One of her problems was that she was incredibly ignorant of that which she wrote about.
For example-she defined sacrifice as giving up a greater good for a lesser. Which is backwards-a sacrifice usually means giving up the lesser for the greater. If you used the former definition, that would be prostitution-or whoring.
Also, for all her drivel about super men and the ubermensch, she failed to realize that the industries she so admired came about with a great DEAL of governmental involvments.
She was basically a very selfish, miserable person-applying her philosophy in real life left her bitter, nasty and insane. She died miserable and alone.
You are failing to separate the woman from her philosophy. It would be easy to show that Ayn Rand acted illogically and tried to apply her philosophy in crazy ways. But the actual philosophy would not approve of the government-made super men. In face, it would be entirely against them.
This isn’t the “Let’s all laugh at Ayn Rand’s misery” thread. It is possible to talk about someone’s ideas without them being perfect (although that would help). Her philosophy wasn’t perfect either, but it makes some good points. It is wrong to divide actions into those that sacrifice yourself for others and those that sacrifice others for yourself. There is such a thing as actions that benefit yourself and have minimal effects on others, and I agree with her that these actions are good.
My point was-always acting in her own self interest did NOT benefit her in the long run. She DID indeed follow the path of selfishness-only to make herself miserable in the end.
Also, I’m not talking about government supermen. She seemed to believe that capitalism came about because of these great individuals, these super humans, who could do anything. She failed to go back and study history, and to see that was NOT how it worked out.
SS replied to JT: *“That premise – that reality is separate from perception – is nothing new.”
Uh, no, it originated with Aristotle.*
Uh, no, it goes back at least as far as Plato. Rand may have thought that it was an Aristotelian innovation, but the notion of true reality being something distinct from the impressions that the human mind forms of it is a core Platonic idea. AFAIK the chief difference between Plato and Aristotle here is that Plato envisioned reality or truth as removed into an entirely different sphere—the noetic—from the perceptual, while Aristotle believed reality to inhere in the perceptible world as its “essence”.
*There is NOTHING about being selfish which requires that you abandon objective reality. *
Except the inconvenient point that “selfish” is necessarily a subjectively defined term, even in Rand’s more neutral sense as one’s own “rational self-interest and happiness.” You can’t define “rationality”, “self-interest”, or “happiness” in a way that is totally independent of subjective interpretation. In other words, forget about not “abandoning” objective, universal reality; except in some very limited contexts like deductive logic and mathematical proofs, you can never really attain it in the first place!
When codified into laws, the morality of selfishness leads to political systems such as the United States in its infancy.
Including the chattel slavery part? Not a very good advertisement for the “morality of selfishness”, I would think; but if you’re going to hold “altruism” responsible for the horrors of the Gulag, it’s just as valid to claim that “the morality of selfishness” is to blame for the horrors of slavery.
The problem is, she did not act in her own best interest. She may have fooled herself into believing that she was, but she wasn’t. She just used her philosophy as an excuse to do things that were not in her best interest. Many of the things she did clearly go against her own philosophy.
Ah…but there’s the problem. How do we KNOW we’re acting in our own self interest?
Basically, selfishness, to me, boils down to doing whatever you want, no matter who it hurts. And that’s what she did-she did what SHE wanted, everyone else be damned.
Which is sad. However, there’s a theory that Rand suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Which would explain a lot.
And no, I’m not mocking her-just offering a possible explanation.
If we wanted to judge philosophies based on the actions of philosophers, we’d have to throw out a lot of modern thinking. Because an awful lot of very popular philosophers were total screw-ups in their lives. Look up the life of Karl Marx sometime.
So I suggest a moratorium on criticism of Rand’s philosophy based on an analysis of her behaviour. The woman was clearly nuts.
However… One of the problems I have with objectivism is the effect it has on the followers of the philosophy in general. I’ve known a lot of objectivists, and most of them had serious ‘issues’ as a result of the philosophy. Now, perhaps this is due to their misunderstanding of it, or perhaps it was due to the poisonous influence of Rand’s behaviour. But objectivists as a group seem to not benefit a whole lot from the philosophy.
Kimtsu: You just hit the nail on the head in describing the difference between Aristotle and Plato. Rand rejected Plato. If Rand were a scientist, she’d be an experimentalist.
I didn’t mean that every thing the U.S. did in its infancy embodied Rand’s principles. I was speaking particularly of the philosophy embodied in things like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, which are all about the individual and the right of the individual to live in freedom to seek his own happiness. I think you knew that, but it’s just too tempting to throw the slavery straw man into the mix. Rand was a fierce opponent of slavery in all its forms, including the draft and mandatory national service.
