.
Thus, underneath Nietzsche’s hard Stoic skin lies a soft Epicurean underbelly,
revealing contradictory impulses and directions in his ethics. Despite his professed
‘pathos of distance’ from others and disdain of the world,22 his attacks on pity
and compassion are inconsistent. As Safranski (2003: 167) notes, Nietzsche’s
compassionate disposition caused him to suffer: ‘The philosopher who later assailed
the morality of compassion displayed an almost osmotic sympathy . . . he could not
be as nearly as ruthless as he demanded from his Übermensch.’ It could be argued in
this vein that his warlike instincts are often overemphasized above his peaceful ones.
In Beyond Good and Evil, for instance, he includes sympathy (Mitgefühl) as a basic
virtue: ‘Courage, insight, sympathy, solitude’ (BGE 284). In Daybreak, his list of virtues
is anything but hawkish: ‘[h]onesty, courage, generosity, politeness’ (D 556). Even in
his final works, he suggests we have a duty to help the weak and unfortunate in an
Aristotelian (‘the great-souled man’) rather than Kantian sense (as a universal mandate
of reason): ‘When the exceptional human being treats the mediocre more tenderly than
himself and his peers, this is not mere courtesy of the heart – it is simply his duty’
188 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

(A 57). Indeed, benevolence is considered by Nietzsche to be a key virtue. He praises

small acts of kindness that people show (HH 49) and the way they contribute to a
collective well-being (HH 111). In Ecce Homo, he proposes the virtues of magnanimity
and veneration (EH 3.10.4). He makes it clear that social power does not necessarily
dictate whether one adopts master or slave morality, and he warns time and again
against confusing political power with strength and misfortune with weakness: ‘I have
found strength where one does not look for it; in simple, mild and pleasant people,
without the least desire to rule – and, conversely, the desire to rule has often appeared
to me as a sign of inner weakness’ (D 413).
For Safranski (2003: 99), what lies at the heart of Nietzsche ‘is a mixture of
contempt and helplessness in the face of both suffering and compassion’. The
philosopher ‘whose last fully conscious action was embracing a dumb animal
to keep it from being beaten was deeply troubled both by the weakness of others
and his own weakness’. Love is a concept not readily associated with Nietzsche but
plays a significant part in his ethics. He employs the concept of love as an attitude
or mode of being responsible for creativity and the growth of the human since in
love I joyously affirm the existence of someone who is not me. This extends to a
social program of justice as ‘love with seeing eyes’ (Z 1.19). He hopes that someday
‘we will no longer have the heart for the logical sin that lies concealed in anger and
punishment, whether practiced individually or socially’ (WS 183). Although it is
important not to sanitize Nietzsche and efface all traces of Stoicism or ‘hardness’
within his thinking, it is equally important not to overemphasize them. While he
advocates a pathos of distance (BGE 257, TI 9.37) and argues that a certain form of
cruelty is indispensable in which greatness means the ability to inflict great pain (GS
325) – life means ‘being cruel . . . toward anything that is growing old and weak in us’
(GS 26) – he recognizes that some cruelties are ‘anti-life’. Nietzsche may sometimes
identify with Roman stoicism – brave tough, resilient, insensitive – but he shows only
a ‘qualified admiration’ for it, ridiculing Stoic metaphysics regarding the rationality
of nature (BGE 9) and more readily aligning himself with Epicureanism (GS 306).
Symbolically, the fourth book of Zarathustra ends with the appearance of a laughing
lion among a flock of doves. In a note of 1883, Nietzsche discusses this symbol as
combining strength and power with gentleness (KSW 21.2), and it is this dialectical
tension between the two that he attempts to sublimate in his apparent contradictory
thinking.
Nietzsche’s ambivalence towards women is common knowledge. The philosopher
who advocated taking the whip to women (Z 1.18)23 was the same person who
throughout his life was always gentle, polite and respectful to them. The ‘man of
dynamite’, as Diethe (2006: 302) remarks, ‘was nothing if not a gentleman’. In July
1874, while a professor, he voted for the admission of women or female students
into the doctoral programme at Basel. It may be the case that three unsuccessful
marriage proposals (and his sister’s intrusive involvement with his relationship to
Lou Salomé) soured his views on women over time, and particularly those of his
family. His ambivalence towards the women in his family surfaces in Ecce Homo
where, after stating ‘as my father I am already dead and as my mother I am still
alive and growing old’ (EH 1.1), he goes on later in the suppressed (by Peter Gast
 
Lebensphilosophie 189

and Elisabeth) part of the chapter (EH ‘Wise’ 3) to refer to his mother and sister
as ‘rabble’ and a ‘hell-machine’. Indeed, he went on to add caustically ‘the deepest
objection against the “eternal recurrence”, my genuine abysmal thought, is always
[my] mother and sister’ (in Oliver 1995: 140). Previously, in March 1883, he had
declared, ‘I do not like my mother, and hearing my sister’s voice annoys me. I always
fell ill when I was with them’ (cited in Safranski 2003: 366).
His confrontational literary style, as Richardson (2020: 111–12) remarks, is
framed ‘in the swaggeringly male persona he often adopts’, a sublimation for his
sexual energy that finds expression in his ‘writerly voice’. It is in this masculine voice
that, in the view of some feminists, Nietzsche repeats the masculine bias of Western
philosophy. In Irigaray’s (1981: 43) view, he negatively associates woman with water,
the element that he most feared, the open seas of groundlessness and the abyss that
we must brave following the death of God. His concept of the eternal return, as
an economy of the same, appropriates and synthesizes all otherness, including the
feminine. Oliver (1995: xi) argues that although Nietzsche has opened up philosophy
to its others – the body, unconscious, untruth, contingency – he has excluded the
‘feminine other’, specifically the maternal other, as a possible subject position. His
misogyny can be seen in this light as an aberrant psychosexual symptom exhibiting
what psychoanalysts call abjection. This is a feeling of disgust or nausea in the face of
things that threaten clear distinctions between borders, especially between self and
other relating to bodily wastes, such as faeces and vomit, that elide the distinction
between inside and outside the body, as well as to our mother’s body when we were
inside and not distinct from it. Nietzsche’s ‘misplaced abjection’ was a severe and
demanding ‘imaginary father figure’, many of whom, such as Julius Caesar and
Alexander the Great, populate his texts. Through his idea of the Übermensch who
self-creates, Nietzsche subsumes creativity in the masculine while the maternal
remains an object of hostility displaced onto all women (1995: 154).24 While his
idea of the decentred, non-essential historical self supports a positive mode of
resistance to social domination and normalization, his anti-feminism is not so much
inconsistent but symptomatic of his own ressentiment.
Kofman and Derrida are two philosophers who have grappled directly with
Nietzsche’s depiction of the feminine, presenting his work as a melting pot of both
positive and negative interpretations. For Kofman (1998: 40), there is no essentialist
idea of woman in Nietzsche. Instead, what we find are ‘Nietzsche’s many heterogeneous
texts on woman’ (1998: 46) in which some women are given a higher value as more
life-affirmative than some men. His first nihilistic image of woman is associated with
the Greek goddess Circe as a goddess of seduction, magic and trickery who in Homer’s
Odyssey attempts to fatally entrap Odysseus and his men: ‘morality has shown itself
to be the greatest of all mistresses of seduction . . . the actual Circe of philosophers’ (in
1998: 26). By contrast, in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science (1887),
Nietzsche uses the Greek female demon Baubô, a minor Greek goddess associated with
Demeter (the ‘female Dionysus’), as a symbol for ‘truth’ as she is subversively associated
with female fertility, fecundity, perspectivism and creation. Where Dionysus appears
naked, however, Baubô is veiled with skirts: ‘The figure of Baubô indicates that a simple
logic could never understand that life is neither depth nor surface, that behind the veil,
190 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

there is another veil, behind a layer of paint, another layer’ (1998: 44). By identifying
wisdom of life with Baubô, Nietzsche celebrates ‘the female sexual organ . . . [as] a
guarantee of regeneration and eternal return of all things’ (1998: 197).
In Derrida’s (1979) view, although Nietzsche’s texts are ‘littered with misogynistic
remarks’, they also deconstruct their own phallocentric pretensions through a
celebration of woman as a metaphor representing the creative forces of life. Nietzsche’s
writings purposively yield multiple interpretations that give rise to heterogeneity and
allow for difference. In Spurs, Derrida articulates three versions of the Nietzschean
woman. First, woman is condemned as a figure of falsehood – the man ‘offers truth and
his phallus as his own proper credentials’ (1979: 97). This is why woman ‘compromises
herself ’ when she attempts to seek enlightenment (BGE 232). Second, woman is
condemned as a figure of truth when she attempts a Christian-Platonic representation
of it but is more liberated when she becomes the ‘phallic woman’, performing the truths
of woman and manipulating them to her own ends within a phallogocentric economy
(1979: 67). In this second position, she does not believe in truth of woman as such but
enacts feminine seductive power in her interest (1979: 67). She exhibits the positive
characteristics of the actor: ‘falseness with a good conscience; the delight in simulation
exploding as a power that pushes aside one’s so-called “character”, flooding it and at
times extinguishing it; the inner craving for a role and mask, for appearance; an excess
of the capacity for all kinds of adaptation’ (GS 361). Derrida sees this as a form of
self-mastery in women. By using her ‘seductive power’, she ‘rules over dogmatism,
and disorients and routs those credulous men, the philosophers’ (1979: 67). As an
appropriator, she upsets the binary divisions between possessed and possessor, master
and slave: ‘Would a woman be able to hold us (or, as they say, “enthral us”) if we did not
consider it quite possible that under certain circumstances she could wield a dagger
(any kind of dagger) against us? Or against herself – which in certain cases would be
crueller revenge’ (GS 69). Third, as represented by Baubô, Nietzsche conceives women
as an active source of creativity ‘recognized and affirmed as an affirmative power, a
dissimulatress, an artist, a dionysiac’ (1979: 97).
While applauding the fact ‘feminine behaviour is celebrated and even coveted’ by
Nietzsche and Derrida, Verkerk notes how both are critical of feminists that attempt
to become like men and inculcate masculine values of rationality and logical thinking
(BGE 232, Derrida 1979: 65). This is conceived as a loss to women’s feminine artistry
and style and reveals in their thinking ‘a double gendered position . . . open to men
but not to women’ (2020: 155–6). Although Nietzsche uses the notion of pregnancy
to explain creativity in general, he makes spiritual pregnancy exclusive to men (GS
72). Consequently, he closes the doors of his Epicurean Garden to women. Unlike
‘free spirits’ ‘who think differently from . . . the dominant views of the age’ (HH 225),
women are ideologically enslaved and socialized to be subservient to social authority
more than men (HH 435).25 Verkerk (2020: 154) thus both welcomes and questions
the attempt by Nietzsche and Derrida to write in the hand of a woman and ‘bear
witness to her abduction’ (Derrida 1979: 41).26 Neither philosopher escapes their own
fetishizations of the concept of woman, but they do proliferate these fetishizations and
thus lay the groundwork for others to exceed them. Although Nietzsche disputes the
coherence of the concept of woman through revealing her phallogocentric genealogy
 
Lebensphilosophie 191

and also by abducting her as a performative fiction (as both a male mother and a
phallic woman), he does so without releasing her from the ‘straitjacket of misogyny’
(2020: 164). For Oliver (1988: 25), ‘dressing up like woman’ to write as her, Nietzsche
writes women out of their own self-articulation – he not only wants to become woman
but also to possess her and shape her to his own ends.
If we look closely at the denouement of the feminine in Nietzsche’s thinking, it
is possible to discern a sublimating dialectic of the feminine and masculine at play.
Arguably, he valorizes the feminine over the masculine (in the form of an ‘inverted
Platonism’) but seeks like a ‘noble individual’ to lessen ‘the deadly hatred between the
sexes’ (EH 3.5) and elide/synthesize/multiply binary divisions. Alongside his agonistic
conception of human relations runs a parallel (feminine) economy of gift-giving. The
virtues of giving and bestowing are constant themes in Nietzsche and integral to his
ideal of healthy friendship. The abundance of gifts is a feature of the Dionysian where
‘freely nature offers her gifts’ (BT 1). Wagner’s ‘true music’ is also a gift (UM 4.6),
and Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s ‘greatest gift’ (EH P4). ‘[T]o give is more blessed than
to have’ (Z 2.9), he maintains, a form of giving that does not shame either giver or
receiver, without gratitude or debt (BGE 265). Life presented as a woman is itself a
gift: ‘Vita feminina’ – ‘But perhaps that is the strongest magic of life: a gold-worked
veil of beautiful possibilities lies over it, promising, resisting, bashful, mocking,
pitying, seductive. Yes, life is a woman!’ (GS 339). He criticizes Christianity ‘with its
unfathomable meanness’ for debasing women and praises the Laws of Manu (a Hindu
text) for a more positive conception of the female:

I do not know any book that says as many kind and delicate things to females as
the law book of Manu. . . . ‘The mouth of a woman’, it says at one point, ‘the breasts
of a girl, the prayer of a child, the smoke of a sacrifice is always pure’. (A 56)

Valuing women for their artistry – ‘woman is so artistic’ (GS 361) – Nietzsche theorizes
gender as performative. Women take up their previous articulations and failures
and then enact new ones, putting on masks even when they appear to be revealing
something about themselves (GS 361). The feminine art of seduction can lead astray
in a negative way, like Wagner, Christianity or Circe (WC 3, A 44, Z 4.15), but is also
positive attracting by ‘another ideal’ (GS 382) rather than compelling or forcing, just
like Dionysus ‘the pied piper of consciences’ (BGE 295).
For Nietzsche, Ariadne is representative of the mythic feminine. She becomes the
lover of Dionysus after her abandonment by Theseus, which is viewed as humanity
abandoning its possibilities for growth and health in favour of a turn towards European
modernity and misplaced masculine values (BT 7, Z 2.13). He praises Goethe for
expressing the idea of the ‘eternal feminine’ as divine, not in a transcendent sense but
as anticipated in the physical workings of the earth in which ‘everything is redeemed
in the whole’ (TI 9.49). While he often values the feminine, Nietzsche’s wider purpose
is to move beyond binary divisions. Dionysus is venerated as the experimenting or
tempting god who integrates masculine and feminine principles (EH 3.6).27 What
is most important about these two drives is their interaction and reciprocity. The
feminine without the masculine is simply ‘weak’ (GS 24) while the masculine without
192 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

the feminine is simply ‘strong’ (BGE 241) – neither on its own is healthy or productive
(TI 9.38). Alongside the positive connotations of masculinity as exemplified by
Napoleon (GS 362), Nietzsche is careful to distinguish between greatness and strength
(BGE 241), arguing that the masculine values of the Germans make them ‘stupid’ (TI
8.1). Likewise, woman’s artistry is applauded by Nietzsche (GS 361) at the same time as
too much artistry or performance in social roles is seen to make women incapable of
the independence required of the free spirit (HH 435). Zarathustra is symbolic of his
‘feminine-masculine’ dynamic. The violent scenes of Z 3.2, for instance, are followed
by the calm and peacefulness of Z 3.3, repeated again at Z 4.2.9 and Z 4.10 following
their synthesis in the form of the child at Z1.1.28 Zarathustra is accompanied at all
times by the eagle as the masculine Greek and the snake as the feminine Judaic (BT
9). Indeed, Zarathustra itself, the work Nietzsche most esteemed, can be viewed as a
‘feminine-masculine’ synthesis, an amalgam of poetry and philosophy that combines
both his ‘feminine hand’ (Derrida 1979) and his masculine ‘writerly voice’ (Richardson
2020; Oliver 1995).29
Reading Nietzsche in a retrievalist way, his ambiguous/polysemous writings on
femininity and masculinity can be viewed productively as a deconstructive manoeuvre
for overcoming binarisms. Safranski (2003: 245) views this as leading Nietzsche
towards an economy of the androgynous or (‘feminine-masculine’) that pluralizes
rather than binarizes sexuality and gender. Significantly, Nietzsche himself, a synthesis
of effeminacy and machismo, entitled the fourth book of The Gay Science ‘Sanctus
Janarius’, paying homage to the martyred saint known in Naples as San Gennaro
who was known for his striking feminine characteristics, soft beauty and his period
bleeding. Considered both man and woman, he is the patron saint of androgyny, a
beautiful synthesis of the masculine and feminine who challenges the coherence of the
bivalent logic of man and woman as a dualistic metaphysical category.30

Sartre and Mother Earth

Like Nietzsche, Sartre was brought up fatherless and lived for periods of his adult life
with his mother. When Jean-Baptiste Sartre died in 1906, young ‘Poulou’ was only
fifteen months old. Describing himself as a ‘fatherless orphan’ (W 70) and the ‘son
of a dead man’ (W 12), he viewed this event positively in retrospect since it ‘gave me
my freedom’ (W 14) and allowed him to be his ‘own cause’ (W 71). When his mother
remarried, this was far from a happy occasion for the young Sartre since it broke
the close intimacy he shared with Anne-Marie and subjected him to his stepfather’s
patriarchal law: ‘I sensed his desire through Anne-Marie; through her, I learned to
scent the male, to fear and loathe him’ (W 137).31 Sartre’s ‘hardening up’ came, as
Nietzsche’s had done, at the hand of other boys at school. The violence and bullying
he suffered at La Rochelle made him take that violence into himself and implement ‘a
physically confrontational masculinity’ as one ‘who can endure hard blows’ (1995: 175).
Alongside learning how to box, his masculine sense of self was built around his heroic
project of writing: ‘For a long while I treated my pen as a sword’ (W 157). Although
friendship with other males (Mahieu, Nizan, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, Cau) was an
 
Lebensphilosophie 193

abiding feature of his life, these were built on philosophical allegiances rather than
any kind of shared intimacy and, when these alliances split, the friendship ended in a
bout of masculinist adversarialism. As he later confessed, ‘I can’t imagine tenderness
in my relation with men’ (1995: 277). Continuing the filial intimacy Sartre felt from a
young age with Anne-Marie, close female relationships dominated his life. In his War
Diaries, Sartre declared that for the first time in his life he felt ‘humble and disarmed’ in
Beauvoir’s company and credits her with ‘forcing’ him to renounce his early theory of
salvation through art (WD 78, 88). Beauvoir, along with his adopted daughter, Arlette,
would be a philosophical partner until his final years.32
Feminist criticisms of Sartre often focus upon certain passages in Being and
Nothingness, particularly his discussion of viscosity and ‘the obscenity of the feminine
sex’ towards the end of the book:

The viscous . . . is a revenge . . . a sickly-sweet and feminine revenge. (BN 789)

the obscenity of the feminine sex organ is that of all gaping things; it is a call for
being, as all holes are, moreover; in herself, the woman is calling for a foreign flesh
which, penetrating and diluting her, must transform her into a plenitude of being.
. . . Doubtless the sex organ is a mouth, and a voracious mouth which swallows the
penis. (BN 794)

Many feminists, however, take a reconstructive approach to Sartre’s philosophy. Mui

