Randian Half-and-half

I have often thought that everything good and decent in Ayn Rand came from Aristotle, while everything dark and creepy came from Nietzsche. The emphasis on reason and its connection to human happiness comes straight out of Aristotle. The triumph of the human will, and the measuring of moral worth by achievement, all comes from Nietzsche.


From a post at National Review Online, by Jennifer Roback Morse


I don’t know if this observation is original to Ms. Morse, but this is the very first time I’ve come across it. Let me tell you the effect it had on me: IT HEAD THE NAIL ON THE HEAD! IT HIT IT OUT OF THE BALLPARK! IT’S THE – okay, enough clichés. Alls I know is that those three sentences sum up my not-too-thought-out feelings on Ayn Rand – particularly, Atlas Shrugged, which I slugged though over the course of four months late in 1999. (And, God help me, I promised to read again if the One is re-elected …) (And I also read her nonfiction diatribes for and against philosophy a few months later – was it just one book or two?)

Now, I’m not a PhD in philosophy. Just a philosopher of the arm-chair variety. (Whether the arm chair exists in some alternate reality, solely in my mind, or separate from myself, I have yet to discern.) I have read somes Aristotle (nothing cover-to-cover, though). And I have read somes Nietzsche, too, and I did read one of his cover-to-cover (Zarathustra). But I’ve also read plenty of commentary, everything ranging from Bertrand Russell to Peter Kreeft and between, on both. So while I couldn’t give a dissertation on why Ms. Morse’s comments are the cat’s pajamas, just know that they are the cat’s pajamas. My cat told me. My cat being my intuition.

Anyway, thought that was neat, and a bright perky spot to my day early this afternoon.