Rand through a Nietzsche filter

[George H. Smith]

George's money got cut off? I could have sworn he wrote that more taxes than planned were deducted. Maybe I have a reading problem? Michael

I don't know what the hell Seymour was talking about. My problem is with the IRS -- to the tune of nearly 50 percent of my income -- not Cato. But getting drunk one evening helped. I haven't solved the problem, but I'm working on it. And I had a heart-to-heart with my landlady the next day, so I'm okay on that front for at least another month. Sometimes you just need to escape from the real world, if only for an evening, and take care of things later.

Ghs

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Sometimes you just need to escape from the real world, if only for an evening...

George,

Have you tried for a lifetime? Seems like someone else has been working on it...

Michael

[George H. Smith]

Sometimes you just need to escape from the real world, if only for an evening...

George, Have you tried for a lifetime? Seems like someone else has been working on it... Michael

I escaped from the real world. Seymour was banished.

Ghs

[anamous Cares]

Well if man kind new what they were doing there wouldn't be research instead they would be called computers..

[anamous Cares]

George's money got cut off? I could have sworn he wrote that more taxes than planned were deducted. Maybe I have a reading problem? Michael

I don't know what the hell Seymour was talking about. My problem is with the IRS -- to the tune of nearly 50 percent of my income -- not Cato. But getting drunk one evening helped. I haven't solved the problem, but I'm working on it. And I had a heart-to-heart with my landlady the next day, so I'm okay on that front for at least another month. Sometimes you just need to escape from the real world, if only for an evening, and take care of things later.

Ghs

I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.

[Selene]

George's money got cut off? I could have sworn he wrote that more taxes than planned were deducted. Maybe I have a reading problem? Michael

I don't know what the hell Seymour was talking about. My problem is with the IRS -- to the tune of nearly 50 percent of my income -- not Cato. But getting drunk one evening helped. I haven't solved the problem, but I'm working on it. And I had a heart-to-heart with my landlady the next day, so I'm okay on that front for at least another month. Sometimes you just need to escape from the real world, if only for an evening, and take care of things later.

Ghs

I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.

Sorry, but I just cannot resist.

How much did you pay for the sex?

[Xray]

I remember the first time I had sex - I kept the receipt.

Sorry, but I just cannot resist.

How much did you pay for the sex?

Brilliant retort!

[Xray]

Why don't you link to a real scholar, Babette Babich who also has graduate degrees in Germany altho an American. Many of her articles on Nietzsche are written in German and translated into English by herself., Her books, her journal on Nietzsche, interviews are all bilingual as the English ones she translates herself back into German. She writes also on Hannah Arendt and Heidegger. Hicks may be a good lecturer, - Penn State is it? - but he is not a world authority on Nietzsche as Babich is. Her understanding of him is intuitive,deep and "true" if I may say that, and comes from a long career reading Nietzsche.

The focus of here is on Ayn Rand's reception of Nietzsche - does B. Babich address this too, and if yes, to what extent?

edited to add:

I just googled "Babich and Ayn Rand" and got a link to a passage of Babich's book on Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science where she writes [bolding mine]:

http://books.google.de/books?id=NhNwUjBT-ecC&pg=PA214&lpg=PA214&dq=babich+and+ayn+rand&source=bl&ots=tJt0JCr7Tf&sig=c2JlwT1r1bJlAN2Hh_PW-G8cBXw&hl=de&sa=X&ei=x9tlT8rqAYrptQaM0MzgBQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false"

BB: "This fear stems in part from the tendency to conceptual solecism that equates Nietzsche's thought with that of Ayn Rand and other more classic proponents of aristo-vulgar esoteric doctrines".

Here is the German translation (going by what you said, I assume it was done by Babich herself):

http://books.google....epage&q&f=false

BB: "Diese Furcht unterscheidet sich von der Neigung zur begrifflichen Sünde, die Nietzsches Gedanken mit denen von Ayn Rand und anderen eher klassichen Fürsprechern aristokratisch-vulgären esotersichen Doktrinen verbindet."

Note that "stems" in the English version is mistranslated in her German version as "unterscheidet", which means something else: 'differs'.

As for the term "begriffliche Sünde", (her translation of "conceptual solecism"), it does not exist in German.

"Solecism" has to be translated as e. g. "Sprachschnitzer" (language blunder), "sprachliche Ungereimtheit", etc.

Grammar mistake: it is not "vulgären esoterschen, but "vulgärer esoterischer".

