Spring 2000 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies
Nietzsche and Objectivism

Unit One: January 31 - February 20

Thomas Gramstad's Remarks on
Diana Mertz Hsieh's "Birds of Prey"
Freedom of the Will and the Value of Genealogy
In Friedrich Nietzsche's
Geneology of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Monday, February 21, 2000 11:12 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Re: Diana Hsieh Pt. 1 Review: Birds of Prey

[From: Thomas Gramstad ]

I have a few comments to Diana's excellent essay.
Diana describes Nietzsche's lambs and birds of prey analogy
with horrifying details and many potential ramifications.
While I agree that this analogy is troubling, I also think that a
couple of the seminar participants read too much into it, in
effect trying to extract or formulate Nietzsche's entire
philosophy from one single analogy! (And then by necessity out of
context too!) This must lead to a skewed result. For example, by
Diana's account, Nietzsche appears to be an essentialist: lambs
will always be lambs, birds of prey will always be birds of prey.
Masters are always masters and only masters, slaves are always
slaves and only slaves. But this runs contrary to a lot of
Nietzsche's other writings, for example his idea of human
evolution into the "overman"; all the things he wrote about the
Free Spirit (see a previous posting of mine about this); and his
admonitions in 'Thus Spake Zarathustra' (hereafter Z). Z is a
book about, primarily, individual development. In Z we see an
anti-essentialist (and anti-determinist) Nietzsche.

Take for example his discussion of the three stages: camel -- lion
-- child. The camel is a slave who is carrying/chained to all the
bad elements of the culture. Yet one must embrace and fight
through this stage. The lion is the next stage, a rebel who says
no and refuse to be chained any more, and more, the lion is a
rebel who must appropriate and build in itself the kind of power
that it is fighting against externally, in order to create the
conditions for a free and self-directed self that can become a
Free Spirit or creator.

According to Nietzsche, slaves aspire to liberty and masters
aspire to nobility. What then is the lion? The lion aspires to
liberty, and thus can be said to be a slave. But since the lion
seeks and gets power, it can be seen as a master. The lion is
also aspiring towards nobility in addition to freedom. It seeks
both what slaves want and what masters want. Essentialism breaks
down. And if we were to assume that masters must be predators,
blond beasts, then it would end here, when the lion gets power.
But it doesn't end with that. There is a transcendence happening
here. The lion is not the end stage, but a transition, a bridge
to the final stage. The final stage is the child -- innocent,
playing and dancing, growing freely and unimpeded. The child is a
master, the master of the joy of becoming. But does this master
sound like a predator or "blond beast" to you? All this is
incomprehensible, if one believes that masters must be predators
and that "master" and "slave" are mutually exclusive essentialist
concepts.

I believe that Objectivists have a lot to learn from the three
stages. Many, or at least more than a few, Objectivists are in a
state of war with/contempt towards their culture. Everything was
better before, or will be at some indefinite faraway point in the
future. They struggle and condemn. They are stuck-up lions,
alienated rather than empowered by their cultural solitariness.
I think of Ayn Rand's tiddlywink music, her insistence that to
struggle is not the meaning of life, but to reach and come from a
place of abundance and creativity; to achieve a good and happy
sense of life, a powerful innocence beyond struggle. I believe
Rand knew the child stage.

Diana writes:
> The troubling part of this analogy is that it requires us to
> discard our common conceptions of freedom of will.

I disagree. The troubling part of this analogy is that it seems to
want us to accept, or even advocate/promote cruel, oppressive
behavior towards others. That's the primary issue. Whether this
cruelness is motivated by "I can't help it" (determinism) or by
"I'm bigger and stronger than you" (Will to Power as domination)
or something else is a more obscure and distant and therefore
secondary matter. Since neither alternative improves upon the
other, it is just a distraction to get entangled in them. No, you
can't think hierarchically and getting to the fundamental bottom
level, the starting point of a one-way, almost-mechanistic causal
chain with Nietzsche, because that's more often than not not how
his "system" of thought is built up. You have to look at
bicausal, multiple and dynamical relationships that change and
reconfigure over time.
Yes, I know that sounds very wishy-washy! :-)


> The method of genealogy, however, does not seem like the best
> tool with which to accomplish these two goals. Additionally, I
> have serious reservations about a philosophical method in which
> the truth is apparently irrelevant, as Jason indicated.

That's not my understanding; the truth isn't irrelevant, but it is
to a large degree created by oneself, determined by what relations
one chooses to enter into and how (and is therefore very
important). You could say that Nietzsche anticipated all those
"reframing" self-help books where one changes one's present by
changing ("reframing") one's relation to or experience of one's
past (for Nietzsche, a process of deliberate and selective
forgetfulness).

Anyway, I found a lot of interest in Diana's essay and may get
back to other topics from it at a later time.

- Thomas
Thomas Gramstad
thomasg@ifi.uio.no
"Our body and mind are not two and not one. I you think your body
and mind are two, that is wrong; if you think that they are one,
that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two _and_ one. We
usually think that if something is not one, it is more than one;
if it is not singular, it is plural. But in actual experience,
our life is not only plural, but also singular."
-- Shunryu Suzuki, _Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind_