I think her writing is very interesting. I'm a fan of her work. She makes me think.
Are you a fan of Ayn Rand works and/or Philosophy?
by Eyebrow2 31 Replies latest jw friends
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zagor
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. - Ayn Rand
Is my favorite quote
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Eyebrow2
I'm pretty sure that there's some material about her on Rick Ross's cult site. It didn't look so good. Hope I'm wrong.
I am not sure who Rick Ross is, but I wouldn't be surprised. There are some people that can make a cult out of anything. (I am not speaking of this Rick person...I mean people who make take a philosophy and distort it.) Its about individualism, and using reasoning and rationality to lead your life.
I have met many people over the past few months, a few of them that have been living this philosophy for over 30 years. One thing I was concerned of early on was whether or not it was some sort of wierd cultish philosophy. These people admire her work as well, but do not act like walks on water or was perfect. She made mistakes in life, and, I remember bringing up a point about her personal life at one meeting. One of the fellows looked at me and said "No one is perfect, even Rand had to recheck her premises from time to time."
Zagor...that is a great quote too. Here is one, it is actually found in Atlas Shrugged,
"If I were to speak your kind of language, I would say that man's only moral commandment is: Thou shalt think. But a 'moral commandment' is a contradiction in terms. The moral is the chosen, not the forced; the understood, not the obeyed. The moral is the rational, and reason accepts no commandments."
On my blog, I used two articles, one from a secular humanist perspective, and one from an objectivist perspective to discuss how the 10 commandments are not the best thing to try to teach kids right and wrong. That, I think, is a great way to sum up the fact that Rand doesn't have a list of Rules of morality.
(for those interested: http://crazyhumanist.blogspot.com/2006/04/why-10-commandments-are-wrong-for.html )
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apfergus
I'm personally not a huge Rand fan. While I do think she had some interesting points, I just don't see eye-to-eye with her on economics at all and I found Atlas Shrugged to be so boring and poorly written that I couldn't get more than a couple hundred pages into it. If I could just get myself to read a little more of her essays, I'm sure I'd have something more constructive to say. Having said that, I can't stand Leonard Peikoff. I think he's the one primarily responsible for the Ayn Rand Objectivist "cult" some other people have hinted at.
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Dune
I was going to read Atlas Shrugged for an english class in high school but lost interest.
I remember a friend likening Ayn Rand and the people who read her stuff as having a cult mentality.
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jstalin
I love Atlas Shrugged. It got me on the path toward atheism and anarcho-capitalism.
I love her defense of individualism, but I disagree with her hate of altruism. Forced altruism, in the form of government programs, is evil, but I have no problem with personal choices to donate to charity to help people.
If you like Rand's work, I would suggest reading Frederic Bastiat's The Law. He wrote it in the 1850's I believe, but it is as relevant today as ever. It's short and sweet.
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Eyebrow2
I am currently reading Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Peikoff, and I am not a huge style of his writing, but I have found the book helpful in understanding the philosophy. And you may be right: some people have taken some of Peikoff's comments (which have been harsh of critics) and used them to try to portary the philosophy as a cult.
I personally enjoy Rand's style of writing more than Peikoffs, and there are others Objectivist writings that have different styles as well. There is decent forum wwww.objectivisimonline.net as well (that is not run by The Ayn Rand Institute. The guy that owns and runs it lives locally in the DFW area).
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Eyebrow2
I love Atlas Shrugged. It got me on the path toward atheism and anarcho-capitalism.
I love her defense of individualism, but I disagree with her hate of altruism. Forced altruism, in the form of government programs, is evil, but I have no problem with personal choices to donate to charity to help people.
If you like Rand's work, I would suggest reading Frederic Bastiat's The Law. He wrote it in the 1850's I believe, but it is as relevant today as ever. It's short and sweet.