(1999: 32) characterizes Sartre as a ‘grumbling misogynist’ that shows through as an
integral component in his ontology in Being and Nothingness but contends ‘woman
nevertheless prevails as a full-fledged consciousness in [his] ontology’. Similarly,
although the passages above ‘are clearly demeaning to women’, according to Sutton
Morris (1999: 70), Sartre is not as guilty of anti-feminism as some suppose. While he
symbolizes the viscous with a repugnant moral quality, his analysis isn’t necessarily
hopelessly sexist, for he also states ‘the viscous is me’ (BN 789) and doesn’t restrict
it to the feminine. Indeed, his idea of holes-to-be filled symbolizes a general human
tendency to desire the ‘spherical plenitude, of Parmenidean being’ (BN 794) and, in
using it, ‘he had more general symbols in mind’ (1999: 71).33 Another complaint levied
against Sartre is his characterization of love as objectification and domination of the
Other in Being and Nothingness as exercised through ‘the look’. However, this is not
the only mode of love Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness and elsewhere. His
description of the process of sexual caress, for instance, involves a ‘twofold reciprocal
incarnation’ (BN 516) and a form of mutual becoming and enrichment. In the War
Diaries, he displays a certain ambiguity over love, seduction and mutual recognition,
stating at one point, ‘nothing is dearer to me than the freedom of those I love . . . but
the fact is, this freedom is dear to me provided I don’t respect it at all. It’s a question
not of suppressing it, but of actually violating it’ (WD 256). But, a few pages later, he
adds, ‘[t]he love that wants freedom in others only so that it can violate it – that form
of love is utterly inauthentic. There are other ways of loving’ (WD 258). He points
to the necessary role of (non-dominative) objectification in reflective self-knowledge
as an affirmation and recognition of our singularized material embodiment and our
194 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

individual consciousness, a form of mutually fulfilling recognition unfolding ‘in the

dimension of otherness’ (NE 280).
In the view of Lacoste (1999: 272, 292), as Sartre’s thought matures it moves
towards a Cixousian ‘feminine economy of reciprocal abandon’ that reverses his earlier
masculine economy and ontology of sadism and masochism in Being and Nothingness.
The hostile look of independent consciousnesses is replaced by the ‘fraternity’ of
‘people bound to each other in feeling and action’ (HN 91). This involves a form of
abandon as not a negative purely passive thing but as an activity of ‘de-selfing’ or
‘de-egoisation’ that lends itself to an ethics of ‘gift-giving’. For Cixous (1994: 133), there
are two different criteria that mark masculine and feminine economies – the relation to
pleasure and the attitude towards giving. She explains the relation to pleasure through
the story of the Apple and Eve and the quest for the Holy Grail. On one side is the law
‘which is absolute, verbal, invisible’ and which is not and, on the other, ‘the apple which
is, is, is’. Perceval (who seeks the Holy Grail) is a mother’s son with no father on the side
of innocence and happiness, but after he is educated, he becomes ‘phallicized’ and falls
prey to the law which is ‘anti-pleasure’ (1994: 135). One’s path in life and participation
in either or both economies is not determined by anatomical sex but is determined
by history, by ‘the cultural schema and the way the individual negotiates with these
schema . . . adapts to them and reproduces them, or else . . . goes beyond them’ (1994:
135). In many respects, Nietzsche and Sartre were two archetypal Percevals, raised by
feminine hands on the side of ‘innocence and happiness’, ‘phallicized’ by institutions
and male violence, but eventually negotiating a path out of this. In philosophical terms,
this is represented through their proposed economy of the gift. In his ‘Essai sur le
don’, Sartre very much anticipates Cixous (and Derrida) in his distinction between
authentic giving and the subjugating gift where the former ‘presupposes a reciprocity
of recognition’ (NE 369) in contrast to the Potlatch ceremony which involves debt and
the alienation of freedom bound up with proprietorship or mastery and other where
‘[t]he act of gift-giving installs my freedom in the other as a subjective limit to the
other’s freedom’ (NE 376). Sartre extends his notion of deep recognition to love where
‘[t]he ego exists to lose itself. It is the gift’ (NE 418). Love is not an appropriation but an
unveiling or creating: ‘In pure generosity, I assume myself as losing myself, so that the
fragility and finitude of the other exists absolutely as revealed within the world’ (NE
507). As Lacoste (1999: 285) comments, in ‘a tone at once Zen and Derridean’, here
Sartre is ‘deconstructing himself, three decades before Jacques Derrida would begin his
own deconstruction’. He did not return to the themes of gifting and authentic love until
the interviews of the 1970s, but in Saint Genet he gives a strong Cixousian conception
of love that involves a total acceptance of the loved one, including the most contingent
dimensions of the body. Genet loves Decarnin unprovisionally in even the body lice
he receives from him. ‘[O]ne loves nothing, if one does not love everything’ (SG 532)
since love is ‘the acceptance of the total person, including his viscera’ (in 1999: 286).
In understanding Sartre, Lacoste (1999: 273) and Boulé (2005: 196) both make a
strong connection between bios and mind, between the personal and political. In the
interviews that took place with Beauvoir in 1974, Sartre mentions his fear of abandon
(to his body and to others) throughout his life and how he tried to exorcize this through
aggressive war games that symbolized mastery over the external world. ‘Appropriating
 
Lebensphilosophie 195

women’ represented a magical means of forgetting about his own perceived ugliness
and recapturing feelings he had long suppressed like tenderness.34 In confronting his
‘neurosis’ and fear of abandon to the women in his relationships, he admits that he
performed the active, objective part of the act but left out the passive, subjective aspect
that would have involved self-abandon and jouissance. This led to a coupure or split
between what he would give and receive since he was pure activity, ‘the active principle’
(1981b: 400, 415). For Lacoste (1999: 282), this mirrors the masculine economy of
Being and Nothingness where Sartre expresses his fear of self-abandon, of receptivity, of
jouissance and of openness to the other by the creation of two antagonistic categories,
the in-itself, ‘which like Cixous’ apple is, is, is’, and the for-itself, which, like Cixous’ law,
‘is abstract and is not’.35
In Boulé’s (2005: 198) view, Sartre’s progression beyond a divided masculine and
feminine side occurred in the 1970s when, due to his blindness and the fact that he
was no longer able to write, he began a process of psychic and social reintegration of
his self, replacing the divided and split selves he had inhabited with a more inclusive
sense of self that involves ‘the closer relationship to the m/other, the body and hence to
love’ (Cixous 1986: 17). A key factor in this transition was his intellectual partnership
with Lévy, a collaboration that split Sartre from his ‘family’ at Les Temps Modernes,
including, of course, Beauvoir. As the Beauvoir interviews took place, Sartre soon
became occupied fully with the Lévy interviews because they were not primarily
about his past life as the Beauvoir interviews were but about his future philosophical
orientation and the formulation of a new social philosophy that he had been grappling
with for several years. The Beauvoir interviews can be seen in many respects as
a domesticated construction of Sartre as a thinker for whom nothing had really
changed in the topography of his thought from his early days, yielding no ‘unexpected
revelations’ (1984: 163).36 Sartre’s ability to form an intimate relation with a man (Lévy),
based not on violence but on partnership and reciprocity, allowed him to experience
those things he had relegated to a footnote in Being and Nothingness, such as maternal
love, pity and kindness. It was not until May 1968 and his collaboration with Lévy
that he was able to finally experience the solidarity and fraternity that he longed for
which was vitalizing for Sartre. They both criticize and modify each other, helping to
shed their ‘grandiose selves’ in a dialogue of mutual support. He defines their work
as ‘plural thought’, revealing a transformed Sartre open to criticism, negotiation and
critical reflexivity.37 This transition is reflected in his shift in the idea of violence. In
the notion of an ‘authentic appeal’ that reaches consciously beyond all inequalities
‘toward a human world where any appeal of anyone to anyone will always be possible’
(NE 285), Sartre does not legitimize the violence of the slave and views it as a dead end
(NE 399–404). In the Critique, however, he turns away from the feminine economy in
the essential role he gives to violence. He finds solidarity in the notion of fraternity but
views the ‘links of reciprocity’ in the ‘fraternity’ of the fusing group as ambivalent and
unstable in that it is only a ‘resemblant solidarity’ (CDR 437). The notion of ‘fraternity’
in the Critique, as Lacoste (1999: 290) comments, is ‘violent through and through’, a
union in violence based on the initial violence against those perceived as oppressors.
Discussing the Algerian war of independence, for instance, Sartre argues, ‘the only
possible way out was to confront the total negation with total negation, violence
196 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

with equal violence’ (CDR 733). The ‘violence of the rebel’ was ‘the violence of the
colonialist’ (CDR 433), a message he reinforced even stronger in his preface to Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth.
In his later thinking, however, Sartre reconfigures the notion of fraternity as no
longer the ‘fraternity-terror’ of the Critique but as ‘necessarily linked to and often is
even engendered by the presence of another’ (HN 71). To consider ourselves as a ‘self
for the other’ (HN 71) means positing transparency as a new intersubjective ideal. This
is a ‘feeling’ for the gift, for a notion of ‘open’ fraternity that extends beyond closed
groups to include all of humanity. He articulates (against Lévy’s pressing) a new ideal
of non-violence and fraternity based on the birth from a common Mother (HN 87) or
‘le matriciel’ (mother-matrix). He tells Lévy that woman has ‘the womb that gives life,
the breasts that nourish and the back that carries’, establishing a relationship where
‘the motivations for an act come from the affective realm’ (HN 89).38 In an interview in
1965, he aligns himself openly with a feminine economy of thinking: ‘But when the day
comes, of course, the special qualities of [sensitivity] for which I prefer the company
of women will be due purely to chance . . . They’ll cease to be a feminine prerogative.’39
Ten years later, he tells Beauvoir that there was a sort of woman inside him (1976a:
116). In his final years, he fulfils the project articulated in Notebooks for an Ethics in
1947–8 of ‘getting rid of one’s ego’, reaffirming and reinforcing the notion of reciprocal
giving: ‘Tenderness one receives, tenderness one gives, the two are linked and there
exists only a general tenderness, both given and received’ (1977b: 81).
As was the case with Nietzsche, the trajectory of Sartre’s thinking gravitates towards
the feminine within a deconstructive logic of inversion and displacement that follows
the ‘dialectical development . . . [of] the feminine and masculine poles of the world’
(BN 779). As Lacoste (1999: 292) argues, Sartre’s last personal philosophy belongs to
an economy that aims at gender-free distinctions (active and passive/masculine and
feminine) where abandon is deconstructed and where it is ‘not negative, not mindless,
nor even passive’ but a positive form of ‘de-selfing’. To avoid essentialism, Sartre’s
thinking follows Cixous’ (1994: 197–205) ideal of bisexuality or ‘the presence of both
sexes’ within each of us, two economies within an individual. On a personal level,
he follows Nietzsche in identifying himself as androgynous. Referring to Flaubert’s
‘androgynous nature’, he states, ‘I’m certainly androgynous myself, which is not a flaw’
(1979b: 37). In another interview (1977b), he attributes sensitivity and subjectivity to
women and rationality and objectivity to men but states that there are some ‘men-
women’ (homes-femmes) who have more subjectivity, a point of androgyny with which
he himself identifies: ‘I was to have the sex of angels, indeterminate but feminine
around the edges’ (in Hayman 1986: 23). Despite his professed ugliness, he views
himself as an ‘homme-femme’ and declares his attraction for androgyny in men, that is,
those who have not split their masculine and feminine sides.40

Playful pianists
Everything seems dead to me when I don’t hear music.
(Nietzsche, KSB 1.238)
 
Lebensphilosophie 197

Accounts of Nietzsche and Sartre often exclude or marginalize their deepest love –
music, the province of the female Muses Euterpe, Erato and Terpsichore – and one
that embodies the cardinal elements of their existentialist philosophy. The piano
was for both philosophers a meeting place where their aesthetics, pre-reflective
freedom, ethics of play and creation, affective phenomenology and Dionysianism
coalesce, forming a composite chord of harmonic resonances, sonorities and parallel
wavelengths. Moreover, the piano signified a perfect expression of their feminine
sociality, encompassing a type of ‘Racinian love’, ‘sororal Eros’ or ‘amorous disposition’
along the lines of a shared horizon (Noudelmann 2012: 151).41 ‘Making music’,
Nietzsche wrote, ‘is another way of making children’ (WP 421). Reading The Birth
of Tragedy and Nausea, we might say that the idea of salvation through music is the
most dreamily metaphysical or starry-eyed that Nietzsche and Sartre ever get in their
terrestrial philosophizing.

Nietzsche, the aspiring composer

Without music, life would be a mistake.
(Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 1.33)

In a letter to his friend Erwin Rohde following a Wagner concert in Mannheim in 1871,
Nietzsche declared, ‘[e]verything that . . . cannot be understood in relation to music
engenders . . . downright aversion and disgust in me’ (KSB 3.257). He began his study
of the piano aged nine and soon developed a passion for Bach, Haydn and Mozart.
In 1857, he began to compose music, encouraged by his mother who passed on her
skill and arranged for piano lessons. In 1861, at Pforta, he started to experiment in
his musical tastes, leaving Beethoven and Haydn to one side and becoming entranced
with the music of Schumann. He also at this time embarked on an intense spree of
composition, including a piece he entitled ‘Satan rises out of Hell’, which he eventually
abandoned for not being able ‘to strike the exact Satanic tone’ (KGW 1.3.3).42 In 1874,
he wrote a piano piece for four hands Hymn to Friendship that he adapted to Salomé’s
poem Prayer for Life in 1882, an intimate expression of their love which they could play
together without Paul Rée sitting between them. His childhood friend Paul Deussen
described how, when taken by a guide in Cologne to a brothel (instead of his request
for a restaurant), Nietzsche confessed to him in a letter that he was ‘speechless’ when
surrounded ‘by a half dozen apparitions in tinsel’, whereupon he went instinctively
to the piano and struck several chords before hurrying outside. In line with this, in
1877 he devised a hierarchy of things according to the pleasure they afforded with
musical improvisation at the pinnacle followed by Wagnerian music and then lust.
Losing himself to the world and his playing, he would play piano for hours on end,
experiencing a sustained form of rapture in which ‘[e]very fibre and nerve of my
being is tingling’ (KSB 2.332).43 He had strong aspirations to become a professional
composer that was mortally deflated when in 1872 he sent his Manfred Meditation to
Hans von Bülow who was far from impressed, stating that ‘you persistently defy every
198 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

rule of tonal connection’ and display ‘a frenzied imagination’.44 Nietzsche’s playing, as

Noudelmann (2012: 54) remarks, was akin to his writing – ‘powerful’, ‘brutal’, ‘sweeping
and polyphonic’, letting the piano resonate fully and sonorously.
Although he was infatuated for a period by Wagner and Bizet, Chopin was Nietzsche’s
firm companion, a composer he never denied his passion for. He listened to Chopin’s
Barcarole over and over again, associating it with his love for Italy and Mediterranean
culture. He connected his own Polish origins to Chopin’s ‘princely nobility’, imagining
himself as a brother to the composer. One of his youthful compositions, a Mazurka,
reproduces many elements of Chopin’s Mazurka op.7, no.1.45 Wagner was at first the
great redeemer who embodied the Romantic aspect of Schopenhauerian ‘great art’, but
Nietzsche eventually tired of him and, as his estimation of Wagner deteriorated, he
reached the point where he had nothing but deep contempt for Wagnerian theatre.
Expecting an art of cultural regeneration, on visiting Bayreuth in 1876, he found instead
an extortionate, soulless circus with Wagner in the middle as the great showman and
egomaniac: ‘It was not just that the complete indifference and illusion of the Wagnerian
“ideal” was palpably evident to me at that time . . . the pitiful assemblage of patrons and
little patronesses. . . . The entire idle dregs of Europe coming together, and every prince
racing in and out of Wagner’s house as though it were more of a sporting event’ (KSW
14.492). The final straw for Nietzsche was Wagner’s Parsifal, a work that expressed anti-
Semitic sentiment and projected Christian ideals (EH 2.5–6).46
Nietzsche’s approximately seventy works (lieder, symphonies, choral works, piano
pieces) cannot be reduced to a mere hobby divorced from his philosophical writings
but, as Noudelmann (2012: 50) suggests, ‘lie at the very heart of his thinking’. Rhythm
and tempo are key features of his writing (he often referred to his books in terms of
musical scores) and denote a certain style connected to the cycles of life and the flux
of feelings (BGE 28, EH Z3), sometimes slow and cautious (D P5) and sometimes
quick and lively (BGE 213, GS 381). His philosophical conception of music runs in
parallel with the three phases of his thinking. His early work champions the idea of
art as salvation, viewing the ‘Dionysian wisdom’ of music as the highest and most
profound of all artistic expression that articulates the ‘gospel of universal harmony’,
not as religion or morality but as purely aesthetic (BT 22). True art is both token
and salvation of a unified culture, employs myths that unify a people (BT 23, UM
4.8) and conceives tragedy as a means for glimpsing and resolving psychological and
metaphysical realities. After his turn away from Schopenhauer and Wagner towards
naturalism and science in his middle period, he sets art and science in a different order
of priority (D 433), viewing art as a dangerous narcotic (HH 108, 148), as ‘degenerate’
(HH 158) or as a form of deception involving the positing of metaphysical illusions
or falsehoods (HH 220, 222). In turn, he is somewhat more circumspect about
noumenal pronouncements (‘as though the innermost abyss of things were speaking
imperceptibly’ (BT 21)), dismissing the idea that music could ever be objective – ‘we
do not make contact with the “essence of the world in itself ” and only “fancy” that a
colossal power speaks through music’ (HH 10). It is not a ‘direct language of feeling’,
he now states, but merely ‘empty noise’ into which we project memories, associations
and physical responses (HH 216). From The Gay Science onwards, however, in his final
phase of thinking his perspective is more nuanced, establishing a distinction between
 
Lebensphilosophie 199

true art and degraded art (Wagner is presented as a sorcerer in Zarathustra).47 He

returns enthusiastically to his former ideal of art as a means to a new ideal, urging
us to live as a work of art (GS 78, 299) and to pursue an ‘art of life’ (A 56) associated
with overfullness and perfection as a tool for combating asceticism (GM 3.5). In
Zarathustra, he associates artistic creation with procreation and pregnancy (Z 2.2) and
revisits his earlier recognition of music’s special powers, beckoning us to ‘Sing! Speak
no more!’ (Z 3.16.7) and contrasting music’s revelatory disclosure of Dionysian insight
with the regime of words and concepts that obscure the reality of things: ‘Speech is a
beautiful foolery; with it man dances over all things’ (Z 3.13.2).
Central to Nietzsche’s distinction between true and degraded art is the role of
the body, hence the importance of rhythm in his thinking that he describes as the
imposition of form upon the real establishing order in terms of measurable space and
time through a form of compelling (GS 84). He links music and thought in general with
the metaphor of dancing – thinking is ‘being able to dance with the feet, with concepts,
with words’ (TI 8.7). In his physiological conception of art, rapture is the basic aesthetic
state: ‘What is essential in rapture is the feeling of enhancement of force and plenitude’
(TI 9.8).48 Rapture is not an ‘inner feeling’ but, in Heidegger’s words, ‘a mode of the
embodying, attuned stance towards beings as a whole’ (1987: 1:105).49 All art ‘exercises
the power of suggestion over the muscles and senses, which in the artistic temperament
are originally active’ (WP 809). Lying at the very heart of his Dionysian aesthetics and
philosophical thinking, music embodies the quintessential expression of his ethics of
play and pre-reflective freedom: ‘It is the music in our conscience, the dance in our
spirit that makes all the puritanical litanies, all the philistinism and moral sermons
sound so dissonant’ (BGE 216). ‘In relation to music’, he writes, ‘all communication
through words is shameless; the word dilutes and makes stupid’ (WP 810). Music is the
superior language of Nietzsche’s Dionysian imaginary and one he would speak when
words could no longer convey the inner drives of his Lebensphilosophie.

