Your Moral Ideal

“Man knows that his desperate need of self-esteem is a matter of life or death. As a being of volitional consciousness, he knows that he must know his own value in order to maintain his own life. He knows that he has to be right; to be wrong in action means danger to his life; to be wrong in person, to be evil, means to be unfit for existence.” (AS 1057)

“Pride is the recognition of the fact that you are your own highest value . . . —that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice. . . .” (AS 1021)

“Do you wish to fight for my world? . . . Do you wish to undertake a struggle . . . where the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal?” (AS 1068)

Pride is one of the seven virtues Ayn Rand crafted for her ethics (AS 1018–21). These virtues are said to be necessary means for a life whose “supreme and ruling values” are: reason, purpose, and self-esteem (AS 1018). Those three values are together “the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life” (OE 25).

The virtue pride corresponds with the value self-esteem, corresponds as necessary means to end (OE 25). Pride is the process of achieving self-esteem by thinking for oneself (AS 1057), by “unbreached rationality” (AS 1059), “by never accepting any code of irrational virtues impossible to practice and by never failing to practice the virtues one knows to be rational—by never accepting an unearned guilt and never earning any, or, if one has earned it, never leaving it uncorrected” (OE 27; see also “Selfishness without a Self” and Tara Smith’s ARNE 236–47).

The virtue productiveness corresponds with the value purpose, corresponds as necessary means to end. Productiveness is means to human survival, but it also provides a central purpose to the life of the rational animal that is man. The central purpose is “the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values” (OE 25). Productiveness is means to purpose by way of realization of purpose. Productiveness is the continual process of “remaking the earth in the image of one’s values.” It is “the process of achieving your values, and to lose you ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live” (AS 1020; see also ARNE 203–5, 209–12).

I should mention that Rand conceives of the particular forms of the virtue productiveness as economically adaptive (AS 713–27). Moreover, the concept productiveness is broad; it includes the work of parents, educators, and counselors (AS 785, 994–95).

The virtue rationality corresponds with the value reason, corresponds as activity to faculty of the activity. Distinctively as virtue, “rationality means the recognition and acceptance of reason as one’s only source of knowledge, one’s only judge of values and one’s only guide to action” (OE 25). Rationality is the fundamental necessary means for human survival and psychological well-being (AS 1016–18).

In Rand’s ethics: “Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward . . . . Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and reward of life” (AS 1021).

To the contrary, Friedrich Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:

“You still want to be paid, you virtuous! Want to have reward for virtue, and heaven for earth, and eternity for your day? / And now you’re angry with me for teaching that there is no reward and paymaster? And truly, I do not even teach that virtue is its own reward. / Oh, this is my sorrow; reward and punishment have been lied into the ground of things—and now even into the ground of your souls, you virtuous! / . . . / All the secrets of your ground will be brought to light . . . . Your lie will be separated from your truth. / For this is your truth: you are too pure for the filth of the words revenge, punishment, reward, retribution. / You love your virtue as the mother her child; but when did anyone ever hear that a mother wanted to be paid for her love? / . . . / Your virtue should be your self and not a foreign thing, a skin, a cloaking; that is the truth from the ground of your soul, you virtuous!” (Z II “On the Virtuous”)

According to Nietzsche, virtue is not means to any end, not even to itself as end. “You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows any cause” (Z I “War and Warriors”).

Virtue is an ascent. One creates one’s virtues from one’s unique suite of drives and passions and one’s unique experience.

“You set your highest goal at the heart of these passions, and then they became your virtues and passions of pleasure. / And whether you stemmed from the clan of the irascible or the lascivious or the fanatic or the vengeful: / Ultimately all your passions became virtues and all your devils became angels. / Once you had wild dogs in your cellar, but ultimately they transformed into birds and lovely singers.” (Z I “On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain”) (See also HH II[1] 91, II[2] 70, and D 560.)