I'd recommend reading BB's work in her native English.

For if one random single sentence in German already shows a number of mistakes, one can imagine what the rest looks like ...

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Well if man kind new what they were doing...

How about the opposite?

Well If woman cruel old what they were doing...

Michael

[Selene]

Apparently spelling is no longer a required discipline, even if it changes the meanings of a sentence.

I pray that the signs that say "DANGER: DO NOT TOUCH" are spelled correctly and that young technicians can still read,

Good grief...we are doomed.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I moved some posts from here to the Garbage Pile: Sockpuppet Garbage

Seymourblogger is now banned. She has made two other accounts and was posting under them, the member "anamous Cares" and a new one today, "Jeremiah Carder."

This is a neurotic person and, in my experience, she is the kind who will probaly try to make bogus accounts again in order to act immaturely, so I will keep deleting them when I find them until she moves on.

This person is no longer welcome to use an OL account.

Michael

[George H. Smith]

I moved some posts from here to the Garbage Pile: Sockpuppet Garbage

Seymourblogger is now banned. She has made two other accounts and was posting under them, the member "anamous Cares" and a new one today, "Jeremiah Carder."

This is a neurotic person and, in my experience, she is the kind who will probaly try to make bogus accounts again in order to act immaturely, so I will keep deleting them when I find them until she moves on.

This person is no longer welcome to use an OL account.

Michael

Good for you. I thought it was odd that a couple more nut jobs showed up all of a sudden.

In retrospect, it is amusing to see Seymour praise her own posts under a different name, e.g.:

http://www.objectivistliving.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=11501&view=findpost&p=159010

Ghs

[Xray]

In retrospect, it is amusing to see Seymour praise her own posts under a different name, e.g.:

http://www.objectivi...ndpost&p=159010

It looks like Janet finally got lost in her own "simulated reality".

Her posts have offered interesting material for study though because they so clearly show the loss of a sense of reality as result of a thinking that leans too heavily toward the irrational.

This irrationality manifested itself e. g. in her total inability to regard her gurus Nietzsche Foucault and Baudrillard from at least some inner distance.

Instead one got the impression of her being under the spell of Nietzsche, Foucault & Co, 'absorbing' them, trying to live out it herself here.

[9thdoctor]

Instead one got the impression of her being under the spell of Nietzsche, Foucault & Co, 'absorbing' them, trying to live out it herself here.

But why here? Why not find a site where her offerings might find a sympathetic audience? There’s a modern lit forum that I spend a little time on, and regulars there have read Delillo, another author she was constantly promoting. Oh well, I suppose she’s still welcome at the SLOP trough, or have they banned her there too?

[Xray]

Instead one got the impression of her being under the spell of Nietzsche, Foucault & Co, 'absorbing' them, trying to live out it herself here.

But why here? Why not find a site where her offerings might find a sympathetic audience?

Imo what got Janet here was her conviction that Rand was "permeated with Nietzsche" and that she was 'post modern' in her thinking.

One of my goals is to place Rand alongside other post modern layers.

From her blog:

http://aynrand2.blog...s-floating.html

[Janet]: "Rand is primarily a post modern theorist, who presented her theory via fiction".

She absolutely wanted to place Rand in there, regardless of whether she fit into these categories.

I think Janet is a Nietzschean through and through, and was also profoundly influenced by Rand's fiction at a fairly young age.

Her emotional attachment to Rand is as strong as it is to Nietzsche, hence her attempt to 'mentally marry' the two in her head.

(I can imagine that the opposite can happen as well: that fervent opponents of both Nietzsche's and Ayn Rand's philosophies also try to label Rand as a 'Nietzschean').

While Rand may well have been influenced by Nietzschean thought at a younger phase in her life, one can also find substantial differences between her thinking and Nietzsche's.

I think Rand took what suited her from Nietzsche and disregarded the rest, building some but, by no means all, elements of his philosophy into her own.

When the differences between Nietzsche and Rand were linked to in Hick's article, Janet would hear none of it. She obviously wanted to preserve the picture she had created of Rand.

There’s a modern lit forum that I spend a little time on, and regulars there have read Delillo, another author she was constantly promoting.

I can imagine that she chose Objectivist forums because she could expect the posters to be more favorable to Rand than on pure literature boards.

On literature forums, she may also run into quite a few experts on postmodern writing who might not share at all her view of Rand as a postmodernist and who would go into a detailed analysis on that.

