newcritics - Latest Comments in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

peterna — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 19:39:53 -0000

Jennifer,

You wrote an excellent, and obviously provocative conversation-starter. I discovered Ayn Rand while completing theological studies for the Lutheran ministry. Those studies came to a sudden stop.

I am discounting all of the critiques of Ayn Rand's writing style. Hardly any in this thread appear to have a sound basis for their criticism, commenting out of "gut reaction" based on the styles that are prevalent in our culture. Few have read the non-fiction side, including her articles or books on writing. I'll just say she wrote about how things could be and should be. That is the stuff that gets people striving to do better at whatever they do.

Collectivism has to be understood in a peculiar sense to get credit for bringing us out of the trees. Man does much better in society than living alone because of three things: sharing knowledge, division of labor and trade. It has nothing to do with sacrificing yourself for the community. Even students of Adam Smith realize that the mutual benefit of those who divide labor and who trade is not motivated by some self-less love of the other party. But fortunately, collectivism is not usually confused with capitalism.

As for laissez faire or unfettered capitalism, I see no hope for humanity than in precisely practicing that. We have laws that we all recognize as applying to individuals regarding theft, fraud, destruction of property, murder, etc. If the same laws apply to dealings between people doing business, including those between individuals and corporations, why would extra, additional laws and regulations be needed in the business world? It is each person's responsibility to use her knowledge to judge what they are buying, to join together to form institutions like Consumer's Union to demand businesses disclose what is in their products and the terms of their guarantees.

No bureaucrat is born with special knowledge of what we all need, what is for our own good, that is superior to the knowledge, intentions, purposes and plans that each of us has for our own projects, our lives.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

lateefah noel — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:26:20 -0000

Hi Jerry Prager I've been looking for this movie for a few years now and I can't seem to find it could you please tell me where you found the movie because I have to read this book for a college class I'm taking and can you get back to me as soon as possble.Thank You

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Greg — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 01:22:52 -0000

Hermant,

You ask a number of good questions, which it would be difficult to address in a comment on a blog. Happily there is an excellent book, *Essays on Ayn RandÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s The Fountainhead*, edited by Robert Mayhew, which contains discussions of many of them. I recommend in particular Onkar GhateÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s essay.

-Greg

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Hemant Kumar Mittal — Thu, 24 May 2007 07:49:27 -0000

I finished this great book today but I have many simple questions to be answered which I couldn't answer myself. This is my first philosophical book so please help me grasp the matter in a better way...
1). Why did Dominique get married with Peter and then Wynand if she was in love with Roark?
2). What was the exact role of Toohey in this whole drama? Was he a villain?
3). At one time, Wynand was a very close friend of Roark. He used to take all the major decision of Banner himself. Suddenly things got changed (Even before the incident of $5000 ring) and his behaviour towards his life was completely changed? WHY....?
4). Is it really practical to live like Roark in this world given you are not an extremely talented person like him?

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Richard Watts — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 07:30:40 -0000

Jerry,
If, in your statement which I quoted above in #121, by "rationalism" you mean Ayn Rand's use of the word "rationality" , then there is something more to be said here.

Before I say it, I will say that you do not know the meaning of rationality, going by your statements throughout the thread. Rationality is not a pragmatic convenience to duck into for a second in order to get one's self out of a pinch, or to try to lend a camouflage of respectability to a string of irrational, contradictory statements. Rationality isn't something to be mixed with a string of lies to confuse what is really being said. Its not something to gut out and climb inside the shell, like a trojan horse, so that you can take advantage of the nomenclature of rational thinking processes in order to undermine and subvert the basis of them. You embrace mysticism and subjectivism . You disparage rationality and try to confuse its meaning in the minds of others. Your claims that you are "rational" and that your statements are "objective", are categorically false.

Rationality is a commitment to reason as a way of life. It is an orientation to reality. It is a recognition that the function of consciousness is to observe, identify, understand reality,not to invent it or remodel it.

You have argued that "Faith is rational when you use presupposional philosophy. We all choose our beliefs, and those beliefs create sequences of ideas". You also argued that " I do believe in an objective reality that can be deduced from experience. Personally I divide experience into two processes, one is the natural world that I call the Actual, the other is the vast mesh of human cause and effect that I call Reality, therefor [sic] I believe that both the Actual and the Real can be understood".

