Nietzsche scholar Brian Leiter has a rather strong opinion about this:
This typically idiotic remark in a recent NY Times book review caught my attention:
“Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nietzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.”
Rand’s “individualism”–if that is what one wants to call her juvenile fantasies about her industrialist heroes–owes as little to Nietzsche as to Smith. Nietzsche loathed capitalism and capitalists (and the cultural and aesthetic vulgarity he saw as their legacy) and also despised what he called “the selfishness of the sick” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) and the “self-interested cattle and mob” (Will to Power). What he admired was “severe self-love,” the kind “most profoundly necessary for growth” (Ecce Homo). “Virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality”–all the things “for whose sake it is worthwhile to live on earth” (Beyond Good and Evil)–all demand such severe self-love, and for this reason, and this reason only, Nietzsche wanted to disabuse those capable of such excellences of their false consciousness about the morality of altruism. He certainly did not think everyone ought to be selfish, or that the pursuit of material goods had any value, or that indulgence of selfish desires was a virtue. What he did think is what is almost certainly true: namely, that if someone like Beethoven had taken Christian morality seriously, and lived a Christian life, he would not have accomplished what the actual Beethoven did (one need only read the famous Maynard Solomon biography to see that Beethoven was no moral saint). The “John Galts” of the world are just a more prosperous example of the “self-interested cattle and mob” Nietzsche always derided.
Been gone at a Libertarian convention. Lots of updates here to catch up on. Still reading Neitzsche so I can’t comment on this with authority yet. I see you’ve quoted text here but not made your own comments. Have you read Rand?
Andrew:
Hope you enjoyed your Mill and Locke and Rand convention.
I didn’t comment—because I had no time yesterday—but I wanted to at least register Leiter’s opinion and think about it.
Have I read Rand?
Yes. Off and on since I was a teenager. She really jarred my fundamentalist noodle when I was a teen. The first time I read her—it was her book “For the New Intellectual”—I was dazzled by her blatant atheism (a naughty read for me at the time) and her mockery of religion in her essay, “Atilla and the Witch Doctor.”
I still love that essay. It’s a great piece (in my view) of atheist didacticism.
—Santi
I’m no Nietzsche scholar, but to be fair to the Randians, they might argue that the sort of self-interest they espouse is the truest kind of “severe self-love” and that Nietzsche’s love of ‘virtue, art, music, dance, and all that other nifty stuff’ was indicative only of how he himself didn’t manage to quite let go of Christian ‘slave morality.’ They might say that ‘vulgar capitalists’ are the ~*real*~ overmen, while Nietzsche himself was just another wannabe.
Gunlord:
Your interpretation is amusing, but Nietzsche made a real distinction between “macht” (power) and “kraft” (force), although only academics, and not the more blunt and rough readers of Nietzsche—like, say, the Nazis—bother to note it.
In other words, force (“kraft”) is Dionysian and conflicted, going in all sorts of wild directions. Force is the great contingency of competing energies in the world, BUT the will to (or for) POWER (macht) is turned into an Apollonian project (a piece of art, a piece of music etc.) that has mastered forces (kraft). Nietzsche was about sublimating contending “wills” and Dionysian forces to an Apollonian project. To overgo is to make forces go in the direction of something new. It is not, for example, making money for money’s sake by just multiplying items already in the world over and over again (making, for example, another can of chicken soup for mass marketing). For Nietzsche, if you are overgoing then you’re not engaging in an iterative game, or a zero-sum game (you win, somebody else loses), or violence for violence’s sake, or violence because of resentment, or for the sake of revenge, or as a self-esteem booster (national or individual). Instead, you are trying to be FRUITFUL, trying to bring something that is overgoing into the world—something not already here; something really new and interesting.
And so I think that Ayn Rand’s character, Howard Roark, is a Nietzschean hero. His interest in exploitation and imitation is zero: he wanted to build an aesthetically great building: something one of a kind and new; something representative of his spirit and power (macht), and he achieved it by an act of Apollonian creativity and will.
Perhaps the best way to think of Nietzsche (if there is a best way) is to think of childbirth. Nietzsche’s philosophy is a masculine version of concentrating all your force to bring something new into the world.
Nietzsche was a mother. Don’t let that walrus mustache fool you.
—Santi
Ah, I see. Thank you very much for the explanation.
It’s always something. But I’m afraid I can’t take the leap that if Beethoven would have been a christian he could not have been Beethoven. Well I think the term christian has as many opportunities for the artistic tortured genius to lead lives of over whelming self-indulgence and egoism as any other profession including libertine. Blake was right the bar and the church are one.
It’s not so much that Nietzsche disapproved of capitalism. It’s that he disapproved of economic materialism, superficiality and the cult of objects that can result from capitalism. Left-liberals need to leave Nietzsche the hell alone. He was not of their kind.
Troll or GTFO!
You’re for both sides! Stop that shit! Troll or GTFO!