Most philosophers seem to be neurotic. While they usually start with an enterprise that appears entirely rational and logical, they time and again end up with something bizarre; their original rational propositional content driven to extremes that deem exaggerated and irrational and that defy common sense. (Of course there are intellectuals that are derisive of the common sense all the same and consider “common sense” as a primitive tool for ordinary people and for the hoi polloi against whom they think they are at war with anyway. Yet they should look out that the joke isn´t on them in the end.) Maybe these philosophers fall in love too much with their own concepts so that they want to see them everywhere and therefore expand them until they get overstretched. Yet maybe their philosophies are an epiphenomenon of their psychologies in the first place, and psychologies frequently are exaggerated, irrational and neurotic. (Actually Nietzsche was the first philosopher to try to track down philosophies and religious doctrines (and even science) to the psychologies – and the irrationalities of the psychologies – of their respective founders. Marx would do something similar in tying philosophies etc. to class consciousness. And, in a way, their debasement of rational thought as more or less an epiphenomenon of an irrational psychology or social position – though intuitive in the first place – seems exaggerated and bizarre and hard to swallow once again.)

Both Nietzsche and Marx are great liberators. They want to free man from oppression, emancipate man and maximise his freedom. That is basically a good and a healthy idea and strikes as a noble cause. Yet at least deeper down inside, both Nietzsche and Marx are very aggressive personalities. They indeed want total liberation and freedom for man, which is irrational (and politically dangerous). They do so because they are paranoid neurotics. Both Marx and Nietzsche are permanently feeling oppressed, besieged, subdued, exploited, they both regard life as a permanent struggle and they see themselves – against their will – integrated into a mere power dynamics that makes up for the human and social fabric in their imagination (whereas Nietzsche felt threatened by groups that form a lower social stratum, Marx felt threatened by groups that form a higher social stratum). When you feel that oppressed, a “revolution” and “total liberation” will appear as the natural antidote. In their all-or-nothing worldview it´s “Victory or Die”. They do not compromise. Because of their uncompromising nature and their maximalist philosophies both Marx and Nietzsche exercise great charisma as iconoclasts and they are captivating to the adventurous-hearted among us. But, whilst being great iconoclasts, how good are they as architects?

Both Nietzsche and Marx obviously had uncomfortable inner lives. They both experienced existence as something painful. Nietzsche considered this inherent to being itself and did not want to change that; he actually considered heightened sensitivity to pain and Weltschmerz as something aristocratic and elite. Via the overman Nietzsche wanted to conceptualise a state of inner freedom that triumphs over the impertinences being imposes on man, and via the Amor fati he wanted to establish a positive force that is greater and more powerful than the negative forces that derive from the outside, as a sort of “in your face” against their impertinence. Marx, by contrast, thought that pain is imposed on man by economic backwardness, by class society and by lack of knowledge/”false consciousness”, i.e. conditions that could be changed via socialist revolution. Both Nietzsche´s concept of the overman and Marx` concept of the revolution are highly energetic and, therein, captivating. Nietzsche wanted to impose pain and hardship on the lower classes whom, for some obscure reasons, he hated and feared – although he did not want to eradicate them. Marx wanted to impose pain and hardship on the upper classes which he hated and feared – and actually eradicate them: though in the dialectic manner of his thinking he wanted the upper classes and their negative, the lower classes, to conclude to a synthesis of a classless man, who will not only overcome the open pain of the lower classes but also the secret pain and despair that haunts the upper classes in a class society. In the classless society of socialism existence would become free from pain.

Also Marx` classless man of the socialist future strikes as some kind of overman. When limitations from the outside are removed, or so Marx thought, man could live up to full universal human potential. Time and again, Marx suggests that in socialism/communism classless man will live a Leonardo da Vinci-like existence of a Renaissance man and of a uomo universalis. Fully developed “productive forces” will do the dirty work, the division of labour will become obsolete (for reasons largely untold by Marx and Engels), and man will “own” his labour and the fruits from his labour himself. Labour will cease to be a necessity and will become some kind of artistic self-realisation of man (or, as you might equally think, some kind of wellness therapy that saves him from boredom). However, also the socialist man envisaged by Marx remains somehow strangely passive when compared to the vision of Nietzsche, who always was speaking about “creation” instead of “labour” when it came to the original mode of the self-realisation of man. Marx` socialist man is actually quite a domesticated man, while Nietzsche always advocated living “dangerously”, adventurously, creatively and outside of society. While Marx wants to remove the forces that restrict the freedom of man from the outside, he never became very vocal or imaginative about the inner freedom of man. What deems paradoxical about Marx and most Marxists is that they do not seem to strive for true inner freedom and emancipation in the first place: because they do not want to be free from Marxism. Marxism is a doctrine, moreover a doctrine largely based on hostility and, as Nietzsche would identify it, on ressentiment; Marxists usually want to be the good ones and some selected other groups to be the evil ones; they do not want to be beyond good and evil, i.e. achieve true inner freedom, because they do not want to free from society and they do not want to free from Marxism. They want to stick to them. Therefore they stick to their attachments and remain entangled in Samsara and its affairs. To combine a struggle for the outer freedom of man with the struggle for the inner freedom of man is where it would get very interesting (and this will be my turn). While Marx wanted to bring a noble society, Nietzsche wanted to bring a noble individual. So they may complement each other – and so they may intrinsically differ from each other. Yet both socialism and the overman are metaphysical constructs at any rate. They are beyond anything mankind has ever experienced. While metaphysics has rationality, we ultimately do not know whether metaphysical postulates are but mere fantasy.

