Ayn Rand Answers by Robert Mayhew

Author:Robert Mayhew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA, Inc.

You say the predominant trend of nineteenth-century intellectuals was collectivist and statist. But didn’t Nietzsche advocate individualism? What’s your estimate of him?

It’s a low estimate, philosophically. I disagree with him emphatically on all fundamentals. Judge a philosopher by the fundamentals of his philosophy—namely, his metaphysics and epistemology. Nietzsche was a subjectivist and an irrationalist. Existentialism claims him as an ancestor, with a great deal of justice. Nietzsche believed that although reason is valuable, it is secondary; man’s basic tool of guidance is instinct or blood. Now there is no greater contradiction than a subjectivist calling himself an individualist. An individualist is essentially a man who thinks independently. A subjectivist is a man who does not care to think—who wants to be guided by feelings and “instincts.” To survive, such a man must be a parasite on the thinking of others. An “individualist parasite” is a contradiction in terms. (See the article “Counterfeit Individualism” in The Virtue of Selfishness.) Incidentally, this is why subjectivists could not stem the tide of collectivism. Politically, Nietzsche was perhaps the most ineffectual of all thinkers. Certain collectivists, like the Nazis, even claimed Nietzsche as their philosophical justification. That was unfair to him; but some passages in his works could be used to justify a totalitarian state (while others would contradict them). Finally, Nietzsche was opposed to capitalism, and contemptuous of the market. [IBA 62]

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