Ayn Rand Contra Nietzsche – The Objective Standard

From The Objective Standard, Vol. 12, No. 1.

Images: Ayn Rand, Courtesy of Ayn Rand Archives / Friedrich Nietzsche, Wikimedia

Editors note: This article is an edited version by Michael Berliner of Dr. Ridpaths article originally written for a 2005 project that was canceled. Because the article was written prior to the publication of A Companion to Ayn Rand, Allan Gotthelf and Greg Salmieri, eds. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), it makes no reference to that books chapter on Nietzsche by Lester Hunt.

I disagree with [Nietzsche] emphatically on all fundamentals.Ayn Rand (1962)1

I do not want to be confused with Nietzsche in any respect.Ayn Rand (1964)2

Why was Ayn Rand determined to distance herself from Nietzsche? Because in her time, as today, various writers portrayed her as a Nietzschean, claiming that she embraced his ideas and modeled her characters accordinglywhich she did not.

The notion of Rand as a Nietzschean was promulgated most viciously in Whittaker Chamberss 1957 review of Atlas Shrugged, published in National Review. Although he acknowledged Rands debt to Aristotle, Chambers wrote that she is indebted, and much more heavily, to Nietzsche and that her operatic businessmen are, in fact, Nietzschean supermen.3 Since then, similar claims have been made in countless articles and books, including Goddess of the Market, in which Jennifer Burns declared that Rands entire career might be considered a Nietzschean phase.4

Was Rand influenced by Nietzsche? To some extent, yes. In the 1930s, she called him her favorite philosopher and referred to Thus Spake Zarathustra as her bible. As late as 1942, Nietzsche quotes adorned the first pages of each section of her manuscript of The Fountainhead. But from her first encounter with his ideas, Rand knew that her ideas were fundamentally different from his.

Rand first read Nietzsche in 1920, at the age of fifteen, when a cousin told her that Nietzsche had beaten her to her ideas. Naturally, Rand recalled in a 1961 interview, I was very curious to read him. And I started with Zarathustra, and my feelings were quite mixed. I very quickly saw that he hadnt beat me to [my ideas], and that it wasnt exactly my ideas; that it was not what I wanted to say, but I certainly was enthusiastic about the individualist part of it. I had not expected that there existed anybody who would go that far in praising the individual.5

However attracted to Nietzsches seeming praise of the individual, Rand had her doubts even then about his philosophy. As she learned more about philosophy and about Nietzsches ideas, she became increasingly disillusioned. I think I read all his works; I did not read the smaller letters or epigrams, but everything that was translated in Russian. And thats when the disappointment started, more and more.6 The final break came in late 1942, when she removed her favorite Nietzsche quote (The noble soul has reverence for itself)7 from the title page of The Fountainhead. By this time, she had concluded that political and ethical ideasincluding individualismare not fundamental but rest on ideas in metaphysics and epistemology. And this is where the differences between her philosophy and that of Nietzsche most fundamentally lie.

The roots of both Nietzsches and Rands philosophies can be traced to their youths.

Nietzsche (18441900) was raised in a strict Pietist household, and he fixated on the cosmos as the stage on which God and Satan battled for mens souls. Beginning in his youth, Nietzsche read widely in Greek and Nordic myth, occult literature, and heroic sagas, all of which he interpreted as the form taken by a cosmic war acting within the minds of men. He sought evidence for this cosmic storm in the power of visions and drives within himself, and, upon entering university to study theology, he pledged his life to first knowing and then serving this cosmic storm. He pursued this pledge in all of his writings, and, by the end of his working life, he believed that his insights into this storm were of cosmic significance.

By contrast, Rand (19051982) grew up in a predominantly secular household, was exposed to a world of productiveness, prosperity, stable order, and romantic arta world in which, through the exercise of reason, one could discover facts, grasp laws of nature, and thereby work for success and individual happiness. By an early age, Rand had identified going by reason as her leitmotif, had rejected faith and God, and had decided on a career in writing. In university she studied history and philosophy, and, upon graduation, left communist Russia for America in order to be free of tyrannical rule.