Sartre, the aspiring jazz singer

Sartre’s early writings are honed around the Schopenhauerian claims of art’s redemptive
qualities in a meaningless world full of suffering and pain. In his story Er the Armenian,
Apollo exclaims, ‘[a]n ethics, what foolishness! But guard the desire to create a work
of art’, and yet warns against the aesthete who merely consumes art. Nausea is often
viewed as both a symptom and antidote of the faith in art as an aesthetic cure for an
ontological sickness in which Roquentin can cleanse himself of ‘the sin of existing’
(N 251) and ‘look back on his life without repugnance’ (N 252). This ambivalence
towards aestheticism is repeated in Existentialism Is a Humanism where he defends
existentialism against the charge of aestheticism or l’art pour l’art (which he also
criticizes in What Is Literature? and The Family Idiot) and yet draws a strong parallel
between ethical invention and the creation of works of art as they both originate in the
imagination.50
Sartre had an interest in many of the arts. Alongside his interest in literature and
drama, as early as 1924 he had written an ‘Apologie pour le cinéma’ (EJ 388–404) in
200 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

which he describes the beauty of the union of image and motion in art form: ‘The
film is the poem of modern life’ (EJ 392). He also defends its anti-elitist spirit and its
advocacy of moral values that are often implicit but easily discernible. The Fine Arts
also captured his imagination. He had a lifelong interest in painting and sculpture,
writing essays on studies of Titian, Tintoretto, Mason, Giacometti and Calder and
commented in a letter to Beauvoir that he was thinking of developing a system of
aesthetics based on cinematic art and a theory about the function of image in the arts
(1981: 27). Despite the variety of his interests, however, music was his prime love and
childhood choice:

I resolved to dispense with speech and live through music. . . . Taken in huge
doses, the music would at last begin to work. Like a voodoo drum, the piano would
impose its rhythm on me. The Fantaisie Impromptu would oust my soul, dwell in
me, endow me with an unknown past, a brilliant, deadly future. I was possessed;
the devil had seized me and shaken me like a plum-tree. (W 79)

In Chopin, Sartre shared a favourite composer with Nietzsche. He would play the Polish
composer assiduously, again and again, and ‘steep myself in the passionate melancholy
of Chopin’ (W 80). His mother’s playing of Chopin’s Funeral March moistened his
eyes with tears while her renditions of Chopin’s Ballades would inspire him to act
out his adventures as a child (W 78–9). While at the ENS he gave piano lessons and,
by all accounts, had a fine baritone voice. During the years of his greatest political
interventionism in the late 1960s, he still maintained an almost daily regime of playing
the piano.51 He rarely risked writing his own music down, but he did compose a sonata
in the style of Debussy that he described as a simple private exercise.52Apart from a
preface to René Liebowitz’s The Artist and His Conscience, however, Sartre wrote very
little on the subject of music. In an interview with Obliques-Arts, he expresses his
preference for classical music over the avant-garde, for an art of sounds over an art of
noise. He was not opposed to new creative forms (like serial music and aleatoric music)
but wondered where the beauty lies in such art forms: ‘I no longer know what this new
beauty is; do they even care about it any more?’53
When Sartre poses the question of art’s salvation in Nausea, it is through music
and, more specifically, a jazz song. The ‘sweetish sickness’ of Roquentin’s nausea
abates when he hears a record ‘Some of These Days’ playing in a café. It begins with
a piano intro, which segues into the singer’s warm voice. For the next few minutes,
all is right with Roquentin’s world for he is ‘in the music’ (N 38). Each note in the
melody leads to the next with a necessity that bestows necessity on his existence
too. For once, everything is poised and smooth. His movements flow with ease and
grace as if he were dancing, until the song ends and everything goes to pieces again.
Roquentin’s compulsive listening to ‘Some of These Days’, as Noudelmann (2012: 40)
argues, is a complex and contradictory exercise in which Sartre ‘mixes the search
for a pure essence of music with the supposed impurity of jazz’. The sound of the
saxophone and the musical progression of the notes momentarily quell the nausea he
feels and sublimate his disenchantment. But pure style, pure art and pure form evince
a modernist Kantian logic that goes against both the practice of jazz and Sartre’s
 
Lebensphilosophie 201

own relation to Romantic music. The record of ‘Some of These Days’ privileges the
imagination and enables the scene of a man alone who can project himself into the
role of the musician: ‘And that is where, without doubt, Sartre’s interior theater reveals
itself: The ideal of musical purity dissolves in favor of role-playing’ (2012: 42). The
necessity Sartre describes is not an ontological necessity but a phenomenological one
of constructing fixity for transient forms that is temporally felt and which dissipates
once the record ends. Sartre is viewed by Noudelmann in this light as ‘a jazzman
manqué’ (2012: 42). According to Hayman (1986: 42), the young Sartre dreamt
of being a jazz singer and jazz, ‘the music of the future’ as he once described it, is
the musical genre that best represents freedom-as-praxis for him.54 Jazz functions
within Nausea, first, to espouse Sartre’s opposition to the distinction between high
and vernacular art and, second, as an exotic Other to represent la mentalité primitive
in an increasingly industrialized and depersonalized modern world.55 We may view
this as an extension of the Dionysian in Sartre’s thinking and a connection to the
Nietzschean emphasis on ‘physiological art’ centred on the body, rhythm, affect and
rapture.
For Nietzsche and Sartre, the piano represented a necessity of life, an active
retreat and the singular affirmation of a self who cannot be summarized into History.
Improvising Chopin transported them ‘to worlds without power’, taking them out of
the general linearity of time and loosening their engagement with their own situation,
offering a privileged time for subjectification within an activity of Kinderspiel.56 For
Sartre, playing the piano signified the harmonious fusion of pour-soi and en-soi, a body
of desire and glory without want, remainder or approximation, involving the fluttering
and subtle movement of temporalities. At the piano, the artist becomes one with his
body: ‘the pianist is his hand, and even that he is entirely in his hand’ (Noudelmann
2012: 18). This creates a sensual dialogue ‘between the ivory shelf and the cushion
of the skin’, revealing chiasmic and recursive effects where, by touching the keys, the
performer is in turn touched, ‘unleashing a sound that enters him’. Rhythm creates
movement and engagement, a corporeal scene in which the body is engaged to move,
vibrate and perform as a musical organism ‘mixed together with the musical materiality
in a flowing reciprocity’ (2012; 136, 140).
In sketching out the subjective scene of their emotions and feelings at the piano,
their playing became an expression of the Dionysian freedom their work argued
passionately for. As Barthes observed, music facilitates ‘the freedom to be delirious
(mainomai: I am lost, I am in love)’,57 a form of pre-reflective praxis that is not a
psychotic delirium but one which allows one to follow one’s unchartered paths. For
Nietzsche, the piano became his last means of communication and subjectification
as he wandered ever further down the path of mute insanity in his final years. After
being committed to a psychiatric clinic in Jena, he spoke rarely but still played every
day, improvising and performing on the upright piano in the cafeteria. On visiting
him in 1890, his friend Peter Gast was taken aback with the contrast between the
loquaciousness and precision of his piano playing and the vague sparseness of his
words: ‘Not one wrong note! Interweaving tones of Tristan-like sensitivity . . .
Beethoven-like profundity and jubilant songs rising above it. Then again reveries and
dreams.’58
202 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Madness and epiphany: Turin and Billancourt

Ah give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at last believe in
myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me
with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling
figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may only come to
believe in myself!
(Nietzsche, Daybreak 14)

As Howells (2011: 20–1) complains, theories of modern philosophy tend not to focus
on the subject’s disintegration, weakness and ultimate dissolution in ‘the radical alterity
of death’. Conceptions of subjectivity that manifest the vulnerability and fragility of
the subject are demoted in favour of those that express autonomy, rationality and
transcendence. In this section, I look at the final years of Nietzsche and Sartre and how
these have been perceived by some scholars as aberrations or ‘breakdowns’ in their
thinking, symbolized dramatically by Nietzsche’s ‘Turin Event’ of 1889 and Sartre’s
‘Billancourt Episode’ of 1970. Against this standard view, I argue for the importance of
their final years as exemplifying key elements of their living philosophy and providing
a window into the nuances and evolution of their thinking.

Nietzsche’s mysterious madness

There is a certain mystery and mystique that surrounds Nietzsche’s madness and some
disagreement as to what caused it. Was it congenital encephalitis, acquired syphilis, a
flight of the untrammelled imagination, a social conduct or mask, a performative self-
configuration or just, as Salomé suggested, the Dionysian terminus of self-dispersal
towards which his Lebensphilosphie was always bound? Was it, one could additionally
ask, a desperate affliction or a saintly gift? A descent into the bowels of despair or an
ascent into the mystic? Pharmakon, both disease and cure? Or, simply, all these things
in combination, embodying an intersectional manifestation of the three ecologies of
the decentred self working together to a point of disintegration? Ironically, in Twilight
of the Idols Nietzsche had roundly condemned the invalid he became: ‘Society should
only have a profound contempt for the man who survives like a vegetable in cowardly
dependence on doctors and medicine after he has lost the meaning of his life, the right
to live’ (TI 9.36). Yet it was only as a ‘vegetable’ and ‘museum exhibit’ of Elisabeth after
the onset of insanity in the 1890s that Nietzsche finally began to achieve the literary
fame and renown he had craved for in his earlier, ‘fully sentient’ years.
Nietzsche’s psychological and physiological infirmity ran from a young age
when, as a sickly child, he was prone to chronic headaches and eye pain. There
was always a strong connection between his physical condition, mental health and
social environment. When, after the death of his grandfather in 1859, he fell ill and
spent long periods in the school infirmary, those around him wondered whether
there might be a ‘psychogenic dimension’ to his illness.59 His family and friends
 
Lebensphilosophie 203

often expressed doubts about his insanity in regard to both his writing and his
personal behaviour. In 1877, an entry in Ida Overbeck’s diary records how his sister
lists a few reasons ‘that would probably land her brother in a mental institution’.
In Bayreuth, Nietzsche’s doctor, Eiser, suggested that his most recent writings
indicated ‘the onset of the softening of the brain’.60 Two years later, after a violent
and sustained migraine attack in Basel which led to his release from the university
on a pension, he conducted what he referred to as ‘a daily battle against headache’,
suffering a ‘laughable diversity’ of ailments. A few years later, he visited Gottfried
Keller in Zurich who declared, ‘I think that this fellow is crazy’. After an onslaught
of depression in 1888, Nietzsche felt the same depths of melancholia (that would
afflict Sartre in the 1930s), lamenting, ‘[t]here are nights in which I can no longer
endure myself ’ (KSB 8.231). Along with the lows, however, he also felt the highs,
feeling intense periods of sudden euphoria, often dancing naked in his room (as
his landlady reported), singing and making ‘strange noises’, wandering into distant
futures and ‘into hotter souths than any artist ever dreamed of; there, where dancing
gods are ashamed of all clothing’ (Z 3.12.2).
On 3 January 1889, Nietzsche left his apartment and caught sight of a carriage
driver beating his horse on the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin. Weeping, he threw
himself around the horse’s neck to protect it and collapsed in compassion with the
animal. Soon after, he was taken to a psychiatric unit and diagnosed with ‘paralysis
progressiva’. At the clinic in Jena, he suffered delusions of grandeur believing himself
to be the Duke of Cumberland or the Kaiser. He spoke only to the other patients in
French and engaged in periodic bouts of violence, smashing windows and throwing
objects.61 In early 1890, his friend Gast went for long walks with Nietzsche whom he
suspected did not want to be cured: ‘it seemed – horrible though this is – as if Nietzsche
were merely feigning madness, as if he were glad for it to have ended this way.’ This
tallies with Franz Overbeck’s impression who, after spending time with Nietzsche,
wrote, ‘I cannot escape the ghastly suspicion . . . that his madness is simulated.’62
Those who visited him during the 1890s tell of his physical degeneration and laconic
utterances but commented on ‘the power of his glance’ (Gabriele Reuter) and the
‘unfathomable exultation’ (Rudolf Steiner) of his facial expression.63 Salomé recorded
that, during his period of madness, ‘his physiognomy, his entire exterior, appeared to
be most characteristically formed’ (1988: 9). When Horneffer visited Nietzsche in the
final months of his life, he described him in beatific terms: ‘Although his eyes were
vacant and his features slack, and although the poor man lay there with crooked limbs,
more helpless than a child, a sense of magic radiated from his personality, and his
appearance revealed a majesty that I would never experience again with any human
being.’64
In Safranski’s (2003: 318–19) view, throughout his adult life Nietzsche had dared
to conceive the inconceivable and ‘fell victim to the colossal dimensions of life’. His
Lebensphilosophie was ‘a departure to far-off shores’, signalling ‘a plethora of forms,
a wealth of invention, and an ocean of possibilities so incalculable and adventurous
that no “beyond” would be required’. This was a culmination of a process of Dionysian
dispersal that brings both great terror and joy (BT 2). As Nietzsche describes the realm
of the Dionysian in his notebooks:
204 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

[It is] a drive towards unity, reaching beyond personality, the quotidian, society,
reality, across the chasm of transitoriness: an impassioned and painful overflowing
into darker, fuller, more buoyant states; an ecstatic affirmation of the totality of
life as what remains constant – not less potent, not less ecstatic – throughout all
fluctuation; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and distress which blesses and
endorses even the ghastliest, the most questionable elements in life; the eternal
will for regeneration, fruitfulness, recurrence; the awareness that creation and
destruction are inseparable. (WP 1050)

Of course, as he debunked and profaned the idea of reason throughout his writings, it
is little surprise that he should succumb to its antipode. Madness was signalled in his
writings as fault lines that become ever more and more pronounced in his undertaking
as ‘the last disciple of Dionysus’ (TI 10.5). Like the naked Nietzsche cavorting in his
room, Zarathustra walks like a dancer (Z P2) and ‘must yet become a child and without
shame’ (Z 2.22). Reverence for the body and earth makes naked Dionysus the ideal of a
being without shame (BGE 295) since the gods require other masks than clothes (BGE
40, GS 77). It is dance that prevents the ‘spirit of gravity’ (Z 2.10), and Dionysus is the
dancing god. In madness, as in dance, one has the sense of being possessed by a higher
power in order to throw off the yoke of custom (D 14). As the sine qua non for moral
evolution, madness produces innovation and creativity where moral innovators had
to feign madness or induce it by means of asceticism. To project his saintly persona,
Nietzsche follows the path of the Jewish prophets, the medicine man of the Indians,
the Christian saints, the Greenland angekok and the Brazilian Pajee who created new
moral ideals through ‘ecstasy or mental derangements’ (D 14). In a note of 1882/3,
he foretells all signs of the Übermensch will appear as signs of madness or illness to
the human herd (KSW 10.217): ‘Where is the madness, with which you should be
cleansed? Behold, I teach you the Superman: he is the lightning, he is this madness!’
(Z P3). Those who cannot stand their ground above the law and moral conformity
must find another law or seek refuge in insanity (D 14). Nietzsche associates madness
with far-reaching insights, such as ‘the madman with the lantern’ (GS 125) who casts
light on things others don’t see and madness as the serum ‘with which you must be
inoculated’ (ZP 3) to protect against the incursion of social norms. However, he views
madness as manifesting in different forms since social norms carry their own force
of madness, warning us to protect against the insanity of groups who have deviated
from health and alignment to the world as will to power (BGE 156). Similarly, he urges
us to guard against the ‘madhouse air’ of those whose shepherd is the ascetic priest
(GM 3.14) and those whose ‘bad conscience’ leads them to posit a transcendent god as
their judge and executioner of their guilt (GM 2.22). Zarathustra also preaches against
the madness of pessimism and nihilism conceived as an end state rather than as a
transitional phase (Z 2.20).
As evidenced by Nietzsche’s sporadic fits of violence in his final years where, along
with smashing the odd window he would also kick the odd dog while out walking with
Franziska, his madness also bore some terror presaged in his final works and notes
of the late 1880s as his aristocratic radicalism took firm hold. Klossowski (1997: 256,
234) reads Nietzsche’s final writings in the light of a new revolutionary ‘grand politics’
 
Lebensphilosophie 205

modelled in part on the violence of the French Revolution which would ‘break the
history of humanity into two’. Extolling the virtues of war and revolution that he had
spoken disparagingly of in his middle period, he proposed heavy artillery, dynamite
and explosive terror. In a letter to August Strindberg in December 1888, he declared,
‘I mean to have the young emperor shot’, and to Overbeck in 1889 he extended this to
haters of the Jewish people: ‘I am just having all anti-semites shot’ (1969: 344, 346).
His demand for the Übermensch may be seen in this light as a form of self-conquest in
which his madness and delusions made him solipsistic enough to identify humanity
with the part of himself that he wanted to conquer. It was, of course, Nietzsche’s
journeying to the other side of reason and the subversive Dionysian wisdom and
terror that his writings contained that were later celebrated by Bataille and Deleuze
and taken up in earnest as a subject of inquiry by Foucault (Madness and Civilization)
and Derrida (Writing and Difference).

Sartre’s crabs
Sartre’s madness is less documented and was less dramatic than Nietzsche’s, but a
certain imprint of insanity and melancholia and a flight towards imagination were
regular elements of his Lebensphilosophie. Grabbed by the voodoo music at a young
age (W 79), Sartre always held a deep fascination for Dionysian experience from his
early intellectual interest in mystics like Teresa de Avila to his later admiration for the
bodily rapture and intoxication of African spirituality. As a boy, he felt more at home
among his books than in the big wide world: ‘I found ideas more real than things’ (W
34). He was wrapped not in the serious world of adults but in the imaginary world of
the swashbuckling heroes of the comic books he read that fed his fertile imagination:
‘Everything took place in my head; an imaginary child, I projected myself through the
imagination’ (W 71). He also recounts his childhood fears – ‘I was afraid of water, of
crabs, and of trees’ (W 96) – three things of the world outside that would reappear as
grotesque recurring elements in his novels, plays and psychological infirmities. He was
always in danger of sliding into the world of the imaginary in a heroic flight against
the world. He relates that, when aged nine, he was beset by a certain schizophrenia
that created a divided self within him: ‘It began with an anonymous flow of chatter in
my head. . . . I thought I had two voices; one – which hardly belonged to me and was
not dependent on my will – was dictating to the other what to say. I decided that I was
dual’ (W 136).
With lack of success as a writer and disenchantment with his job as a teacher,
deep depression took hold of Sartre in his twenties. Boulé (2005: 77) attributes the
catalyst for this to have been his conscription for military service in the meteorological
corps at Tours from 1929 to 1931 when he recorded: ‘I know that the same thought
will recur, the same hope and despair and all the schizophrenic fabrications which
I notice I’m trusting more and more. Thus I sink into the condition of all who are
sequestered’ (1983a: 33). This fed into his private life where he felt himself catapulting
towards delirium, describing his relationship with Olga Kosakiewicz as ‘passion
and madness’ in which he was transformed from a pitiable neurotic into a dramatic
206 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

buffoon. Fascinated by the anomalies of perception which he was analysing in his

study on the imagination, in 1935 he asked his friend Dr Daniel Lagache to inject
him with mescaline, an experiment that would have a long-lasting effect on the young
philosopher, both philosophically and psychologically. After the injection, he lay down
on a bed in a barely lit room while, as Beauvoir (1983: 209) recorded, ‘just past the
corner of his eye, swarmed crabs’. The hallucinatory patterns did not pass and Sartre
mentions in a letter to Louise Védrine in August 1939 of being in fear when swimming
alone of the Beast who lives under the water. In the aftermath of his psychedelic
experiment, Sartre never quite saw the world in the same way again. He told Gerassi
decades later that, for days after, he saw crabs in the street ‘trotting along behind him’: ‘I
started seeing crabs around me all the time. They followed me in the streets, into class
. . . and they would be there, around my desk, absolutely still, until the bell rang’ (2009:
62–3). It was only writing and socializing with his friends that ‘protected him from
[these] crabs and similar monsters’ (1983: 211).65 His faculties, as Beauvoir (1983: 210)
reported, were distorted for weeks: ‘Houses had leering faces, all eyes and jaws, and he
couldn’t help looking at every clockface he passed, expecting it to display the features
of an owl.’ He told her while walking by the Seine in Rouen that he was ‘on the edge
of a chronic hallucinatory psychosis’ but she downplayed this, thinking that his only
madness was thinking he was mad and believing his anxieties and psychoses to be the
result of a deep emotional malaise in which he was unable to confront growing into full
adulthood and manhood.66
Unsurprisingly, the subject of madness and psychological bewitchment surfaced in
Sartre’s writings around this period. Crabs emerge twice in Nausea, firstly in Roquentin’s
sexual encounter with the restaurant proprietor. When he is caressing her thigh, he
begins to dream and suddenly finds himself in a garden full of insects and ‘even more
horrible animals’ which ‘were walking sideways with crab-like legs’ (N 89). After that,
he is wandering by the docks and looks down at the water to see a cork floating on the
speckled surface. He wonders ‘what could be under the water? . . . A monster? A huge
carapace, half embedded in the mud? A dozen pairs of claws slowly furrow the slime.
The monster raises itself a little, every now and then’ (N 116). Crustaceans reappear
in his last original play The Condemned of Altona in which the protagonist is hauled
before a condemnatory court of crabs as creatures of the thirtieth century who are
aware of the entire history of humanity.67 Also in the late 1930s, in The Wall (Le Mur), a
collection of five short stories published in 1939, Sartre directly explored the question
of madness in literary form. In the third story, The Room, Monsieur and Madame
Dabedat think that their son-in-law Pierre is insane and should be placed in an asylum.
However, their daughter Eve accepts her husband in his deteriorating condition and
seeks to accommodate and understand his delirium in contrast to those who want to
lock his madness away. Sartre shows in this short story, as Vasey (2020: 432) points out,
how the madman’s abnormality is but a manifestation of our contingency: ‘we are not
all the same, we are not all normal, but we all experience the burden of being ourselves
nonetheless. To be rid of him is to be rid of a window into our contingency.’
Sartre pursued this further in philosophical form in The Imaginary (1940) where
he sets about effacing the strict Cartesian boundaries of madness and reason. The act
of imagination, he argues, ‘is a magical act’ (IM 125). Imagination and perception are
 
