Is there such thing as a truly selfless act? Nietzsche criticized selflessness and altruistic deeds as often being a display of weakness, decay and a lack of belief in one’s self and one’s own goals. To help your neighbour is often to hinder yourself. However, if you are going to pursue a selfish life, you had better make sure your goals, and your self, are worth it, writes Guy Elgat.

Should one be altruistic and act for the sake of others, even at a cost to oneself? Should one’s actions be free of any egoistic motivations? Is selflessness a virtue one ought to strive for and cultivate? To many of us the answer to such questions is so self-evident that even raising them would appear to be either a sign of moral obtuseness or an infantile attempt at provocation. For Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19^th Century “immoralist” German philosopher, however, the answer to these questions was by no means straightforward and unequivocal. Rather, he believed that altruism and selflessness are neither virtues to be unconditionally pursued and celebrated nor obligations grounded in absolute morality. Moreover, he thought that other-regard (regard for others) is something to be practiced, if at all, with care and moderation; indeed, in some cases selflessness could pose a great danger or even be a sign of deep existential malaise.

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To approach Nietzsche’s challenging and unsettling views on this topic, it would be helpful to avail ourselves of a well-known distinction in philosophy, namely, that between psychological egoism and normative egoism. Psychological egoism, roughly put, is a view about human psychology, which holds that as a matter of fact human beings are such that all their actions – appearances to the contrary notwithstanding – are exclusively motivated by egoistic self-concern. Those who think differently, according to this view, are simply victims of self-deception: fearing to see their true visage in the mirror, they play hide and seek with themselves, never catching themselves in the act. Normative egoism, on the other hand, is not concerned with psychology, not with what is the case but, as its name suggests, with what ought to be the case. It holds that even though we might harbor within ourselves other-regarding feelings and concerns, we should struggle against the pull of these forces and become utter egoists, since we would be better off if we practiced self-love and asked, with respect to any course of action, “What’s in it for me?”.

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As Nietzsche writes “under strict examination the whole concept “unegoistic action” vanishes into thin air”.

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Now, both of these views are quite radical, and to that extent, rather implausible. But it is important to see that Nietzsche rejects both of them. Take the claim of psychological egoism: despite the impression that one might acquire upon reading Nietzsche’s “middle period” texts, the period of his writing when he was mostly interested in these questions, Nietzsche is actually and very carefully arguing for a far more subtle position. Thus, in his 1878 work Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche, rather than arguing that we are all egoists through and through, sought to show that every action we perform is at least to some extent, but not necessarily exclusively, egoistically motivated. Consequently, for Nietzsche, every action is either utterly egoistically motivated, or is of mixed motivation – partly altruistic and partly egoistic.