Compared at the beginnings of their respective professional lives, Nietzsches and Rands philosophies stand in profound opposition over two basic issues. Whereas Nietzsche held that the subject matter of philosophy is a cosmic storm of warring forces; Rand held that philosophy studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of mans relationship to existence.8 Whereas Nietzsche held that the proper method for studying philosophy is to look inward, at activities within ones self as a guide to the basic forces of the universe; Rand held that a proper method is to look outward, at objects in the world, and to build, through reason, a conceptual understanding of man and his relationship to existence. Nietzsche referred to his system of views as his ontological myth; Rand held that philosophy is the science of fundamentals.

In 1958, Rand wrote in her philosophical notebook that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, philosophy had admitted into its domain a series of fantastic irrationalities, which, being cosmology, were not part of the rational science of philosophy. As she emphasized the point, Cosmology has to be thrown out of philosophy (italics hers).9

This fundamental difference between Rands and Nietzsches philosophies was in place by their respective university years and would expand with time. This will become increasingly evident as we examine and compare their philosophies.

As a university student, Nietzsche had given up his Pietist vision of the cosmos. He still believed that some kind of forces raged throughout the cosmos, but he no longer believed those forces to be God and Satan, nor that religious faith was the means to accessing whatever forces exist.

Guided by Greek myth and three philosophersHeraclitus, Schopenhauer, and HegelNietzsche developed an early version of his cosmological myth. The most profound influence on Nietzsches life was the myth of Dionysus, who reigned in a hidden realm of formless turmoil and traveled to the human realm in order to show men the boiling cauldron out of which they had temporarily arisen and back into which they would be absorbed.

From a very early paper, The Dionysiac World View (1870), to the last passage of a grand posthumous collection of Nietzsches most significant passages, the Dionysian model of the cosmos remained central to Nietzsches worldview. As he put it in The Will to Power:

And do you know what the world is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; . . . a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing; . . . a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, eternally self-destroying, this mystery world.10

Alongside the Dionysian myth, Nietzsche revered Heraclitus, whom he characterized as having the highest power of intuitive conception11 and from whom he took the view that the universe is a random process, a flux, a becoming, out of which specific things emerge, temporarily, and then are reabsorbed. This underlying flux works through the increase and release of tensionthat is, through conflict, struggle, the interaction of positive and negative forces. All things are unifications of opposite states, Heraclitus said. All things happen according to strife and necessity;12 War is father of all and king of all;13 and the world is The eternal and exclusive Becoming, the total instability of all reality, which continually works and never is, as Heraclitus teaches.14

The young Nietzsche was convinced that the universe consisted of two contradictory forces, that these forces are more fundamental than the entities that they create and then reabsorb, and that process, activity, and changenot the things that act and changeare the cosmic fundamentals. There is no being behind the doing, he wrote; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed; the deed is everything.15 What is basic is not that which acts, but activity itself.

Nietzsche found further support for this view of the cosmos in Hegels belief that the existing cosmos (Hegels Nature) was a realm of interacting and contradictory manifestations of one ultimate force. This dialectical explanation for all change would underlie all of Nietzsches further writings. On this view, reality consists of conflicting, contradictory forces. And entities, including men, are the arenas in which these forces clash. This Hegelian view, Nietzsche held, is the basis of an explanation for all things, all change, all evolutionary advances. (Hegels argument that one cosmic goal was being sought through change in the universe would also come to underlie Nietzsches final cosmic view.)

From Schopenhauer came a view of the cosmos that would prompt Nietzsche to write his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (the work that Ayn Rand said really finished Nietzsche for her). Unlike Hegels cosmos, Schopenhauers cosmic force was a Dionysian Will bent on destruction, although Nietzsche gave it a more positive connotation. With The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsches early metaphysics, that of two fundamentally opposing cosmic forces interacting, was complete.

