Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit Four: April 17 - May 14

David Potts and Kevin Hill
on the Relationship Between the Philosophies
of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Friday, April 28, 2000 11:54 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Some Points of Agreement Between Rand And Nietzsche

[From: David L. Potts ]

Some Points of Agreement Between Rand And Nietzsche


Kevin Hill writes:

[snip]

Given Nietzsche's elusiveness and suggestiveness, I think that trying to
understand Nietzsche in terms of a list of core commitments, in terms of a
reconstructed "Nietzscheanism", while of value in making sense of
Nietzsche, is not the best way to gauge whether or not a particular figure
went through a Nietzscheanism phase." I think that a more profitable way of
conceptualizing the matter is: how much *attention* did the thinker devote
to Nietzsche...

[snip]

I am inclined to think that Kevin hits the nail on the head throughout this
post. (I'll still be interested to see what Eyal has to say in reply,
though, if anything.) And I agree that _attention_ as Kevin describes it is
critical to the question of influence. But I would be willing to press a
little further on the issue of core commitments. Here is a list I kept while
I was first reading GM back in February of points of agreement between Rand
and Nietzsche.

Rand and Nietzsche both:

(1) are driven by an ideal of the _highest_ in man.
(2) believe only a precious few people will ever achieve great things.
(3) wish to _protect_ the achievers; allow them to flourish.
(4) think the "noble soul" simply _forgets_ others; whereas the man of
"ressentiment" obsesses over other people. (GM i.10; ii.24)
(5) think the lower people are offended by the "severity and
high-mindedness" of the noble man, but are pleased by people like
themselves, who "let themselves go." (GM ii.24)
(6) reject the mind/body dichotomy.
(7) regard this-worldly values - sex, health, pleasure, etc. - as good.
(8) express disappointment in _artists_ as compared with their works_.
(GM iii.4)
(9) believe in happiness. (GM i.10)
(10) believe religion is hostile to life.
(11) criticize the attack on reason (e.g., in Kant) as anti-life (and
say that anti-life philosophers attack reason). (GM iii.12)
(12) criticize the notions of "pure reason" and objectivity as
disinterestedness, and say in reply that all knowledge takes
place by some particular means. (GM iii.12)
(13) are pro-life as a or _the_ key value.
(14) have a conception of human life which is biological.
(15) believe the most corrupt motive is hatred of the successful per
se. (GM iii.14)
(16) see altruism as a dirty trick to gain control of the powerful,
the successful, the happy. (GM iii.14)
(17) have a sense of _hierarchy_ of personal worth (some people are
more important than others).

All these points of agreement still hold in _The Fountainhead_. I'm inclined
to think they all stayed with her through the end of her career, though
some, such as (17), she soft-pedaled after _The Fountainhead_.

All of these are agreements about positives, not just agreements about being
_against_ something, except (10) and (16). Some which may seem negative are
only phrased that way. (6) and (11), for instance, could be stated as
believing in mind/body unity and defending reason. It may seem strange to
say that Nietzsche defended reason, but that's what Kaufmann says, and he
has a point. Nietzsche never uses "reason" in a negative sense. It's
_rationality_ he criticizes.

People are going to say that, if Nietzsche has _ultimately_ no use for truth
or objectivity or rationality, he can't be a defender of reason. And people
are going to say similar things about many of the above points. For example,
that Nietzsche isn't "really" pro-life. In response, I want to say that we
should allow for different detailed conceptions of core ideas. Perhaps I
agree that, if you don't believe in truth, you don't "ultimately" believe in
reason. But I'm not _sure_ I do, to be quite honest about it. It's actually
a very deep topic. However, it seems clear that at the _phenomenal_ level
Nietzsche and all of us mean the same thing by "reason," viz., ratiocination
that follows certain strict rules.

Similarly for being pro-life. This is a better example, actually, because
Nietzsche was more fervently pro-life than pro-reason. As Kevin says, it is
difficult to state Nietzsche's exact position on the value of life. But we
can be pretty sure that it differs from the Objectivist view. However, to
say therefore Nietzsche wasn't "really" pro-life stikes me offhand as
absurd, since quite obviously he was passionately concerned about it. So,
although it is probably true that Rand and Nietzsche don't agree in detail
about the value of life, at a certain valid level of abstraction I think
they do agree, and the agreement is quite important.