Oh well, I suppose she’s still welcome at the SLOP trough, or have they banned her there too?

She still there, but with fewer posts. They are mostly one/two-liners like

[adressed to me]:

"I read the world through a Godard film. Through Foucault. Through Baudrillard. Through Nietzsche. Through Zizek to name a few.

Go ahead. Keep searching for origins, root causes, and horizons of a future better world. It will keep you occupied while you are waitng [sic] for Godot."

(end quote Janet)

This is another streak running through Janet's thinking: an 'authority bias', evidenced in her constantly 'reading' the world through the perspective of her prominent idols.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

I think Janet is a Nietzschean through and through...

Angela,

I disagree.

I actually don't want to discuss this person. She has taken up too much of my time already. But I find your comment merits some attention since I am interested in human behavior and I have started becoming interested in Nietzsche.

I have been skimming over his writing, thinking about going deeper into his works if something catches my fancy (ah me... philosophy is long and life is short and that seems to be the main thing philosophers try to prove... ). By way of a more thorough introduction, I have been going through a lecture series by professors Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins from the University of Texas at Austin (Solomon is now deceased), admittedly at a leisurely pace--I have only done 5 of the 24 so far.

From the information I am gleaning, I only see a superficial correlation between Nietzsche's ideas and this Janet Abbey person's posts (here and elsewhere). What I have really seen is this person aping some of Nietzsche's more flamboyant attitudes--without any of the substance--to such excess that the show was a caricature.

I'm reminded of the more boneheaded Randroids who constantly spout Objectivist jargon, sneer at people and call them mystics and altruists and intrinsicists so forth, and make a show of going into an artificial ecstasy over anything and everything Rand loved as their sole credentials for identifying themselves as experts in Ayn Rand.

I agree that Abbey poses as a Nietzschean, but is she a Nietzschean through and through?

Nah.

It's all on the surface and through a fun-house mirror at that.

If you are interested in Nietzsche, read Nietzsche. Don't use this person as a model for anything except as an example of what to avoid--i.e., an example of how much a Nietzsche-roid misrepresents him and how silly it looks once you start getting familiar with his work.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

"Artificial ecstasy"--that's a keeper, Michael.

--Brant

[caroljane]

Jannie, we hardly knew ye.

9th, Angela and Michael. I think you are all right in your conclusions and implications. She was on a mission to spread the

word that there is only one true way to look at the world, through the 3D glasses of Foucaut, baudrillard and babich, and like all evangelists she kept it simple, repeating "read them, read them" because she had little more to say.

If she does not participate in a forum on postmodern literature, my guess would be that it is because she is not very widely read in it, and fairly ignorant of its genesis and development. Only DeLillo deserves her attention, as only Nietzche and his interpreters deserve philosophical attention, because they're the top; the best, the only, the Ones she has always sought who know best, and tell it best. And Janet is their prophet.

It reminds me of old threads on art here, where Victor Pross posited himself endlessly as the cutting-edge rebel and culmination of the history of art, of which he showed himself to be mainly ignorant.

This person seems to have spent most of her life in schools of some sort, and having learned from the best she feels she now knows best herself, and is the only arbiter of the Important.

It is her pleasure to feel superior to those who live in the real word, looking through their own eyes, reading the books they want to read. The real world, where if the signs are floating, somebody hauls them down and reattaches them firmly to the golden arches.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

It reminds me of old threads on art here, where Victor Pross posited himself endlessly as the cutting-edge rebel and culmination of the history of art, of which he showed himself to be mainly ignorant.

Carol,

He was not banned for that reason, although the empty pretentiousness that both he and Abbey displayed is never attractive. Neither is their penchant to gratuitously pick fights at whim, goad people and start flame wars. Those things are just annoying and I generally try to resolve them with banter or whatever in the discussions.

He was banned because he was a prolific serial plagiarist and polluted this forum with it.

Michael

[caroljane]

It reminds me of old threads on art here, where Victor Pross posited himself endlessly as the cutting-edge rebel and culmination of the history of art, of which he showed himself to be mainly ignorant.

Carol,

He was not banned for that reason, although the empty pretentiousness that both he and Abbey displayed is never attractive. Neither is their penchant to gratuitously pick fights at whim, goad people and start flame wars. Those things are just annoying and I generally try to resolve them with banter or whatever in the discussions.

He was banned because he was a prolific serial plagiarist and polluted this forum with it.

