Considering Ayn Rand as a Post Modern Philosopher - heir to Nietzsche

[seymourblogger]

Are there others who wish to explore this topic with me. Ron Merrill in his book was so close with his uncovering of Rand's first edition of We the Living, comparing it with her revised edition, and her rationalization that her English was wavery at the time she wrote it. Barbara Branden in her book describes Rand as buying Zarathustra as her first book in English when she got here and underlining all her favorite passages. So we know she perfected her English by reading Nietzsche. As William Burroughs says, a good way to learn a working knowledge of a foreign language is to take a book in that language that is one of your favorites and the same book in your native language. By the time you finish you will have a decent command of the language.

I don't know if you have experienced how a favorite writer, at an early impressionable age, can take over your imagination, your thinking, your language, etc. But I guess many of you do as Rand has done that for many readers.

There are other parallels with Nietzsche that we could discuss. Rand's linguistic gifts received from Nietzsche and his unique way of thinking and writing.

Yes? No?

[Peter]

I am busy watching football. With Baltimore out, NY must win so I can root for someone in the Super bowl. So, don’t bother me. Don’t bother me. Don’t bother me. Here is what a quick search revealed. I have not read it.

Peter

Parallels and Influence

Rand had been introduced to in Russia. Allan Gotthelf records that Rand was introduced to Nietzsche “by a cousin, who informed her that ‘he beat you to all your ideas’” (2000, 14). When she came to America in 1926, the first book she bought in English was Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “and she underlined her favorite passages” (18n7). Rand had considerable affinity with the Nietzsche of that work. Prof. Gotthelf notes that the remark by Rand’s cousin suggests that Rand already held some ideas in common with Nietzsche before being introduced to his thought. He hastens to add that Nietzsche surely did have an influence on Rand’s thought as she came read some of his work.

I remember a high school class in which I had spoken up concerning individualism, self-reliance, and freedom. The teacher had said in a friendly way “You should read Ayn Rand. You’re just like her.” I did not follow up on that. I would come around to reading Rand about three years later, by another encouragement.* That later nudge was through receiving Fountainhead and Atlas as a Christmas gift. The giver had written in the front of Atlas: “Read ‘The Fountainhead’ first.” When I opened Fountainhead and began to read about Howard, I could not help but notice that he was a lot like me, especially in the part in which Peter’s mother gets after Howard to leave his drawings and go to see the Dean. It is not implausible to me that two people can independently of each other have a good many values and personal characteristics in common. Moreover, it is not implausible to me that a thinker, even one further along in intellectual development than Rand had been at her discovery of Nietzsche, could have independently come to a good many of the same explicit and rare philosophical views. For there was such a man, his writings endure, and his name is Jean Marie Guyau.

When Guyau wrote A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction, he was not acquainted with Nietzsche’s writings. In the fall of 1884, Nietzsche ordered this book, soon to be issued, from Paris. Guyau was a new philosopher and was unknown to Nietzsche until he received this book, which he had begun to study by May 1885.

(Nietzsche had learned to read French with ease in time for Guyau’s Sketch. An expanded second edition of this book appeared in 1890, two years after Guyau’s death (age 34), one year after Nietzsche’s complete mental collapse. Guyau’s Esquisse d’une Morale sans Obligation, ni Sanction was translated into English by Gertrude Kapteyn in 1898. Hers is a translation of the second edition. Outside the Sorbonne several years ago, I purchased the second edition in the original language for a memento of the trip. So I have been able to verify Kapteyn’s translation. Some years ago, I found the first edition in Regenstein at Chicago. I marked up my second edition to indicate the alterations and additions made from first to second. So in any of my discussions of Nietzsche’s Guyau, I am able to meet the requirement of relying solely in what was in the first edition.)

There were remarkable affinities between their ideas. In common background, they had knowledge of certain authors and currents in contemporary psychology, biology, and philosophy. In this 1885 work, Guyau was setting aside morality from religious faith, from Kantian duty, and from utilitarianism. He was investigating how far morality could be determined from a purely scientific view of the nature of life. Here was a kindred spirit for Nietzsche (and, more importantly for Nietzsche, a competitor). There were differences: Guyau had some training in and love for science; he prized modern, capitalistic life; and although his was a thoroughly individualistic vision, it was not an egoistic vision.

