Posted on 10/23/2009 11:15:47 AM PDT by Publius
In my experience, people who've read Ayn Rand's books either love them or hate them. I'm one of the few who fall somewhere in between. When I first read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in the 1980s, I was blown away. Those books portray the power of the free individual in ways I had never thought about before. Since then, I've grown more critical of Rand's outlook because it doesn't include the human needs we have for grace, love, faith, or any form of social compact. Yet I still believe firmly that her books deserve attention, and in that regard, Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made provides important and meaningful insight into the evolution of Rand's world view.
The Fountainhead is a stunning evocation of the individual and what he can achieve when unhindered by government or society. Howard Roark is an architect who cares nothing about the world's approval; his only concerns are his integrity and the perfection of his designs. What strikes me as still relevant is its central insight—that it isn't "collective action" that makes this nation prosperous and secure; it's the initiative and creativity of the individual. The novel's "second-handers," as Rand called them—the opportunistic Peter Keating, who appropriates Roark's architectural talent for his own purposes, and Ellsworth Toohey, the journalist who doesn't know what to write until he knows what people want to hear—symbolize a mindset that's sadly familiar today.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.com ...
Ayn Rand ping.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year-old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Not a bad piece, but they could have picked a better messenger.
I’m reading Atlas Shrugged for the second time.
I want to find out what I missed the first time, as I wasn’t really awake then.
Stupid, greedy SC republicans are gumming up the works at the statehouse trying to get all tied up in impeachment hearings, even though there's only a year to go in Sanford's term.
Sitting in my office in my “Galt’s Gulch, CO” sweatshirt. I’m surrounded by libs at work, and nobody has ANY clue what my sweatshirt means. It always cracks me up.
LOL.Good one.
Sanford sees himself as Francisco Domingo Carlos Andres Sebastián d’Anconia and wishes he too was born in Argentina.
Ditto.
He wouldn’t like Dagney because she’s American.
I have read Atlas Shrugged at least four times, and listened to the audiobook (unabridged) twice.
My brother is a recovering liberal, and he is almost through the audiobook now, and all he can say is “Oh my God. It sounds like what we are seeing now...” (He just finished Galt’s monologue, and he hated that. I told him I did too. I read it all the way through the first time, and skipped it every time since. Once was enough!)
I don’t think my brother is a liberal anymore...:)
BWAHA! Ya got me! I was getting up to throw something right before “orcs”...
Colonel, USAFR
Did Jesus preach “enlightened self-interest” or the “virtue of selfishness”? Would He have sworn the Objectivist Oath (”I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”)?
Of course not. Our Lord was God, but He voluntarily renounced His self-interest. And He lived and died for the sake of all of us.
Hmmm, whom to follow: Ayn Rand on Jesus Christ?
I’ll follow Ayn Rand, thank you.
KuKuKashew has spouted more of his meanless leftist dribble.
This is not directed at you, you just happened to say something that many people say.
I’ve been a studant of philosophy for many years, and that study included Ayn Rand. I regard the most important philosophers (in the positive sense) as Aristotle, Abelard, Locke, Aquinas, and Rand. There are other very important philosophers, because they were very bad, like Plato, Hume, and Kant.) Most people do not know that Rand was a philosopher, though a writer first.
All Rand’s writing was a concretization of her philosophy. Atlas was the means of making her philosophical principles of morality and individuality something that could be experienced. My personal view is that those who read Atlas and do not like Galt’s speech to the world, do not really understand Atlas. For me, it was the most breathtaking part of the entire book, everything else was just an “illustration” of the contents of that speech.
There is nothing wrong with reading the book, and skipping the speech, but it’s like children who “read” National Geographic, but actually only look at the pictures.
Hank
Then I pity you.
I thought it was another magazine that people "read" by looking at the pictures.
I'll say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ex-rVkOFHU
Over here, the strangest thing I ever heard Rand say. It’s at 3:30 as she is discussing mortality with Tom Snyder. Subjectivist virus must have hit her.
“I thought it was another magazine that people “read” by looking at the pictures.”
Not in my generation.
Hank
“Hmmm, whom to follow: Ayn Rand on Jesus Christ?”
Why do we always have to weigh Rand with Christ? She’s not even a great novelist—though a very good po-novelist—let alone one of History’s Greatest Men, and not simply because she’s a woman. Can’t you ignore her atheism and appreciate what’s left? It’s easy.
I think of it more as a “Do as I do, not just what I say.”
Obama teaches give free fish.
Christ teaches teach men to fish.