Lebensphilosophie 207

‘the two great irreducible attitudes of consciousness’ (IM 120) and they are coextensive
– there is no real without the irreal and vice versa. Consciousness in the world is
always ‘pregnant with the imaginary’ and is constantly presented as ‘a surpassing of the
real’ (IM 186). The imaging consciousness is described as ‘magical’ by Sartre as it is a
spontaneous creation of consciousness that does not obey causal laws and, in certain
cases (artistic creation, dreams, madness), it can captivate itself so much that the
real can be completely suspended, transfigured or corrupted. This culminates in the
phenomenon of possession where the imaginary saturates the world in ‘every concrete
and real situation’ through a form of magical hypercaptivation (IM 186). Extreme cases
can fragment consciousness and suspend the real attitude for long periods or even
for the rest of one’s life. For Sartre, hallucinations and visions are like waking dreams
(IM 152) when imaginary consciousness is completely captive to itself (IM 164) and
when one is ‘isolated from the real world, enclosed in the imaginary’. The psyche
becomes a ‘closed consciousness’ that has ‘lost the very notion of reality’ (IM 165),
immersed within a ‘spellbinding fiction’ divorced from the real (IM 175). In madness,
‘the distinction between subjective and objective’ (IM 158) collapses where one enters
a ‘twilight life’ (IM 157) in which ‘spontaneities, wholly unforeseeable and fragmentary
as they are, can be charged little by little with a certain ideo-affective material’ (IM
159). In psychosis, ‘spasms of consciousness’ (IM 154) precipitate a progressive
‘disintegration’ (IM 155) and fragmentation. As Sartre demonstrates, ‘partial systems’
develop to the extreme whereby one’s magical creations take over and persecute the
mind that gave birth to them (IM 155).
In later life, madness revisited Sartre. As his health deteriorated in the 1970s, in the
spring of 1973 on holiday in the South of France, he was beset by symptoms of vascular
dementia, mistaking one person for another and believing that fictional characters were
real like in his childhood. Mirroring symptoms of delusion and confusion displayed by
Nietzsche in the 1890s, his imagination took over as he expected the arrival of Hercule
Poirot and regularly confused Arlette with Beauvoir when they met up in Avignon.68
This was presaged in Sartre’s ‘Turin moment’ of October 1970 when he was scheduled
to appear as a witness in the trial of a Maoist, Alain Geismar, but chose instead to
stand on an oil drum and address workers at a Renault factory in Billancourt in order
to break with the role of the ‘classical intellectual’ and forge a new union between
workers and intellectuals in which the intellectual is not to give advice to the people
but to help the masses take on a new shape (1974c: 66). Like Nietzsche’s event in Turin,
Sartre’s Billancourt incident has splintered perception of their final years, between
those who view these events as catalysts and symptoms of their impending madness
and downward spiral and others who see them as epiphanies of their self-overcoming
and reinvention. There is something quite poignant and powerful about this Renault
episode which, as Cox (2016: 268) notes, represents ‘a key element in the folklore of
the later Sartre, a crucial piece of the Sartre jigsaw’. Was Sartre losing it, becoming a
caricature of himself – the spokesman of a generation standing undignified on an oil
barrel, being ignored in a factory car park? Or was it ‘[a] Socrates moment, maybe even
a Jesus moment’ (2016: 268), a symbolic expression of his spiritual and philosophical
growth? Or even a ‘Zarathustra experience’ whose philosophical imploring in the
marketplace also fell on deaf ears?
208 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

Sartre’s physical deterioration and the ‘philosophical turn’ of his last decade have
been viewed differently by separate factions of the ‘Sartrean family’ and continue to
stimulate debate. The struggle between Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Lou Salomé
for what Nietzsche truly thought as he was still drawing breath in his armchair was
re-enacted in type between the ‘old Sarteans’ (Beauvoir, Lanzmann, Bost and Pouillon)
and ‘New Sartreans’ (Lévy and Arlette) who squabbled over Sartre’s sanity as he sat
there listening. Lévy was appointed as Sartre’s secretary in September 1973, but this was
something Beauvoir would soon regret. She regarded the Lévy interviews (which were
assembled by Lévy as Hope Now in 1991) with horror, calling them the ‘abduction of
an old man’ by his young secretary and countered them with a publication of her own
interviews conducted in 1974 which she included in her last book, Adieux: A Farewell
to Sartre (1984). Despite attempts by the old Sartreans to block its publication, Le
Nouvel Observateur published the interviews as Hope Now in three consecutive weeks.
In Beauvoir’s eyes, Lévy steered Sartre towards Jewish Messianism and was ‘cajoled’
to be dismissive of old Sartrism, rejecting the meaning of literature and political
engagement which had been lifelong Sartrean concerns. Following a decision not to
publish a piece by Lévy and Sartre in Le Nouvel Observateur on the peace movement
in Israel (Beauvoir and Bost persuaded Sartre not to), Lévy stormed out of the meeting
calling Beauvoir and the editors ‘putrefied corpses’ and referring to them disparagingly
from then on as ‘old Sartreans’.69
Against those who believed Sartre’s ‘addled brain’ was being manipulated, the editor
Jean Daniel related how clear-headed and lucid Sartre was just prior to the interviews
and how well he knew the text in his head. Sartre resisted the view of the interviews
as a dynamic of subordination but viewed the interviews as a collaborative project or
co-creative effort representing ‘something new, a thought created by two people’ (HN
73). Nonetheless, he insisted that he maintained control of the ideas they developed,
being the essential voice of the conversation and transforming Lévy’s understanding of
freedom and political equality. Responding to the old Sartreans, Sartre insisted ‘[t]he
itinerary of my thought eludes them all, including Simone de Beauvoir’ (in Solal 1991:
514). One of the charges levelled against Sartre in Hope Now is that his pugnacious spirit
is no longer there. Raymond Aron finds him unrecognizable because he is strangely
reasonable, something he hasn’t encountered in Sartre before – ‘Sartre’s work has never
been sensible’ for he is ‘an excessively delirious man’. Edward Said described Sartre at a
meeting a year before his death where he was largely silent and despondent, ‘a haunted
version of his earlier self ’. In his final months, Jean Pouillon, Sartre’s friend from Les
Temps Modernes, advised Peter Caws not to interview Sartre for he was such ‘a wreck of
his former self ’ that it would be ‘an embarrassment all around’.70 In Boulé’s (2005: 194)
view, however, Sartre’s later period was not the abduction of an old man by a young
pretender but a mark of Sartre’s own transformation into a new kind of intellectual and
self. He has realized he ‘does not have to carry on boxing; he can retire from the ring’. In
his final years, Sartre finally fulfils the project he articulated in Notebooks for an Ethics
of ‘getting rid of one’s ego’.71 Whereas he could simply have rested on his laurels and his
notoriety, he still accepts being challenged past his retirement age, questions himself
and is prepared to change.72 In trying to fix Sartre’s meaning once and for all when he
told Daniel that the new trajectory of his thought had eluded them, it could be more a
 
Lebensphilosophie 209

case that that old Sartreans had become the old guard and his psycho-social evolution
had simply continued to evolve beyond their expectations.73
In the work of his later years, Sartre revisited the question of madness in The Family
Idiot via his analysis of the imaginary which he presents as a complex interplay between
freedom and the unconscious. Analysing Flaubert’s crisis and epileptic seizure at the
Pont-l’Évêque in January 1844 (Nietzsche’s ‘Turin Event’ of 1889?), Sartre construes this
as a form of autosuggestion or ‘Pithiatism’ where the ill bear some sort of responsibility
for their maladies. This illness allowed Flaubert to abandon his law exams and become
an artist. His neurosis was in this sense ‘chosen’ as a purposive manoeuvre: ‘To imagine
is at once to produce an imaginary object and to become imaginary’ (FI 912). As Flynn
(2014: 404) notes, Sartre distinguishes pre-reflective from irreflective consciousness in
this context to arrive at a middle level or dimension between pre-reflective (common
awareness that precedes reflective knowledge) and reflective, introducing a ‘somatic
aspect’ that was present in emotional consciousness in magical bodily incantations that
acts as the operative intentionality of the unthought. Gustave’s understanding

is a silent adjunct to live experience, a familiarity of the subjective experience

with itself, a way of putting components and moments in perspective but
without explanation; it is an obscure grasp of the meaning of a process beyond
its significations. . . . Intermediary between nonthetic consciousness and reflexive
thematization, it is the dawning of a reflection, but when it surges up with its
verbal tools it frequently falsifies what is ‘understood’. (FI 3:429)

In cases of autosuggestion, Sartre writes, ‘it all happens unbeknownst to the pithiatic
subject’, but it must be understood that this unknowingness is not unaware: ‘it is an
intentional unknowingness that is play-acted as the necessary condition of the process.’
In the depths of this reflective intimacy, ‘meditative thought conceals itself and by the
same token senses that it is suffered, that without the body’s docility it would remain
imaginary, that it finds its seriousness and its reality in the way the organism receives it
and by conforming to it, gives it a dimension of nonthought’ (FI 3:628). This is akin to
Nietzsche’s idea of intentionality as ‘[s]omething that does not will and is unconscious’
yet purposive (WP 675).
In line with their philosophy of the pre-reflective, the aesthetic and the performative
self, it is important to embrace the final years (and madness) of Nietzsche and Sartre
as a vital and revelatory window into the evolution of their thinking and the complex,
ambiguous freedom they embraced, displaying the reconfirmation of youthful
impulses, a form of innocent child’s play and a new becoming that enfolded their
contingency. Sartre links his ‘madness’, as Nietzsche did, to a germinal political vision
and creative ethics: ‘What I like about my madness is that it has safeguarded me, from
the very first, against the blandishments of the elite’ (W 158). It is ironic, but also
perhaps inevitable, that the two philosophical/psychological therapists who devoted
their minds to exposing and dissolving the bewitchments of human consciousness in
the form of ‘purifying reflection’ should fall prey to insanity and the wild flight of the
imagination. After all, both philosophers, experimenters for the future, showed how
madness infects groups, as well as individuals, implying not only disintegration and
210 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

dispersal but also freedom and a subversive wisdom. Although Sartre is left out of the
debate around madness, his writings very much inform it. As early as 1939, he displays
a sensitivity to the other side of reason in The Room, a theme, as Hayman (1986: 442)
notes, he presaged in Derrida and Foucault ‘to listen more sympathetically to the
“insane” discourse of those who might formerly have been dismissed as incapable of
communicating with us’. As Sartre remarks in Words, for instance: ‘A madman’s ravings,
for example, are absurd in relation to the situation in which he finds himself, but not in
relation to his madness’ (N 185). Like Derrida, for whom a ‘madness must watch over
thinking’ (1995: 342–5), and for Lacan, for whom ‘madness is the permanent virtuality
of a gap opened up in [our] essence . . . [and] is freedom’s most faithful companion,
following its every move like a shadow’ (2018: 262), and, of course, Nietzsche before
them, Sartre’s writings attest to reverse Cartesian separation and deconstruct the firm
dualistic boundary between reason and madness in search of a sublimating logic.
 Conclusion
Twin ternary thinkers

Revaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination

on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me.
(Nietzsche, Ecce Homo 4.1)

In analysing the Nietzsche–Sartre connection, my conclusion in this book has been

firmly associative. Sartre’s philosophy is unthinkable without its Nietzschean influences
but utilizes, develops and expands those insights significantly, particularly in the area of
intersubjectivity and social ensembles. When we filter out the noise and distortion that
has plagued the broadcasting of their thinking, we find true harmonic resonance between
them right across their philosophy in the areas of the self, ethics, ontology, aesthetics and
even politics. In this study, I have attempted to open up the vault of the Nietzsche–Sartre
connection and survey the objects within, but there are other treasures of comparison to
intrigue that I have left untouched, such as their shared Hebreophilia and their love of
travel (in Italy in particular), more evidence of their pluralist defence of the ‘Otherized’
and their ‘spiritual nomadism’. My hope is that this book will stimulate others to look
more closely at the fecundities of their thinking and find other objects of parallel interest.
As ‘prey for the living’ (BN 706), I have tried to view these parallel philosophers with fresh
eyes (in terms of the ‘New Nietzsche’ and the ‘New Sartre’) in a bid to alter the future
perception of them as well as to rethink the twentieth-century triangulation of Nietz​sche-​
exist​entia​lism-​posts​truct​urali​sm which, through the distortions of Heidegger, Derrida,
Foucault and a cohort of interpreters, has misled many into thinking them as adversaries.
Given the prescience and ingenuity of their thinking, it is easy to label both of these
thinkers as ‘philosophical geniuses’, but if so, then we must follow their own advice and
do so non-metaphysically since both conceive of the genius as much more of a ‘serious
worker’ than divinely inspired. There is, Nietzsche argues, no fundamental difference
between the activity of the genius and that of ‘the inventor of machines, the scholar
of astronomy or history, the master of tactics. . . . Genius too does nothing except
learn first how to lay bricks then how to build. . . . Every activity of man is amazingly
complicated, not only that of the genius: but none is a “miracle”’ (HH 162). Genius is
something we acquire through praxis alone:

Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds
who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put
212 The Parallel Philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche

it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would
boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman which first
learns to construct the parts properly before it ventures to fashion a great whole;
they allowed themselves time for it, because they took more pleasure in making
the little, secondary things well than in the effect of a dazzling whole. (HH 163)

Sartre concurs wholeheartedly on this point, agreeing that genius is as genius does:
‘The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the
series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing’ (EH 32–3). He describes in his
autobiography how his own works are more the result of perspiration than inspiration
as they ‘reek of sweat and effort’ (W 103).
‘Each individual’, according to Sartre, ‘moves History forward by recommencing
it, as well as by prefiguring within himself new beginnings yet to come’ (1974: 166).
Alongside their cultivated genius, I have set out also to expose some of their all-too-
human prejudices, such as Nietzsche’s aristocratism and ressentiment and Sartre’s
residual anthropocentrism/exclusivism, showing that, as Nietzsche said, despite our
spirals of self-overcoming, ‘we remain under the sway of that world we receive as a
legacy from our youth’.1 But breaking through the logic of modernity (even if they
couldn’t completely erase it in their thinking), both philosophers, as ‘posthuman
progenitors’ and ‘inverted Platonists’, supplied a philosophical groundwork for, among
other things, the deconstructed self; a relational ontology of interconnectedness; an
enchanted, magical view of nature as a sympoietic aesthetic assemblage; a pluralist
ethico-political vision that goes beyond the antinomies of modernist thinking in
eliciting vital forms of subjectivity and collectivity; a Dionysian ethic of musical
intoxication and play; a concept of affectivity and vicarious causation; an androgynous
conception of gender; and a deconstructionist method of inversion and displacement.
Prefiguring Derridean deconstruction, their ‘inverted Platonism’ does not exclude
subordinated terms, however, but sublimates them into a ‘mediated’ or ‘modified’
Third, evidenced, for example, in Sartre’s concept of ‘lived experience’ as an amalgam
of ‘unconscious-conscious’. Although Nietzsche disparages the dialectic (TI 2.6, WP
431), he employs a form of non-Hegelian dialectical thinking that Sartre expands and
elucidates brilliantly in the Critique, a ‘decapitated dialectic’ that incorporates openness,
sublimation, contingency and emergence. Embracing ambiguity dialectically without
metaphysical consolations or analytical closure, they confront the problem of freedom
and existential meaning in a contingent universe without extrinsic purpose or design.
Like a dice game, even the origin of those things we take to be necessary (our mental
categories, knowledge, reason) are the products of chance and historical circumstance
(Z 1.16). In Z 1.1 Zarathustra celebrates this contingency. The struggle against the
dragon is for chaos against a fixed order since ‘one must have chaos within one still,
in order to give birth to a dancing star’ (Z P5). And yet, amidst this contingency, both
thinkers impose an existential and ethical imperative. For Nietzsche, humans must be
liberated from chance as from priests (EH 3D2), from the diversion of the aimless and
incidental (D 150, A 58) or from the rule of chance in human evolution (HH 24). Great
culture must will some underlying necessity so that it becomes a willed achievement.
There is an intimate relation between culture and the artist (BGE 62, Z 3.1) such that,
 
Conclusion 213

for instance, Wagner could not have come about by chance (UM 4.5–6). Nietzsche
also views self-overcoming as a necessity not an accident by imposing a single taste or
self-imposed law on the multiplicity of drives (GS 290, GS 277, Z 2.20). In the stage of
higher spiritual liberation, ‘one should replace everything that is contingent-natural in
relation to life with something that is chosen-necessary’ (KSW 8.23, 8.426). Freedom
and necessity are thus not opposites that exclude each other but implicated in one
another as dialectical coordinates. Knowledge of necessity becomes a form of freedom
(Z 3.12.2, BGE 213), allowing us ‘to seize hold of chance by the forelock!’ (BGE 274) and
so avoid the impasses of nihilism.
Viewed from the outside, Nietzsche and Sartre were stuck in the paradox of
meaning that their philosophy laid bare. We are inescapably condemned to meaning
in an objectively meaningless universe. In such a Heraclitean universe of becoming
and passing away and in the quantum reality of dissipative systems without cosmic
or moral purpose, the notion of progress seems a spurious concept since ‘becoming
aims at nothing and achieves nothing’ (WP 12A).2 However, such a ‘view from above’
ignores the phenomenological perspective of the philosopher, the intentional and
existential view ‘from the inside’, and the counter-cry of active nihilism that is the
enduring hallmark of their ethical thinking. Curbed of metaphysical consolations and
idealist illusions, they provide us with an earthly compass to navigate the twenty-first
century and the age of the Anthropocene, responding to our present predicament in
all its contingency by urging humanity on affirmatively ‘as Diogenes did, by walking’
(CDR 806).
Nietzsche defines the true philosopher as a ‘liberator’ (UM 3.1) and it is in this
light that I present Sartre and Nietzsche – as twin thinkers of freedom, but not, of
course, abstract freedom in the metaphysical sense that they relentlessly critiqued in
their terrasophical thinking. In broad terms, both can be characterized as ‘philosopher
doctors’ or ‘spiritual physicians’,3 analysing patterns of thinking and opinions, spiritual
and moral ailments or bewitchments ‘which have so deranged mankind!’ (D 563) and
practising a form of ‘existential psychoanalysis’ directed towards the ‘art and science
of healing’ (D 202). In asking what philosophers have previously lacked, Nietzsche
suggests a three-pronged answer: ‘(a) an historical sense, (b) knowledge of physiology,
(c) a goal in the future’ (WP 408). Along with Sartre’s, his philosophy represents a form
of ‘unveiling’ or demystification, identifying patterns of philosophical befuddlement,
bad faith and asceticism with a view to eliminating them and replacing them with
a creative, playful, terrestrial and aesthetic eudaimonist ethics. In the precarious
posthumanist/transhumanist crossroads of our present time, their parallel thinking
as ‘a totalization of knowledge, a method, a regulative Idea, an offensive weapon, and
a community of language’ (SM 6) is needed as a crucial vector for the future to go
beyond ultra-humanism and the ravages of modernity more than ever. Consigning
them to the nineteenth century, or indeed the twentieth century, is thus a serious
mistake since, as I have set out to demonstrate, they clearly foreshadowed many of the
dominant themes in contemporary posthumanist thinking. As Negri said of Marx, the
same is also true of these two extraordinary existentialists – just as we feel that we are
over them and have got beyond them, we are forever discovering that they were already
there long before us.
214
 Notes

Introduction
1 As Cox (2016: 76) writes: ‘the moustache, for Sartre, became the emblem of the
shallow, self-satisfied, respectable, reactionary middle-class gentleman that he
despised even more than crustaceans.’ According to Burnier, one of Sartre’s self-
professed most successful ventures was to deter a number of young men from growing
moustaches (in Boulé 2005: 89). Roquentin, the protagonist of Nausea, leaves us in no
doubt how he feels about moustaches: ‘The fine gentleman exists Legion of Honour,
exists moustache, that’s all . . . he sees the two pointed ends of a moustache on both
sides of the nose; I do not think therefore am moustache’ (N 147).
2 See Daigle (2009: 57).
3 While at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, for instance, Sartre and Nizan would occasionally
refer to themselves as ‘supermen’. One should also not take at face value Sartre’s oft-
quoted youthful remark about Nietzsche in the Carnets Midi – ‘He is a poet who had
the bad fortune to be taken for a philosopher’ (EJ 471). In Aron’s Mémoires, he reports
that Sartre wrote an essay for one of Brunschvicg’s seminars arguing firmly against
this view that Brunschvicg himself espoused (see Flynn 2014: 28).
4 See Boulé (2005: 53). Boulé points out that Frédéric shares Sartre’s own characteristics
of being a prankster, looking awkward in fashionable clothes and feeling lonely even
as the ‘dominant male’ at the epicentre of his group of friends. Noudelmann (2012:
46) suggests that Richard’s sarcastic treatment from Sartre is a tacit swipe at his
grandfather, Charles Schweitzer, describing, with a ‘flagrant anti-German’ tinge’, for
example, how his ‘arrogance’ comes to the fore when he sings with an exaggerated
movement of the jaw, ‘his lips ferociously revealing his teeth’.
5 See Flynn (2014: 38).
6 See Flynn (2014: 45).
7 There are three other references to Nietzsche in Being and Nothingness. The second
(favourable) reference is to Nietzsche’s ‘become what you are’ which he translates
as ‘become what I was’ (BN 189), the third a casual reference, and the fourth an
identification of the will to power with libido as a ‘psychobiological residue’ (BN 741)
which he translates as volonté de puissance.
8 See Flynn (2014: 200).
9 See Woodward (2011: 42) and Churchill (2013: 47).
10 See also Contat and Rybalka (1981: 1663) and Boulé (2005: 86). I address this more
fully in the next chapter.
11 For Solomon, Sartre is ‘the ultimate individualist’ (1988: 173), and ‘the basic ontology
Sartre accepts is . . . a Cartesian one’ (1988: 179).
216 Notes

12 See Reynolds and Woodward (2011) for a succinct overview of these similarities. This
is a case, as Webber (2018) advises, of ‘rethinking existentialism’ beyond common
misconceptions and distortions.
13 See Ansell-Pearson (2011) who asks this question about Nietzsche and decides that
he is both. Analysing the ‘existential signatures’ in Nietzsche, Bergoffen (2002: 84)
concurs, stating that it should not be conceived as an ‘either/or’ choice.