Neither of these statements is objective. What is actual and what is real are the same thing, but not in the way that you have defined them. Existence is both actual, and real. Existence is reality. Reality is actual. A human's mind is part of the universe, but it is a discrete part of it, not a cell in an organic whole. It is a self contained unit, yet it is capable of knowing reality, without the help of bacteria or of a god. The universe is orderly because of the nature of matter. Man can identify things which exist because these things have a definite nature, and because his senses and his type of awareness have a definite nature. Because of these conditions, the characteristics of these things are observable to man's senses and identifiable to him by his conceptual thinking - but only if he uses the method by which his mind is suited to know reality. And that method is logic.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth applies here - truth is the recognition of reality - to reach conclusions that are true is to correctly identify reality.The basic requirement of this process of identification is to turn one's mind on, to make a full effort to be aware at all times, to focus. The type of thought that produces a correct identification of reality, is to base one's reasoning on sensory evidence, rejecting all assertions that are not grounded in the evidence of the five senses, using an unbroken chain of non-contradictory logic to understand what one observes - using both sensory evidence and the entire framework of one's conceptual knowledge to make the identifications and to check them for accuracy. It is this process that each of us depends on in all stuations and issues of our lives, to keep one from stepping out in front of speeding cars, walking off cliffs, drinking alcohol until he or she is dead, catching deadly diseases. A human depends on sound reasoning to gain or to keep everything that is of value to him, or to her - Life, health, happiness, friends, a lover, a job, a car, or a house. To the extent that one fails in this process of rational thought, one loses at life. One cannot use your methods of thinking, Jerry, and be rational - despising "pure rationality" and seeking to supplement it with unreason, irrationality. A person's knowledge is an interconnected, interdependent framework. The only way one has to determine the truth or falsehood of any part of his knowledge is to check it against one's previous knowledge which he knows to be true. To discover whether it is consistent with what he already knows - which he learned from reality - or whether it contradicts his knowledge. Embracing contradictions cuts man off from his means of knowledge and from his means of survival, health and happiness. To ask someone to accept contradictions is like offering them poisoned food. "Pure rationality" is a redundancy. To deliberately insist on injecting, or keeping, elements of irrationality in one's thinking is to reject reality - it is to *embrace* irrationality.

One's knowledge is a hierarchy of information, on many different levels of abstraction, but it is all properly arrived at, step by step, by logic, with sense perception as its base and starting point. Done properly, all of one's hierarchy is grounded in sense perception. Only what is grounded in this way can correctly be claimed as knowledge. A piece of information gotten from others, without validating it for one's self by this process, may be true or it may not, but only by observing and thinking for one's self can one know if it is true or not. This is what you ask others to give up when you ask them to accept arbitrary assertions instead of truth, when you ask them to accept contradictions, wnen you tell them that faith is rational and that "intuition and instinct" (i.e.whim and emotion as substitutes for thought) are better than reason. These are the notions you offer them to wreck their minds and their lives with. You are a good altruist - these efforts of yours to confuse and mislead, show the true nature of your concern for others. You are concerned about others all right, but it is not for their well-being that you are concerned.

Rationality entails a refusal to fake reality, starting with a refusal to practice the self-deception which you sanctioned in #102. Rationality is a refusal to replace logic with emotion. Emotions are good as responses to thoughts, but not as substitutes for thought. Rationality is placing nothing above the healthy, non-contradictory functioning of one's own mind.

In contrast to rationality, Ayn Rand didn't say that "rationalism" is good. She did not use the word rationalism in its broadest sense. She used the word "rationalism" only in the sense of Rationalism as against Empiricism, Rationalism as thought disconnected from experience and from reality, - as against - Empiricism as experience disconnected from thought. Objectivism is reason *applied to* experience, thought *in relation to* reality. Ayn Rand definitely did not say "evil religion/good rationalism", as in the formula you ascribed to her.

However, she did make a sharp distinction between mysticism and reason, identifying mysticism as evil, and reason as good.

