| | Ted,
You wrote: Yes, Nietzsches' influence was aesthetic, he provided her with spiritual fuel, but she never accepted and then fully rejected his Metaphysics, Epistemology, and his Ethics once she identified them explicitly.
Never say never. She may have accepted his ideas before fully identifying them.
I don't think she flipped over Nietzsche in college because of his writing style, but because of the ideas he presented. Later maturity and some inner reflection taught her that Nietzsche and herself were not that closely related in philosophy.
You can see later on that her iconoclastic technique is similar to Nietzsche's, even if Rand changed the terms she did not change the rules. Nietzschean morality is characterized as a rising above traditional master-slave morality, and that is exactly what you find in the character of Howard Roark, who is master and slave to none.
Furthermore, Nietzsche believed that master-slave morality tended to harm the highest of men, but that these men nevertheless give this morality their sanction. It was Nietzsche's express intention with his morality to teach these highest men a new moral purpose.
Also, Nietzsche believed that the self is transparent, and you can see this theory reflected in Rand's theory of subconscious premises.
But then, there are numerous differences between Rand and Nietzsche, and those are the parts that Rand did not absorb for whatever reason.
You wrote: Remember that Kant's noumenal pole is empty of content. His two sided coin is turns out to have only one side. Fichte accets the reasoning which Kant took to get to the dichotomy, but calls one fork a sign where there is no road.
I don't see Fichte accepting the reasoning Kant used. The road to the noumenon involves the thing-in-itself (they are not the same thing) which Fichte also rejected. And anyway, I don't see how your argument contradicts my thesis that Fichte took certain Kantian elements and rejected the rest, because it still remains true even if what you say is correct. We only differ on the details.
The stuff you wrote about the "noumenal pole" is wrong. The noumenal has a content, it consists of Ideas of Reason, therefore its content is ideal. But Kant specifically states that the transcendental is empty of content, where the transcendental is simply the a priori form of a judgment in general (and not some platonic extra-dimension). The transcendental is that which is left over when the content of a judgment has been removed, for example, the "is" of a judgment which is not content but a link formed by the judging mind between subject and object content. How the mind forms the "is," Kant would say does not come from the empirical, although the content of an empirical judgment certainly does. The "how" behind the copula present in a judgment is a priori to the judgment itself and not an a posteriori product of the judgment.
You wrote: Fichte's politics are not central. Remember Metaphysics>Epistemology>Ethics>Politics. rand would say Fichte's ethics is more consistent with Kant;'s philosophy, and I agree.
However the chain goes, Aristotle wrote his physics before his metaphysics. At any rate, I have compared Fichte's ethics with Kant's ethics, and there is no basis for comparison. They are total opposites. There may be some superficial similarities, but starting from the simple I or Ego as Fichte did was not Kant's methodology at all. In fact, Kant took to task the very idea of a "simple I" in the CPR in the section on Paralogisms, to wit: The logical exposition of thought in general has been mistaken for a metaphysical determination of the object. (B409) And that is exactly the mistake made by Fichte.
So you can say in general that both Fichte and Kant started from a metaphysical basis in developing their respective moral philosophies. And yes, they both had a categorical imperative. However, stealing someone else's terms, as Fichte did, is not the same thing as developing the same philosophy. It is simply not allowed in Kant's system to develop a morality synthetically from the proposition of a "simple I" as Fichte did.
Perhaps you don't understand the true extent of Fichte's sinister deviousness. While the German public waited impatiently for Kant's book on Religion, Fichte himself penned one and published it anonymously. The public mistook this book for a Kant work and hailed it as a work of great genius. When it was determined that Fichte (an unknown scholar at the time) himself wrote it, and not Kant, Fichte then managed to gain a toehold on eventual fame, not on his own merits, but simply because his book on Religion was mistaken for and widely proclaimed as a long-awaited Kant book.
At the time of Kant's death, Fichte's fame had risen to such an extent that he had managed to replace Kant as the foremost scholar of his time. And THAT was his primary goal all along. Wilhelm Gottlieb Fichte was a parasitical Keating-like imitator who happened to succeed at it because he was much, much smarter and more talented than Keating.
You wrote: I don't get the examples/vs premises remark.
I'm just saying that while you can bash my examples, by using the same premises I can come up with more suitable examples because those premises haven't been affected by your bashing. And that is, while you can always find differences between different thinkers, you will always find ways they were influenced by other thinkers as, for example, Aristotle's theory of forms was influenced by Plato, and that, without Plato, Aristotle's theory would not have even existed.
(Edited by Robert Keele on 1/08, 8:15am)
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