-David


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Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

email: cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

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To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Monday, May 01, 2000 11:14 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Nietzsche's Best and Worst

[From: David L. Potts ]

Nietzsche's Best and Worst


Readers of my posts to this cyberseminar will have observed that, in the
matter of interpreting his writings, I have little interest in cutting
Nietzsche any breaks. This is not out of hostility to Nietzsche, however.

The fact is that, in spite of how appalling some of his views are, I have
found Nietzsche to be a highly stimulating, valuable, and even positive
author. In fact I think he has made the largest positive contribution of any
German philosopher (not necessarily the highest praise, mind you!). And now
that the question has been raised whether Ayn Rand could have found anything
positive in him, I want to try to formulate just what I think the positive
components of Nietzsche's philosophy are.

Following is a list of eight.

(1) Belief that one's own life is critically important and one should
seek to make it as perfect as possible. (C.f. eternal recurrence
discussion at GS 341.)
(2) Belief that life should be for "the earth," i.e., this worldly.
(3) Belief that life should be (one way or another) the standard of
value.
(4) Belief that philosophy should be for _life_.
(5) Naturalistic approach to human nature (psychological, biological).
(6) Profound discomfort with the attempt to make pity the core of
morality.
(7) Major concern with excellence and desire to promote it.
(8) His undogmatic, _growth_ oriented intellectual attitude (not just
"officially" but in his practice and what he seeks to elicit in
others).

The foregoing eight planks are intended to capture fundamentals of Nietzsche
's thought, not necessarily his positions on detailed, textbook philosophic
questions. I take it they all represent very important issues and that
Nietzsche's views on them (at the level of abstraction depicted here) should
be welcome to Objectivists.

To complement the above, I have also tried to come up with a list of the
eight most deleterious tenets of Nietzsche's philosophy, again sticking to
fundamentals. Here is the list.

(1) Belief that truth and objectivity are mythical (i.e., rejection of
reality as possessing determinate identity discoverable by reason).
(2) Denial of political rights to "lower" people.
(3) Emphasis on the order of rank as a key moral principle.
(4) Makes higher forms the end of life rather than well-being.
(5) Psychology of cruelty and power lust.
(6) Celebrates "living dangerously" (GS 283) (i.e., risky, painful
"self-overcoming") and despises living well (i.e., prudence,
excellence as measured by given standards, rational decision
making).
(7) Rejection of rationality as capable of determining ends and
standards of value.
(8) Social conflict, and the subjugation of the weak by the strong, not
only as necessary but as a positive good.

Perhaps surprisingly, I found the second list much harder to generate than
the first. And notice how many of the items overlap in meaning. Really, I
think there are just three tenets here - best captured by numbers (1), (2),
and (6) - which the remaining items merely elaborate and fill in.

On this accounting, therefore, in spite of the very bad things about him,
Nietzsche is far from completely bad. Am I missing something? What are
others' reactions to my two lists?


[David Potts]


*****************************************************
Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

email: cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

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To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2000 2:10 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Nietzsche's Best and Worst

[From: Kevin Hill ]

I was delighted to find myself in substantial agreement with David Potts'
list, and would like to amplify this with some observations of my own:

On the political side, I have always maintained that we must look both at
what Nietzsche's political-*philosophical* commitments are, on the one hand,
and also try to see what his hum-drum political commitments are, without
assuming too tight a linkage between them. In my personal experience, I've
noticed that most people, philosophers and non-philosophers alike, are much
more mutable in their justificatory thinking than they are in their actual
political opinions. The limited historical evidence suggests that, whatever
his views on ultimate grounds, Nietzsche was, from the mid-1870s on, in
favor of limited government focused on the securing of property-rights,
disarmament (I don't think we discussed this, but it's there, in _Wanderer_
#284) cosmopolitanism, European unification and an ever-increasing distaste
for manifestations of German nationalism. Interestingly, most of these views
also appear in Schopenhauer, whose metaphysics and epistemology may be even
more disturbing than Nietzsche's. However, Nietzsche's *influence* has not
stressed these aspects of his thought, Kaufmann notwithstanding, and most
people who have had their own politics influenced by Nietzsche have either
embraced deplorable views on the far right or the far left (e.g. Foucault),
with the latter currently predominating. So I think that there are plenty of
grounds for criticism here, but it should be mitigated by the fact that
Nietzsche's real political sympathies were quite different from those
"entailed" by his thought and derived from it by others.