Rand teaches establish a fishing school and feed your family.
It’s a quote from an English poet, and I’m blanking out on his name. He’s 20th Century, early.
Thanks for the ping. What’s the update on the deal? Did your agent get any nibbles?
Funny how conservatives love to bash Rand while their country is falling to statists.
It becomes clearer by the day why we’re in the mess we’re in.
I’ve heard the ‘childish’ and ‘naive’ characterization since I was, well, a bookish 14 year old. Atlas Shrugged was assigned by an English teacher I had.
These are the same people that claim to defend the constitution but actively work against it in their actions.
Conservative aren’t ‘naive’ and ‘childish’ enough to avoid arguing on the same basic platform as the hard-left. Granted, it is a ‘lesser degree’ of statism, but still statism.
I fear ignorant conservatives far more than intelligent leftists. And there are plenty of the former on FR.
If the average conservative bromide is this nation’s best hope of remaining free, we’re in big trouble.
“Most people do not know that Rand was a philosopher, though a writer first.”
I’d say her philosophy was pretty shallow. Her big answer to the whole problem of induction and the epistemological crisis since Hume/Kant is basically that we have knowledge of reality ‘cause she says so. I like to call her, as I heard somewhere once (perhaps in Allan Bloom’s “The Closing of the American Mind”) a Sub-Nietzschean.
This is not to denigrate her, since philosophy obviously wasn’t her calling. The best that can be said is that for a novelist she’s a decent philosopher, and for a philosopher she’s a decent novelist.
By the way, I wouldn’t be so hard on Hume. Someone once said he was a Tory by accident, but he was a Tory—that is, a conservative—nonetheless. And even if you don’t like skepticism (I do, but that’s me), he was a decent historian. As for Kant, well, Randians have poisoned the well on that one. They somehow manage to miss all his liberal (in the good sense of the word) leanings. He has tendencies, along with Rousseau, which place him as an inspirer of modern liberalism (shudder). But he’s not all bad. Hegel is a far, far better candidate for the horrors they blame on Kant, in my opinion.
“though a very good po-novelist”
I meant to say “pop-novelist”
Funny you said that.... Last week I wore my “Rearden Metal” shirt to an art show. I had all kinds of intellectually challenged art house types coming up to me saying “Awesome shirt man, what kind of music do they play?” I just laughed and said “Post-Capitalist Punk Rock”... they never had a clue.
Still waiting to hear from him.
“...we have knowledge of reality ‘cause she says so.”
I will agree that some don’t have a working knowledge of reality. I knew this long before I read Atlas Shrugged.
Kant...was he really a man, or did I just concoct him? Hmmmm...the Kantians will surely never know.
But, of course, I don’t really exist, except in my mind, so why am I typing this?
I had vous jade today. For a moment, everything had a compelling sense of unfamiliarity.
I have to disagree with the conservative part. Notice how these posters 'just signed up'?
LOL! You just cost me money. BTT.
Most people would say the same thing, if they even know she was a philosopher, but most people have only read a few of her better known books, or perhaps what others have written about her philosophy.
Unless you've read everything she has written in the field of philosophy, and are aware of the very in-depth correspondence she had with other philosophers and the thinking illustrated in her journals, (which most people wouldn't, of course, nor should they) you really do not know what here philosophy is--and no one, to date, even Peikoff, (who has become a stark raving idiot) has captured the depth of that philosophy.
I do not agree with many of her most profound conclusions, but still regard her is a major philosopher, who has covered more ground in that field since Locke. Just my opinion.
My objection to Hume is not "skepticism," itself, but the fact everything he wrote (which is much easier to read than pholosopher's writing, for which I give him credit) is an exercise in floating abstractions and begging the question (in the logical fallacy sense). It can all be reduced to, "I have knowledge and can reason and will now set out to use that knowledge and reason to prove we have no knowledge and cannot reason." He was either the greatest charlatan in the world, or an idiot.
I agree that Hegel was much worse that Kant, but after the Second World War, I do think he's had any influence on the field of philosophy directly. I regard the influence of Hume and Comte and Kant which resulted, in an odd way, in the development of linguistic analysis, logical positivism, and ultimately post modernism as the source of the destruction of the whole field of philosophy.
So now we know why we disagree with each other, thankfully, without being disagreeable. ;>)
Appreciate the comments.