A year earlier, in The Gay Science:

“Have you never heard of an intellectual conscience? A conscience behind your ‘conscience’? Your judgment ‘this is right’ has a pre-history in your instincts, likes, dislikes, experiences, and lack of experiences. . . . / The firmness of your moral judgment could be evidence of your personal abjectness, of impersonality; your ‘moral strength’ might have its source in your stubbornness—or in your inability to envisage new ideals. . . . / What? You admire the categorical imperative within you? This ‘firmness’ of your so-called moral judgment? This ‘unconditional’ feeling that ‘here everyone must judge as I do’? Rather admire your selfishness at this point. And the blindness, narrow-mindedness, and modesty of your selfishness. For it is selfish to experience one’s own judgment as a universal law; and this selfishness is blind, narrow-minded, and modest because it betrays that you have not yet discovered yourself nor created for yourself an ideal of your own, your very own—for that could never be somebody else’s and much less that of all, all!” (GS 335; see also 120 and BGE 221, 228, 272)

[The translation of the preceding passage is Walter Kaufmann’s except that I have put narrow-minded for kleinliche where he put petty, and I have put modest for anspruchslose where he put frugal. It is perhaps unnecessary to say, but I will say it just to be sure: Nietzsche espouses a type of noble selfishness, which the selfishness criticized in this passage is not. Rand, of course, espouses a variety of rational selfishness.]

In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche writes of his competitors:

“Whether it is hedonism or pessimism [sympathy/pity], utilitarianism or eudaemonism [well-being/happiness]—all these ways of thinking that measure the value of things in accordance with pleasure and pain, which are mere epiphenomena and wholly secondary, are ways of thinking that stay in the foreground and naïvetés on which everyone conscious of creative powers and an artistic conscience will look down . . . . / In man creature and created are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, form-giver, hammer hardness, spectator divinity, and seventh day . . . . / There are higher problems than all problems of pleasure, pain, and pity; and every philosophy that stops with them is naïveté.” (BGE 225)

In Zarathustra:

“Those who care most today ask: ‘How are human beings to be preserved?’ But Zarathustra is the only one and the first one to ask: ‘How shall human being be overcome?’ / The overman is in my heart, that is my first and my only concern—and not human beings . . . . / Oh my brothers [you higher men], what I am able to love in human beings is that they are a going over and a going under . . . . / . . . / Today the little people have become ruler: they all preach surrender and resignation and prudence and industry and consideration and the long etcetera of little virtues. / . . . / That [which is of little people] asks and asks and does not tire: ‘How do human beings preserve themselves best, longest, most pleasantly?’ With that—they are the rulers of today. / . . . / Overcome for me, you higher men, the little virtues, the little prudence, . . . the pitiful contentedness, the ‘happiness of the greatest number’!” (Z IV “On the Higher Man”)

On Rand’s view, “man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads” (AS 1069). The roads of man are of unlimited good prospect because of the possibility of men embracing the value of human existence and the virtue of rationality, because of what men will discover and invent, because of their advancing material productions.

When Rand writes of the individual “shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man,” it is man we know, with moral virtues right for all men; it is not man becoming some faint fancied overman. These universally fitting human virtues are not strangers; they are of one’s self.

When Rand writes of a struggle wherein “the hardships are investments in your future, and the victories bring you irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal,” the ideal is more fully embodied than in the quotation of the preceding paragraph. Here “the world of your moral ideal” is success in one’s particular ventures of production together with success in joint efforts to create a dependable and just legal framework for those ventures. Rand’s term irreversibly is puzzling. It seems to me that she was thinking of a relative irreversibility, a relative reliability of advance, in comparison with prospects under false virtues and under law not protecting true, individual rights.

A world in which virtue brought one (not relatively, but absolutely) “irreversibly closer to the world of your moral ideal” would seem to be a world with dynamics of human action “as it ought to be.” I expect there is some sense to this plane of ethical thought—I’m reminded of the idea of an evenly rotating economy in economic theory—but for now its moorings remain in the mist.

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I will write further on differences between Nietzsche and Rand concerning virtues, as well as differences in their underlying concepts of life, in a later installment. In the meantime, comments on material in the present installment are very welcome.

Nietzsche References 

Human, All Too Human (HH) 1879–80 (II). R. J. Hollingdale, trans. 1986. Cambridge.

Daybreak (D) 1881. R. J. Hollingdale, trans. 1997. Cambridge.

The Gay Science (GS) 1882 (I–IV). W. Kaufmann, trans. 1974. Random House.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z) 1883 (I&II), 1885 (IV). A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge.

Beyond Good and Evil (BGE) 1886. W. Kaufmann, trans. 1966. Random House.