Ayn Rand Integrations: Nietzsche, Emerson, Montessori, Ibsen

Deepen your understanding of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism by integrating and contrasting it with the ideas of four other world-class thinkers.

Ayn Rand created a rational, observation-based “philosophy for living on earth,” and studying the ways in which her ideas integrate with those of other great thinkers can leverage the value of each toward clearer thinking and better living. This course will examine how Rand’s ideas integrate with those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maria Montessori, and Henrik Ibsen.

Friedrich Nietzsche was one of Rand’s earliest influences, though she later distanced herself from his ideas. Martin Hooss, instructor in Students For Liberty’s “New Frontiers of Objectivism” program, will show that although both Rand and Nietzsche rejected mysticism and Christian ethics, Rand argued in support of objective knowledge, objective ethics, and capitalism, whereas Nietzsche upheld a moderate form of subjectivism, moral nihilism, and the “Ubermensch’s” (alleged) ‘right’ to sacrifice his inferiors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was one of the founders of the American philosophic movement known as Transcendentalism. Enormously influential on American culture, particularly through such admirers as Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Emerson’s work shaped—and still shapes—how many Americans think about individualism. Timothy Sandefur will discuss the similarities and differences between Rand’s theory of individualism and that of Emerson and the Transcendentalists.

Maria Montessori created a revolutionary observation-based teaching method that fosters children’s independence and cultivates their reasoning abilities. Rand quotes Montessori extensively in “The Comprachicos,” her most comprehensive essay on education. Trained in the Montessori method (for ages 12–18), philosopher Dr. Carrie-Ann Biondi will discuss integrations in Rand’s and Montessori’s ideas on education and how these integrations can be used to teach children and adolescents how to think and flourish.

Henrik Ibsen was an influential yet controversial 19th-century playwright, to whom, in The Fountainhead, Rand gave a hat tip as a great writer. He is best known for An Enemy of the People, A Doll’s House, Brand, and Ghosts. “His greatest works,” wrote Timothy Sandefur, VP of legal affairs at Goldwater Institute and host of this session, “pose some of the hardest questions literature has ever asked about integrity, sacrifice, the value of the self, and the dangers of mobocracy.” Sandefur will explore Ibsen’s influence on the style and themes of Rand’s fiction.