Not all mystics are "religious" in the churchgoing sense - in a way that people would think of as being religious. The way I see it, religion is evil, but it is not the root of the evil. I think that religion is a system of ideas that results from mysticism. But mysticism is a basic orientation away from reality. If rationality is a commitment to fully perceive reality to the best of one's ability, then mysticism is turning one's back on reality, refusing to see it for what it is, inventing (or believing on someone's word) alternatives that are not there and cannot be verified with evidence. And Jerry, that is where your claims come in.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Richard Watts — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 22:52:43 -0000

Jerry
You said:
"I also think Rand is only partially correct about religionÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s effect on morality. What she means by religion I think just means politics by clerics.
Her simplification and reductions of spiritual practice into an evil religion/good rationalism are a false dichotomy to me".

Ayn Rand did not sat that religion is "politics by clerics". She did not say that "spiritual practice" is "evil religion/good rationalism".

The false dichotomy is of your own making. You fabricated these statements yourself, from your own imagination

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Curt Holmes — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 15:37:20 -0000

Jerry wrote:

Ã¢â‚¬Å“May I never think another thought about Rand or Fountainhead or her subjective objectivism again.Ã¢â‚¬Â

My wish would be somewhat different. May you think about Rand and what she wrote for the first time.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Greg Perkins — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 13:39:44 -0000

Jerry,

That others do not find your vision of life and the universe and proper philosophizing compelling does not necessarily mean that they are zealots intent on maintaining their faith --
it could just as easily be that they have stayed open to facts, and reasonably dismissed you as an uncareful thinker who has been a victim of perhaps a few too many rap-sessions involving a bong.

If Objectivists don't take you seriously when you indeed have something important to share, then you have a handy court of final appeal to settle the dispute: reality. All you need to do is point to the facts.

Argument by assertion and groovy, arbitrary speculation simply won't cut it among people of reason -- that's more suited for people of faith.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 10:21:36 -0000

Alright, since you think all my points are inane, the field is yours, not because Truth has been arrived at,
but because your thought is closed
and I am unable to inspire you to see life in much larger context than you do.
You call it objectivism. I don't. Your ideal is subjective, your defintions are subjective, your arguments are subjective.
Your world is very small and unheroic to me. You're welcome to it. As far as I'm concerned people who admit no weakness are dangerous, far more dangerous than people like me who do. To me Roarck is an emotional midget.
And it is that selfish, rapacious pursuit of profit that has the world on the brink of ecological disaster. It's why America is hated around the world, even more than it is admired.
Roarks march in to countries despising their cultural traditions, their religions, their tribal unities, they pillage and they leave lives in ruins all in the name of capitalism's freedom and so the Western World can go on stuffing its face at the expense of every one else, gobbling up most of the earth's resources in the name of their selfish rights.
May I never think another thought about Rand or Fountainhead or her subjective objectivism again.
It was designed to be an apology for the self-serving.All my efforts to expand your definitions of objective experience and the context of the human in the natural world came to nothing. As the villain in the piece, I only came back so you could kill me off before the denouement anyway, because I knew your arguments were set in stone like commandments.

Rootie
if you think you are about to embark on an open discussion, wait for the steam roller, nothing you say will make the slightest difference to them, unless you acquiesce to their arguments.

Nothing has changed in my sense that Randians are cultists either. One with factions undoubtedly, but stuck in arguments splitting the same hairs over and over again.
Don't worry Michael Caution, I'll take my tattered respectability with me and leave you to collectively feed on Rootie's objections to your creed.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Michael Caution — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 21:40:06 -0000

More and more the discussion here has been diverted from the original topic of Ayn RandÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s The Fountainhead, her literary accomplishments, and broadly the philosophy that underlies it. Instead it has focused more on microscopic bacteria, Ã¢â‚¬Å“lung fieldsÃ¢â‚¬Â, and overall skepticism as a result.

You can probably tell from my list that I lay the blame at JerryÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s feet since he is the only person who persists on bringing up such inane issues. I am simply shocked at your open declaration of deception towards others here. In comment 95 you said, Ã¢â‚¬Å“I pushed your collective buttons because I still have a trace of cruel streak and I knew you would be upset by being named as being what you most despise, a collective, a hive.Ã¢â‚¬Â This statement demonstrates you continued ignorance of the contextual meaning of the word Ã¢â‚¬Å“collectivismÃ¢â‚¬Â as I said in comment 47 but it also demonstrates something more monstrous. It showed your inability to respectfully discuss issues in a rational manner and so instead initiated a type of manipulation on your part to get your kicks. This is evidenced when you admitted in comment 113, Ã¢â‚¬Å“I employ whatever methods are at hand to make my points, especially when I think that I am being steamrolled.Ã¢â‚¬Â Apparently, using methods of rational discussion to unravel your web of distortion was too much for you to handle, if this is what you call Ã¢â‚¬Å“being steamrolledÃ¢â‚¬Â. Your methods are not genuine and subvert the discussion to your whims.

