As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve been reading Sciabarra’s Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical. While I agree with him much of the time and I’ve found his speculations about Nietzsche’s influence on Rand to be interesting and informative, I cannot (at least at the moment) completely agree with his interpretation of Nietzsche as championing Master morality over Slave morality, Dionysus over Apollo, and subjectivist egoism over intrinsicist altruism. It has been a long while since I have read Nietzsche so I don’t have citations readily at hand to back up my suggestions, but my recollected interpretation of Nietzsche is that he tried to transcend these dichotomies with his doctrine of the Overman. Although Nietzsche appears to champion Dionysus in his later work it was my impression that he continued to use the term Dionysus as a synthesis of his early conceptions of Dionysus and Apollo. Similarly, he did not argue that the Master morality should be adopted instead of the Slave morality, but rather (like Marx’s critique of capitalism) recognized the good and the bad in it. He remarks in his Genealogy of Morals that Slave morality is a disease in the sense that pregnancy is a disease. He credited Slave morality with the creation of the soul. He recognized the good aspects of Apollo. I realize my own thoughts are rather tentative and suggestive on this, so just take it as food for thought. One of these days I’ll have to go back and reread Nietzsche in order to confirm or deny this interpretation and maybe write up a scholarly essay on it. It may well be that in the final analysis Nietzsche remained a subjectivist egoist, but if I am right his thought is more subtle and dialectical than even Doctor Diabolical Dialectical himself realizes.
(Mis)Interpreting Nietzsche?