Like Nietzsche (GS §48; BGE §56), Guyau rejected the pessimism that Schopenhauer and his followers had decorated and that, really, had been cultivated as far back as Buddha. Guyau argued against the pessimistic view of life that condemns pleasure and desire. Guyau looks “not only to psychology, but to biology [to] find out whether the actual laws of life do not imply a surplus value of welfare over pain” and to show that the morality he would uphold on scientific grounds “would be right in wanting to conform human actions to the laws of life, instead of aiming at final annihilation of life, and of the desire to live” (S 33).

“If, in living beings, the feelings of discomfort really prevailed over those of comfort, life would be impossible. . . . The subjective discomfort of suffering is only a symptom of a wrong objective state of disorder . . . . The feeling of well-being is like the subjective aspect of a right objective state. In the rhythm of existence, well-being thus corresponds to evolution of life, pain to dissolution” (S 33–34).

“If the human race and the other animal species survive, it is precisely because life is not too bad for them. . . . A moral philosophy of annihilation, to whatever living being it is proposed, is like a contradiction. In reality, it is the same reason which makes existence possible and which makes it desirable” (S 37).

Guyau concludes “that suffering is not the evil most dreaded by man—that inaction is often still worse; that there is, moreover, a particular kind of pleasure which springs from conquered sorrow, and, in general, from every expended energy” (S 30).

“There are two kinds of pleasure. At one time pleasure corresponds with a particular and superficial form of activity (the pleasure of eating, drinking, etc.); at another time it is connected with the very root of that activity (the pleasure of living, of willing, of thinking, etc.). In the one case, it is purely a pleasure of the senses; in the other, it is more deeply vital, more independent of exterior objects—it is one with the very consciousness of life” (S 77).

With those few samples from Guyau, a little of his kinship with both Rand and Nietzsche is apparent. Guyau, however, was not a proponent of any sort of egoism, and his praise of concern for one’s fellows was repellant to Nietzsche. Guyau motivated such concern in a conception of life that included expansiveness and growth in its fundamental nature and that included a stress on the love of risk in human nature. Nietzsche increased his attention to those factors in his subsequent representations of life, though he continued forth with his recently distilled fundamental characterization of life as will to power, quite at odds with Guyau’s concept of life.

Until recently, I had assumed that, despite important similarities with Rand’s outlook, it was very unlikely she would have ever encountered Guyau's ideas (in French or in English). However, I have recently learned that a summary of Guyau was widely available in Petr Kropotkin’s Ethics: Origin and Development (1924 in English). So perhaps Rand had known something of Guyau’s view, not only the views of some of the moralists (and the anti-moralist Nietzsche) better known than Guyau today, as she crafted her own view.

Robert Mayhew notes that Rand had read “all the major works of Nietzsche, in Russian translation, before she left for the United States” (2005, 37). I would count as major The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and On the Genealogy of Morals. Prof. Mayhew does not specify which works of Nietzsche he means as major. Another widely read work of Nietzsche’s, and one read by Rand sooner or later, was his The Birth of Tragedy (1872). I shall neglect this early work of classical studies and cultural commentary. After the professional failure of that work, Nietzsche turned away from writing philology and inched towards writing philosophy. He finds his own philosophic voice (reached by the fourth) in the sequence Human, All Too Human (1878–80); Daybreak (1881); The Gay Science (1882 [i–IV]); Zarathustra (1883 [i–II], 1884 [iII], 1885 [iV]); Beyond Good and Evil (1886); The Gay Science (1887 [V]); On the Genealogy of Morals (1887).

Statements and concepts expressed with multiple possible meanings in the early works of this sequence are put to decided meaning, integral to his mature philosophy, in the later works. That is the way I look at Rand’s philosophical statements within her We the Living (1936) and her Anthem (1938). In these works, Rand had not yet found the positive philosophy fully her own. She sometimes used the philosophic voice of the mature Nietzsche, but with meanings less definite than his and without their organic connectivity in Nietzsche’s mature thought. In subsequent installments, I shall trace various Nietzschean chimes in Rand’s early works to their replacements in her mature philosophy. There we arrive at the oppositions of Rand’s mature philosophy to Nietzsche’s. This project can be given the smiling title “Overcoming Nietzsche.”

In the piece “Your Moral Ideal” at the beginning of this thread, I addressed the Nietzschean idea that there is not some one morality appropriate for all men; I addressed the contrast with Rand’s mature position. Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil:

Quote

Not one of these clumsy, conscience-stricken herd animals (who set out to treat egoism as a matter of general welfare) wants to know . . . that what is right for someone absolutely cannot be right for someone else; that the requirement that there be a single morality for everyone is harmful precisely to the higher men; in short, that there is an order of rank between people, and between moralities as well. (§228)

Signs of nobility: never thinking about debasing our duties into duties for everyone . . . . (§272)

Reaching back in Rand’s intellectual (and literary) development, we find her writing in We the Living (1936):

Quote

Kira: I know no worse injustice than justice for all. Because men are not born equal and I don’t see why one should want to make them equal. (Quoted in Sciabarra 1995, 101; and in Mayhew 2004, 211)

References

Gotthelf, A. 2000. On Ayn Rand. Wadsworth.