How is ‘selfish’ a subjectively defined term in the context we are discussing? I’m afraid you lost me on that one.
By the way, Rand didn’t deny the existence of subjectivity. She recognized that the senses are flawed, and that perception is tainted. What she was saying was that subjective opinion does not displace objective reality.
If you are going to talk about Ayn Rand’s philosophy, you have to understand the terms she used. When she used the term “selfishness” she meant “concern with one’s own interests.” As opposed to only being concerned about other peoples’ interests. She did not at all mean “doing whatever you want, no matter who it hurts.” The main reason she used the word selfishness was to challenge that definition, because she disagreed with it so strongly.
She was challenging the idea that the greatest moral thing to do is to sacrifice yourself for others. What if everyone sacrificed themself? There would be nobody left to sacrifice for. We would cease to even be individuals. She was not at all proposing that you sacrifice others for yourself. She was saying that you should do what is in your best interest, without sacrificing anyone.
Exactly. That is the problem, and one of the reasons her philosophy can lead to misery, even if followed properly (which she didn’t). She failed to understand that sacrificing yourself for others can actually be in your best interest in the long run.
Rand was on Donahue one time, and Donahue asked her, “If someone was about to shoot your husband, would you step in front and take the bullet?”
Her answer: “Of course I would. Because to me, the value of his life exceeds my own, TO ME. I would not choose to live in a world which did not have him in it.”
That one phrase gives you a fair bit of insight into what she’s talking about by selfishness. She is NOT talking about hedonism, or sacrificing others for your amusement. What she was talking about was developing a set of values that were important to you, and then living a rational life to best achieve them.
There is nothing in objectivism that prevents you from helping the needy, or working to save the rain forest, if that’s where your own value system takes you. What IS prohibited in Objectivism is to decide that the value of saving the rainforest or helping the needy somehow trumps the rights of others who do not share in those values.
In that sense, Objectivism bears a lot of similarity to the Libertarian credo of never initiating force against others.
And this, dear friends, sums it up. We can talk for hours about whether Rand honestly thought her views were objective, or whether they could be derived from the reality-perception distinction. All such talk is unnecessary, though. Rand’s own terminology and definitions demonstrate a departure from what is truly objective.
Nightime was quick to emphasize that Ayn Rand defined selfishness as “concern with one’s own interests,” as though this demonstrated that her worldview was derived from objectivity. Such a definition does not support that case though; if anything, it destroys it! Such definitions emphasize that her worldview is decidedly subjective, insofar as she repeatedly extols her concern for her own interests.
And I’ve read her stories, too. A guy blows up a community building over aesthetics? A business leader leads a revolt against government after letting it become quasi-communist? Raping occurs as a way to say hi?? And they are supposed to be heroes of her philosophy, her stories? Indeed.
You are forgetting that Ayn Rand believed human interests themselves to be objective. That each individual has objective biological and psychological needs. Therefore, when you speak of interests that refer to these objective needs you are not abandoning objectivity.
I think Ayn Rand made a great contribution to people, whether or not it holds up in the world of philosophy. She brought ideas to the table how we value different things in our lives, how we ought to make our decisions, how we think of ourselves as individuals. Her work is intellectually accessible to people who don’t have the background and experience necessary to understand some of the “greater” philosophical writers of the last few hundred years. I may have enough background about some of the issues in philosophy that I can learn about metaphysical realism from Searle, others might prefer the more directly illustrated ideas from Ayn Rand (which is not to say that all of her writings are this way, just a good portion.) That she presented her ideas in this way does not make her any less a mind than Searle.
I think Ayn Rand’s philosophy is a strong part of the ideology of the Libertarian Party, so we libertarians owe alot to her. Every high schooler that reads Atlas Shrugged is exposed to the idea of the individual refusing to sacrifice himself to some supposed “greater good”, refusing to make himself chattel to some nebulous entity called “society.” They can accept or reject those ideas, but the ideas are there to be heard and easy to find. She is the only popular political philosopher that could be considered a libertarian, so her point of view is unique to many first-time readers.
BTW, I’d like to clap my hands for Sam Stone. I think you’re doing an excellent job of discussing Rand’s philosophy.
