Nietzsche and the Tao Te Ching: What I Found in Both That Neither Could Give Alone

I read Nietzsche first, when I was twenty and serious about being serious. It was winter in a university library in the American Midwest — the kind of cold where the radiators click all night and your breath fogs the window glass. I was holed up in a carrel on the fourth floor, the one with the broken armrest, reading Beyond Good and Evil with the intensity of someone who has just discovered that everything he was raised to believe might be a story someone else wrote.

The prose was electric. A German philologist, alone in the Swiss Alps, dismantling Christianity with a hammer and laughing while he did it. I did not understand half of it. I underlined everything anyway.

I read Laozi years later, on a rooftop in Beijing in July, the air thick with jasmine from the neighbor’s balcony and the faint smell of chuanr smoke drifting up from the street below. I was in my thirties, I was tired, and the prose I found was nothing like Nietzsche’s. It was quiet. Unhurried. It did not argue — it described. The first chapter of the Tao Te Ching tells you that whatever you are about to read cannot be put into words, and then it gives you 81 short chapters of words anyway, like someone who knows the paradox and has made peace with it.

It took me years to realize they were talking about the same thing.

What They Both Saw About Morality

Nietzsche saw that fixed moral systems — Christianity, for him — create as many problems as they solve. Define “good,” and you create “evil.” Define “virtue,” and you create people who perform virtue while feeling nothing. He called this “slave morality” — when the weak define themselves as morally superior because they cannot win on other terms.

I remember the moment I connected this to the Tao Te Ching. I was rereading Chapter 18: “When the great Tao is forgotten, kindness and morality appear. When cleverness emerges, great hypocrisy follows.” I put the book down and stared at the ceiling. Laozi had said in 12 words what Nietzsche spent three books saying.

Both of them understood something that still makes people uncomfortable: the loudest professions of virtue often signal its absence. The person who needs to tell you they are good is usually the person whose goodness is most fragile.

Beyond Good and Evil — The Part That Took Me Years to Get

Nietzsche’s “beyond good and evil” is one of the most misunderstood phrases in philosophy. He was not advocating for cruelty. He was describing a person who has outgrown the need for external moral rules because their character has become integrated enough that they naturally do what is appropriate. The Übermensch does not need commandments. Their own nature, fully developed, is the guide.

When I first read that, I thought it sounded dangerous. It took meeting a Taoist teacher in a tea shop near the Dongyue Temple in Beijing — a woman in her sixties named Liu who spoke slowly and never raised her voice — to understand what it actually means. Liu did not quote rules. She did not tell me what I should or should not do. She asked me to notice what happened when I acted in certain ways. The feedback came from reality, not from her.

This is Wu Wei in moral form. The sage in the Tao Te Ching does not follow rules. They are aligned with the Tao — the underlying pattern — and because they are aligned, their actions are naturally appropriate. It is not obedience. It is accuracy. Nietzsche, who never met Liu, would have recognized her immediately.

Where They Part Ways — And Why I Need Both

The difference is not in their analysis but in their temperament. Nietzsche is a philosopher of intensity — his prose burns, his images are dramatic, he wants you to become something greater than you are. I read Nietzsche when I need to be reminded that the comfortable answer is often the wrong one.

Laozi is a philosopher of ease. His prose settles. He does not want you to become something greater — he wants you to stop trying to become anything at all and notice that you are already inside something vast. I read Laozi when I have been trying too hard for too long and the effort itself has become the problem.

I used to think I had to choose between these. I don’t anymore. There are mornings when I need the intellectual adrenaline of Nietzsche — the voice that tells me the structure I inherited is a choice, not an inevitability. And there are evenings — late, on that same Beijing rooftop with the jasmine and the street food smoke — when the only sane thing in the world is a quiet Chinese voice telling me to stop pushing and notice that the river is already flowing in the direction I was trying to force.

Ziran — naturalness, spontaneity — is not something you achieve. It is what is left when you stop achieving. Nietzsche spent his life trying to break through to something on the other side of morality. Laozi, I think, would say the thing was never on the other side. It was always right where you were standing. You just had to stop squinting.