Whereas Marx at times is not even considered a full-blown philosopher because he was overly preoccupied with politics, Nietzsche wanted to refrain from all politics and he took pride in considering himself “den letzten unpolitischen Deutschen”. Nevertheless he also had his views about how a society should be organised, and as he definitely wanted to be segregated from the lower classes he advocated some kind of caste system; at least he was a political reactionary and he staunchly resisted socialism. Yet Nietzsche, first and foremost, seemed too egoic and self-obsessed to apparently even being able to develop a concept and an understanding of what a society actually is and what politics actually is. In a way, Nietzsche remained “politically naïve”. Marx, by contrast, was super political, to a degree that his understanding of politics morphed into the philosophical and metaphysical. The forces that determine politics in his view – “dialectical materialism”, “class struggle”, “revolution”, “socialism” – are on the verge of being deeply ontological ideas, if not metaphysical and eschatological ones. Nietzsche wanted to free himself from obstructive outside influences. He had a considerably feminine, “compassionate” personality, and he longed for “masculine” dominance, resilience and strength. In a way, Nietzsche´s life struggle was to liberate himself from the influence of his gently possessive mother, and he described this struggle for self-realisation with great and captivating pathos. Therefore Nietzsche is appealing to so many people (with the exception of most Marxists however), because self-realisation is a universal topic. Marx, by contrast, was estranged from his mother. He knew that in part he was himself to blame for this, due to his thorny and detrimental egoism and his exploitative and dominating habitus he already demonstrated as a child (characteristics he would later attribute with great and captivating pathos to capitalism). The theme of his life was “alienation” and reconciliation. His vision is to reconcile man with society, end all conflict and alienation and end all egoism by letting the individual labour of man become literally symbiotic with the labour of society. Socialism, as Marx literally had envisaged it, bears similarities to a protective and nurturing womb, in which the embryo can “progress” and develop freely. While there are rationally justifiable hopes that socialism would make a better economy and society, Marx went beyond that in his vision and hopes for socialism and became quite irrational. Psychologically, his strive for socialism may be interpreted as an attempt for reconciliation with his “mother” (though in an actually archaic and regressive way), respectively with his own suppressed emotionality to finally become a fully realised “ganzer Mensch”. Both Nietzsche and Marx actually were overmen due to their very superior intellect – and they also were barred from being overmen because their emotional lives were in disarray. Hence their laborious and pathos-ridden struggle for liberation, for the overman or for socialism strikes as an expression of their fundamental phantasma.

Both Nietzsche and Marx seem to be concerned with the issue of value. They want to create new values and want to stretch the human experience to where it had never been before. Nietzsche considers it the task of the philosopher to evaluate existence and to attribute value to things. Nietzsche does this out of an aristocratic understanding and self-concept, whereas Marx despises the aristocracy (although there are indications that he secretly admired the aristocracy). At any rate they are both confronted with the problem of establishing an intrinsic value. Nietzsche wants to do this via the overman as the elevated instance that attributes value to everything else. Marx sees the abstract labour of the worker as the source of all value. Yet value hardly is intrinsic. A value is both substantial as well as relational: it refers to a quality that needs to be there, but that also needs to be considered as “valuable” from someone else. Both Marx and Nietzsche most obviously had an inferiority complex. Out of that sprang their desire to feel superior to others, their quick irritation when someone else had power, and their hunger to demonstrate to themselves that they had “intrinsic” value, independent from anyone else´s judgement. Yet the only thing that may have intrinsic value is God in heaven. Both Marx and Nietzsche wanted to do away with God and become some kind of God in heaven themselves.

Nietzsche was dismissive of a popular philosopher of his time whose name I forgot. He considered him flat and unoriginal. When Nietzsche became popular the respective philosopher took revenge and considered Nietzsche as flat and unoriginal and as a plagiarizer of Max Stirner, who, in his work Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and Its Own) advocated the self-realisation of the individual (how egoistic it ever may be) as the sole purpose of life. He rejected the idea of man as a social being and became a forerunner of individualist philosophy and, politically, of anarchism. Therefore there is some resemblance to Nietzsche (although Nietzsche´s body of work was much more comprehensive and his writing style far superior to Stirner´s). We do not know whether Nietzsche had read Stirner, but Marx certainly had and he criticized Stirner´s egoic philosophy to an extend that it seemed to have been obsessive. The difference between Nietzsche and Stirner however is that while Stirner wanted to realise the full potential of the ego, of man, Nietzsche wanted to overcome the ego, overcome man and reach out into an entirely different kind of man, a different kind of subject: the overman, as a transcendental to man. Marx, by contrast, struck hard against Stirner because Stirner negated the social existence of man and wasn´t a “socialist”, although also Stirner´s ideas lie along the general trajectory of enlightenment, liberation and progress (whilst, within the “dialectics of enlightenment”, Stirner´s contribution was also some kind of “dark enlightenment”). Like Marx, also Stirner departed from Hegel, and like Stirner, also Marx was (in some way) a philosopher of anarchism and of the abolition of the state. Yet, if you take a closer look, Marx´ obsession with Stirner may have been grounded in that there may have been an intimacy between them deeper down inside. If you take a closer look at Marx´ vision of socialism you find astonishingly little about a society and an economy. What you have is an individual that has become omnipotent, that is in full possession of his skills, of the products of his labour, who via fully developed productive forces controls the world and the economy and who via the socialist plan even kind of controls destiny. He has become some kind of God in heaven, who can be assured to have his intrinsic value. On a more profane level, the vision of Marx about socialism seems to be similar to the vision of Stirner: what Marx describes as the socialist man appears to be, deeper down inside, a full imaginary realisation of the personality of Marx who gets reconciled with his suppressed emotionality and with the aspects of his personality he does not yet control and “own”, appears to be “der Einzige und sein Eigentum”.