In 1881, however, Nietzsche experienced a lightning bolt of inspiration about the ultimate nature of the cosmos. It was given to him that the cosmos was not composed of two opposing forces in dialectical struggle, but rather was one force in two opposing forms. And this force was not Schopenhauers Will-to-Destruction or Hegels Will (to cosmic self-discovery), but rather a cosmic Will to Power, a Will on a relentless quest for ever-increasing cosmic power.

In the next eight years, Nietzsche would interpret everything of interest to him as surface manifestations of this one basic force. The cosmos as Will to Power was Nietzsches ultimate cosmological myth. According to this myth, everything and every event ultimately is reducible to units of will, which he called quanta. These quanta, as he described them, are not things but processes, active centers of force or energy. And despite Nietzsches use of the term Will, he does not have in mind any aspect of consciousness, but rather some mystical force that underlies all consciousness and matter.

What are these quanta doing? Seeking power. The only true existent, wrote Nietzsche, is the willing to become stronger, from each center of force outward. This is the most elementary fact, which results in a becoming, an acting.16

In Nietzsches world, there are no things, no individual entitiesthose are all mental constructions. True reality is activity, power seeking, conflict. Reality, at root, is made up of little imperialistic centers of will, all striving to gain power at the expense of others. Reality, including all life, is reducible to quanta seeking to dominate neighboring quanta and not to be dominated by them. This is Nietzsches version of the war that Heraclitus said was the Father of all and the King of all. In this process, as quanta randomly interact, two strains of quanta-combinations arise. Those encompassing greater strength and capacity for coordination are Nietzsches virile or master strain of the Will to Power, whereas the weaker and less capable are the decadent or slave strain.

Because life is a biologically evolved organization of quanta, it reflects the process of power seeking in which the quanta, whether virile or decadent, are engaged. Thus, Nietzsches Dionysian interpretation of life: Life itself is essentially appropriation, injury, conquest of the foreign and the weaker, oppression, harshness, imposition of its own forms.17

Although living things, as individual constellations of quanta, are necessarily egoistic to the core,18 said Nietzsche, the enhancement of their power, rather than the lives of individual men, is the ultimate cosmic goal. Nothing exists for itself alone.19 And further, Nietzsche tells us, There is nothing to life that has value besides the degree of power.20 The deepest desire of life is to create beyond and above itself.21 In other words, power is not for the sake of life; rather, life exists to serve power.

In sum, Nietzsches view of reality denies the fundamentality of individual entities. On the basis of an alleged mystical insight, he asserts the existence and omnipresence of a cosmic Will to Power as the true metaphysical fundamental. Activity is more fundamental than that which acts, and activity is the product of a dialectical clash of contradictions. Power (not life) is the ultimate value. Life is essentially conflict. And life in service to the cosmic Will to Power is the highest fate available to man.

These positions put him squarely in opposition to Ayn Rand.

It is difficult to imagine a metaphysics more opposite to Nietzsches than that of Ayn Rand. Nietzsches worldview is dominated by turmoil, flux, dialectics, contradictions, cosmological mythswith centers of power-seeking activity as the ultimate constituents. In contrast, Ayn Rands metaphysics consists of the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity, and, as a corollary, the law of causality.

In Rands view, the world out there consists of entities existing independent of consciousness, a world where existence has primacy over consciousness, a world of stable natural law. Her metaphysics, as we shall see, leads to views of human nature, epistemology, ethics, and politics that are opposite to those engendered by Nietzsches metaphysics of turmoil and flux.

Rand held that certain primaries are inescapable, directly observable, irreducible to anything more fundamental, implicit in all facts and knowledge, and rationally undeniable. These axiomatic facts are existence (something exists), consciousness (of which I am aware) and identity (and it is something specific). They are implicit in perception and used in any attempt to deny them.