Because of this I no longer wish to engage in such forms of discussion. And even before you start proclaiming that I am some dogmatist or that IÃ¢â‚¬â„¢m stifling the conversation by stopping, realize that it was you it did it long before me and that I gave you ample time to present your argument.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Rootie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 17:11:16 -0000

Jennifer,

You asked about collectivsm vs. individualism.

I've much to learn -- I admit googling "collectivism". Surprise!Conflicting results as to whether production belongs to the state or the people.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define...

(welcoming objectivist feedback here -- I don't claim authority on this matter)

Neither individualism (in the purest sense) nor collectivism really describes the interaction and relationships I would expect to find in an objectivist society.

Objective values are defined by those "things" (including non-physical and social) that promote a man's rational life.

In reality, my survival is enhanced by embedding myself into a larger society of individuals. There is a very good reason I do not live on a desert island or among lions.

This does not mean that an objective society I am embedded into is a collective in the collectivist sense. Neither does this mean that I or the objectivist society I might be a member of is individualist in nature.

I would expect that objectivism actually highlights the relationship between the individual and the society. The society cannot exist without the support of the individuals in it. The individuals must obtain some objective values from their society. At times, my participation may mean loss of personal values (i.e. life / limb) while serving to protect that society from the attacks of others.

Rootie

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Rootie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:37:01 -0000

Jerry,

The "lung field" of a toddler must be huge -- mine can alter the stress level of an entire restaraunt full of adults. :-O

Sorry, I'm way off topic.

Rootie

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:18:48 -0000

Holy bunch of typos Batman.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 16:16:11 -0000

rootie
Sorry about sending you to a site that didn't make my point I did a quick google search and came up with a quick reference. But I'm glad you found Lewis Thomas delightful.

Actually we do have laws governing how automobiles are built. I think you would find that every kind of nut used in an car has very specific specs and if they aren't meant the car doesn't go on the road.
Just how a mechanistic metaphor touches on the life array of within a living human however isn't clear to me.
Presumably my post 110 makes more sense of my position.

101 Michael
I was basing my statement about Rand being a bridge between old and new objectivism on page 10 of the Romantic Manifesto. There at least she he does not call herself a bridge to Aristotle "Thomas Aquinas is one illustrious example, he was the bridge between Aristotle and the Renaissance" Perhaps else she dispenses with Aquinas and makes herself the bridge, I don't know, but on page 10 she defines her roles as similar to Aquinas'.
"I am a bridge of that kind - between the esthetic achievements of the nineteenth century and the minds of that chose to discover them." she goes to say that she is concerned with defending the achievements of the rational culture of the brief span of less than a century.
Perhaps my mistake is in identify objectivism with the 'esthetic achievements..."

Also Michael, my point is that faith founded on pre-suppositional philosopphy is founded on reason. My God is Creative Love. Granted there has been a lot of the irrational in my developement due to home life circumstances that don't matter here, the point is that I set out to discover evidence for my faith. Faith is just a choice that one makes about what to trust.
You may deny that your belief in Objectivism is a faith, but that's precisely what it is to me. You chose to be an objectivist, and not just any kind of objectivist, but one with an allegience to Rand's thought. You have faith in her, you trust her methodology.

As for my comments about my having only a high school education, it is not because I feel daunted by intellectuals that I made the comment, it's because I don't have the debating techniques of trained philosophers. I employ whatever methods are at hand to make my points, especially when I think that I am being steamrolled.

