Every once in a while, I am unfortunate enough to stumble upon the “Ayn Rand was a Nietzschean” hoax. The gist of it is “Nietzsche was an amoral philosopher who thought in terms of power, and viewed morality as a way to justify one’s weakness and fear of taking said power. Ayn Rand rejected altruism and collectivism, which are the essence of morality, so all that is left is individual power”. As I will show throughout the next 3 or 4 posts, this hoax betrays a lack of knowledge about Nietzsche, Rand, and philosophy as a whole. However, before I get started on Nietzsche’s epistemology and how it relates to Rand’s, let’s get his general flaws out of the way.
Nietzsche as far from an objective thinker as one can be. He often spoke in murky symbolism and, when he bothered to speak clearly, would often use very ambiguous definitions. However interesting his ideas might be, the fact that one needs to know about his personal life to translate his theory to plain English is a testament to his inability to create a systematic body of knowledge. Like the other Proto-Objectivists, his merit was in his unique criticism to both subjectivists and intrinscists, not in his proposed solution to the dichotomy.
In the realm of epistemology, that criticism came in the form of his “perspectivism”, i.e. the idea that man’s thoughts are shaped by his own perspective. This might sound like just another form of determinism, in which some external factor defines man’s knowledge, thus invalidating it, but it was the exact opposite - a quasi-Randian critique to the adoption of inhuman standards with which to judge knowledge.
On one hand, Platonic and Kantian authors rejected Man’s senses as flawed, and unable to give him knowledge, arguing for an extra-sensorial epistemology based on faith, “pure logic” or some other form of mystical nonsense. On the other, Positivists and other materialists would reject Man’s intentions as impure, arguing that they would always distort his thoughts - the solution being the now cliché idea of disinterested “scientific” observation. Nietzsche identified that both of these approaches shared the same flaw - they expected man to know by means that contradicted his own nature.
He argued that all thought was necessarily shaped by the thinker’s perspective. His “perspective”, however, was not an innate, deterministic category, but a multifaceted, ever changing cognitive context - very similar to Rand’s notion of knowledge as contextual. Furthermore, he did not see that as an impediment to knowledge, but as a normal and necessary aspect of it - essentially like Rand’s notion that consciousness has identity. So how is his epistemology different from Rand’s?
In a word: subjectivism. Rand bases her theory of knowledge on the non-contradictory nature of existence. Since existents have non-contradictory identities, we can identify them by means of non-contradictory thought. Nietzsche, on the other hand, sees objectivity as a consequence of one's ability access conflicting perspectives at will, using them to balance one another. While he rejects most of the anti-Man approach of his predecessors, he was still unable to adopt existence as the standard for knowledge - and consequently, to use man’s life as the ethical standard, which is the next article’s subject.
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