Chapter 1
1 See Beauvoir (1981:165–6). Nietzsche also expresses an admiration for Stendhal – ‘one
of the most beautiful accidents of my life’ who ‘took away from me the best atheistical
joke that precisely I might have made: “God’s only excuse is that he does not exist”’
(EH 2.3).
2 If, as Flynn notes (2014: 314), these two elements lived in creative tension in Sartre’s
work, the philosophical gene emerged as dominant in his later years after he bid his
farewell to imaginative literature in Words.
3 See Charmé (2020: 258). Heldt (2020: 162–3) describes this process in the framing of
the self as ‘Memorial Totalization’ wherein ‘both aspects of the dialectical relationship
between the subjective and the objective, between the psychic life of the individual
and the world of which it is a part’ are considered. The dynamics of ‘memorial
appropriation’ refers to ‘a particular facet of the unifying and multiplying activity of
(self-)temporalization (and psychic spatialization) . . . [that] remains, in unreflective
lived experience, predominantly non-thetic’. Nietzsche captures mnemotechnics
with the following aphorism, giving full sense to Heldt’s notion of ‘memorial
appropriation’: ‘“I have done that”, says my memory. “I cannot have done that”, says
my pride, and remains adamant. At last – memory yields’ (BGE 68).
4 See Davis (2011: 140), Boulé (2005: 86) and Contat and Rybalka (1981: 1663) who
warn against assimilating Sartre directly to his literary characters.
5 See Solomon (2003: 407) for a good account of Nietzsche’s ad hominem method.
6 Sartre also recognizes the merits of the aphoristic or notebook form, which of course
he utilized in his War Diaries and his Notebooks from Youth: ‘this free and fragmented
form isn’t subject to prior ideas, you write each thing according to the moment and
only take stock when you want to’ (1983: 14).
7 As Catalano notes (2010: 203), in spite of Sartre’s insistence in The Family Idiot on the
‘Universal Singular’ and the importance of Gustave’s choice in determining his writing
self, he hints in the concluding paragraph that a proper reading of the text will show
how it was the ‘objective spirit’ of art for art’s sake that prompted Flaubert to write
rather than individual predilection or ‘original choice’.
8 See Schrift (1990: 109).
9 See Mueller (2019: 46).
10 Nietzsche and Sartre were both fond of this exercise of overwriting original texts. As a
young boy Sartre would directly base his stories in a plagiaristic way on those he had
just read in comics and adventure books, overwriting odd sections or phrases. Given
La Fontaine’s Fables by his grandfather, he recounts how ‘I decided to rewrite them in
alexandrines’ (W 90) and how making minor alterations to texts ‘enabled me to blend
memory and imagination’ (W 91). Nietzsche took a similar approach to his piano
playing, learning complex pieces by his favourite composers but never reproducing
 
Notes 217

them to the strict edicts of the written score, preferring instead to infuse them with
his own extemporizations.
11 See Woodward (2011: 92).
12 In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche is much more disparaging of his ‘German blood’ and the
‘German spirit’, proposing the word ‘German’ as ‘an international coinage for . . .
psychological depravity’ and as singularly ‘lacking the idea of depth’ (EH 3CW3).
13 Cf. HH 185 ‘The paradoxes of an author. The so-called paradoxes of an author, which
a reader objects to, are often not at all in the author’s book but rather in the reader’s
head’ where he hints at such a sublimating logic.
14 Words is littered with accounts of Sartre’s self-transfigurations enacted through the
regular shifting of perspective: ‘I never stopped creating myself; I was both giver and
gift’ (W 23); ‘Above all, I had to renounce myself ’ (W 102); ‘I have often written them
against myself ’ (W 103); ‘I came to think systematically against myself to the point of
weighing the evidence for an idea by how much I disliked it’ (W 156).
15 Characterizing Sartre as ‘a play of temperamental opposites’, Boulé (2005: 119) cites
the testimony of Perrin, a priest in the Stalag where Sartre was held as a prisoner of
war who described him as a ‘steamroller’ with ‘the milk of human kindness’.
16 Also: ‘I’ve changed like everyone: within a permanence’ (cited in Flynn 2014: 377).
17 Zarathustra is often considered as a ‘transitional’ or ‘bridge’ text that links the middle
texts to the late ones.
18 See Schrift (1990: 16).
19 See, for instance, Verkerk (2020: 11).
20 See, for instance, Betschart (2016), Boulé (2005), Lacoste (1999) and Murphy (2020).
21 See, for instance, Cumming (1981), Mirvish (1994), Remley (2020), Heldt (2020) and
O’Shiel (2020).

Chapter 2
1 He speaks dismissively of the fabricated character of The Will to Power, ‘the so-called
major work’ (1987: 3:10) that contains a ‘mixing’ of passages ‘from many different
periods’ (1987: 3:13).
2 According to Beauvoir (1977: 288–9), the one occasion Sartre met Heidegger, Marcel’s
play (La Dimension Florestan which parodied Heidegger) was ‘all they talked about’.
Heidegger was unaccustomed to seeing himself in satire and Sartre politely apologized
on behalf of his compatriot.
3 According to Richmond (2018: xxvii), Heidegger’s influence pervades Being and
Nothingness, though Sartre does not always acknowledge it, citing four main elements
that derive from Heidegger: (i) his Being and Time might have inspired Sartre’s title,
(ii) his deployment of anguish as apprehension of freedom, (iii) his decision to make
nothingness a central philosophical category and (iv) his emphasis on ‘thrownness’,
‘instrumentality’ and authenticity. Kirkpatrick (2017a) and Baugh (2020) argue that
the influence of the three ‘Hs’ (Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl) on Sartre is overemphasized
at the expense of his French influences, such as the French Mystics and French
interpreters of the three ‘Hs’. In support of this second view, it should be noted that,
in a letter to Marcel (1943), Sartre expresses gratitude to Marcel for being the primary
inspiration for his theory of embodied consciousness and idea of ‘situatedness’ (which
are often automatically attributed by scholars to Heidegger’s influence).
218 Notes

4 See Perrin (2020: 264–6).

5 See Burnham (2017: 215) and Perrin (2020: 265–6).
6 See Warren (1991: 34–6) for an elaboration of this point.
7 See Schrift (1996: 336) and Woodward (2011: 337) for a good account of Derrida’s use
of Nietzsche.
8 As Schrift (1990: 14, 17, 52) remarks, Heidegger’s Nietzsche may be more ‘excellent
Heidegger’ than it is ‘good Nietzsche’, involving a wilful dogmatic reading of a text
in accordance with a pre-existing schema of interpretation by ‘overdetermining
Nietzsche’s philosophy as metaphysical’. This is a case of ‘appropriation becoming
expropriation’ that demonstrates the kind of ‘incapacity for philology’ Nietzsche
criticizes in A 52.
9 It is said that Foucault’s editor at Gallimard insisted on the removal of many anti-Sartrean
remarks from the manuscript of The Order of Things before its publication. In riposte to
Foucault, Sartre argued that what Foucault offers is not an archaeology of human thought
but a geology of successive levels: ‘But Foucault doesn’t tell us what would be the most
interesting, namely, how each thought is constructed from these conditions or how men
move from one thought to another. For that he would have to allow praxis and thus
history to intervene, and that is precisely what he refuses to do. To be sure, his perspective
remains historical. He distinguishes epochs, a before and after. But he replaces the movie
with the magic lantern, movement with a succession of immobilities’ (1966: 87).
10 During the 1960s, Sartre exchanged some lively arguments with Lacan concerning
freedom, the self, language and the unconscious (see Sartre 1966). Several
scholars, however, detect a strong Sartrean influence on Lacan’s (early) thinking on
subjectivity – see, for example, Charbonneau (1999) and Richards (2019). Perhaps the
most vitriolic attack on Sartre came from Althusser who wrote in graphic terms in
February 1964: ‘He has to be shaken out of his happy psychosis and only a whip will
do it.’ Referring to Words, Althusser states, ‘when you think that such a theoretical
mess . . . serves as thought – or saves the bother of thinking – for so many men . . .
I can see only the whip across the face as a way to silence him or send him back
to literature’ (1998: 518). In November of the same year, however, he also wrote
‘about Sartre: did I tell you I have always recognized in him an incomparable genius’
(1998: 580).
11 See Howells (1992, 1999), Davis and Davis (2019), Davis (2011), Baugh (1999),
Chambers (2019), Martinot (1999), Sawyer (2015) and Reynolds (2006).
12 He does criticize Sartre, however, for confining this to ‘the “Look”’ in Being and
Nothingness and falling back on a subject/object distinction. Deleuze was also critical
of Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism which he felt repeated Kantian tropes of
humanist and universalist thinking (as did Sartre himself).
13 Cited in Young et al. (2013: 271).
14 See, for instance, Daigle (2009, 2011), Tubert (2018), Richardson (2009), Safranski
(2003), Solomon (2003), Haar (1988) and Megill (1985).
15 As we will see in the next chapter, Sartre’s ‘pre-reflective’ (Being and Nothingness)
or ‘irreflective’ (The Family Idiot) cogito is far removed from the transparency and
detachment of the Cartesian cogito and much closer in nature (though not identical)
to Freud’s Unconscious.
16 See Ally (2017) and Flynn (2014) for a clear analysis of Sartre’s abiding
phenomenological method of doing philosophy.
17 See Tubert (2018: 223–5) for an overview and critique of this view.
 
Notes 219

18 Nietzsche also extends this phenomenological approach in our relation to other

people as a form of analogical introjection or transference into a first-person
perspective: ‘To understand another person, that is, to imitate his feelings in ourselves’
(D 142).
19 This phrase is Merleau-Ponty’s (1968: 69).

Chapter 3
1 According to Gardner (2009: 1), this shows an irresolvable tension in Nietzsche since
‘there is a striking lack of fit between the . . . conception of the self that is presupposed
by his practical philosophy’ and the theoretical self that he dissolves. He posits the self
as a fictive entity while requiring a substantive notion of selfhood for his normative
project. What Gardner misses here is that Nietzsche’s ‘revisionary self ’ (Riccardi 2018:
187) and ‘new version of the soul hypothesis’ are altogether different from the fictive
egoic substantial self that he critiques. Not all conceptions of selfhood are ‘fictive’, for
Nietzsche, although they are emergent, transitory and derivative from pre-reflective
consciousness or ‘herd-consciousness’ as I argue below.
2 See Warnock (1989: 135) and Solomon (2003: 225).
3 See Ure (2015) and Cannon (2013) who view Nietzsche and Sartre primarily as
therapists whose aim is to cure psychological and philosophical bewitchments that
lead to ascetic morality and tropes of bad faith.
4 Cited in Manschot (2021: 30).
5 As Ferrando (2020: 126) notes, Nietzsche’s Lamarckism should not be read
deterministically or metaphysically as an ‘either/or’, for Lamarck posited an internal
force in organisms where individuals in a species ‘willed’ themselves to change. This
connects to the science of ‘epigenetics’ in which the effect of environmental factors on
the genetic make-up of an organism demonstrates the irreducible intra-actions and
intra-changes between things – a ‘link between nature and nurture’.
6 See Manschot (2021: 88).
7 Beauvoir (1984: 288) relates that, as an adult, Sartre felt people were often unfriendly
to him as a result of his ugliness. As he remarked: ‘if you are ugly, then asking the way
to the Rue de Rome means inflicting a disagreeable presence on the person you ask.’
8 See Boulé (2005: 182).
9 See HH 543 where Nietzsche also illustrates such a unity: ‘Embodiment of the spirit.
When a man thinks much and cleverly, not only his face, but also his body takes on a
clever look.’
10 See Howells (2011: 32), Sutton Morris (1999: 84) and Morris (2020: 235).
11 For instance, ‘the truest caress consists in the contact made by the most carnal parts of
the two bodies’ (BN 522), also in The Family Idiot, ‘woman making herself flesh in
order to nourish, nurture, and caress the flesh of her flesh’ (IF 1:47).
12 Howells (2011: 40) quotes Sartre himself who was critical of his own position on the
body in Being and Nothingness, exclaiming in an interview in 1970: ‘It’s incredible:
I really believed it.’
13 As Burnham (2015: 339) notes, Nietzsche thinks of heaviness as a burden that
prevents ascension and flight, like the camel at Z 1.1, and is associated with the
‘spirit of gravity’ (Z 1.7, Z 3.11) characterized by seriousness, deliberation in thought
220 Notes

and action rather than by instinct (TI 6.2). In his middle works, he links heaviness
with adherence to rules or structures imposed externally (moral laws from God or
nature).
14 At Z 2.7, Zarathustra states that the unfulfilled moral feeling of the parent is regularly
acted out by the children: ‘What the father kept silent, that comes in the son to be
spoken and often I found the son to be the father’s unveiled secret.’
15 Although Nietzsche presents individuality as deriving from the herd requirement
to be able to make promises and form a moral conscience in order to follow social
rules, he shows how in older historical times: ‘To be a self and to esteem oneself
according to one’s own weight and measure – that offended taste [in the past] . . .
There is no point on which we have learned to think and feel more differently’ (GS
117).
16 See Charmé (2020: 262).
17 See Martinot (1999: 50).
18 See Solomon (2003: 180).
19 See Solomon (2003: 207) who argues that Nietzsche’s ideas of amor fati and eternal
recurrence of the same are best read not as fatalism but as ‘basically a form of
compatibilism’.
20 Hayman (1982: 28) records how Nietzsche put a handful of lit matches onto his palm
at Pforta in imitation of the Roman soldier, Gaius Mucius Scaevola, who had put his
hand into a fire to demonstrate his indifference to pain. In his time at Pforta, ‘[h]is
desire for self-mastery made him willing to accept a stringent discipline, while his
submissiveness was fortified by fanatical piety’. Safranski (2003: 45) also notes how
Nietzsche practised asceticism on himself. In Leipzig between 1866 and 1868, for
instance, in order to gain mastery over himself, he imposed a strict regime of minimal
sleep, a restricted prescribed diet and long periods of solitude.
21 See Richardson (2020: 187).
22 In Verkerk’s (2020: 93) words, ‘consciousness and the activation of the intellectual
conscience brings Apollonian structure and semblance to the Dionysian will to power
and allows for the human to emerge as a creative being that employs its reflective and
communicative skills to sublimate the drive into something new’.
23 Plank (1998: 375) is one of the few to notice the similarity between the ‘terrible joy’
of the Dionysian and the nausea felt by Roquentin as he loses his individuality and
becomes totally enmeshed in Nature in apprehending the brute existence of the
chestnut tree.
24 Richardson refers to this as ‘self out of multiple parts’ and the ‘self out of enveloping
other’ (2020: 419, 424).
25 See Richardson (2020: 419).
26 See Howells (1979: 1–2).
27 See Flynn (2014: 68).
28 Sartre locates this in the pre-reflective cogito where ‘any conscious existence exists as
the consciousness of existing’ (BN 12).
29 As Solomon (2003: 79) rightly observes, Sartre’s development of emotion as ‘a
different way of eluding a difficulty, a particular way of escape, a special trick’ (STE
25) overlaps with Nietzsche who showed how passions are not just physiological
disturbances but also involve an emotional intelligence and an element of
strategic agency. For Nietzsche, pity is an expression of egoism and fear (HH 103),
magnanimity is cloaked egoism and revenge (GS 49), neighbourly love is a way to
avoid self-reflection rather than a concern for others (Z 1), generosity is motivated
 
Notes 221

by a desire to rule over others (Z 3), humility is ‘timid baseness’ (GM 1.14), a
means to gain moral superiority, and erotic love is a form of possessive greed (GS
14).
30 As Boulé (2005: 113) notes, Sartre himself was apt (along with others) to over-
rationalize his self and his work. When he submitted himself to a Rorschach test in
1960, he was surprised to find out that, according to Denise Pouillon, it revealed a
creativity springing from affects rather than from logic or rational reflection. ‘[I]t was
obvious’, she recorded, ‘that for Sartre emotions were not a temporary state but the
very fabric of his life.’
31 As Burnham (2015: 8–9) notes, despite his valorization of play, Nietzsche is
ambivalent about acting. The actor is often used pejoratively as vain and fake (UM
1.10) or as a sorcerer (Wagner in Z4 5.2). He bemoans the use of actors in the Greek
chorus to represent mythic figures (BT 5, 12) and views acting as forming a pretence
that is bred in certain classes or groups as a requirement of constant adaptation (D
306, GS 356). However, Nietzsche praises Odysseus’ self-possession by wearing masks
without having any faith in them (D 306), and, of course, he identifies himself with
Dionysus, the god of masks. Nietzsche’s pejorative remarks are directed towards forms
of Schauspiel that involve bad faith or ‘metaphysical consolation’.
32 See Sawyer (2015: 46).
33 Although some read the conclusions of Being and Nothingness as ‘bleak’ and
‘pessimistic’, we misunderstand Sartre if we ignore this progression of his analysis in
which he weaves the ontic facts of our current existence into the more generalized
ontological structures of existence (see Webber 2011: 182). Sartre’s discussion of
interpersonal relations, for instance, cannot be arguing for the pessimistic view that
human interaction is necessarily (ontologically) conflictual but is rather intended to
show that such alienating relationships are inevitable within patterns and projects
of bad faith. Bad faith is endemic in capitalist society but it is contingent and not
necessitated by the basic structures of human existence: ‘bad faith is the corruption
from which authenticity is recovery’ (Webber 2011: 187).
34 Simont (1992: 193) describes Sartre’s ideal of authenticity as one of the ‘aesthetic
attitude’ in which he links generosity and gift-giving to the work of art. According
to Wittmann (2009: 19–20), ‘[o]ne can accuse Sartre of many mistakes, but he
never questioned the connection between art and freedom, which he regarded as
indissoluble’. In Sartre’s aesthetics, art is given a particular function. It points the way
into the future and anticipates something ‘by revealing what a human being can one
day make of himself, of his life or of his work and even of the world’.
35 In Sutton Morris’ (1997) view, Foucault emphasizes conscious self-control and
fashioning more than Sartre whose freedom is more pre-reflective, involving the
conscious relation of self to itself through the writing of diaries and meditational
practices more than the agent engaged practically in the world as a ‘lived body’.
36 See Howells (1992, 1999), Baugh (1999), Sawyer (2015) and Chambers (2019).
37 The poststructuralist advocacy of ‘transgressive practices’ and ‘limit experiences’
echoes the importance given to the experience of ‘extreme’ or ‘boundary’ situations
in existentialist philosophy. ‘In these situations’, as Mitchell (2020: 6, 22) writes,
‘one is no longer be governed by internalized norms and is thus free to invent
oneself ’. Jolted into sharp relief by the dramatic presentation of extreme situations,
authenticity can be attained when one’s experience reveals the pre-reflective self
behind the masks and disguises that no longer function. Authenticity thus cannot
be achieved simply by reflecting deeply on the events of our lives for it involves
222 Notes

the pursuit of, and openness to, exceptional and boundary experiences as well as
a continual awareness of, and resistance to, social and existential structures that
inhibit it.