And finally capitalism, I'm actually baffled by the defense of it. I cannot imagine why an individualist would not suspect everything a corporatist does.
I was asked to produce examples of corporate crimes against humanity as if the concept had never crossed any of your minds. That alone made me suspicious of Rand's influence on your thinking. There's a whole world of corporate malfeasance a google search away.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:41:45 -0000

Richard, I am not saying the universe is random, far from it, I am saying that the only pre-supposition about the existence of the universe that allows for the logical conclusion of meaning is that it was intentional created.
As you pointed out Rand explicity stated that it was not created.
What I am saying is that those who pre-suppose that the universe exists as consequence of chaos theory or that it came out random fractal processes cannot build a philosophical case for the existence of meaning based on their presuppostion.
Most scientists appear to propose that Cosmic Spontanenous Generation is responsible for the existence of the universe, and thus for the existence of life, and thus for the existence of meaning.
I suppose what you're saying to get around the necessity of the pre-suppositional argument is that Rand pre-supposed that life always existed, always operated by the laws it operates by now ?

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Rootie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:33:21 -0000

Jerry,

I read the article you provided. It was speaking specifically about the *evolutionary origin* of our current cell structure, not about active living symbionts. The article addresses the question, "how did our cells evolve?" not "what are we today?"

How many symbionts are passed via sperm and egg? Only *pieces and parts* of what *used to be*. We are each a complexly integrated organism.

I accept without question there are certainly symbiotic relationships in, on and around the human body, but that isn't a fundamental of who we are _as humans_.

Stating what Greg said a little differently, we don't have laws regarding how nuts, bolts, gears sheet metal and window glass drive down the highway. We do have laws regarding how cars and trucks are operated on the highway. (ok, those of you jalopy drivers still have to worry about pieces falling off in an unsafe fashion... ;)

The delightful piece by Lewis Thomas seems to do nothing to advance or support your point. Was there something you intended to convey with it?

Rootie

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:31:25 -0000

So now we come to some points of agreement.
My notions of individualism cannot be separated from mutual benefit, they can be distinguished but not divided.
As for the need of animals to think or not, quite frankly I don't think humans know enough about the subject to be conclusive, and there is ample evidence that animals learn from humans, and in a sense learn to think like humans, not in abstract ways perhaps, but in concrete ways.
I think that given our symbiotic nature words like intuition and instinct have to be re-examined. It is why I took umbrage at your out of hand dismissal of them in favour of a solely rationalist basis for human understanding.
My case is that single-celled lifeforms in our cytoplasm individually do not amount to much more than transmitter-receivers of energy-information, but one human being is a mulit-zillion array of information processing lifeforms, on top of the 75 trillion human nuclei that constitute each one of us.
How is the energy-information processed, certainly not just by the brain.
The human body produces three electromagnetic fields: the brain field extends outside the body about one foot, the lung field is slightly larger and the heart field is about ten feet around us.Electro-magnetic fields contain ionized particles, every breath the lungs for example breathe out ionized particles (free radicals), within each particle is an information 'bit', some of which energy remains within the lung field, creating a field of 'memory' particular to each of us.
For my purposes, given the lingustic connects of spirit and breathe, I regard the lung field as the spirit.
The brain field (mind) is similar, but obviously the brain doesn't breathe ionized particles into its field, nonetheless it streams with ionized information, memory related to us personally.
The heart field (soul) does the same, only it is much more powerful because of its size. It streams with information presumably linked to neural peptide transmissions.
While this whole system is rational in the sense that it can be discovered and understood by science (See the HeartMath Institute's website) it is itself far more of a source of intuitive insight than mere thinking could ever provide.
According to Christian Huygen, the Renaissance Dutch clockmaker who wondered why every clock in his clockshop ticked in unison, despite the fact that he could not set a clock going simultaneously with every other clock in the room, he deduced that the clocks in the clock shop were entraining to the largest one in the room, the grandfather clock. It does so because it produces the largest electro-magnetic field in the vicinity.
In the same way, the heart's EM field , being the largest, is capable of entraining both the brain and lung fields.
According to the HeartMath Institute's experiments, in moments of stress, when brain waves are spiking, and breaths are short and ragged and the heart is racing, the rational thing to do, is to turn to the Heart field.
Values that they call core heart values produce immediate results, finding something to appreciate in a situation, something to care about, something to love triggers the entraining power the Heart field and the mind and the lungs lose their stress patters and produce coherent ones.
Yes it took a rational mind to discover the phenomenum, and it takes a moment of thought for an individual to chose to turn to the heart, but thought itself cannot entrain a human being and restore them to energetic coherency.
At the same time every animal on the planet with a brain, lungs and a heart has the same power, and without coherency no mammal would survive long. Animals are much better at staying within their coherency states than humans are, (not because they are less rational than humans, but because humans are irrational in ways no animal ever appears to be unless it has rabies.)

