Nietzsche began work on Beyond Good and Evil in June 1885. When he opens §3 with the remark “the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctive activity,” he is in step with a French author he had been studying the preceding month. The rest of §3 is distinctively Nietzsche, but that general opening idea is to be found (albeit with instinct taken in the broad sense) in that new book from Paris: A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction (1885).

The author Jean Marie Guyau writes that it is erroneous to think “that most of our movements spring from consciousness, and that a scientific analysis of the springs of conduct has only to reckon with conscious motives . . . . Even those acts achieved in full consciousness have generally their beginning and first origin in dumb instincts and reflex movements. Consciousness is, therefore, only a luminous point in the great obscure sphere of life; it is a small lens, gathering in bundles some rays of the sun, and imagining too readily that its focus is the very focus from which the rays start” (S 74).

In that paragraph, Guyau mentions a question then being debated in France and England as to whether “consciousness is, in life, but an epiphenomenon, in the absence of which everything would go on in the same way” (S 74). Nietzsche completed BGE in January of 1886. In the autumn of that year, he composed Book V of The Gay Science to be added to a new edition of that 1882 work. In V he entertains the idea that “we could think, feel, will, and remember, and we could also ‘act’ in every sense of that word, and yet none of all this would have to ‘enter consciousness’ . . . . The whole of life would be possible without, as it were, seeing itself in a mirror. Even now, for that matter, by far the greatest portion of our life actually takes place without this mirror effect; and this is true even of our thinking, feeling, and willing life . . . . For what purpose, then, any consciousness at all when it is in the main superfluous?” (GS 354) Nietzsche conjectures that consciousness is proportionate an animal’s communication capabilities, that these capabilities have had advantages for survival, and that in humans thought-with-language has brought consciousness and self-consciousness beyond what is needed for survival (GS 354).

At the time of Sketch, Guyau was not familiar with any of Nietzsche’s work. There were remarkable affinities between their ideas. In common background, they had knowledge of certain authors and currents in contemporary psychology, biology, and philosophy. Like Nietzsche, Guyau rejected the pessimism that Schopenhauer and his followers had decorated and that, really, had been cultivated as far back as Buddha.

Guyau argued against the pessimistic view of life that condemns pleasure and desire. Guyau looks “not only to psychology, but to biology [to] find out whether the actual laws of life do not imply a surplus value of welfare over pain” and to show that the morality he would uphold on scientific grounds “would be right in wanting to conform human actions to the laws of life, instead of aiming at final annihilation of life, and of the desire to live” (S 33).

“If, in living beings, the feelings of discomfort really prevailed over those of comfort, life would be impossible. . . . The subjective discomfort of suffering is only a symptom of a wrong objective state of disorder . . . . The feeling of well-being is like the subjective aspect of a right objective state. In the rhythm of existence, well-being thus corresponds to evolution of life, pain to dissolution” (S 33–34).

“If the human race and the other animal species survive, it is precisely because life is not too bad for them. . . . A moral philosophy of annihilation, to whatever living being it is proposed, is like a contradiction. In reality, it is the same reason which makes existence possible and which makes it desirable” (S 37).

Guyau concludes “that suffering is not the evil most dreaded by man—that inaction is often still worse; that there is, moreover, a particular kind of pleasure which springs from conquered sorrow, and, in general, from every expended energy” (S 30).

“There are two kinds of pleasure. At one time pleasure corresponds with a particular and superficial form of activity (the pleasure of eating, drinking, etc.); at another time it is connected with the very root of that activity (the pleasure of living, of willing, of thinking, etc.). In the one case, it is purely a pleasure of the senses; in the other, it is more deeply vital, more independent of exterior objects—it is one with the very consciousness of life” (S 77).

Rand writes that her morality of reason “is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live” (AS 1018). The traction she gets in constructing definite broad values and virtues for human life comes from the specific constitution of Man and his Life which is raised as standard for life-affording correct values and virtues. In other words, the traction she gets is in the specific identity of human being per se, including all the conditional relations bearing on human life as well as the possibility that humans can power down and stop making life-affording values operative in themselves. All along the days one is chugging away with those values and virtues functioning in one’s machinery, one is affirming life. But there can come times when one has lost greatly loved persons or projects or one has badly lost some treasured abilities, or one is in great pain. For these times, I appreciate especially that Rand had written “and a single choice: to live” and not “and a single choice: to be happy.” One may no longer remember what happiness was, but one may still see what life is. You may still be able to think on continuance of your self, of your world with you alone in it; and those underlying, basis pleasures, noted by Guyau, may idle you along. In a while, you may choose life anew.

~~~~~~~~~~

Controversies over the relation of value and choice in Rand’s ethics have been tackled by Tibor Machan and by Douglas Rasmussen in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 7(2):257–73, 309–28 (Spring 2006).

Nietzsche had learned to read French with ease in time for Guyau 1885. An expanded second edition of this book appeared in 1890, two years after Guyau’s death (age 34), one year after Nietzsche’s complete mental collapse. Guyau’s Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation, ni Sanction was translated into English by Gertrude Kapteyn in 1898. Hers is a translation of the second edition. Outside the Sorbonne several years ago, I purchased the second edition in the original language for a memento of the trip. So I have been able to verify Kapteyn’s translation. Some years ago, I found the first edition in Regenstein at Chicago. I marked up my second edition to indicate the alterations and additions made from first to second. I have relied solely on what was in the first edition for my discussions of Nietzsche’s Guyau.

References

Guyau, J. 1885, 1890. A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction. Kapteyn, trans. 1898. Watts & Co.

Nietzsche, F. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil (BGE). Horstmann and Norman, trans. 2002. Cambridge.

———. 1887. The Gay Science (GS §§343–83). Kaufmann, trans. 1974. Vintage.

Rand, A. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. Random House.

In the fourth paragraph above, I mentioned Rand’s denial of a variety of instincts in humans, where instinct is used in the narrow sense. Another human ability from which she would dispel instinct is logical thought. “Reason does not work automatically; thinking is not a mechanical process; the connections of logic are not made by instinct” (AS 1012).

Nietzsche had wrestled with the origin and place of logic in the biological world (HH I 18) and in Greek and contemporary philosophy (D 544; GS 111). He observed that it is a good intellectual habit by which men at odds can come to agreement (GS 348).

Continuing a quotation above, from Beyond Good and Evil, we have: “Most of a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced into determinate channels by the instincts. Even behind all logic and its autocratic posturings stand valuations or, stated more clearly, physiological requirements for the preservation of a particular kind of life” (BGE 3).

“The project for philosophical laborers on the noble model of Kant and Hegel is to establish some large class of given values . . . and press it into formulas, whether in the realm of logic or politics (morality) or art. . . . But true philosophers are commanders and legislators . . . . True philosophers reach for the future with a creative hand and everything that is and was becomes a means, a tool, a hammer for them. Their "knowing" is creating, their creating is a legislating, their will to truth is —will to power.” (BGE 211 [Horstmann and Norman])

(See also the Preface §4 added to Daybreak the same year as BGE.)