Anyone attempting a comparison of the philosophies of Hegel and Nietzsche is immediately confronted with what seems to be an intractable difficulty, for the two men represent ‘fundamentally divergent types of philosophical style and temperament’. Hegel is a systematic philosopher who places his faith in the rigorous and methodical unfolding of dialectical reason, whereas Nietzsche is an unsystematic, highly literary writer, the champion of brilliant isolated perceptions and colourful, arresting metaphors. Linguistically the philosophers are worlds apart. Hegel's speculative discourse, whatever its intrinsic merits and purpose, strikes many, including Nietzsche, as cumbersome and obscure, whilst Nietzsche's lively and lucid style seems, as B. F. Beerling puts it, to defeat with its light-footedness the innate ponderousness of the German tongue. These differences raise awkward questions for the commentator: Why should we undertake a comparison of Hegel and Nietzsche? And how are we to undertake that comparison? Are not the philosophers simply too far apart from each other to warrant or even to allow comparative evaluation? In this chapter we will survey some of the answers that have been given to these questions.

The effort of comparing Hegel's speculative philosophy with Nietzsche's Dionysiac philosophy of life has been justified on many different grounds. The most direct justification has come from Gilles Deleuze.