Chapter 4
1 See Schrift (1995: 257–63).
2 As Woodward (2011: 74) notes, the poststructuralist relation to Hegel is akin to the
one with structuralism – more of a critical transformation than outright rejection,
more ‘post’ Hegel than ‘anti’ Hegel. Reynolds (2006: 165) suggests deconstruction was
perhaps influenced and pre-empted by Merleau-Ponty’s ‘hyper-dialectic’ articulated
in Visible and Invisible (which is similar in turn to Sartre’s ‘decapitated dialectic’ in the
Critique).
3 See Richardson (2020: 367).
4 Nietzsche especially denies being dualism where things are grounded in distinct
ontological realms and ‘the things of the highest value must have another, peculiar
origin – they cannot be derived from this transitory, seductive, deceptive, paltry
world’ (BGE 2). He also rejects both sides of Cartesian duality – there’s no ‘merely
material body’ (as conceived by Descartes) just as there is no incorporeal body.
5 See Siemens (2015: 97–8).
6 In philosophical posthumanism, relata do not precede relations, but relations do not
precede relata either: ‘relata and relations generate out of co-constitutive, embodied,
agential processes, situated in specific spatio-temporal environments’, therefore
neither is primary (Ferrando 2020: 165).
7 To grasp Sartre’s ‘Cartesianism’ in Being and Nothingness, it is essential ab initio
to note the distinction between Cartesian philosophy (the rationalistic analysis of
the structures of individual existence) and the philosophy of Descartes (dualism,
ego-cogitans). Sartre doubtlessly inherited the influence of the former (largely
through the philosophy of his ‘Mentor’, Husserl) but not the latter, and it is perhaps
the failure to recognize this that leads certain scholars to conclude erroneously that
‘Being and Nothingness is actually an essay in Cartesian dualism’ (McCann 2011:
202). If Sartre inherited a Cartesian framework of understanding from Husserl, he
bequeathed a distinctly anti-Cartesian schema, one that is evident even in his early
work.
8 According to Flynn (2014: 317), Sartre’s dialectical thinking begins in his early
phenomenology with his correction of Husserl and Descartes by granting ontological
priority to pre-reflective consciousness above the reflective cogito.
9 For a critical review of this new translation and a list of the ways in which it improves
upon Barnes’ original translation in clarifying Sartre’s philosophy, see Eshleman
(2020b) and van den Hoven (2020).
10 Beauvoir recounted how Sartre was always reluctant to be cornered into sharp
dichotomies when pressed by Aron’s analytic approach into either/or choices – ‘as
there was more imagination than logic in his mental processes, he had his work cut
out’ (1983: 33).
11 Eshleman (2020a: 150) also posits a vertical axis of explanation, consisting of five
different levels of analysis within which Sartre moves seamlessly but unpredictably
– phenomenological, inferential, ontological, epistemological and metaphysical.
 
Notes 223

Phenomenological descriptions supply the evidentiary basis that leads to an

inferential strategy that establish or justify ontological claims that in turn supply onto-
ontological conditions that motivate speculative metaphysics.
12 See Ally (2017: 98).
13 See Eshleman (2011: 43) and Webber (2011: 182).
14 See Ally (2017: 128). Boxing, of course, is an apt metaphor for Sartre. As a young
adult, the ‘masculinist’ Sartre boxed regularly and later he used the theme of boxing
centrally in the Critique to explain the dynamic of the class struggle.
15 See Flynn (2014: 316).
16 See, for instance, Solomon (1988: 173) and Dobson (1993: 186).
17 See Perna (2007: 38) who draws firm parallels between Sartre’s ontology of the group
and Hardt’s and Negri’s (2005) concept of the ‘multitude’.
18 The intermezzo, as Deleuze and Guattari theorize it, is the space of the ampersand,
the conjunctive and ‘included middle’ in which we are able to ‘pass between the
traditional dualisms’ (1987: 277). This consists, as Deleuze writes, of a ‘set of
these enveloping and enveloped intensities, of these individuating and individual
differences which endlessly penetrate each other’ (2004: 327). Rozehgy (2002: 117)
argues that the category of ‘the outside’ and ‘open space’ that circulates in Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s idea of smooth space is rooted firmly in the ontology of Being and
Nothingness in which consciousness must constantly realize its being outside of itself,
both temporally and spatially.
19 See Braidotti (1991: 67) who argues that Deleuze employs a modified dialectic.
Aligning with Sartre’s ‘dialectic with holes’ (NE 449), one might term this a ‘dialectic
with folds’.
20 In The Antichrist, he declares his allegiance towards science and truth against
Christianity which has cleansed our culture of the scientific advances and
understanding of the Ancient world (A 59).
21 It is said that Plato burned the works of Democritus.
22 See Ally (2017: 164, 174).
23 As Ally (2017: 180) notes, this also links Sartrean dialectics to the Niche-Construction
Theory that emphasizes the capacity of organisms to modify their environment (and
thereby natural selection) and act as co-directors of their own and other species’
evolution.
24 Ally (2017: 332) and Farrell Fox (2020: 492–3) are exceptions to this but are suggestive
rather than systematic. Plank (1998) provides an in-depth analysis of the relation
between Nietzsche’s will to power and quantum mechanics in The Quantum Nietzsche.
25 See Zohar (1991: 107).
26 See Zohar (1991: 95, 66) who states in Bose-Einstein condensates the many
parts that make up an ordered system not only behave as a whole but also become a
whole: ‘their identities merge or overlap in a way that they lose their individuality –
like individual voices in a chorus which become “one voice” at certain levels of
vibration or harmony.’
27 Cited in Zohar (1991: 115, 155). Interestingly, Zohar’s (1994: 106) analogical model
for quantum interaction as an emergent collective reality is a free jazz jam session.
Rhoad (2009: 167) argues exactly the same for Sartre’s social ontology, proposing
improvised jazz as illustrative of the intersubjective ethic of Hope Now. Unfortunately,
Zohar is oblivious to Sartre’s dialectical ontology in her brief allusions to his
philosophy, accusing him erroneously of ‘liv[ing] in the shadow of Descartes’ isolated
cogito and Newton’s impenetrable billiard balls’ (1991: 113).
224 Notes

28 This quantum penetration is evident in Sartre’s own ‘twinship transference’ (Boulé

2005: 130) with Beauvoir, who, in Beauvoir’s words, fused together ‘[l]ooking at
the world in unison and sharing its enchantment’ (1983: 259). In his letters to ‘the
beaver’, Sartre describes her variously as ‘my dear little you who are me’ (1983b: 501),
‘my little self ’ (1983b: 169), ‘my little moral consciousness’ (1983b: 180) and ‘little
paragon’ (1983b: 95). He states that ‘[w]hatever I thought, it seemed as though I was
saying it to you or rather that you were thinking it with me’, that ‘[y]ou seem to have a
surer sense of me than I do’ and that ‘I haven’t stopped feeling that there’s an internal
link between us. [. . .] I had the feeling of two consciousnesses melted into one’
(1983b: 417, 157). In his very earliest recollection of fusion, Sartre recalls in his youth
running down the Place du Panthéon with his friends, playing ball and shouting in
glee: ‘I felt like steel, freed at last from the sin of existing . . . I was indispensable’ (W
139).
29 See Mirvish (1996: 65, 69).
30 Just as Sartre devotes much space to his description of the ‘viscous’ in Being and
Nothingness when illustrating the ontological continuity of pour-soi/en-soi, quantum
biologists gave much of their early research to looking at the quantum properties of
‘warm and sticky’ phenomena, such as the brain, yeast cells and bacteria. See Zohar
(1991: 77).
31 Following Haraway, Ferrando (2020: 140–1) prefers the term ‘sympoiesis’ which
unfurls and extends autopoiesis to describe the fundamental exchanges between
organism and environment since no system is self-producing or organizing.
32 According to Randall (2005: 83), the ‘materialization’ of matter occurs like the strings
on a musical instrument. On a subatomic level, matter is not static and fixed but
constantly vibrating, composed of tiny vibrating loops of energy, defined as strings.
As the vibrations of strings produce different sounds, the vibrations of energy strings
produce different kinds of particles and different modes of existence. There are no
fundamental particles or atoms since ‘[e]ach and every particle corresponds to the
vibrations of an underlying string, and the character of those vibrations determines
the particle’s properties. Because of the many ways in which strings can vibrate, a
single string can give rise to many particles.’ This is a musical conception of nature
that resonates sonorously, as we will see in Chapter 7, with Nietzsche’s and Sartre’s
Dionysian and ontogenetic view of art and music.

Chapter 5
1 Cf. Nietzsche – ‘Fundamental thought: the new values must first be created – we
shall not be spared this task!’ (WP 979) and Sartre – ‘You are free, so choose; in other
words, invent’ (EH 28) and ‘What art and ethics have in common is that we have
creation and invention in both cases’ (EH 43).
2 There is a significant field of literature on this topic, but some of the most prominent
advocates are Hatab (1995), Warren (1991), Siemens (2015), Connolly (1988) and
Patton (2015). Additionally, Shapiro (2016), Lemm (2020) and Manschot (2021) give
Nietzsche’s democratic ethos a strong ecological inflection.
3 As Sartre was still working on the study in his later years, it would have been
fascinating to view his analysis of Nietzsche’s ethics in the light of the ‘New Nietzsche’
as presented by the French poststructuralists in the 1960s and 1970s.
 
Notes 225

4 This, it must be said, creates a certain tension in his thinking between his historical
and naturalistic approaches (which we saw at play in his theorization of the self) that
intensifies in his final period where he tends to replace psychological explanations
with physiological ones. Megill (1985: 30), for instance, takes Nietzsche’s morality
to be anti-naturalistic to the extent that ‘for any culture that is sufficiently self-
conscious about its behaviour, the idea of naturalness has become so distant as to be
useless, except as propaganda’. Richardson (2020), by contrast, posits Nietzsche as a
thoroughly naturalistic philosopher. Reading Nietzsche dialectically, we can say that
this opposition is sublimated within his concept of ‘transfigured physis’ (UM 2) as a
‘nature-culture continuum’. As biological organisms we have natural drives but these
are elastic in the sense that they are recursively affected by the cultural forms they take.
5 Richardson (2020: 355) refers to Nietzsche’s value monism as a ‘surprising, more
radical analogue to [his] ontological monism’. In his attack on opposite values, he
denies the opposition and strict separation of good and bad.
6 Elsewhere he posits honesty (BGE 227), scepticism/the abandonment of certainty
(GS 347), the destruction of habituated beliefs (HH 225) and the pursuit of one’s ‘own
experience’ (HH 292) as the defining features and values of the ‘free spirit’.
7 This is a view also taken by Linsenbard (2020: 291), Remley (2020: 277), Perna (2007:
47) and Mirvish (1996: 67).
8 See Webber (2018: 96–109) for a lucid commentary on the deeper ethical message of
Huis Clos.
9 Although (contra Sartre) Nietzsche dismisses the idea of reciprocity as ‘a piece of
gross vulgarity’ that assumes something I do can be done by another (WP 926), his
concept of friendship (and the bad friend Zarathustra identifies who is like a leech)
implies some form of reciprocity.
10 Flynn (2014: 361) refers to Sartre in this context as ‘the moralist of paradox’.
11 Although groupe-en-fusion is often translated as ‘fused group’, ‘fusing group’ better
captures Sartre’s sense of fusion as an ongoing totalization rather than as fixed or
static.
12 See Ansell-Pearson (1994: 3). Strong (1996: 132) asks whether Nietzsche really has
a ‘real’ political doctrine. If so, he makes no attempt in finding an intersubjective
standard by which policy can be judged and ‘appears to make political action
impossible, pointless or without standards’.
13 As Blue (2016: 146) observes, Nietzsche’s time at Pforta was characterized by the
conflicting desires of conformity and a growing rebellious individualism inspired
by Schopenhauer. Despite his conservative upbringing, in 1861 he was drawn to the
Hungarian poet Sándor Petöfi, a radical who had been a ringleader in the Revolution
of 1848. As late as December 1864, he composed six songs based on Petöfi’s texts and
also gave expression to other revolutionary sentiments. In reaction to Wagner’s essay
‘Art and Revolution’ of 1848, he exclaimed, for example, ‘[d]own with all art that does
not by its very nature urge on to the revolution of society and the renewal and unity of
the people!’ (KSW 8.218).
14 See Ansell-Pearson (1994: 162, 96).
15 It should be noted that Nietzsche’s aristocratism is not based on a simple class or
economic distinction between the base rabble and the educated elites: ‘there might
still be a greater relative nobility of taste and tactfulness of respect within a people
these days, within a lower sort of people, namely within the peasantry, than among
the newspaper-reading demimonde of the spirit, the educated’ (BGE 263).
16 See Verkerk (2020: 88) and Aydin (2007: 31).
226 Notes

17 Also, EH 4.1: ‘And with all this there is nothing in me of the religion-founder –
religions are mob-affairs. . . . I never speak to masses.’
18 See Zamosc (2018: 176–7).
19 According to Plank (1998: 128–30, 389), Nietzsche proposes a cosmology that
subsumes the mental-physical and the scientific-moral, making possible ‘a coherent
Darwinian-evolutionary ethics in which the epigenetic has equal reality with the
genetic’. Individuality (in the form of genetic diversity and variation) is essential
for the biological integrity of the species since rigid encodement is evolutionarily
degenerate just as it is for the moral integrity and advance of humankind.
20 See Richardson (2020: 237).
21 Also: ‘Collective mind. A good writer possesses not only his own mind but also the
mind of his friends’ (HH 180).
22 Nietzsche distinguishes between higher and lower forms of friendship based on the
main criterion of reciprocity/non-reciprocity. Some people have nothing to bestow or
offer in a friendship, suffering from greed or weakness, acting like secret thieves who
manipulate situations for their own ends: ‘With the eye of a thief it looks at everything
that shines; with the greed of hunger it measures him who has plenty to eat; and it is
always skulking around the table of those who bestow’ (Z 1.22.1). Zarathustra’s first
friend is the corpse who weighs heavily on his shoulders and drags him down. His
second is the jester, a companion who ridicules and pokes fun, ready to deceive at any
moment.
23 This is not to say some of Nietzsche’s insights cannot be used in turn to supplement
Sartre’s theory of mediations and ensembles. As Diers (1999: 254) notes, friendship
is a topic to which Sartre granted very little attention. This deficiency can be seen as
a weakness of the social theory that Sartre develops in the Critique since he stays on
the ‘historical’ level of explanation and neglects the ‘local’ level where friendships
develop and emerge. Ideally, Diers (1999: 255, 263) avers, we need to build a bridge
between the two levels in order to explore friendship as ‘a source of revolutionary
praxis’.
24 See Boulé (2005: 76).
25 In March 1940, he writes that in the camp he seeks Grener’s esteem because he is a
worker despite the fact that he ‘belches, farts, spits in constant floods’ (1983a: 119).
26 Danto (1980: 12), for instance, describes Nietzsche as ‘a critic of concepts and a word-
tormenting anarchist’.
27 See Manschot (2021: 48).
28 Also, WP 744: ‘An old Chinese said he had heard that when empires were doomed
they had many laws.’
29 Although there is evidence to support mutually inconsistent ideologies (anarchist,
totalitarian, classical liberal, radical liberal), in Hunt’s (1993: 184, 65) view, Nietzsche’s
political orientation ‘is clearly an instance of “individualist anarchism”’ which he
describes earlier as a ‘liberalism with teeth’.
30 See Eshleman (2020), Heter (2020), Remley (2018), Betschart (2016), Farrell Fox
(2003) and McBride (1991) for characterizations of Sartre as ‘a deeply anarchistic
thinker’ (Heter 2020: 528) of a ‘unique but unfinished version of democratic anarcho-
socialism’ (Eshleman 2020a: 20).
31 See Remley (2018: 206) and Heter (2020: 533) who reject common associations of
Sartre’s anarchism with Stirner’s individualism.
32 See Betschart (2016) for a salient overview of Sartre’s pluralistic politics.
33 See Heter (2020: 535).
 
Notes 227

34 Deleuze and Guattari both credit Sartre with inspiring their notion of the ‘subject-
group’ as a basis for the production of richer modes of subjectivity (this they later
modified to the ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’). See Young et al. (2013: 148).

Chapter 6
1 The Anthropocene, also referred to as ‘Anthrobscene’, Capitalocene’, ‘Plantationocene’
and ‘Chthulucene’ (Ferrando 2020: 105), describes the period of catastrophic
environmental damage done to the Earth since the Industrial Revolution, and, in
general, to describe the recognition of the intimate symbiotic connection between
the actions of humans and the well-being of the planet. Most see the Anthropocene
beginning with the Industrial Revolution, but others (e.g. Shapiro 2016: 202) view it as
a process beginning with urban life and agriculture starting around 8,000–10,000 BCE.
2 See Woodward (2011: 187).
3 This exhortation is repeated when Zarathustra praises the tightrope walker for making
danger his vocation (ZP 4) and talks about courage and seeking danger as main
characteristics of the growth of the human (Z 4.15).
4 In Plank’s (1998) view, both the evolutionary and juridical models work together in
tandem in terms of the ‘goal’ of promoting plurality and singularity.
5 See Richardson (2020: 480).
6 See also (Verkerk 2020: 58) who argues that Nietzsche’s aim ‘is to eclipse the
metaphysical faith of Christianity with a post-metaphysical approach to life’.
7 In the passage ‘On Redemption’, Zarathustra declares to a gathering of cripples who
surround him that the redemption we should seek are opportunities to transform our
experiences of earthly time rather than try to escape from it or reverse its marks.
8 See Ferrando (2020: 135).
9 See O’ Shiel (2019: 113) for a good discussion of how the ‘magic of experience’ can,
through modes of impure reflection, become ‘dark forms’ that lead to bad faith,
addiction, madness and prejudice.
10 This is a point illustrated by E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops where Vashti
contemplates the ‘imponderable bloom’ of real things compared to their impoverished
digitally generated simulacra: ‘she fancied that he looked sad. She could not be sure,
for the Machine did not transmit nuances of expression. It only gave a general idea of
people – an idea that was good enough for practical purposes. . . . The imponderable
bloom, declared by a discredited philosophy to be the actual essence of intercourse,
was rightly ignored by the Machine, just as the imponderable bloom of the grape was
ignored by the manufacturers of artificial fruit’ (2011: 5). Nietzsche makes a similar
point in HH 218 when he speaks of the ‘desensualization of higher art’ as leading to a
‘coarsening of the senses’.
11 See, for instance, Deleuze (1977), Mellamphy (2015), Shapiro (2016) and Manschot
(2021).
12 See Blue (2016: 59).
13 See Shapiro (2016: 13).
14 See Manschot (2021: 83, 151, 22).
15 For Nietzsche there is a productive tension in nature between the garden and the
volcano wherein volcanoes are not only threats but also sources of nourishment for
gardens. This is why we should ‘[b]uild our cities on the slopes of Vesuvius!’ (GS 283).
228 Notes

16 See Manschot (2021: x).

17 Also, WP 540: ‘There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes – and
consequently there are many kinds of “truths”, and consequently there is no truth.’
18 See Richardson (2020: 161).
19 They describe scenopoetes dentirostris, a bird in the Australian rainforest, as ‘a
complete artist’ (1994: 189).
20 See Ansell-Pearson (1997: 138, 124).
21 This is consistent with The Transcendence of the Ego where Sartre ascribes qualities
and characters to things: ‘It is a property of this Japanese mask to be terrible, an
inexhaustible, irreducible property belonging to its very nature – and not the sum of
our reactions to a piece of sculpted wood’ (TE 89).
22 See Gorz (1966), McBride (1991) and Farrell Fox (2003), for instance.
23 Here I concur with Ally (2017: 39) who disagrees with McBride (1991: 74) that
‘the early Sartre is of little use for the more positive task of constructing a suitable
ecological ethic’. His early phenomenology of the affective dialectic between
consciousness and world, as I have argued, contributes much to a Sartrean
‘socioecological imaginary’.
24 As Ally (2017: 396–7) notes, this matter is not helped by Barnes’ misleading
translation of ‘une rubrique categorielle’ as ‘the rubric of a category’. This is also
the case with Sheridan-Smith’s translation of praxis in the Critique that leads us to
think praxis is the sole or primary relation to matter rather than the first relation.
Furthermore, Sartre’s relentless use of qualifiers and modifiers in his texts are
sometimes omitted in Sheridan-Smith’s translation, giving us a sense of analytical
closure in place of an open-ended integrative approach.
25 In a footnote in her translation to Search for a Method, for instance, Barnes writes,
‘[a]s Sartre uses it, praxis refers to any purposeful human activity’ (SM 5).
26 It is as if, as Ally (2017: 370) remarks, we can find two Sartres in the same work (and
breath) – the assertive Sartre of the text (where he makes bold exclusivist claims)
and the querying Sartre of the footnote (where he questions them and suggests
alternatives). We have less to learn from the assertive Sartre of the text, in Ally’s view,
than we do from the parenthetical Sartre who ‘wears his [ecological] secrets on his
sleeves’.
27 On this point I have to disagree with Reynolds’ (2006: 164–5) statement – ‘while
Derrida’s later interest in the question of animality can be seen to undermine aspects
of Sartre’s philosophy, animals were an ongoing concern of Merleau-Ponty’s from
the 1930s’. This is a slight oversight on Reynolds’ part as elsewhere (2006, 2013) he
writes with some perspicuity on the similarities between (Sartre’s) existentialism and
poststructuralism but here doesn’t consider Sartre’s comments (1981c, 2014, CDR)
when representing his view.
28 See Boulé (2005: 29).
29 See, for instance, Coole (2005) and Abram (1997).
30 Against the charge that Sartre doesn’t supply a concept of ‘objective possibility’
as the negative dimension (1973: 122), this ignores Sartre’s The Communists and
Peace where he does prefigure a concept of counter-finality that he would develop
further in the Critique. Also, his criticism that Sartre’s thinking ‘derive[s] from his
philosophy . . . of consciousness’ (1973: 105) ignores the concept of Sartrean praxis
that he had articulated as a literature of praxis in What Is Literature?. See Flynn
(2014: 320–1).
31 See Boulé (2005: 29).
 
