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Posted on 09/11/2007 7:28:53 AM PDT by oye 2007
Ayn Rand said my personal life is a post script to my works/novels : it consists of the sentence "And I mean it ". I have always lived by the philosophy I present in my books - and it has worked for me , as it works for my characters .The concretes differ , the abstractions are the same. But as stated in " The passion of Ayn Rand " - she suggested an open affair with Nath for just a year or so , as she couldnot see herself as an old woman chasing a younger man It is appalling to know that she could even think of such an arrangement.Later it is said in the book that at times Ayn wanted Frank to assert himself and deny her the affair , why does Mrs Logic need someone else to sanction /deny her the moral premise of an affair ? Hasnt she said that the highest sanction of any man comes from within himself and not without . Also she swore to secrecy everyone who was involved in this immoral arrangement , thou she said one doesnot need to hide one's love ...which is the reflection of our highest values in another person . It seems she knew her followers would denounce her if this ever came to light and thats why when her public falling out occured she gave other reasons but never admitted the real truth to anyone for fear of being judged harshly , the same as she had always judged others who had fallen short of her moral definitions. So does this mean when it comes to belief - it has to be a choice between her works or her life as a model ? I have always strongly felt that a philosopher has to first live the philosophy he/she teaches and i feel in this aspect (only) Ayn Rand failed . Agree or disagree ? No doubt Nathaniel was a hyprocrite but the brilliant moralist/objectivist that Ayn was ought not she have to seen through him ? Or at the very least , if she loved him she ought to have left Frank and choosen to marry Nath /live with him rather than make others suffer the indignity of her open affair ? Some may say that she never advocated a "one man for life " philosophy , but her heroes/heroines always ultimately "choose" their ideal mate . What she did in her personal life seems to me as a convenience and not love.....entirely opposite to the definition of love she gave through her books. Im looking to find rational answers only please.
Paragraph breaks are your friend!
You are missing one key element that pretty much disputes this whole argument; Rand was a proponent of acceptance of our nature as individuals versus the nature defined by the collective group. If Rand had an affair, she was accepting what she considered her nature, and thus, she as an individual would also accept the consequences of that nature. It is part of the ‘is’ of being.
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Perhaps I have made your ability to have an orgasm during intercourse sound as if it is a purely physical proposition. In a sex-research laboratory, orgasm is defined as a reflex that includes PC-muscle spasms and increased heart rate. Because orgasm is a physical reflex similar to a sneeze or a yawn, pelvic stimulation leading to increased blood flow is sufficient to trigger orgasm. But orgasm includes many other physical and psychological phenomena. If you respond better to more psychologically based solutions, try these.
Orgasm can include many full-body experiences such as tingling in the fingers and toes; spasms of the arms, legs and face; emotional outbursts; and psychological feelings of relief, release or even ecstasy. Some of these responses can be mimicked voluntarily and practiced during intercourse, thereby increasing your chances that they will occur spontaneously. Also, you may want to explore your own psychological makeup and determine if any of the following factors could be preventing you from having an orgasm during intercourse: embarrassment, increased vulnerability, pressure to perform in a sexual situation, lack of trust in your partner or lack of experience with your current partner
Female Orgasm , Copyright © 1999 WebMD, Inc. All rights reserved
Another point of contention because if this were true, our only philosophers would be on the surface being and not into the inner conflict of man. If this were the case, it would be impossible for any philosopher to teach the idea of embitterment, as, being human, their struggle to reach embitterment is the same as all of us. One can learn just as much from the journey and the struggle as one does from the finish line.
Another point of contention because if this were true, our only philosophers would be on the surface being and not into the inner conflict of man. If this were the case, it would be impossible for any philosopher to teach the idea of embitterment, as, being human, their struggle to reach embitterment is the same as all of us. One can learn just as much from the journey and the struggle as one does from the finish line.
P.S. If you ever find John Galt he will soon become ill and you will have to care for him the rest of your life. Ayn Rand’s philosophy on male/female relationships is worse than a childish myth.
Ayn Rand’s moral philosophy was flawed since it is a pagan philosophy. She was unbalanced, not in the sense of insanity, but in a sense explained by Chesterton in part of a chapter in Orthodoxy. I’ve included a link to the full chapter, which is remarkeable, at the end of the quote:
Christianity Versus Pagan Rationalism
Chesterton’s Orthodoxy
“All sane men can see that sanity is some kind of equilibrium; that one may be mad and eat too much, or mad and eat too little. Some moderns have indeed appeared with vague versions of progress and evolution which seeks to destroy the golden mean or balance of Aristotle. They seem to suggest that we are meant to starve progressively, or to go on eating larger and larger breakfasts every morning for ever. But the great truism of the golden mean remains for all thinking men, and these people have not upset any balance except their own. But granted that we have all to keep a balance, the real interest comes in with the question of how that balance can be kept. That was the problem which Paganism tried to solve: that was the problem which I think Christianity solved and solved in a very strange way.
Paganism declared that virtue was in a balance; Christianity declared it was in a conflict: the collision of two passions apparently opposite. Of course they were not really inconsistent; but they were such that it was hard to hold simultaneously. Let us follow for a moment the clue of the martyr and the suicide; and take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,” is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying. And it has held up ever since above the European lances the banner of the mystery of chivalry: the Christian courage, which is a disdain of death; not the Chinese courage, which is a disdain of life.