Guyau, J. 1890 [1885]. A Sketch of Morality without Obligation or Sanction (S). G. Kapteyn, translator. 1898. Watts & Co.

Mayhew, R. 2004. We the Living: ’36 and ’59. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s We the Living. Lexington.

——. 2005. Anthem: ’38 and ’46. In Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Lexington.

Nietzsche, F. 1886. Beyond Good and Evil. Horstmann and Norman, translators. 2002. Cambridge.

Rand, A. 1936. We the Living. Macmillan.

Sciabarra, C.M. 1995. Ayn Rand – The Russian Radical. Penn State.

[Guyau]

Good evening, Janet Abbey,

Peter was quoting one of my pieces on Rand and Nietzsche from here at OL. But he forgot to mention that in his captivation with the ball game. Here is an index to my work on this topic here.

Nietzsche v. Rand

– Your Moral Ideal

– Claiming Nobility

– Parallels and Influence

"Truth of Will and Value"

Part 1 – Before Zarathustra

Part 2 – Zarathustra and Beyond

––––––– Rand 1929–38 A, B, C

––––––– Rand 1938–46 A, B, C, D, E

––––––– Rand in Full

--Stephen

[Peter]

Stephen Boydstun wrote:

Peter was quoting one of my pieces on Rand and Nietzsche from here at OL. But he forgot to mention that in his captivation with the ball game. Here is an index to my work on this topic here.

end quote

Jeez, I am sorry Stephen. You are one of the few people in the world who can make me feel like a worm. You should get the next Nobel Prize for “brilliance.” Mea culpa.

Back to the NY Giants, SF Midgets game. I will remain silent for the rest of my incapacitation.

Peter

[Dennis Hardin]

In terms of his heroic view of man, his denunciation of religion and his contempt for human weakness and self-sacrifice, Nietszche has some superfical aspects in common with Rand. In terms of his skepticism, his emotionalism and his hatred of reason, Nietszche has some more fundamental elements in common with postmodernism.

This reveals the extent to which Nietszche was so often bewildering in his utter lack of structure and consistency—much like the post that began this thread.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Dennis,

I'm glad you made some sense out of all this. I'm still scratching my head.

Michael

[Dennis Hardin]

You’re welcome, Michael. I too found the hyper-comtemporaneity of the poster’s theme to suggest a recurrent ambivalence of seductive Baudrillardian subjectivity.

[Brant Gaede]

She had a long discussion on SLOP about her thesis. I still don't understand it. Something about pro or anti-dialecticism regarding Rand who is suppose to be some kind of "pomo" philosopher. It was a great sport watching posters on SLOP trying to swim through her intellectual molasses.

--Brant

"No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious"--George Bernard Shaw

[PDS]

You’re welcome, Michael. I too found the hyper-comtemporaneity of the poster’s theme to suggest a recurrent ambivalence of seductive Baudrillardian subjectivity.

I believe Emerson once asserted that it is well known that hyper-contemporaneity is consistently the hobgoblin of small minds. Or something like that.

[Selene]

You’re welcome, Michael. I too found the hyper-comtemporaneity of the poster’s theme to suggest a recurrent ambivalence of seductive Baudrillardian subjectivity.

I believe Emerson once asserted that it is well known that hyper-contemporaneity is consistently the hobgoblin of small minds. Or something like that.

One of my favorites...

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

[Guyau]

Against contemporary views of Nietzsche as successfully freeing his thought from modernity and as simply either premodern or postmodern, a good study is Robert Pippin’s paper “Nietzsche’s Alleged Farewell: The Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Nietzsche.” The paper is in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (1996) as well as in Pippin’s collection Idealism as Modernism (1997).

[Brant Gaede]

You’re welcome, Michael. I too found the hyper-comtemporaneity of the poster’s theme to suggest a recurrent ambivalence of seductive Baudrillardian subjectivity.

I believe Emerson once asserted that it is well known that hyper-contemporaneity is consistently the hobgoblin of small minds. Or something like that.

One of my favorites...

"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."

Rand didn't like the Emerson quote, that's for sure.