Put a group of humans in a room full of stressed out individuals and if the group employs heart entrainment they can produce a large enough field of coherency to effect the stress levels of other people in the room. One human could not do it to a room full of other people, several people can.
Lewis Thomas, in one of his essays suggests that humanity may be the central nervous system of the planet, in that our existence could be rooted in the need for life to articulate itself to itself.

It could be that the price of that role is our capacity for enduring paradox, highly stressful situations of understanding - which I think you call contradiction, and which you dismiss as irrational. To me paradox MAY be the knife edge on which human consciousness is split open and out of which a planetary awareness MAY be developing.

It won't put an end to individuality, and nor will it make me indistinguishable from you or from the fly on the wall, and nor will it put an end to rationality, but it will be an awareness that will change us forever.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Richard Watts — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:15:38 -0000

Jerry,

You said:
"The new objectivism is founded on the metaphysics of a randomly create universe; random creation is akin to cosmic spontanenous generation.
Its quite astonishing to me the number of people who people in cosmic spontaneous generation.
The logical conclusion of a world created by randomness is randomness, not meaning"

What "ramdomness" are you referring to? It certainly is not an Objectivist concept, nor does Objectivism hold that the universe was "created" at all. In fact Ayn Rand specifically denounced that notion as being arbitrary.

The fundamental nature of the universe is not random. The atomic nature of matter is very orderly, and is the cause of the order in the universe that is observable to the scientist (but not to mystics such as yourself who refuse to see it).

What evidence do you offer that the fundamental nature of the universe is random, and came out of randomness? What instances do you offer in which the laws of physics have ever been violated, and where is your proof?

Where is your evidence that the universe was created, or that it came from "randomness"? Can you point back to a time when there was no order, when atoms, or their orderly particles and sub-particles did not exist?

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Rootie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:15:03 -0000

Anon$,

You are absolutely right. I did "forget" to cover that part of Objectivism vs. religion.

Objectivism opens its eyes and sees reality in front of it, extends its hand and touches reality, and comes to know it directly through rational exploration, and indirectly through independently verifiable scientific methods employed by others.

Religion deliberatly shuts its eyes to the world around it (faith), cuts off its hand to help a worthless neighbor (altruism), and comes to know the world by reading a self-contradicting book of (mostly?) fiction written so long ago that experts can't even agree what some of the words mean. (http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v14/i2...)

Objectivism is as extreme or more extreme than many religions. It requires people to think for themselves, act for themselves in a rational fashion, and to learn and respect the metaphysical truths around us. This is not an easy task. It is much harder to do than to simply "believe" and deny all accountability for any actions you may have committed. (http://www.jesus-is-savior.com/Basics/gods_simp...)

An Objectivist life is (as near as I can tell from personal experience) much harder to live than a religious one.

Rootie

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Ralph DeMarco — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 15:06:05 -0000

Greg wrote: "The ideology of abolitionism was extreme and didnÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t fail or have to be moderated. Neither did the idea of deposing kings in favor of representative governments."

I must admit I was wrong about extremism. John Brown and the Abolitionists were the real extremists, not the slave owners. After all, has there ever been a better Capitalist system? US Slavery was the product of free markets and free white men! But they did have to compromise a bit since blacks basically became wage slaves and second class citizens after the Civil War.

And let's not forget those who opposed the divine rights of Kings! Those extremists who wrote the Magna Carta actually wanted the King to be bound by the rule of law! They even wanted subjects to be protected by Habeas Corpus. Of course, the idea that Royal blood is divine and that those who have it are annointed by God to rule is not an extreme ideology.

And thank goodness for The Virtue of Selfishness! That book, and the Satanic Bible, changed my life.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Greg Perkins — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 12:35:10 -0000

Just as the right tool can make a job easy and the wrong tool can make it hard, the concepts one brings to bear can make all the difference.