And now I began to find that this duplex passion was the Christian key to ethics everywhere. Everywhere the creed made a moderation out of the still crash of two impetuous emotions. Take, for instance, the matter of modesty, of the balance between mere pride and mere prostration. The average pagan, like the average agnostic, would merely say that he was content with himself, but not insolently self-satisfied, that there were many better and many worse, that his deserts were limited, but he would see that he got them. In short, he would walk with his head in the air; but not necessarily with his nose in the air. This is a manly and rational position, but it is open to the objection we noted against the compromise between optimism and pessimism—the “resignation” of Matthew Arnold. Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things; neither is present in its full strength or contributes its full colour. This proper pride does not lift the heart like the tongue of trumpets; you cannot go clad in crimson and gold for this. On the other hand, this mild rationalist modesty does not cleanse the soul with fire and make it clear like crystal; it does not (like a strict and searching humility) make a man as a little child, who can sit at the feet of the grass. It does not make him look up and see marvels; for Alice must grow small if she is to be Alice in Wonderland. Thus it loses both the poetry of being proud and the poetry of being humble. Christianity sought by this same strange expedient to save both of them.
It separated the two ideas and then exaggerated them both. In one way Man was to be haughtier than he had ever been before; in another way he was to be humbler than he had ever been before. In so far as I am Man I am the chief of creatures. In so far as I am a man I am the chief of sinners. All humility that had meant pessimism, that had meant man taking a vague or mean view of his whole destiny—all that was to go. We were to hear no more the wail of Ecclesiastes that humanity had no pre-eminence over the brute, or the awful cry of Homer that man was only the saddest of all the beasts of the field. Man was a statue of God walking about the garden. Man had pre-eminence over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken god. The Greek had spoken of men creeping on the earth, as if clinging to it. Now man was to tread on the earth as if to subdue it. Christianity thus held a thought of the dignity of man that could only be expressed in crowns rayed like the sun and fans of peacock plumage. Yet at the same time it could hold a thought about the abject smallness of man that could only be expressed in fasting and fantastic submission, in the grey ashes of St. Dominic and the white snows of St. Bernard. When one came to think of one’s self, there was vista and void enough for any amount of bleak abnegation and bitter truth. There the realistic gentleman could let himself go—as long as he let himself go at himself. There was an open playground for the happy pessimist. Let him say anything against himself short of blaspheming the original aim of his being; let him call himself a fool and even a damned fool (though that is Calvinistic); but he must not say that fools are not worth saving. He must not say that a man, qua man, can be valueless. Here again, in short, Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites, by keeping them both, and keeping them both furious. The church was positive on both points. One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.
Take another case: the complicated question of charity, which some highly uncharitable idealists seems to think quite easy. Charity is a paradox, like modesty and courage. Stated baldly, charity certainly means one of two things—pardoning unpardonable acts, or loving unlovable people. But if we ask ourselves (as we did in the case of pride) what a sensible pagan would feel about such a subject, we shall probably be beginning at the bottom of it. A sensible pagan would say that there were some people one could forgive, and some one couldn’t: a slave who stole wine could be laughed at; a slave who betrayed his benefactor could be killed, and cursed even after he was killed. In so far as the act was pardonable, the man was pardonable. That again is rational, and even refreshing; but it is a dilution. It leaves no place for a pure horror of injustice, such as that which is a great beauty in the innocent. And it leaves no place for a mere tenderness for men as men, such as is the whole fascination of the charitable. Christianity came in here as before. It came in startlingly with a sword, and clove one thing from another. It divided the crime from the criminal. The criminal we must forgive unto seventy times seven. The crime we must not forgive at all. It was not enough that slaves who stole wine inspired partly anger and partly kindness. We must be much more angry with theft than before, and yet much kinder to thieves than before. There was room for wrath and love to run wild. And the more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.
Mental and emotional liberty are not so simple as they look. Really they require almost as careful a balance of laws and conditions as do social and political liberty. The ordinary aesthetic anarchist who sets out to feel everything freely gets knotted at last in a paradox that prevents him feeling at all. He breaks away from home limits to follow poetry. But in ceasing to feel home limits he has ceased to feel the “Odyssey.” He is free from national prejudices and outside patriotism. But being outside patriotism he is outside “Henry V.” Such a literary man is simply outside all literature: he is more of a prisoner than any bigot. For if there is a wall between you and the world, it makes little difference whether you describe yourself as locked in or as locked out. What we want is not the universality that is outside all normal sentiments; we want the universality that is inside all normal sentiments. It is all the difference between being free from them, as a man is free from a prison, and being free of them as a man is free of a city. I am free from Windsor Castle (that is, I am not forcibly detained there), but I am by no means free of that building. How can man be approximately free of fine emotions, able to swing them in a clear space without breakage or wrong? This was the achievement of this Christian paradox of the parallel passions.”
http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/books/orthodoxy/ch6.html
The core argument is that Ayn Rand was wrong. She made a thing, “freedom,” her God.
We are now at ZOTCON ONE. Special weapons release has been authorized.
I promised myself long ago not to get into anymore Ayn Rand arguments.
The last time I discussed philosophy of this nature was to my three dogs.
And they seemed to be a little bored.
So I cracked open a beer and threw a stick.
Save me a bit of troll!
Why is everybody having a ZOT-gasm over this? It was posted in chat (unless the mods moved it), and Ayn Rand was a major conservative voice.
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