Hank
“Unless you’ve read everything she has written in the field of philosophy, and are aware of the very in-depth correspondence she had with other philosophers and the thinking illustrated in her journals, (which most people wouldn’t, of course, nor should they) you really do not know what here philosophy is”
I find that hard to accept. There are plenty of thinkers whose thought is not summed by any one book, but you’d think that reading any single book would at least give you a taste, if not comprehensive knowledge, of their philosophy. I would feel comfortable saying I am familiar with Hume after reading “A Treatise of Human Nature” or Kant after reading “Critique of Pure Reason” (if I could decipher it).
I Rand’s case, she herself, I think, considered her novels her central works. Philosophy was something she developed, if I have the timeline right, to make her a better artist. I have, in fact, skimmed through “The Virtue of Selfishness” and “Philosophy: Who Needs It?”. However, if I couldn’t figure out what she’s all about by reading the long speeches in “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” I should hang up my philosophy cleats.
Perhaps there are unknown depths, waiting to be sounded. I’ll never know if I don’t read every word she ever published. But life is short, and there’s a lot out there to read.
“It can all be reduced to, ‘I have knowledge and can reason and will now set out to use that knowledge and reason to prove we have no knowledge and cannot reason.’ He was either the greatest charlatan in the world, or an idiot.”
That was Rand and Peikoff’s position, as far as I know. It is a rather glib interpretation. I object above all to the characterization of Hume and Kant as anti-intellectuals. We can laugh at them for tripping into logical webs of foolishness. That’s what laymen do. But it wasn’t just that they pushed around “floating abstractions”. They were attempting to find the limits of reason, using reason. I never get the feeling, reading either of them, that they’re deriding Truth and Knowledge, like I do when I read Nietzsche, for instance.
That feeling can arrive later, when it occurs to me that, yes, of course the sun will rise tomorrow. But that’s the response of a laymen, as previously described. Not that you have to wind yourself up into a tangle of contradicting thoughts to understand things, but you do have to step outside of quotidian thinking to participate in the philosophic process.
Rand’s response to Humekant was the response of a layman. Which would be fine, if she presented it as dramatically as did Descartes. His famous “Cogito ergo sum,” after all, is not so much a philsophical argument as it is an immediate, personal reaction to the looniness of extreme subjectivity. Rand’s philosophy was based on just such an immediate realization, I think. She should have drug it out, like Descarte. The empistemological problem of modern Western philosophy is too big a problem to deal with flippantly.
Yes, they're working on Directive 209, setting wages of executives right now.
Emmanuel Kant was a real pissant...
Mark
FYI, it’s 10-289.
revered for all the wrong reasons...villified for all the wrong reasons, Atlas Shrugged is a must read.
I skipped it the first time, did paragraph scan the second, finally read it fully the third time. “John Galt Speaks” (whatever it’s titled) chapter could have been eliminated. Don’t give up on your brother, he’s read Atlas Shrugged, he’s open for reform.
>>”I don’t think my brother is a liberal anymore.”<<
Good job! It should be read by all. I will be sending our youngest son my FIRST EDITION (8th printing) like new hardback next week. He has read the paperback version. Hopefully he will hand it down to his offspring and that they will cherish it as much as old grandpa did.
P.S. I found it at an SPCA Thrift Store for one dollar! Actual current market value is around $200, but the content is priceless.
Of course not. Our Lord was God, but He voluntarily renounced His self-interest. And He lived and died for the sake of all of us.
Hmmm, whom to follow: Ayn Rand on Jesus Christ?
Strictly speaking she was against altruism which is not the same thing as Christianity. In Roarke's speech she points out that the choice between egoism and altruism is a false one, then ironically she develops a philosophy of egoism.
Christ on the other hand said to love one's neighbor as one's self; an entirely rational proposition. He went one step farther and told us to love our enemies, a commandment that is considered unacceptable by the mediocre.
LOL...I get that, but...I did say I read it in its entirety at least once. And it was a LOT easier than reading “Rules for Radicals”.
I think I understand Galt perfectly (I better after reading it that often)
I simply think that in that section he is hashing, re-hashing and re-re-hashing it again and again and again. I got it pretty early on, and the repetition really got to me.
"We did not know whether we'd live to see the liberation of the world or whether we'd have to leave our battle and our secret to the next generations. We knew only that this was the only way we cared to live."
What drove the rebellion in Atlas was the absolute refusal of the rebels to live in any way other than as free individuals.
"That one word—individualism—is to be the theme song, the goal, the only aim of all my writing. If I have any real mission in life—this is it," Rand wrote.
Here is a link you will either love or hate:
http://usabig.com/atnmst/jrnl_ii.php?art=31
Until we begin to have a society filled with individualist rebels, there is no hope for this country.
Hank
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