1001Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche vs Jean-Paul Sartre on Mind

Nietzsche analyzes the mind as a battleground of competing drives whose surface unity is itself a product of ranking and discipline. Sartre analyzes consciousness as the for-itself, a nothingness that confronts the in-itself of brute being and projects meaning into a meaningless world. Both treat the mind as constitutively engaged in the creation of value, but Nietzsche's analysis is genealogical and ranked, while Sartre's is structural and universal.

About this topic

Philosophy of mind asks what mental states are, how they relate to bodies and brains, and how thought, perception, and feeling are possible at all. Classical sources from Plato through Descartes treated the mind as a distinct substance, while later philosophers proposed varieties of materialism, functionalism, and emergentism in its place. Phenomenologists in the twentieth century turned attention to consciousness as it is lived from the inside. Contemporary philosophy of mind works in close dialogue with cognitive science.

For a side-by-side overview of the two philosophers more broadly, see the full Friedrich Nietzsche vs Jean-Paul Sartre comparison. To browse philosophy more widely on this theme, see the the Mind quotes hub.

Representative quotes on mind

Friedrich Nietzsche on mind

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking.”

  • Attributed to Friedrich Nietzsche:

    “The higher we soar the smaller we appear to those who cannot fly.”

Jean-Paul Sartre on mind

  • “Hell is other people.”

    Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres.

  • “Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom .”

    L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936)

  • “L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

    He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.

  • “L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”

    He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life.

  • Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre:

    “Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”

All 6 Jean-Paul Sartre quotes on mind →

Continue reading