Notes 229

32 This phrase is used by Connolly (2011) to describe the emergent and shifting reality of
assemblages.
33 Although Baudrillard (2003: 3) indicates that the trajectory of his thought should
be understood as an examination of the object in opposition to phenomenological
and existentialist views of the subject, interestingly he cites Sartre’s depiction of
Roquentin’s encounter with the tree in the park as his prime inspiration for his
‘philosophy of the object’.
34 ‘Ideas are worse seductresses than our senses’ (GS 372). As Plank (1998: 256, 352)
points out, Nietzsche recognized that humans and animals use unconscious systems
of difference to achieve individuation, for example, by pheromone. His will to power
can be compared to Deleuze’s ‘autoproductive unconscious’ in the sense that it
generates desire below the level of reflective consciousness through a synthesizing
fusion of all senses.
35 This, of course, is exactly what Roquentin’s nausea of the chestnut tree in the
municipal park in Nausea reveals.
36 Nietzsche is often scathing about our ‘human, all-too human’ features: ‘Most ugly. It is
to be doubted whether a well-traveled man has found anywhere in the world regions
more ugly than in the human face’ (HH 320). Also: ‘Lower than the animal. When
man howls with laughter, he surpasses all animals by his coarseness’ (HH 544).
37 According to Heidegger (1993: 243) in his ‘Letter on Humanism’ (1947): ‘The first
humanism, Roman humanism, and every kind that has emerged from that time to the
present, has presupposed the most universal “essence” of man to be obvious. Man is
considered to be an animal rationale. This definition is not simply the Latin translation
of the Greek zoon logon echon but rather a metaphysical interpretation of it.’
38 It is interesting to note that Existentialism Is a Humanism, a lecture hastily delivered
to dispel the charge that existentialism was a philosophy of pessimism, quietism and
despair, was left by Sartre in the interrogative in French ‘l’existentialisme, est-il une
humanisme?’.

Chapter 7
1 As Bakewell (2016: 323) writes, for instance, ‘Sartre was a profound atheist, and a
humanist to his bones. He outdid even Nietzsche in his ability to live courageously
and thoughtfully in the conviction that nothing lies beyond, and that no divine
compensations will ever make up for anything on this earth.’
2 See, for instance, Megill (1985) and Kirkpatrick (2017b).
3 Of Nietzsche’s many criticisms of Christianity, its torturous aesthetic was a not
insignificant one: ‘what a wretched place Christianity has managed to make of the
earth, merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere, thereby branding the earth as the
place “where the righteous are tortured to death”!’ (D 77). Indeed, for Nietzsche,
Wagner committed the unpardonable aesthetic sin in his last opera Parsifal – he
became a Christian (EH 2.5–6).
4 See Blue (2016: 127).
5 Despite his admiration for Jesus, although Nietzsche viewed the Old Testament as one
of the greatest pieces of literature (BGE 52, GM 3.22), he believed the New Testament
(following Luther’s translation) marked a catastrophic turn in European history (WP
186).
230 Notes

6 See Golomb (2004: 178).

7 ‘Life desires ascent, and in ascending it will overcome itself ’ (Z 2.7), the teacher of the
overhuman is ‘he who will teach human beings to fly’ (Z 3.11.2). Nietzsche describes
free spirits as ‘astronomers of the ideal’ (D 551) and ‘aeronauts of the spirit’ (D 573). It
is, of course, possible to interpret these passages in a naturalistic or ‘terrasophical’ way,
as Manschot (2021) does, for instance, linking Nietzsche’s love of heights and ascent to
his love of mountains and climbing.
8 See Parkes (1996: 373) and Richardson (2020: 477). Nietzsche’s new religion is close
to Buddhism, in Richardson’s view, as it dispenses with gods and affirms existence. He
is, however, critical of Buddhism’s renunciation of the will which he views as a form of
passive nihilism (GM P5, WP 155, WP 220).
9 See Richardson (2020: 363–5) and Plank (1998: 406) who ascribe pantheism to
Nietzsche. Plank describes him as ‘a pantheist and mystic without God’.
10 Nietzsche states that ‘Zarathustra himself indeed is merely an old atheist’ – he could
believe in a god that dances but will not (WP 1038).
11 See Richardson (2020: 476).
12 Nietzsche puts the Übermensch where God once was – ‘Once one said “god” when
one looked upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say: superman’ (Z 2.2), but
there is still room, as Richardson (2020: 475) argues, for the existence of many fictive
gods in the creation of his ethical imaginary.
13 Dionysian intoxication, Nietzsche warns, should not to be confused with
‘narcotization’ that acts like a sedative rather than stimulant, for example, Wagner’s
music (EH 3HH3).
14 Charmé (1999: 302) contrasts Sartre’s interest in religious concepts with Beauvoir’s
disinterest: ‘Where Beauvoir saw only stinking garbage in the “compost of religion”,
Sartre found nourishment for his own budding vision of reality.’
15 As he recounts in Words, ‘[t]he myth was a very simple one and I swallowed it without
difficulty . . . a vast collective power had penetrated me; lodged in my heart, it was
keeping watch, it was the Faith of others’ (W 155).
16 This passage illustrates perfectly Sartre’s residual metaphysics woven, as Derrida said,
into the very language it uses to attack it, where ‘the end of Man is bound to be written
in the language of Man’ (Badmington 2000: 9). Sartre continued to use ‘man’ and
‘fraternity’ even in his depiction of a ‘feminine economy’ of thinking in his later years.
17 Sartre refers to his War Diaries as a ‘proud, pagan journal’ (WD 69).
18 As Ferrando (2020: 207) notes, mysticism was the preserve of women, their only
access for ‘words to be heard’ due to their exclusion from Christian religious
orthodoxy.
19 See Ally (2017: 32–3).
20 See Blue (2016: 40).
21 He tried to redeem this (unsuccessfully) by pursuing attempts to become an officer. By
contrast, from 1929 to 1931 Sartre did his compulsory military service and refused to
become a military officer, preferring instead to mix with private soldiers rather than
the officers.
22 See Alfano (2018: 122, 126).
23 For other remarks that display Nietzsche’s ‘misogynistic straitjacket’ (Verkerk 2020:
164), see EH 3.5, BGE 144, 232, CW 3, HH 435.
24 This is evidenced by the fact that Nietzsche consistently downplayed his mother’s role
in his upbringing and development, stating, aged twenty-one, ‘the main points of my
upbringing were left to me’ (KGW 1.5.52) despite the fact, for instance, that he only
 
Notes 231

took responsibility for his own laundry from Franziska in 1868, aged twenty-four.
Although, of course, she would later exert her influence in dramatic (and unfortunate)
ways, his sister Elisabeth had regularly acted since childhood as a kind of amanuensis
for her brother, transcribing his early plays and as a university student helping him to
compile and index material. See Blue (2016: 106, 296, 307).
25 See Verkerk (2020: 32).
26 In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche wonders, ‘Do I dare to suggest that I know
women? This is part of my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first
psychologist of the eternal-feminine’ (EH 3.5).
27 As Burnham (2015: 34) notes, it is likely Nietzsche was influenced by the work of
Swiss anthropologist Johann Bachofen, a source of the Apollo/Dionysus account who
argued that the Dionysian was a ‘transitional phase’ between matriarchal societies
(Gaia and Demeter) and the patriarchal stage of the Apollonian which included the
formation of states and the ‘male lust for struggle’ (BT 21).
28 See Burnham (2015: 133).
29 Irigaray identifies the Presocratics after whom a rupture between poetry (feminine)
and philosophy (masculine) took place, that, through language, marked the
problematic differentiation of the sexes and ‘the point at which male identity
constituted itself as patriarchal and phallocratic’ (cited in Woodward 2011: 151).
30 It is worth remembering, of course, that the Übermensch is not gendered.
31 Like David Oehler had been for Nietzsche, Sartre’s grandfather Charles Schweitzer
was his main male adult influence as a young boy, introducing him to a large library of
books and ideas.
32 Gordon (2020: 508) notes the ‘glaring absence’ of the recognition of Beauvoir’s
influence on Sartre’s thought and expresses surprise at her ‘Heloïse complex’ in
insisting that she did nothing original in philosophy and that her writings were
applications of Sartre’s philosophy as a mere acolyte. As is the case with Merleau-
Ponty, it is perhaps most useful to see Sartre’s intellectual relationship with Beauvoir
in simple terms as one of ‘reciprocal influence’, as in his description of himself and
le castor engendering ‘the feeling of two consciousnesses melted into one’ (1983b:
157).
33 According to Noudelmann (2012: 19–20), ‘[t]he jelly that remained stuck to the
mind’s finger in Being and Nothingness, or the pebbly mud that had made Roquentin’s
hand sticky in Nausea, speak to a Sartrean repugnance at feeling one’s own body
plunge into a suspect substance’. More a ‘masturbator of women’ than a ‘penetrating
Hussar’, Sartre himself caressed both beings and things, staying at their surface. This,
of course, has parallels with Oliver’s diagnosis of Nietzsche’s abjection.
34 See Boulé (2005: 57).
35 While Lacoste plots with some acuity Sartre’s passage to a fully feminine economy
of reciprocal gift-giving, I do think she overstates differences between Sartre’s early
and later thinking, viewing them caesurally rather than as a form of continuous
enrichment. As I argued in Chapters 4 and 6, the elements of Sartre’s smooth ontology
in Being and Nothingness are often overlooked and therefore it is misleading to equate
the pour-soi straightforwardly with an abstract ‘imperialistic stance’ to appropriate,
control and master the world as Lacoste (1999: 282) does.
36 See Lacoste (1999: 274).
37 See Boulé (2005: 195–6).
38 See Lacoste (1999: 293–4).
39 In interview with Gobeil, cited in Boulé (2005: 5).
232 Notes

40 Speaking about Lévy, Sartre states, ‘[y]ou were a man, but a man with feminine
qualities.’ Boulé suggests this may partly account for the rift between Lévy and
Beauvoir. Just as Beauvoir represented for Sartre someone who had integrated her
feminine and masculine aspects, Lévy was ‘the male equivalent of Beauvoir’ (see
1977c: 10).
41 Sartre associated music with feminine company. He did not own a piano so would
play at Arlette’s place, or his mother’s or at his grandmother’s when he was younger.
Similarly, Nietzsche would always associate piano playing with a shared intimacy, a
union of solitude and communication. He played fourhanded Haydn sonatas with
Franziska and later he often played piano duets with Sophie Ritschl (as a student in
Leipzig) and Lou Salomé. Both found solace in feminine company that suspended
the power relations that often alienate the male psyche. Tellingly, Nietzsche had
a preference for playing duets on two pianos whereas Sartre preferred to play
fourhanded pieces on the same piano (where he could feel as well as hear the other).
See Noudelmann (2012: 20–1, 113).
42 See Blue (2016: 76, 229, 147).
43 See Safranski (2003: 20–1).
44 Cited in Danto (1980: 50).
45 See Noudelmann (2012: 55, 63).
46 According to Siemens (2018: 324–6), Nietzsche’s criticisms of Wagner play upon this
notion of measure where genius must learn to measure itself or limit its dominant
discharge through ‘creative restraint’. Wagner created powerful and beautiful illusions
that energized cultural life but lacked self-restraint and so became a tyrannical force
without measure or limits. The trauma of Wagner’s megalomania is ‘clearly visible
in the “exclusivity” of genius in the modern sense and the loathing of one-man rule
Nietzsche shares with the agonal Greeks’.
47 With Wagner ‘music has been deprived of its world-transfiguring, affirmative
character, that is décadence music and no longer the flute of Dionysus’ (EH 3WC1).
48 Nietzsche wrote of his own extreme physiological response to music and how it
became ‘a total digestive experience’, recounting how his compulsive listening to
Carmen reduced him to tears after concerts. See Noudelmann (2012: 92).
49 Nietzsche argues music must be understood geographically, praising Bizet for having
‘discovered a piece of the southernness of music’ (BGE 254) in contrast to German
music of the North that ‘loves clouds and everything that is unclear, becoming, twilit,
damp, and overcast’ (BGE 244). Deleuze links this to Nietzsche’s ‘geophilosophy’ and
to the close relations between sonority and territory in nature. See Shapiro (2016:
92).
50 See Flynn (2014: 36).
51 See Noudelmann (2012: 35).
52 Noudelmann (2012: 132, 44) notes how in this composition Sartre took his inspiration
more from Debussy than from Chopin, making some use of Debussy’s innovative
and extended spacings but ultimately sticking to the sonata form instead of trying,
through Debussy, ‘to use intervals capable of disrupting traditional forms’.
53 Cited in Flynn (2014: 388).
54 See Rhoad (2009: 167) who views improvised jazz as the perfect analogue of Sartre’s
social ethics in Hope Now. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre describes rhythm as a
unifying bond that facilitates fusion between individuals: ‘the rhythm that I generate
comes into being jointly with me and laterally, as a collective rhythm; it is my rhythm
 
Notes 233

to the extent that it is their rhythm, and vice versa. That is precisely the basis of the
experience of the we-subject: in the end, it is our rhythm’ (BN 559).
55 See Carroll (2006: 406).
56 See Noudelmann (2012: 44, 31).
57 Cited in Noudelmann (2012: 143).
58 Cited in Hayman (1982: 341).
59 See Blue (2016: 112).
60 See Safranski (2003: 179).
61 See Safranski (2003: 339).
62 See Hayman (1982: 341).
63 Interestingly, it was only when he was mad in 1890 that he wrote a love letter to
Cosima Wagner whom Nietzsche liked and admired more than any other woman. See
Hayman (1982: 122).
64 See Safranski (2003: 371).
65 He sought out Jacques Lacan for help and together they concluded that the crabs
represented his ‘fear of being alone’ (in Gerassi 2009: 62–3).
66 See Boulé (2005: 76).
67 ‘What crabs? Are you mad? What crabs? Ah! Yes’ (The Condemned of Altona). In
Lethbridge’s view (2015: 75), the crabs are, for Sartre, ‘the symbolic representation
of a deep-rooted Oedipus complex and its attendant castration anxiety’ conceived as
strange creatures that lurk in the dark depths of the Unconscious, rising to the surface
intermittently to pinch with their sharp pincers.
68 See Cox (2016: 283).
69 See Beauvoir (1984: 110–1) and Kirkpatrick (2019: 373).
70 See Murphy (2020: 321). Interestingly, Caws (1999) changes his view of Hope
Now from his previous one of scepticism to one of a more positive consideration,
symbolizing a general trend in Sartrean scholarship towards this more sympathetic
viewpoint (see, for instance, Murphy (2020), Boulé (2005), Santoni (1998) and
Lacoste (1999)). As Caws writes, ‘I felt along with many Sartre scholars a cognitive
dissonance between the philosopher we knew through his earlier writings and the
apparently pliable old man who seemed to talk about whatever his handler wanted
him to . . . [but] . . . it was a mistake on all our parts to consign Sartre to complaisance
or enfeeblement, to dismiss him as an old man led by the nose, to regard him as, in
effect, as good as dead’ (1999: 24).
71 When they interviewed Sartre not long before his death, Le Bitoux and Barbadette of
Le Gai Pied remarked on his ‘stupefying freshness’ and ‘extraordinary kindness’. See
Lacoste (1999: 295).
72 See Boulé (2005: 183). Throughout the interview, Sartre and Lévy address one another
with the informal ‘tu’ as a move to dissolve distinctions of class perpetuated through
linguistic convention as he had done with all of his Maoist friends for whom he was
not a celebrity but just one of them. After 1968, he also changes his lifelong dress
code of formal tie and suit in order to embrace informality and avoid rigid bourgeois
convention.
73 Betschart (2016: 5–6) brings attention to the political rupture between Sartre and
Beauvoir that had taken place during the second round of the presidential elections
in1974. Whereas Sartre did not vote, Beauvoir supported Mitterrand and by that
became a social democrat. When we read the interviews of the 1970s in the order
they were actually taken and not published, according to Betschart, we clearly
234 Notes

recognize a high consistency in the development of Sartre’s ethical and political

thinking in them.

Conclusion
1 Cited in Hayman (1982: 104). On the importance of childhood, see Sartre’s concession
to Freudianism in Words – ‘Every man has his natural place; its altitude is determined
neither by pride nor value: childhood decides’ (W 60) – in addition to numerous
passages in The Family Idiot and Search for a Method.
2 Also, ‘the nineteenth century does not represent progress over the sixteenth . . . .
“Mankind” does not advance’ (WP 90). Sartre also views the idea of progress as highly
questionable – see CDR 2:409 and CDR 33: ‘what was progress becomes proposed
solution, that is, closed in on itself and problematic.’
3 See Ure (2015: 163).
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 Index

abjection 189, 231 assimilation 62, 79, 96, 110–12, 129–31,

affect 6–8, 26, 50–2, 58–65, 77–82, 152
111–13, 136–7, 149, 155, 157–60, atheism 4, 127, 176–85, 216, 229–30
168–71, 180–1, 201, 212, 221 authenticity 4–6, 26, 30, 41, 49, 74,
affirmation 5, 16, 21, 29, 45–6, 63, 75–7, 79–80, 82, 84–6, 89, 117, 121–3,
86, 120, 134–6, 172–4, 179–80, 204 130–1, 144, 183, 194–5, 217, 221
agonism 35, 115, 128–32, 134–5, 142 autopoiesis 108, 111, 158, 224
Alain 25 Avila, T. de 25, 205
Alcibiades 63
Alexander the Great 189 Bachofen, J. 231
Althusser, L. 218 bad faith 4–5, 36, 68, 81, 84–6, 122–3,
amor fati 180, 220 138, 166, 173, 184, 213, 219, 221, 227
anarchism 115, 138–46, 226 Badiou, A. 99
androgyny 184, 186, 192, 196, 212 Bakunin, M. 138
anguish 60, 217 Barth, K. 178
animal(s) 77, 104, 136, 149, 153–9, Barthes, R. 31, 201
162–4, 172, 174, 181, 185, 187, 203, Bataille, G. 20–1, 46, 116, 205
228–9 Baubô 189–90
Anthropocene, the 25, 147, 153, 164–5, Baudelaire, C. 15, 80
213, 227 Baudrillard, J. 229
anthropocentrism 30, 46, 147–9, 158, Beaufret, J. 41
161, 165, 170, 212 Beauvoir, S. de 3–4, 10, 15, 26, 36, 41,
Antichrist, the 16, 133, 153, 187 64, 66, 105, 115, 136, 143, 159,
aphorism 2, 14–15, 20, 28, 33, 216 166–7, 173, 175, 182, 193–6, 200,
Apollo/nian 77, 79, 82, 87, 94, 105, 125, 206–8, 217, 219, 222, 224, 230–3
128, 132, 151, 179, 199, 220, 231 becoming 4, 6–8, 18, 28, 30, 40, 45, 48,
Argos 52 50, 55, 60–1, 75, 80, 84, 89, 92–3,
Ariadne 19, 191 100–1, 113, 117, 128–31, 135, 138,
Aristocratism 2, 5, 30, 33–4, 115, 149–50, 153, 156, 158, 172, 174,
117–18, 121, 125–7, 132, 136, 176, 179–80, 185, 193, 209, 213
141–2, 204, 212, 225 Beethoven, L. von 197, 201
Aristotle 42, 95, 187 Being and Nothingness 4, 7, 26, 31, 36,
Aron, R. 208, 215, 222 41–2, 48–9, 51–2, 55–6, 66, 69–70,
art 6, 34–5, 40, 52–3, 63–4, 71, 75–6, 81, 84–5, 89, 91, 106, 109, 131,
78, 80, 85–7, 93, 105, 122, 125, 145, 162, 165–6, 183, 193–5, 215,
128, 134, 142, 151, 158, 172, 193, 217–18, 221, 223–4, 231–2
198–201, 213, 216, 224–5 and Cartesianism 9, 23–4, 64–5, 222
asceticism 44, 56, 64, 75–6, 103, new translation of 24, 222
116, 149, 175, 181, 199, 204, pour-soi/en-soi 98–9, 102
213, 219–20 Sartre on 37, 80, 97, 121–2, 136, 167,
assemblage 61, 96, 107, 112–13, 144, 219
165, 169–70, 198, 212, 227, 229 structure of 56, 98, 161, 222
250 Index