Yes, it is a fact that we are composed of the same materials as the rocks, trees, and rabbits. And it is a fact that we are dependent on and composed of other tiny organisms, and that other species share those same dependencies with us. And it is a fact that we, like everything, exist in an amazing causal web, interacting with the world, the other suborganisms, other animals, other collections of animals, and on and on. It's true: depending on our focus, we can view man as a part of an entity, as an entity, as composed of entities. And as Jerry makes clear, it is easy to see all this and conclude that we need to get over ourselves.

Yet it is a fact that none of that sort of thing invalidates the Objectivist identification of man standing alone in nature as the sole entity posessing individual rights -- that individual men, not parts or aspects of men, not collections of men, and not animals other than men, are the unit of account in moral action and political rights.

Recalling that in #75 I said Objectivism is entirely shaped by respect for fundamental facts, the question you should have is: what the heck fundamental fact would compell Objectivists to so boldly sweep away these sorts of impressive and humbling facts about composition and connection and interrelations as seemingly irrelevant to their notions in moral and political theory?

The fundamental fact that singles individual men out of this vast spectrum of entities and interactions is that we (currently) stand alone as the rational animal -- the conceptual animal -- the animal with volition -- the animal that can and must think if it is to live. This is the fundamental fact that puts the spotlight on individual men in the epistemological, moral, and political spheres. In fact, these spheres exist only *because* of that fundamental fact: individual men need guidence in the (volitional/conceptual) act of thinking because errors are possible; they need guidence in the (volitional/conceptual) choices of how to act because their lives depend on it and they could choose poorly; they need guidence in the (volitional/conceptual) project of creating social conditions that allow thinking and acting. Mitochondria, cells, and spleens need no such guidance, no such freedom to think and act -- and *collections* of men need no such guidance either, because thinking is not a group sport.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Jerry Prager — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 09:40:47 -0000

I guess this site on symbiosis will do on a simple explanation of symbiosis.
http://www.geocities.com/jjmohn/endosymbiosis.htm
The SET theory they refer to is the work of Lyn Margulis, of course she would argue that her works puts an end to God forever, but God has a way of surviving such pronouncements.
I'll just leave that aside for the moment to deal with symbiosis.
My all time favourite writer on this subject is Lewis Thomas the essayist, the former dean of both New York University and Yale schools of medicine.
In a chapter called Organelles as Organisms published in 1974, he says this
"Finally there is the whole question my identity, and, more than that my human dignity. I did not mind it when I first learned of my descent from lower forms of life. I had in mind an arboreal family of beetle-browed, speechless, hairy sub-men, ape-like, and I've never objected to them as forbears. Indeed being Welsh, I feel the better for it, having clearly risen above them in my time of evolution. It is a source of satisfaction to be part of of the improvement of the species.
But not these things. I have never bargained on descent from single cells without nuclei. I could even make my peace with that, if it were all, but there is the additional humiliation that I have not, in a real sense, descended at all. I have brought them along with me, or perhaps they have brought me."
"It is no good standing on dignity in a situation like this. It is a mystery. There they are, moving about in my own cytoplasm, breathing for my own flesh, but strangers. They are much less closely related to me than to each other and to the free-living bacteria out under the hills. They feel like strangers, but the thought comes that the same creatures, precisely the same, are out there in the cells of sea gulls, and whales, and dune grass, and seaweed, and hermit crabs, and further inland in the leaves of the beech in my backyard, and in the family of skunks beneath the back fence, and even in that fly on the window, Through them I am connected; I have close relatives, once removed, all over the place."
"This is new information, for me, and I regret somewhat that I cannot be in closer touch with my mitochondria. If I concentrate, I can imagine I feel them; they do not squirm, but there is, from time to time, a kind of tingle. I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a way o explaining music to myself."
Lewis Thomas

That was written in 1974, the science is not even new anymore. But it is there, and when symbiosis is taught to our children and they grow up in the world Thomas writes about, and when that world is combined with membrane physics, everything about the way we think and feel about the universe will shift, and our children's children will live in a world where mutual benefit is the central reality.
We won't need state collectives, and we won't need corporate collectives, but life will be seen to be composed of independent communitarians.
Individual because we will always be able to distinguish ourselves as such, but part of an organic whole, from which we cannot be divided, and from which damage to a part is damage to the whole.
And if humans cause too much damage it will be humans who suffer extinction, the symbionts have survived billions of years of evolution. They don't need us as as much as we need them,. And the sooner we live that lesson and stop deluding ourselves that we are the gods of this planet, the sooner we might get around to figuring out how to survive the damage that has already been done and the consequences of our hubris that are already bearing down on us.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Anon$ — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:28:00 -0000

Yes Richard, I meant TOC, bit of a typo there. Then again they are always changing their name, so...lol.