--Brant

[Guyau]

In 1976 Jacques Derrida was invited to speak at the University of Virginia “to give a series of lectures on the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, in honor of the Bicentennial of the American founding” (263). He told the audience:

He found the prospect of subjecting the Declaration of Independence to a “‘textual’ analysis” “intimidating.” But before he abandoned his commissioned experiment, he briefly gave it a try, and in terms that would be increasingly familiar to the ever-increasing American audience for his deconstructive criticism. He questioned the source of authority and the representational function of the signatures on the declaration, arguing that independence—indeed the very subject of the “we” announcing its independence—did not exist prior to, but rather was instantiated in, the act of signing. . . . Derrida asserted that the “signature invents the signer” and the speech act of “we” creates its own subjectivity . . . .

. . . “Do I dare, here, in Charlottesville, recall the incipit of your Declaration?” He then abruptly abandoned the experiment. “Nothing,” he confessed, “had prepared me for it.” In fact, he did have preparation, though not for such an interpretive task so much as against it. After all, for decades Derrida had been steeped in an author whom he understood to have warned against the hunt for origins, and mistaking findings for foundings. So instead of keeping his promise, . . . . he fell back on the very author who counseled against the very commemorative exercise he had agreed to undertake. Derrida did not lecture on the Declaration of Independence. He lectured instead on Friedrich Nietzsche.

. . . In Charlottesville he delivered deconstruction at work. For Derrida, following Nietzsche, the hunt for origins had come to an end, because origins are simply that which we ourselves create, and then impute meaning after the fact. We found foundings, we do not find them. Likewise, when we read Nietzsche, as Derrida would do in his analysis of Ecce Homo, we can no longer expect to locate the author, or his intended meanings, in the text. . . . By drawing from Nietzsche’s ideas about language, extending the implications of his “death of God” to the “death of the author,” and showing the utter instability in the simplest acts of reading, Derrida offered a new textualist Nietzsche . . . .

Derrida may have broken his promise to his Charlottesville hosts to lecture on the Declaration of Independence, but in his reasons for doing so he in fact participated in what, by 1976, was a long-standing practice in American intellectual life: he thought about America by thinking with Nietzsche. . . . . And yet the methods by which he did this seemed radically new and unfamiliar. . . . American observers were increasingly coming to know this new style of thought as postmodernism, a general term to encapsulate new interpretive modes from France specifically deconstruction and poststructuralism. . . . What got lost in much of the thrill and horror of the “new French” Nietzsche was that the language and methodologies were new but the reckoning with antifoundationalism was not. Although Nietzschean-inspired French philosophy and literary criticism played a significant role in cultivating new academic and popular audiences for the German philosopher, they comprised an important, but not the only, source of American engagements with Nietzschean antifoundationalism. (263–65)

(Before my rational anarchist friends rush to embrace Derrida, I would have them consider that the same deconstructionist approach could be applied to written contracts or to the written procedures used by an electrical company or by an airline company. Poets posing as philosophers are not the only blessings of written language.)

I have been quoting from American Nietzsche – A History of an Icon and His Ideas by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (Chicago 2012). If one looks up Antifoundationalism (AF) in the Index, one will find the following among the subheadings: American thinking and AF / AF as central to Nietzsche’s project / cultural criticism and AF / Emerson and AF/ James and AF / pragmatism and AF / Royce and AF / Ubermensch concept and AF.

This looks to be a very fine book. There is no mention of Ayn Rand in the book, but I think it can be valuable to the scholar of Rand’s philosophy and literature. It can give one the Nietzsche currents among American intellectuals during the years that Rand was writing We the Living and The Fountainhead.

The absence of any mention of Rand in connection with Nietzsche in American cultural history is perhaps in part due to the usual academic wish to not mention her in serious print. But there is a more substantive reason as well.

Rand became noticed significantly with appearance of The Fountainhead, the book and the movie. The reception of them by some in American audiences included associations of Rand’s ideas with Nietzsche’s. That is a small story missing from American Nietzsche. However, close reading of Fountainhead shows a lot against Nietzsche . (See Hunt 2005 and Boydstun 2010, a, b, c, d, e.)

After Atlas Shrugged, Rand became known for her own fully developed, systematic, foundationalist, pro-reason philosophy. She was thereafter not part of the Nietzsche currents important on the intellectual scene in America.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ninth, the Nietzsche quotations that Rand had thought to use (gathered from her Fountainhead-composition notes) as headings of Fountainhead’s four sections are discussed by Shoshana Milgram in “The Fountainhead from Notebook to Novel” (Mayhew 2007).