Bergson, H. 25, 169 dancing 34, 84, 180, 184, 199–200,

Binswanger, L. 50 203–4, 230
Bizet, G. 133, 198, 232 Darwin, C. 30, 104, 148, 155–6, 226
Blanchot, M. 28, 46 Death of God, the 2, 22, 44, 115–16, 120,
body, the 20–1, 26, 30, 40, 55, 61–7, 71– 180–1, 183, 185, 189
2, 76, 78–9, 82, 87, 90–1, 98, 105, Death of Man, the 22, 44, 47, 174
110, 112, 137, 148–50, 157, 159–61, Debussy, C. 200, 232
166, 168–9, 178–9, 184, 189, 194–5, deconstruction 7, 9–10, 13, 22–3, 25,
199, 201, 204, 219, 222, 231 30, 32, 43, 45, 47–8, 55, 73, 78, 83,
Boscovich, R. 95 86, 89, 113, 115, 127, 147, 161, 174,
Brunschvicg, L. 215 184–5, 190, 192, 194, 196, 210,
Buber, M. 178–9 212, 222
Buddhism 62, 179, 230 de-egoization 49, 77, 82, 87, 124, 145,
194–6, 208
Caesar, Julius 29, 63, 141, 189 Deleuze, G. 9, 13–14, 19–22, 24, 36,
Camus, A. 192 44–6, 48, 50, 69, 79, 89, 91–2, 94,
capitalism 142, 149–51 102, 112, 136, 139, 143–4, 146, 154,
caress, the 65–6, 69, 168, 193, 219 158, 164, 169–70, 205, 218, 227,
Chancel, J. 31 229, 232
Chopin, F. 27, 198, 200–1, 232 Demeter 189, 231
Christian/ity 25, 43, 63, 77, 83, 94, democracy 5, 33–4, 115, 117, 121, 125–
121–2, 131, 149, 155, 157, 176–85, 30, 134–9, 141–5, 187, 224, 226
190–1, 198, 204, 223, 227, 229–30 Democritus 104, 223
cinema 137, 199–200 Derrida, J. 7–9, 16, 18–20, 22, 24, 36,
Circe 189, 191 39, 41–53, 86–9, 112, 116, 146, 164,
Cixous, H. 194–6 174, 189–90, 192, 194, 205, 210–11,
cogito 218, 228, 230
Cartesian 40, 68, 223 Descartes, R. 23, 42, 48, 50–1, 57–8, 62,
irreflective 218 222–3
pre-reflective 50, 81, 166–7, 220, 222 determinism 7, 30, 55–6
communism 138 dialectic/al 9, 36–7, 42, 49–50, 56, 60,
compatibilism 7, 55–6, 220 76, 78, 82, 91, 94, 112–13, 115, 123,
consciousness 7, 11, 17, 22, 26, 40, 51–2, 128, 131–8, 160–4, 173–4, 185, 188,
55–66, 68–9, 76–8, 80–2, 86, 88–9, 191, 196, 216, 222, 225, 228
94, 98, 101, 108–10, 113, 117, 130, circularity 67, 70–3
152, 155, 160, 164, 167, 170, 172, comprehension 31–2, 99–102
183, 185, 193–4, 207, 209, 217, distortion of 92
219–20, 222–4, 228–9, 231 Hegelian 21, 24
contingency 3–5, 8, 10, 21, 24, 40, 44, 60, ‘with holes’ 96–7, 212–13, 223
65, 83–4, 88–9, 100, 104–5, 128–9, of nature 105–8
149, 161, 165, 167, 174, 176, 189, nominalism 24, 28
206, 209, 212–13 difference 21–2, 24, 87–9, 92, 96,
contradiction 12–13, 27–32, 34, 46, 48, 128–30, 141–2, 148–9, 190
55–6, 79, 85, 93, 97, 99–100, 156, Dionysus/Dionysian 5–6, 16, 20, 29–30,
164, 174 33–5, 45, 61, 63–4, 75–9, 82, 87,
law of (non-) 3, 21, 94–5, 186–8 91, 94, 105, 128, 132, 134, 136,
Copernicus, N. 27 151, 160, 164, 172, 179–81, 185,
Corbin, H. 46 189–91, 197–205, 212, 220–1,
counterfinality 73, 112 224, 230–2
 
Index 251

dissipative systems 96, 105, 109, 169, 213 Flaubert, G. 12, 15, 71–2, 82, 89, 168,
Dostoevsky, F. 182 196, 209, 216
drives 14, 40, 51–2, 55, 58, 63, 65, Foerster, H. von 109
74–9, 94, 96, 105, 119, 129, Forster, E.M. 227
149–50, 153, 155–7, 172, 187, Foucault, M. 7–9, 13, 16, 20–4, 36,
191, 213, 220, 225 39, 42, 44, 46–7, 49–50, 86–7,
dualism 9, 43, 63, 65, 92–4, 97–102, 146–7, 168, 174, 205, 210–11,
113, 147, 178, 184, 186, 192, 210, 218, 221
222–3 fraternity 47, 123–4, 145, 184–5, 187,
Durkheim, E. 25 194–6, 230
free spirit, the 16, 29, 52, 56, 75, 78,
Ecce Homo 2, 16, 27, 30, 34–5, 74, 77, 118–20, 133, 135, 151–4, 172, 178,
148, 187–8, 217, 231 180–1, 192, 225, 230
École Normale Supérieure (ENS) 1, 165 Freud, S. 20, 70–1, 81–2, 218, 234
ecology 113, 153, 161–5 Friedrich, Caspar D. 151
ego, the 11, 26, 40, 42, 56–61, 69, 74, 76, friendship 27, 129, 131, 134–6, 191–3,
81–2, 89, 134, 179, 219, 222 225–6
egoism 125, 128–9, 133–5, 143, 198, 220 fusion 86, 102, 109, 111, 123, 134, 138,
eliminativism 55–6, 74 145, 151, 171, 201, 224–5, 232
emergence 44, 53, 61, 68, 76, 96,
102, 115, 137, 167, 172, 212, 219, Gaia 108, 154, 231
223, 229 garden/s 118–19, 151–4, 190, 227
emergent interactionism 100–1, 107–9, genealogy 21–2, 39, 43–4, 77, 79, 113,
144–5 115, 117, 127–8, 158, 190
Emerson, R. W. 151–2, 154, 177 Genet, J. 15, 72, 80, 194
emotion 7, 26, 51, 59–64, 75, 78–9, geophilosophy 143, 154, 232
81, 91, 111, 168, 171, 201, 209, gift, the 29, 121–4, 129, 135, 191, 194,
220–1 196, 221, 231
Engels, F. 106, 163 Goethe, J.W. von 76, 148, 172, 191
Enlightenment, the 121, 127, 148, groups 49, 70, 77, 79, 99–101, 109,
155, 173 123–4, 127, 133–8, 142–6, 154,
Epicureanism 64, 75, 118–19, 151, 154, 179, 184, 195–6, 204, 221, 223,
168, 187–8, 190 225, 227
eternal return of the same 2, 13, 21, 28, Guattari, F. 8–9, 46, 49, 56, 61, 79,
34, 40–1, 44–5, 127, 153, 179–80, 89–92, 94, 102, 112, 143, 146, 150,
189–90, 220 154, 158, 169, 223, 227
eudaimonia 119
exclusivism 156, 161, 163, 212 Haydn, J. 197, 232
existentialism 10, 23, 26, 30, 36, health 14, 62–4, 76, 118–19, 124, 140,
41, 46, 48–9, 84, 87, 97, 182, 153, 175, 192, 204
211, 216, 229 Hegel, G. 20–1, 24–5, 43, 45–6, 91–2,
Existentialism is a Humanism 6, 35–6, 99–100, 102, 125, 144, 149, 212,
41, 199, 218, 229 217, 222
Heidegger, M. 6–8, 13, 18, 20, 22,
facticity 42, 65–6, 84, 86, 88, 97, 167 25–6, 35, 39–46, 62, 78, 98,
fascism 127, 173 154, 156, 170–1, 199, 211,
feminine, the 7, 36, 64, 92, 186–97, 217–18, 229
230–2 ‘hell is other people’ 9, 12, 23
Fink, E. 44–5 Helmholtz, H. von 95
252 Index

Heraclitus 4, 6, 28, 44–5, 92–3, 95, Lange, F.A. 104, 177

104–5, 120, 128, 155, 176, 180, 213 language 16–17, 24, 28, 43–4, 50, 60,
herd, the 1, 27, 58, 62, 68, 115, 117, 128, 67–8, 72–3, 86, 112, 218, 230–1
132–6, 138, 140–3, 204, 219–20 La Rochefoucauld, F. 43
holism 24, 91, 98, 105 last man, the 44, 116, 120, 150, 153, 172
humanism 9–10, 15, 22–4, 31, 39–41, Laws of Manu 118, 191
43–4, 46–7, 116–17, 151, 156–7, Lebensphilosophie 31, 175, 199, 202–3,
162–3, 171–4, 187, 213, 218, 229 205
Hume, D. 42, 78 Lefebvre, H. 25
Husserl, E. 20, 25–6, 39, 46–8, 50, 58, 69, Leibniz, G.W 42–3
98, 106, 170, 217, 222 Les Temps Modernes 36, 47–8, 143,
Huston, J. 81 165, 195
Levinas, E. 25–6
idealism 42, 50, 58, 165 Lévy, B. 36, 195–6, 208, 232–3
imagination, the 18, 26, 36, 68, 80, Lévy-Bruhl, L. 25
87, 110, 124, 145, 150, 199, 201, Lewin, K. 110
205–7, 222 liberalism 127, 226
incorporation 62–3, 69, 96, 111, Liebowitz, R. 200
129–31, 152 look, the 36, 50, 166, 193–4, 218
individualism 23–4, 34–6, 109, 123, 129, love 14, 71, 78, 129–31, 134, 145,
144, 150, 173, 215, 225–6 172, 179–80, 183, 188, 193–5,
ethical 7, 117–18, 131–3, 135–6 220–1
methodological 10, 91, 101–2 Lyotard, J.-F. 36, 39, 73
institution, the 13, 61, 69, 71–2, 135,
137–8, 175, 194 Machiavellianism 126–7
instrumentalism 161–2, 217 madness 19, 34, 42–3, 50, 52, 90, 127,
intellectual conscience, the 61, 77–81 175, 203–10, 227
interconnectedness 100, 102, 109, 212 magic 25–6, 58–61, 64, 81, 111–13,
intermezzo, the 102, 223 150, 164, 185, 203, 206–7, 209,
intersubjectivity 12, 70, 101, 108, 122, 212, 227
132–6, 145, 166–7, 173, 179, 211 Mallarmé, S. 80, 172
Irigaray, L. 189, 231 Mann, T. 34–5
Marcel, G. 10, 217
Jaspers, K. 28, 33, 35 Marx, K./Marxism 20, 23, 25, 33, 36, 41,
jazz 199–201, 223, 232 46, 138, 141, 143–4, 150, 213
Jesus Christ 178, 207, 229 masks 15–16, 28, 30, 84, 150, 172,
justice 125–6, 140–1, 144, 155, 188 180–1, 191, 204, 221
materialism 24, 42, 56, 102, 111, 165,
Kant, I. 7, 15, 23, 29, 36, 43, 51–2, 55, 169–70, 183
57–8, 69, 187, 200, 218 matriciel, le 36, 167, 196
katharsis 82 Mauss, M. 25
Kierkegaard, S. 99, 182 Menge, die 142–3
Klossowski, P. 20–1, 204 mereology 107, 113
Kofman, S. 20, 44, 189 Merleau-Ponty, M. 10, 26, 46, 65–6,
Kropotkin, P. 138 164–8, 170, 173, 192, 219, 222,
228, 231
Lacan, J. 24, 39, 73, 210, 218, 233 metaphysics 16, 21, 24, 31, 33, 40–3,
Laing, R.D. 50 45–7, 89, 94, 102, 105, 178, 185,
Lamarck, J.B. 62, 68, 104, 219 188, 223, 230
 
Index 253

mnemotechnics 11, 74, 216 pantheism 179–80, 185, 204, 230

monism 28, 51, 91–2, 94–5, 98, 101–2, paradox 7, 9, 13, 15, 20–1, 27–33, 55,
113, 163, 169, 180, 225 66, 84, 100, 122, 131, 182, 187, 213,
Montaigne, M. de 16, 43 217, 225
Mozart, W. 197 Pardaillan 64, 84
multiplicity 17–18, 52, 55, 61–2, 76–9, Parmenides 95
89–92, 96–7, 100–1, 145, 157, Paul, St. 178
159, 169, 213 perspectivism 17, 29–30, 50–3, 55, 112,
music 5, 64, 105, 125, 151, 158, 142, 156, 167, 189
191, 196–201, 205, 212, 224, Petöfi, S. 225
230, 232 Pforta 104, 177, 186, 197, 220, 225
myth 28, 33–4, 67, 128, 139, 151, pharmakon 116, 157, 202
178, 181–3, 185, 191, 198, phenomenology 5–6, 11, 25–6, 48–53,
221, 230 60, 66, 69, 80, 99, 111, 122, 160,
164–6, 170–1, 176, 183, 197,
Nachlass, the 13, 34–5, 76, 91, 127, 222, 228
148, 156 philology 13, 15, 18–19, 22, 44,
naturalism 104, 178, 198 177, 218
nature 3, 6–7, 34, 51, 69, 79, 104, 106–8, Picard, M. 18, 33
112–13, 121, 148–54, 157–69, 172, Pithiatism 209
174, 184–5, 189, 212, 219, 224–5, Plato/nism 3–4, 6–7, 39–43, 45, 51,
227, 232 62–3, 78, 93, 104, 116, 121, 149,
nausea 5, 60, 75, 160, 179, 183, 189, 200, 178, 190–1, 212, 223
220, 229 play 5–6, 8, 11, 16–19, 22, 28, 31, 44–6,
Nazism 2, 20, 22, 44, 127 82–6, 93, 104, 118, 151, 154, 180,
Negri, A. 143, 184, 213, 223 197–201, 212, 221
Newton, I. 104, 107, 109, 223 pluralism 10, 18, 46, 79, 91–2, 96, 101–2,
Niche Construction Theory 223 112–13, 115, 118, 121–2, 126, 128,
Nietzsche, Elisabeth Förster 19, 127, 138–9, 141–4, 154, 156, 169–70,
189, 202, 208, 231 172, 176, 180, 185, 192, 211–12,
Nietzsche, Franziska 177, 186, 189, 226–7
204, 231–2 polytheism 180
nihilism 2, 5–6, 21, 23, 39–40, 43–5, 62, Ponge, F. 46
83, 103–5, 116–17, 120–1, 138, 149, posthumanism 9, 19, 26, 31, 35, 53,
172, 174, 176, 178–9, 181, 183, 185, 86, 96, 111–13, 147–51, 158, 164,
204, 213, 230 169–74, 185, 212–13
nomad/ism 14, 89, 92, 139, 143–4, 152, postmodernism 8–10, 23–5, 31, 91,
154, 158, 211 112, 148
practico-inert 70, 72–3, 80, 100, 107,
objective spirit 67, 69–70, 167 112, 123, 137, 150, 167
Odysseus 158, 189, 221 praxis 9, 18, 30, 66–7, 70, 79–82, 85, 90,
Oehler, D. 186, 231 99–102, 106–8, 112–13, 123, 131,
O-O-O (object-oriented ontology) 111, 137, 145, 162–3, 174–5, 201, 211,
169–71 218, 226, 228
Orestes 4, 184 precautionary principle 150
pre-reflective 25, 52, 58–9, 61, 63, 78,
pagan/ism 153, 164, 176–7, 180, 185, 80–2, 130, 164, 166–7, 170, 197,
225, 230 199, 201, 209, 218–22
pan-Europeanism 126, 128, 133, 153 progress 30, 127, 148–9, 213, 234
254 Index

progressive-regressive method 32, socialism 125–6, 130, 138, 141, 144, 226
51, 174 socius 61, 63, 67, 90
psychoanalysis 23, 46, 50, 71, 106, Socrates 52, 93, 103–5, 151, 167, 172,
189, 213 185, 207
psychology 14, 28, 34, 51, 60–3, 77, 81, space 5, 69, 91, 110–11, 130, 135, 137,
85–7, 90, 103, 105, 120, 167, 198, 143, 152–3, 166, 168, 199, 223
202, 219, 225, 231 Spinoza, B. 11, 42, 91, 101–2, 113,
143, 169
quantum physics 104–5, 108–10, 113, Stalinism 138, 143
213, 223–4 state, the 29, 121, 125, 128, 130, 133,
138–45, 154, 172, 231
rapture 6, 64, 76–8, 86, 90, 134, 161, 172, Stendhal 11, 133, 216
176, 180, 197, 199, 201, 205 Stirner, M. 144, 226
reason 4, 7, 23, 40, 42–3, 52, 60, 62–3, Stoicism 64, 75–6, 78, 118, 120–1, 169,
76–9, 84, 89, 91, 101–4, 106–7, 187–8
150, 156, 170, 172, 187, 204–6, style 20, 28, 30, 46, 64, 74–5, 78, 83, 87,
210, 212 154
reflection 6, 12, 44, 57–9, 61, 78, sublimation 32, 77–9, 82, 87, 94, 96, 117,
80–2, 85, 87, 133, 166–7, 170, 131, 145, 189, 212
209, 221, 227
relationality 94–6, 100, 162, 176, 185 Taoism 179
rhizomatic 90, 92, 158 ternary 9, 25, 91, 96, 100, 113, 117,
Roquentin, A. 2, 4–6, 11–12, 185, 211
159–161, 172, 199–200, 206, terrasophy 154, 176, 213, 230
215, 220 231 theatre 137, 182, 198
Rousseau, J.-J. 29, 125 Theseus 191
Tillich, P. 178
Salomé, L. 14, 20, 33–4, 175–6, 178, 188, Tönnies, F. de 34
197, 202–3, 208, 232 totality 20, 48, 59, 88, 92, 96, 98–101,
Sanctus Janarius 192 109, 133, 144, 168–9
Sartre, Anne-Marie 64, 143, 192–3, 232 totalization 10, 24, 66–7, 70, 72, 80–1,
Sartre, Arlette Elkaïm 175, 193, 97, 99–102, 107–8, 112–13, 123,
207–8, 232 163, 174, 216, 225
Saussure, F. de 89 transcendence 40, 60, 65–6, 70, 84, 86,
Schopenhauer, A. 6, 13, 27, 33, 43, 74, 88, 97, 100, 116, 149, 178, 202
125, 157, 198–9, 225 transhumanism 147–50, 213
Schweitzer, C. 215, 231 truth 4, 6, 23, 27, 32, 34, 40, 42, 45,
science 3, 27, 29, 33, 93, 95, 102–8, 49–50, 83, 94, 103, 105, 113, 121,
111, 142, 148, 151, 171–2, 198, 141–2, 152, 164, 181, 189–90,
213, 219, 223 223, 228
Selbst 62–3, 78
selfishness 62, 134 Übermensch 2, 5, 13, 21, 29–30,
self-overcoming 29, 74–5, 77–8, 86, 116, 34, 40, 44, 75, 77, 83, 92, 117,
119, 129, 172, 207, 212–13 120–1, 128, 132, 136, 148–50,
sensism 154, 170 155, 157, 172, 178, 187, 189, 204–5,
seriality 49, 68, 79, 109, 112, 124, 135, 230–1
137–8, 144, 184, 200 Uexküll. J. von 158
seriousness, the spirit of 83–6, 103, 118, unconscious, the 10, 20, 73–4, 78–9,
145, 185, 219 81–2, 189, 209, 212, 218, 229, 233
 
Index 255

undecidability 22, 48, 86, 89, 150 will to power 2–3, 5–7, 9, 13, 21–2,
Universal Singular 9, 67, 72, 99, 216 28–9, 34, 40–1, 57, 79, 92, 95–6,
104–5, 108, 116, 127, 136, 139, 148,
vécu, le 81 152, 154–7, 160, 169, 172, 174, 181,
vicarious causation 171, 212 204, 215, 220, 223, 229
virtues 7, 117, 119, 127, 132, 135, 152, Will to Power, The 20, 35, 217
155, 187–8, 191, 205 Words 17, 73, 89, 164, 210, 216–18, 230,
viscous, the 61, 111, 193, 224 234
Voltaire 43 writing 11–17, 19, 43, 45, 64, 72, 122,
voodoo 181, 184, 200, 205 174–5, 182–3, 189, 191–2, 195, 198,
206, 216–17, 221, 226
Wagner, Cosima 3, 233
Wagner, Richard 3, 13, 27, 33, 35, 78, Zarathustra 1, 4, 16, 27, 34, 40, 62,
103, 125, 138, 187, 191, 197–9, 213, 75, 83, 94, 120, 132–3, 135–6,
221, 225, 229–30, 232 140–1, 148, 151, 153–5, 157, 172,
Wahl, J. 25 178–80, 192, 204, 207, 212, 220,
wholeness 76, 79, 132–3, 148, 172, 225–7, 230
179, 181 Zeus 120, 184
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