A second point is one that I ultimately owe to Rand herself, though I had to
rediscover it for myself to see how right she is. A few years back I had a
close personal relationship with someone born and raised in Europe. Many
puzzling personality traits kept popping up that seemed, well, irrational;
talk with another friend led to their making a statement that they had had a
very similar experience with someone else from the same country. Out of an
unrelated curiosity, I found myself reading a *travel* book recently,
_Understanding Europeans_ and saw these very same traits being discussed.
They are precisely the traits on Potts negative list. To paraphrase and
summarize the book: Europeans have suffered from so many centuries of
violence, and oppression imposed by violence, that it is *baked* into their
sense of the world. (One example: how many Americans walk over old
battlefields and past ancient fortresses everyday? How many Europeans?) To
be pessimistic means to accept that life is war, sometimes by other means
but often not, to thrive you must carve out your piece, by force if
necessary, before others carve a piece out of you, winners can afford to be
excellent, losers are compelled to submit. Rational debate is just war by
other means--listening to what someone else is trying to say, being open to
the possibility of being wrong, being willing to change your mind in the
face of another's superior reasons is just prudentially *stupid*--it is to
hand a knife to an enemy. Debates never change anyone's mind, and not being
deeply skeptical about the importance of reasoning is a sign of deplorable
naivete. Life is suffering but the better people create pockets of beauty
amidst it. To be *optimistic* means: perhaps someday everything just
described can be washed away by a cleansing act of revolutionary violence.

And us? Americans are: naive, stupid, smile too much, have no sense of
reticence or caution or privacy, are tacky, make friends too easily, are
absurdly overconfident and their reluctance to embrace the revolutionary
cleansing fire means that on some level they must *like* the fact that the
world is as the Euro-pessimist describes it.

I was brought up with the Liberal Myth that there was something called the
West, which was just like America, but included Western Europe. But we
deeply misunderstand Western European culture and values if we project our
own trust, confidence, reasonableness and good-naturedness on it. At the
risk of overgeneralizing, when an American expresses views that express
confidence in reason, justice, progress, etc. we *believe* it. When
Europeans express the same views, they are either an expression of what is
thought to be an unattainable ideal, or else a cynical mask for the pursuit
of power. In short, Nietzsche's views were not all that strange--it was his
open profession of them that amazed Europeans, and his refusal to say that
it at least *shouldn't* be that way. And today, for example, among the
French, he is celebrated for his wisdom and honesty, precisely because of
the Byronic things on Potts' list #2.

Ayn Rand understood all this, as a European-American immigrant. When she
said that Nietzsche thought you had to choose between being an exploiter or
being exploited, and that he preferred the exploiter, she was *basically*
right at the deepest level, however Nietzsche might've wanted to *vote* (if
he had voted). And when she said, elsewhere, that this was the way Europeans
in general tend to think, she was basically right about that too (you're
suppose to openly disapprove of it--that's the Christian legacy--while
privately acknowledging its inevitability and seeking your own advantage
within it). And when she said that Americans had discovered, at least on the
level of sense of life, a fundamentally different stance, feeling and way of
living, beyond the false alterntaive of exploiter and exploited, she was
right about that too. She knew first-hand. I wonder if she ever fully
overcame her own Europeanness. But I do think that she gave us the
opportunity to see ourselves through alien eyes and to learn just how
unusual we are.

In short: Nietzsche's views are shocking to us, but what made them shocking
to Europeans was not what he said, but *that* he said it. What he said was a
kind of silent conventional wisdom in his broader culture. Getting a sense
of that takes us a long way toward understanding him. And ourselves.

[Kevin Hill]


*****************************************************
Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

email: cybersem@objectivistcenter.org

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*****************************************************