"Faith is rational when you use presupposional philosophy. We all choose our beliefs, and those beliefs create sequences of ideas. Yours create one sequence, mine create another. Mine arenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t good enough for you, yours arenÃ¢â‚¬â„¢t good enough for me. Sounds like individualism to me."

Sounds like moral relativism to me, completely removed from reality, as if man had no nature whatsoever.

The 'lack of debate' or lack of challengers in a given thread does not mean the thread itself is full of mindless true believers. Debate ends when the truth is discovered, and if truth were not possible there would be no value in debating.

Arguing for relativism like that is contradiction, since if what you say were true Jerry, you could never prove it, and no one could prove otherwise either. It's a dead end.

Also, Rand never claimed to be a link to "past and future Objectisvism", the concept of "Objectivism" as we know it was not actually defined until the last century. Rand considered herself a bridge from Aristotle, in that they shared the same metaphysics, but this is not the same as what you proclaim.

For Rootie, I agree, but it is dangerous to say religion and Objectivism begin at the same place, as if "existence" were taken on faith. The fundemental difference in those principals is in faith vs reason, in belief vs observation, not just some arbitrary set point we begin from. Though I doubt you meant that, I want to clarify because many non-objectivists will be reading this.

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Rootie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 03:20:26 -0000

Jerry,

Please provide a link for scientific paper which states that organelles are symbionts and not a simple part of a cell.

"randomness can only produce randomness" Hmmm... salt crystals aren't very random, but the solution they formed in certainly is. Diamonds aren't very random. And can you explain for me how Lovelock's carbon dioxide comes to exist without a reaction of some form between carbon and oxygen?

"I think we need to free enterprise by making it individual, and associational" My hard drive was built by a corporation, not by a association of free individuals. Please show me one that was. As much as I dislike to "pay The Man", I'd rather run windows than linux, and I'd rather run photoshop than gimp. Ultimately, competition drives innovation and investment like no other force. (show me a counter-example) What aspect of loose associations encourages (or forces) such goal setting? How does a simple loose association of individuals gain any efficiency of scale?

One of your objections to Objectivism seems to be based on objectivism being very inflexible because it is based roughly on what you called the "actual". That which is. You don't throw a ball up in the air and expect it to keep going. Neither can you expect man to live without logic, without rational understanding. A man who does not eat cannot expect to continue living for very long.

As I learn more, I continue to wonder how the ideals of objectivism will come to pass in a larger society. There will always be disruptive elements within the society. I see much more hope for "a positive outcome" in objectivism than I do in unstructured associations of individuals. What happens to the disruptive elements in your scenario? Who polices them? What policies would you put in place with regard to welfare, public health, public infrastructure?

Finally, do you have any reason to believe that without catastrophic collapse of human civilization, anything can be done for the environment? If so, what? How would it be driven or supported today by anything other than the products of the corporations you detest? Will you sell stone axes, flint, and firewood door-to-door? There is no doubt in my mind that we must be stewards of the environment -- I believe this is supported within objectivism as part of the "long term nature" of man's life. The challenge we face is to gain a full understanding of the complex systems we live within and amongst that allows us to truly have a long-term existence.

Oh, and one more parting question -- if we live in a "meant universe", who "meant" it? Who meant the "meant"-or? Certainly the "meant"-or couldn't exist without meaning, so who created the meaning? Who created the meaning of the meaning of the meaning? Ultimately, religion and objectivism start at a similar argument: "___ just is", whether "god just is" or "existence just is". The real question is where you go from there. "Lightning struck the herd of sheep -- the shepherd must have angered the gods" or "maybe the shepherd shouldn't have had the sheep on a hilltop during a lightning storm"

Re: Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead

Richard Watts — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 01:49:25 -0000

Anon$ :
In "You can thank Ã¢â‚¬Å“institutesÃ¢â‚¬Â like TOS for the above post"

Did you mean TOC?