I am glad you brought that up: Objectivism is against charity by FORCE...if you value a charity and want to give to it, knock yourself out. If it is your choice go ahead. It is your money, do what you want. Rand was against compelled charity. Objectivists that I know are not stingy people. They are ready to give to causes they believe in, and they do.
and thanks for the suggestion...I will look it up
BTW, I just went on the Rick Ross site and the only thing I could find on Objectivism was a really poorly written piece that was full of a lot of mis information. It liken her to Hubbard, who created Scientology (a religion not a philosophy). I was surprised. Most sites about cults and supposeded cults at least try to look scientific and not inflammatory. There are a few other articles it seems when you search under Rand instead of Objectivism that quotes her here and there for various reasons, but it isn't listed as a cult. (Nor should it be)
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apfergus
Cool. I'll check out the website, but do you have any of Rand's essay collections you might be able to recommend? It's something I've been meaning to read up on once I get a break from school and work.
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Robdar
Ayn is a little too preachy for me in Atlas Shrugged. Other than that, I enjoy her philosophy but do have some problems with it. It will take too much time and effort to write why I have problems with it. So, instead, I found this essay on line and decided to post it. Sorry if some of you have a problem with cutting and pasting.
Here is a portion of the essay:
5.3.6. THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION OF EGOISM
G.E. Moore identified the following as the fundamental contradiction of egoism (Principia Ethica, section 59): The egoist says that each person ought rationally to hold, "My own happiness is the sole good": "What egoism holds, therefore, is that each man's happiness is the sole good - that a number of different things are each of them the only good thing there is - an absolute contradiction!" (emphasis Moore's).
This is a criticism that still seems to me, as it did when I first read it, exactly on the mark. Let's look at it more closely, though. The ethical egoist is one who believes that he ought to aim only at promoting his own happiness (it does not matter if we substitute "interests" or anything else for "happiness"). Certainly, then, he thinks that it is good that he should be happy. What does he think everyone else should do?
He might maintain, "Everyone else also ought to serve my interests," but this would be implausible. Then he would have to answer "What's so special about you?" Unless he thinks he himself has some kind of special status, some characteristics that no one else in the world has, he must grant that, if his happiness is good, the happiness of others is also good.
Therefore, to maintain the plausibility of his theory, the egoist has to say that everyone's happiness is good, and that each person ought to aim at that person's own happiness. But if other people's happiness is also good, then the egoist must be hard put to explain why he does not aim at it in the same way he aims at his own. In other words, how can he justify acting as if his own happiness were the only good thing there is, given that he grants that every other person's happiness is good in just the same way that his own happiness is?
We can phrase the conflict another way, in terms of the idea that individuals are ends in themselves. Let A be an egoist, and let B be the egoist's next-door neighbor. The egoist regards his own life as an end in itself, and he says B ought to regard B's life as an end in itself. But, insofar as A is concerned only for furthering his own life, A can not, himself, treat B's life as an end in itself. A's sole value is A's life; therefore, A can value B's life, if at all, only as a means (i.e. if B's life furthers A's). Similarly, when A recommends to B that B should be an egoist, he is recommending that B should regard A as being only valuable as a means. This necessarily follows from the supposition that B should regard B's life as the sole end in itself, which is the meaning of egoism. A therefore seems to be caught in a contradiction: A holds that A's own life is an end in itself, but at the same time A thinks that no one else ought to recognize A's life as being an end in itself. In a parallel contradiction, A holds that other people are valuable only as means, but he holds that other people are correct in regarding themselves as valuable not merely as means but as ends in themselves. In other words: Each individual is correct in a belief which directly contradicts what every other individual correctly believes. A is correct to believe P, but B is correct to believe not-P. Is this not, in Moore's words, "an absolute contradiction"?
Notice that here, the Objectivist doctrine that rational people's interests never conflict, even if it were true, would provide no help. That the life of my next door neighbor should be valuable as an end in itself and that also, it should be valuable only as a means to further my own happiness, is a contradiction, regardless of how well my and my neighbor's happiness may harmonize.
The rest of the essay can be found here: http://home.sprynet.com/~owl1/rand.htm.