Nietzsche vs. Kant: Or How I Stopped Worrying and Learnt to Love Thymos
At the dawn of history, two men stand to fight in a “bloody battle to the death”. The motivation of the battle is to be seen. To be recognized.
As just another mammal, humans desire to survive drove them to make tools, hunt in packs, and domesticate animals on their way to subjugating all nature. But now that man lorded over all, what remains is to be recognized as such. As a master.
But if all the other creatures were subjugated, then what is it to be seen or recognized by a deer, squirrel, or even a lion? The only recognition that matters, is the recognition of this other man. And so the battle proceeds. Two men fighting to the death for their desire to be recognized.
It proceeds, until the desire to survive in one of the combatants prevails, and they submit, creating the first power structure in history. That of a master - who was driven till the end by their desire to be recognized - and a slave - whose desire to survive ultimately prevailed.
That’s at least how Francis Fukuyama sets up the Hegelian dialectic force driving history towards its concluding synthesis at the “End of History”1. Slavery, imperialism, feudalism, aristocracy and democracy are all explained as a result of the developing fight between those two competing forces: man’s desire to be recognized and his desire to survive; their conquering, adventurous “spiritedness” (or Thymos as Plato called it in the Socratic Dialogues) , and their peace-seeking, desiring, consuming self.
Which brings us to Product Management.
The Short Brutish Life of a Startup Founder
Before we get to the End of History and the Rise of the Product Manager, we should stop by Thomas Hobbes, who - simplistically - worried that left to their own Thymos, humans are likely to keep battling. Without the overwhelming power of the sovereign (Leviathan) to check them, men will engage in a war of “all against all” leading to the aforementioned “nasty, short, and brutish” life as the default state of nature. Did I mention that 70% of startups die before the age of 10? 2
The solution that developed through Locke, and Hume, and was informed by Christian thought - liberal democracy - amounted to an argument that as members of a society we should get into an agreement to let this desire to be recognized business to the side. Have the state recognize all of you as equal humans with equal rights. And focus on the surviving stuff. No one should harm you, and you shouldn’t harm anyone. Work, make money, have property. But please don’t try to duel someone for your tribe’s prestige or to conquer new lands.
When you think about it, a similar Hobbesian trade is involved in most modern professions. Instead of dueling it out in the world of risk taking, with a chance to get bankrupt, go take a job, make money, save, and retire. Co-exist with the realities of the organization you are working in: your co-workers, bosses, the organization’s brand, legal and regulatory status, etc.
Kant and Work Life Balance
Product Management represents a special case3 of professional work. In most businesses of small or medium size, the founder, the CEO, or the business owner, typically make those decisions that a PM is expected to make. They are deciding who their customer is, what are they offering that customer, how much resources to put into serving customers, etc. They have total creative control. But as companies grow and “professionalize”, the CEO or the founder, doesn’t have enough time to make every decision, so they hire managers of all kinds to handle different parts of the business.
But in tech businesses, the “product” is usually what got the founder involved in the first place. It is the idea they obsessed over and risked all to bring to life. Most founders don’t start tech companies out of a desire to survive or just make a living. They are usually pursuing some deeper meaning: working on something they enjoy, bringing positive change to the world, or just be rich and famous. In other word to be recognized for their talent, ability, fame, or wealth. So when they let go a little of that total creative control on this thing that means too much to them, they do it reluctantly. They try to hire someone like the person who has been in the job so far - them - while also starting to adopt things like strategies, plans, and other mechanisms to ensure that their vision of the company and product continues to be recognized. In a way, by hiring their first PM, they move the business towards rationality. Towards being run by rules, and by cooperation between hired professionals. The hiring of the first PM signifies an important step in the progression of the history of the organization.
Immanuel Kant believed that there is freedom in this kind of rational relationship with the self and other. From that comes a sense of duty towards them, and the potential for cooperation. He saw this as the ultimate realization of Nature’s purpose of man:
Need forces men, so enamored otherwise of their boundless freedom, into this state of constraint. They are forced to it by the greatest of all needs, a need they themselves occasion inasmuch as their passions keep them from living long together in wild freedom. Once in such a preserve as a civic union, these same passions subsequently do the most good. It is just the same with trees in a forest: each needs the others, since each in seeking to take the air and sunlight from others must strive upward, and thereby each realizes a beautiful, straight stature, while those that live in isolated freedom put out branches at random and grow stunted, crooked, and twisted. 4
I know it feels like a stretch to project this lofty language on the development of the corporation. But.. I mean.. the motivational poster is writing itself:
And indeed there is freedom in the “grown up” corporation. There is a community in a larger organization, more resources to take on harder problems, and more things to learn and explore. Also, you get a stable income that allows you to escape the short, brutish life of risk taking, and lead a comfortable life that is perfectly balanced with your work.
Nietzsche: Enter Stage Left
Like an amoral, cranky shitposter on Twitter, you can see Friedrich Nietzsche snarking “Slavery. Congratulations, you just invented slavery bro”. The slavery our man Friedrich is probably talking about is the slavery to the comfort of being a part of a herd. However sophisticated that herd is. He’d probably wave his arms around and wonder what greatness has ever come out of people living comfortably, sheltered from risk and striving? The liberal tendency to suppress Thymos in favor of the rationality of rules, and order, limits - by definition - the ability of an individual to create. When the desire to survive (now desire to consume) completely overtakes the desire to be recognized, Fukuyama, channeling Nietzsche, observed that
[liberal democracy] produced fewer of the beautiful but useless things that are typical of aristocratic societies, from poems and theories of metaphysics to Faberge eggs; on the other hand they produced vastly greater quantities of things that are useful but ugly: machine tools, freeways, Toyota Camrys, and prefabricated houses. 5
In other words: more condos, less cathedrals.
Modern organizations understand that at some level. In order to nurture some degree of striving, they employ a combination of two tactics. The first is creating a feeling of togetherness, an esprit de corps that channels the desire for recognition - the Thymos - of the group, outwards. It is we against the world. We are the disruptors, fighting for a battle to the death against the behemoth. The IBM, Microsoft, Google. “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”. And this tactic works. Stories from early days of most of the disruptive companies convey the rush of a Trojan wall defense. Take for example, a news article description of Amazon’s first major holiday peak in 19986:
The company was dramatically under-staffed. Every employee had to take a graveyard shift in the fulfillment centers to meet orders. They would bring their friends and family and would often sleep in their cars before going to work the next day.
This of course works until it doesn’t. At some point you win. The disruptor become the behemoth. They can try to keep up the “we against the world” mentality, promising bigger fights, newer markets, more innovative products, etc. But by that time, their ranks are probably already filled with people who came in here exactly because they don’t want to fight. They want the peace and cooperation in a large org, and a stable living. They need work-life balance. Nay, work-life harmony.
That’s when organizations have already typically switched to the second form of nurturing Thymos: formal games. Like sports, which - really - has no outward purpose except competition, organizations create all sorts of internal sports. They call it titles, promotions, and levels. And like sports, they have their arbitrary rules, and records. And those too work. The evidence is too obvious to point out. But the effect is an internal striving, that is not really much about the recognition of the world, but rather the recognition of the people on the intranet. The organization becomes a planet of its own, floating in space, waiting to be hit by a disruptive meteor, like the one it once was.
You Mentioned Something About a PM?
People involved in building the core product(s) of a tech company, show the dissonance between the “first man”- created in the image of the founder - and the “last man”- striving in arbitrary internal competitions - best. People working in strong functional areas (e.g. accounting, legal, sales) tend to have a clearer path of excellence in their own functional areas. For example, a CFO can be unambiguously responsible for the financial health of the company, and can be recognized as a really good CFO, even when product or sales are struggling. But PMs are typically too in the middle of what the company and the product IS to be able to excel in isolation of excellence of all the other parts. A PM, especially a good one, can’t put their head down and just do their job. They need to look around, and make sure everything else is working.
That fact leads to some of the modern romance around the PM job. It also leads to the mistaken view of the PM as the GM or the CEO of the product. That is patently an incorrect view, because a PM usually doesn’t have formal control on all resources required for success of their piece of the business. However, they are just tied too closely to the mast of the ship. But even that is exciting. Especially in a small organization, where what a PM does feels a lot like what the CEO does. The chaos and unpredictability of a nascent business creates a lot of opportunities to identify gaps, plan attacks, and build stuff. It is creative, in the most literal sense, because of that unpredictability and chaos. It’s will-to-power, gritty, and self-surpassing all the way to the Ubermensch. Or at least Uber.
But as the organization grows, consultants are hired, and rules are put in place, the unpredictability starts subsiding, discontinuities appear less frequently, and chaos becomes a bad word. The PM who still remembers the formative days is increasingly presented with the choice between the Kantian world of rules, collaboration, predictability and management by policy, and the Nietzschean world of bare-knuckle, free-reining, Thymos. They can act professionally, make plans, write business cases, and produce the world most beautiful metric decks. Or they can build hundreds of scrappy, duct-taped Mad Max-style experiments hoping that something works. They can become agents of order, or continue to bring in the chaos. The gravitational pull of most organizations is clear, and more and more engineers, PMs and designers end up striving for incremental features, in fancy office buildings, stuffed with gourmet food and signature espressos.
Do I have a choice to advocate for? Not really. It would be hypocritical to dismiss the personal advantages of the Kantian pull towards rationality. Too much chaos can be draining and unproductive. A sense of community and opportunity to collaborate with like minded people is invaluable. Building stuff that breaks every other day is traumatizing. Having steady, predictable income is nice.
And yet, as Orson Welles put it:
in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
So, who knows?
Bonus the-internet-has-everything content:
If you squint, this primordial fight looks too much like the Biblical fight between Cain (a jealous megalomaniac), and Able (a peace-loving shepherd) over who God favored, or recognized.
I am really using PM title liberally to include some engineers, UX designers, and traditional product manager; people who have some degree of authority in shaping what is it that a company offers to the world.
Fukuyama, F. (2020). End of History and the Last Man. Chapter 28.