Sad Similarities

A couple of days ago, while looking over some of Walter Kaufmann’s commentaries on Friedrich Nietzsche, I thought about  some similarities between Nietzsche and Ayn Rand – not in their ideas where the similarities and differences are well known, but in the last years of their lives and the actions of their followers after their deaths.

In early 1889 after producing five books in 1888, Nietzsche collapsed into insanity and spent the last decade of his life as a helpless and hopeless madman.  Ayn Rand did not lose her mind, but the years between her break with her protégé and lover Nathaniel Branden in 1968 and her death in 1982 seem to have been hard, difficult, and relatively unproductive, even apart from the obvious factor of her declining health.

She had seen Branden as an embodiment of much of her vision of the highest type of man and  her sexual relationship with him as an appropriate recognition of and reward  for herself as a women worthy of being the partner of that type of man.  She also had seen him as a man of action and integrity  who would, through his Nathaniel Branden Institute and the magazine he edited with her, spread her ideas and influence and perhaps over time redeem the American culture and reverse what she saw as its decline.  Rand’s finding her paragon had been lying to her and stringing her along while carrying on an affair behind her back with a pretty girl  in her twenties was, on the evidence, devastating and embittering.  She broke all personal and business ties with him, denounced and repudiated him in print,  and put an immediate end to his institute and with it any sizeable organized efforts by anyone to disseminate her ideas. The following years saw  a decrease In the scope and quality of her writing,  the physical and mental decline and later death of her husband, and her struggles with lung cancer and other health problems.

Her post-1968 essays, while often insightful,  are in general more topical, less theoretical,  and more intensely alienated in tone and pessimistic about the world around her than her earlier writing.  At times  bitterness and a sort of willful pessimism seems to have overwhelmed both objectivity and any desire to maintain and display a “benevolent sense of life”.  Her polemics on the American scene are often about as harsh as the things Nietzsche had to say in his later books about the Germans of his day. Eventually she shut down her newsletter and stopped writing essays, giving boredom and disgust with the state of the culture and the sort of subjects she had been writing about (along with wanting to have more time to work on writing books) as reasons for doing so.  She did not publish any fiction during those years, before or after she stopped writing essays.

After Rand’s death control of her estate including all her papers and unpublished writings passed to Leonard Peikoff. This was unfortunate in several ways .  He was not exactly Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, but there were some ominous parallels.  Just as Förster-Nietzsche had a Nietzsche myth to create and perpetuate, Peikoff had a Rand legend to protect – the story that Ayn Rand’s ideas and opinions never changed meaningfully over time but were always consistent with her final preferences and conclusions. He published editions of Rand’s notes and other unpublished writings that are, according to some scholars who have seen the original documents, misleadingly bowdlerized, redacted, and scrubbed. More seriously and damagingly, he fostered the absurd cult of “official objectivism” with its posturing, dogmatic intolerance,  and notion that Rand’s philosophical writings and opinions form a complete,  closed, and obviously true philosophical system which must be accepted in total without criticism or deviation and with himself as  the ordained interpreter and umpire of questions concerning  that system.

It took years and a Walter Kaufmann to repair and correct some of the damage and misconceptions Förster-Nietzsche created in the minds of the public. Maybe over time somebody will repair and correct some of Peikoff’s.  Considering at least Peikoff and Branden, and perhaps also the older Alan Greenspan, a person might well recall the way Kaufmann began the prologue of his book on Nietzsche - with a quote from his subject that the first adherents prove nothing against a doctrine.