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  1. Welcome back, Ilya It's always refreshing to view your multi-faceted concise and to-the-point interlocutions.
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  2. Eiuol, I applaud your effort to grasp Nietzsche, especially in D, GS, Z, BGE, and GM. I am delighted to report that the number of reads of my series Nietzsche v. Rand has now passed 14,000. I want to direct you to the Appendix (scroll down) to this essay in that series. This Appendix traces the transition in Nietzsche from “feeling of power” to “will to power” and elaborates just what was his mature conception “will to power.” Nietzsche’s conception of life in terms of will to power includes domination of organism by organism in all the forms of life. He foisted his favored conceptions of human social relations onto the nature of all life (defining life differently than Rand would do seventy years later for mainstay of an objective morality [and differently than had Guyau 1885, also for purport of an objective morality]), then pointed to that supposed way of all organisms as rationale for his often nasty views of human nature, particularly focused on social relationships. Never forget Nietzsche’s BGE 265, which is antithetical to Rand’s ideal in Anthem (1937) and to her mature ideal of Atlas Shrugged. “At the risk of annoying innocent ears I will propose this: egoism belongs to the essence of the noble soul. I mean that firm belief that other beings will, by nature, have to be subordinate to a being “like us” and will have to sacrifice themselves.”
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  3. Lester Hunt, a philosopher anthologized in the book mentioned in #9, once said that N. is important to a biographical or developmental understanding of Rand but useless for understanding the positions she arrived at.
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  4. Eioul, If you have access to the Modern Philosophy: Kant to the Present, Lecture 5 starting at 30:45, Peikoff devotes almost 48 minutes in a much more charitable view than Rand's in the interview shared in your OP. Knowing that Rand deals with broad ideas, she is speaking of Nietzsche as a general overview of his overall philosophy. Peikoff examines examples of his writings as you have used in outlining the issues you've identified. In one passage from the lecture, LP makes the statement: In general, all you can say is the irrational element dominates progressively as Nietzsche grows older. Another statement, paraphrased, likens Nietzsche's writings to the Bible, as he is supposed to be all things to all men. In LP's summary he says: Nietzsche shares a kinship with Objectivism only in isolated, unsystematic passages.
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  5. I have read a little bit of Nietzche's work, and I've found his to be rather amoral. He rejected free will entirely, and believed as a result that someone who was truly wise would recognize that there was no distinction between good and bad, and that everyone's actions were just the predetermined result of their nature -- thus, someone like Hitler would not really be responsible for the atrocities he committed, and it is foolish to condemn him or to see creators of value as superior to Nazi oppressors. He also had a contemptuous attitude toward morality, and my understanding is that he did, in fact, want to see the "masters" trample on the slaves as punishment for the slaves' choice to believe in a moral code, and as a reward for the masters' ruthless pursuit of (What Nietzche would consider) their own self-interest. He also regarded all morality as socially prescribed, and nothing more than the will of the strong imposed on the weak, and did not recognize any possibility of an objective morality based on the value of human life. I believe that Nietzche preferred masters because he saw them as strong due to their willingness to coerce the slaves into obedience. I haven't found much of value in Nietzche's works. I suppose he deserves some credit for his recognition that altruism was wrong. But his response, like Rand's, should have been to construct a new moral code based on self-interest which recognized the right to life of all human beings. What he created instead was a blank check to trample on human life, in order to satisfy one's own whims at the expense of others.
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