PÈRE GORIOT

Author: Honoré de Balzac
Year: 1976 (1835)
Publisher: Czytelnik
Language: Polish (translator Tadeusz Zelenski-Boy)

Honoré de Balzac’s “Ojciec Goriot” (“Père Goriot”) is a haunting study of human motives in a society driven by ambition, status, and material gain. Beneath its realist detail lies a profound meditation on the tension between altruism and egoism, a tension that plays out through its central characters and constitutes an important literary contribution to the philosophical scrutiny of the theme by many thinkers before and after. Balzac's Paris is not merely a backdrop but a moral melting pot where love, sacrifice, and ambition merge.

Goriot himself represents an extreme form of altruism: a man who gives his wealth, his dignity, and ultimately his life for the happiness of his two daughters. He expects nothing in return, finding joy in their comfort, even as they abandon and exploit him.

The figure of Eugène de Rastignac provides the moral counterpoint to Goriot’s doomed idealism. A young provincial law student, Rastignac arrives in Paris dazzled by the glamour of the aristocracy and hungry for success, yet not initially corrupted. He is seduced by wealth, elegance, and power, but he does not abandon his principles lightly.

SPOILER ALERT

His relationship with Father Goriot acts as a moral anchor; in the old man’s quiet suffering, Rastignac perceives a kind of nobility absent from the salons and ballrooms he increasingly frequents. He cares for Goriot with genuine compassion, tending to him in his final decline, moved by a mixture of pity, affection, and admiration. For as long as Goriot lives, Rastignac resists the full embrace of ambition. He stands, if uneasily, in the moral space between selflessness and self-advancement.

But with Goriot’s death, that space collapses. The man who represented disinterested love and unwavering devotion is buried without ceremony, abandoned by his daughters, unmourned by the world he gave everything to. At his grave, something in Rastignac shifts. The city’s glittering façade no longer conceals its cruelty. It reveals it. What was once temptation now becomes strategy; what was once aspiration becomes a challenge. It is only after Goriot dies, and with him the last human bond that had tied Rastignac to an ethic of care, that the young man’s heart hardens. His infamous declaration “À nous deux maintenant!”is not simply a cry of ambition; it is a renunciation of sentiment, the moment he steps fully into the logic of Hobbesian egoism. The social world, as Hobbes imagined, is a battleground, and Rastignac, no longer restrained by affection or idealism, enters it with icy resolve.

This moral transformation is as disturbing as it is understandable. In the world Balzac depicts, those who cling to ideals are destroyed, while those who embrace calculation and self-interest survive, perhaps even flourish. And yet this flourishing is not without its own pathology. For Friedrich Nietzsche, values like altruism and self-sacrifice are symptoms of weakness, tools of the powerless to bind the strong. Yet the strength Rastignac gains is ambivalent. He wins power, but loses warmth. He becomes shrewd, but perhaps no longer fully human. Balzac neither condemns nor celebrates this metamorphosis; he simply records it, with cold precision.

The moral world of “Ojciec Goriot” becomes truly troubling when viewed through Nietzsche’s critique of altruism. For Nietzsche, values like self-sacrifice and humility are the product of a “slave morality”. Goriot’s relentless self-denial, his total subjugation to the will of his daughters, would appear to Nietzsche not as virtue but as a form of decadence; a renunciation of the will to power and of life itself. His daughters, who manipulate and discard him in pursuit of beauty, status, and influence, are closer to Nietzsche’s “strong” individuals, though without his corresponding ideal of the creative, life-affirming Übermensch. They are not admirable, but they are potent, and in their cold self-interest, they expose the fragility of Goriot’s love. Balzac neither endorses Nietzschean strength nor Goriot’s abjection; instead, he holds them both up to scrutiny, showing the horror of a world where moral weakness is punished and moral strength is dehumanizing.

What emerges from this interplay of philosophical ideas is not a simple moral lesson, but a tragic recognition of the contradictions at the heart of human life. Altruism, in its purest form, may be beautiful, but it is also profoundly vulnerable to exploitation. Egoism, on the other hand, offers power and success, but at the cost of empathy, connection, and moral clarity. Balzac seems to suggest that the moral ideals we inherit, whether from Kantian duty, Hobbesian realism, or Nietzschean egoism, cannot be cleanly applied to the mess of social life. Each contains truth, but none is sufficient. The novel ends not with resolution but with irony: Rastignac ascends, Goriot is buried alone, and the city looms indifferent and vast, its glittering promises secured only by the loss of innocence or the collapse of self.

In this way, “Ojciec Goriot” becomes not only a work of literary realism, but a philosophical drama or a parable of modernity in which love and power, virtue and strategy, collide with tragic inevitability. Balzac does not moralize; he exposes. His characters are not lessons but questions, and the answers they suggest are as disturbing as they are true.