Michael

I know that was the reason he was banned, and such a headache and heartache because of his betrayal of your good faith and trust it must have been. I was commenting on the entries that seemed to be his own work - Grade 8 level literacy, total arrogance and truculence, smirking silliness. The saddest, most unfathomable thing to me, is that he appeared to have no interest at all in learning or knowing anything about the things that truly interested him -- such as writing. Only in pretending that he already knew them, in "getting away with it".

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

... in "getting away with it".

Carol,

Bingo.

You just hit on one of the main themes of these problem people.

I would like to say that it goes beyond this, but it doesn't.

Oh, there are always reasons for such an obsession, but there comes a point when humans become adults. And at that point, the people these neurotics target can look at "getting away with it" as their primary motivation and forget about why they are neurotic.

The neurotics can change that frame for acting if they want to, but they never want to. They choose to stay that way because being that way is good in their evaluation. And what's worse, you have to literally push them away from you to get their BS out of your life. They certainly won't stop the BS. That would work, too, but they won't stop it. They would die first. And if you don't push them away, they just won't leave.

Michael

[Xray]

I have been skimming over his [Nietzsche's] writing, thinking about going deeper into his works if something catches my fancy (ah me... philosophy is long and life is short and that seems to be the main thing philosophers try to prove... ).

I too often think: there's still so much to for me absorb about philosophy and life is so short ...

But the good thing is that one does not have to religiously wade through a philosopher's complete works (at least as a layperson), as philosophers often repeat their key thoughts.

Each time I read something by Nietzsche, I have the feeling of being pulled into some kind of 'vortex'. From his exaltation and his "verbal power", I (subjectively) associate him more with 'poet', or 'prophet', than with a philosopher whose ideas are suitable to be put into practice.

From the information I am gleaning, I only see a superficial correlation between Nietzsche's ideas and this Janet Abbey person's posts (here and elsewhere). What I have really seen is this person aping some of Nietzsche's more flamboyant attitudes--without any of the substance--to such excess that the show was a caricature.

The strong effect of Nietzsche is in itself an interesting object of study. What is it that attracts people toward his philosophy (or that causes them to feel an aversion toward it)?

Nietzsche is a very polarizing philosopher about whom it is nearly impossible to feel 'neutral'.

[caroljane]

I have been skimming over his [Nietzsche's] writing, thinking about going deeper into his works if something catches my fancy (ah me... philosophy is long and life is short and that seems to be the main thing philosophers try to prove... ).

I too often think: there's still so much to for me absorb about philosophy and life is so short ...

But the good thing is that one does not have to religiously wade through a philosopher's complete works (at least as a layperson), as philosophers often repeat their key thoughts.

Each time I read something by Nietzsche, I have the feeling of beng pulled into some kind of 'vortex'. Form his exaltation and his "verbal power", I (subjectively) associate him more with 'poet', or 'prophet', rather than with a philosopher whose ideas are suitable to be put into practice.

From the information I am gleaning, I only see a superficial correlation between Nietzsche's ideas and this Janet Abbey person's posts (here and elsewhere). What I have really seen is this person aping some of Nietzsche's more flamboyant attitudes--without any of the substance--to such excess that the show was a caricature.

The strong effect of Nietzsche in itself an interesting object of study. What is it that attracts people toward his philosophy (or that causes them to feel an aversion toward it)?

Nietzsche is a very polarizing philosopher toward whom it is nearly impossible to feel 'neutral'.

X and Michael,

Oh hell, now you've done it. I really will read the man just to see where I polarize.

Wretched, authoritarian OL - forcing me to think again!

[Dennis Hardin]

This month's issue of PLAYBOY (April, 2012) has a letter from David Kelley defending Ayn Rand in the "Forum Reader Response" section. (p. 42)

. . .Rand was not a Nietzschean: She could not have made it clearer that her vision of individualism, including the pursuit of rational self-interest, had nothing to do Nietzsche's view of the superman seeking power over others...

Sorry, you'll have to visit your local newstand to read the rest of it.

(You might also find some of the pictures interesting.)

[Brant Gaede]

(You might also find some of the pictures interesting.)

In the Rand Playboy interview issue there was a fake centerfold in the Girls of Russia section. It was of a tractor in a field.

Hefner always got it basically wrong*. You want to see women with some clothes on so your imagination can go to work about what's underneath and how you're going to get there.

--Brant

*not with Marilyn Monroe