Nietzsche, Ayn Rand and "vulgar Nietzscheanism"

In the previous post, I discussed a couple of articles on libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand (born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum), including Michael Prescott, Romancing the Stone-Cold Killer: Ayn Rand and William Hickman (2005) and Corey Robin, Like Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand Peddled Garbage As Truth -- Why Did America Buy It? 06/07/2010. His sketch is interesting for the biographical background he provides.

I wanted to follow up on Robin's discussion of the brand of "vulgar Nietzscheanism that has stalked the radical right ... since the early part of the twentieth century" is decent, focusing as he does on the aspects of this type of Nietzscheanism on Rand herself. But his discussion of Nietzsche doesn't distinguish well between the actual Nietzsche and "vulgar Nietzscheanism."

Despite these reservations, those two articles together give a worthwhile sketch of the dark side of Rand "libertarian" ideology.

Nietzsche himself didn't make a "journey back to antiquity, where he hoped to find a master-class morality untainted by the egalitarian values of the lower orders." He was a philologist by training, a specialist in Greek and Latin. He built his concept of "slave morality" on the ancient Greek usage, as in Homer, in which the aristocratic characters spoke of "good" not in terms of morality but in terms of what aristocrats did. What the common people did was "bad", not because it was morally evil but because it wasn't aristocratic.

Nietzsche argued that Judaism turned that notion on its head but also redefined them, so that they regarded what was aristocratic as not just "bad" but evil, morally damnable. He saw Judaism and, to an even greater extent, Christianity, as a product of the anti-aristocratic "slave morality." But, despite his extravagant language, he wasn't condemning that development, he was describing it - and with a great deal of perception. Robin seems to see Nietzsche as the prophet of conservative anti-religious sentiment. While Nietzsche rejected Christianity, though, he respected religion as a human force.

And he hoped to see humanity turn to a higher form of religion that affirmed life and human passions in a way he believed existing Christianity did not. He envisioned that higher form of religion as a return to the Dionysian religion of old.

Tags: ayn rand, nietzsche, radical right