As an aside, I’d note that Rand still has a presence on popular literature. I’ve noticed that the last two Terry Goodkind “Sword of Truth” novels have a blatant Rand-ian bent to them. (I was in the midst of reading Atlas Shrugged when the first of those last two came out, put down Rand to read Goodkind, and the parallels were quite clear immediately.) If you found Rand’s fiction hard to read, but would like to see the ideas put into a narrative that examines them by an author with a better narrative style, I’d recommend those last two, even if you don’t usually read fantasy adventure novels.
I had never heard of Ayn Rand before I went to college. To this day, I’ve never met anyone outside of the academic world who believes that her ideas have any merit whatsoever. Modern overviews of philosophy, such as Miller’s Quesitons that Matter, don’t even mention her. Once you realize that Rand had very little original to say and took far too long too say it, it becomes difficult to take her seriously.
As far as I can tell from the 900 pages I read in her dreadful novel Atlas Shrugged, the only original idea she ever had was to dream up the philosophy of altruism. I say ‘dream up’ because nobody actually practices or promotes the idea of altruism as she (and others in this thread) defined it, or at least nobody has ever been able to provide me with a single example of any person or organization promoting such a philosophy. It’s been remarked that defeating imaginary villains is a lot easier than defeating real ones; small wonder that Rand decided to spend almost all her time beating up on fictional characters and fictional ideas that bear absolutely no relationship whatsoever to anything in the real world. But to call her shallow-minded revenge fantasies ‘philosophy’ is a disgrace to the field. And while it may be true that Rand said that she was opposed to corporate welfare, nothing that she wrote suggests that stopping it would be a high priority for her. In the Randiverse, as described in Atlas Shrugged, the only villains are the evil liberal commies in the government, and there’s no sense in wasting time fighting anyone else.
capacitor, you’re showing your ignorance of Rand. Roarke did not blow up that development because of aesthetics. He blew it up because he did not recognize the group’s right to steal his property for their own ends, which is essentially what they did. He was taking a stand.
Btw, what a lot of people don’t understand about Rand’s fiction is that it is intended to be classical romantic fiction as opposed to realism. She had a lot to say about how she was portraying man in the ideal, rather than men as they are. This is an old tradition in storytelling which has been somewhat lost. The book was meant to portray people in extremes, as prototypical examples of her values. To read it as a serious exposition of what she thought the future would look like is simply wrong.
Which brings us back to Roark’s dynamiting of Cortlandt. It was a symbolic act, in a symbolic tale, meant to prove a philosophical point.
Well, if the “Randiverse” is described in Atlas Shrugged, I’d say she definitely had corporate villians. Dagny’s brother James was one of those, he made arrangements with the government to increase his market share and profitability. Rearden rejected an offer by the government to create an unfair market advantage for him. John Galt fires mercilessly at those types of businessmen during his radio address. If you were too bored and unimpressed with her literary style to actually finish the book or pay much attention to it, then that’s fine for you, but don’t go on to claim you understand Ayn Rand from a book you didn’t even bother to read all the way through.
FWIW, my 892 page Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (1995) (of great help in deciphering Eris’s philosophical posts, btw) has no entry for Ms. Rand. Indeed, she is not even in the index. (!)
The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OTOH, provides accolades. S.R.C. Hicks of Rockford College in RRRRRockford, IL provided that entry.
I read some of Rand years and years ago, and, apart from finding it garbled and soporific (better than Bataille at bedtime), I could detect not one seminal or original idea or concept in her work. I freely admit I may have missed the value items if they exist, so someone please point them out to me.
My impressions from her writing style are that this is no philosopher, but an imbalanced fanatic of shallow knowledge who repackaged elementary concepts for her personal promotion and a buck or two. Her “philosophy” does not seem to be particularly innovative–or well thought. A lot of smoke and no fire.
The contribution I can see is that she hijacked and dumbed down philosophy in a manner not much different from someone like Deepak Chopra, relying on the cult of personality and strength of convinction rather than reasoned arguments. In the process she made her confused materials accessible to millions of people, to the setback of real philosophy. Whenever one of my friends mentions Ayn Rand I usually tell them to pick up Bertrand Russel’s The Problems of Philosophy, which is much clearer, shorter, better organized and more complete than her work. Failing that, a reading of Desmond Morris should fix any bizarre conjectures and needless elaborations about “selfishness”, “altruism” and so forth.
The ideas Rand writes about may generally be found–with better treatements–in Plato, Aristotle, Nietsche, Leibniz, or others, just with different name tags. Even her fundamental law of morality (never initiating the use of force) and thoughts on slavery, weren’t they recycled from Lysander Spooner?