Regarding the primacy of existence, wrote Rand, every phenomenon of consciousness is derived from ones awareness of the external world.22 Thus, man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward,23 and the development of human cognition starts with the ability to perceive things, i.e., entities.24

In Rands metaphysics, entities exist out there. They are not mere illusory mental concoctions, as Nietzsche claims. And, contrary to Nietzsche, they are not cosmologically intuited constellations of unfolding contradictory forces; they are what we perceive them to be:

A thing iswhat it is; its characteristics constitute its identity. An existent apart from its characteristic would be an existent apart from its identity, which means: a nothing, a non-existent.25

Entities are what they are; A is A; to be is to be something specific; existence is identity. Thus, a contradiction cannot exist; nothing can contradict its own identity, nor can a part contradict the whole; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate ones mind.26

Nietzsches metaphysics was anathema to Rand, who held that change cannot be fundamental, for there is no change without something changing. Nietzsches dynamic universe, wrote Leonard Peikoff, was a resurrection of the ancient theory of Heraclitus: reality is a stream of change without entities or of action without anything that acts; it is a wild, chaotic flux.27 And Rand rejected it outright. All the countless forms, motions, combinations and dissolutions of elements within the universe, she wrote, are caused and determined by the identities of the elements involved.28

Ayn Rands world is not the mystery world of Dionysus. It is a causal world of lawful order. Whether its basic constituent elements are atoms, or subatomic particles, or some yet undiscovered forms of energy, wrote Rand, the universe is not ruled by a consciousness or by will or by chance, but by the Law of Identity.29

Rands world is not a Dionysian cauldron. It is not false, cruel, contradictory, demoralizing, without sense.30 And it is not a place in which mens lives are characterized by conflict, mystery, and fate. It is a world of entities, the identities of which determine their capacities to acta world of natural law and knowable fact. Consequently, it is a world in which individuals can live and prosper.

In Nietzsches view, as we saw earlier, the understanding (or naturalizing, as he termed it) of any subject matter involves reducing it to little bundles of power-seeking energy (i.e., quanta). Human beings are reducible to constellations of quanta, each caught up in the cosmic struggle to increase its power. From this, Nietzsche drew several inferences: . . .

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1. Ayn Rand, Q&A, The Intellectual Bankruptcy of Our Age, The Ayn Rand Program radio series, April 5, 1962, in Ayn Rand Answers, edited by Robert Mayhew (New York: New American Library, 2005), 117.

2. Ayn Rand, Objectivism vs. Nietzscheanism, Ayn Rand on Campus radio program, December 13, 1964.

3. Whittaker Chambers, Big Sister Is Watching You, National Review, December 28, 1957.

4. Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 303n4.

5. Ayn Rand, interview by Barbara Branden, transcript 198, The Ayn Rand Archives, Irvine, CA.

6. Rand, interview, 200.

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1989), 228.

8. Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It (New York: New American Library, 1984), 2.

9. Ayn Rand, Journals of Ayn Rand, edited by David Harriman (New York: Penguin, 1997), 698.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968), 54950.

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy during the Tragic Age of the Greeks, quoted in F. A. Lea, The Tragic Philosopher (London: Methuen: 1957), 46.

12. Heraclitus, B80.

13. Heraclitus, B53.

14. Nietzsche, Tragic Age of the Greeks, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 46.

15. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Book One, sec. 13, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1969), 45.

16. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in G. A. Morgan, What Nietzsche Means (New York: Harper, 1965), 277.

17. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 61.

18. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 285.

19. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Lea, The Tragic Philosopher, 212.

20. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 118.

21. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 63.

22. Ayn Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1990), 29.

23. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 29.

24. Ayn Rand, Art and Cognition, in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: New American Library, 1971), 46.

25. Leonard Peikoff, The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy, in Rand, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 105.

26. Ayn Rand, This is John Galt Speaking, in Ayn Rand, For the New Intellectual (New York: New American Library, 1961), 126.

27. Leonard Peikoff, The Ominous Parallels (New York: New American Library, 1982), 51.

28. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 25.

29. Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, 25.

30. Nietzsche, Will to Power, quoted in Morgan, What Nietzsche Means, 50.

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Ayn Rand Contra Nietzsche - The Objective Standard