I am a huge bookworm and have books in every room in the house. I have a bookstand that contains my favorite books. In it, is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Both books sold a ton of copies and elevated Rand's philosophy to the stratosphere. I enjoy books with a good fictional social message. Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Emile Zole were great writers who did this flawlessly. Writers these days of both political stripes, are rather pathetic by comparison IMHO. Some would argue that her works are weak and fail to constitute great works of literature. I disagree.

Questions for debate:

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

No real comment from me on this one, as I have not read anything by her except her very short book Anthem. For whatever it might be worth, I thought that novel was pretty weak, particularly compared with other dystopian fiction such as 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, or We (which resembles Anthem in many ways.) My main criticism with that book is that it did not have even the tiniest trace of wit, which is absolutely mandatory for satire. Maybe her other books are great, but they scare me off with their sheer size and the fact that every single review I have ever read of them makes them sound unbearably turgid.

2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

Sure. Why not? There are good people with all kinds of personal philosophies.

Let's have the author speak for herself. Ms. Rand?

Link



Thank you.

There's a lot to chew over here.

I have no problem with point number one; the external universe exists.

Point number two is OK, as long as you include the proviso that reasonable people can disagree about what their "reason" tells them is real. The scientific method -- observation, hypothesis, experimentation, refinement -- is the best way to make use of "reason."

Point number three may be the most controversial aspect of Objectivism. It can be interpreted as the elevation of selfishness to the level of a virtue, although this is something of a caricature of Rand's point. I would rather say that, although self-interest is only natural and nothing to be ashamed of, neither is it something to glorify.

Point number four presents the problem that it assumes that all participants in all economic situations -- "trade" -- are fully informed, perfectly rational, and absolutely truthful. Clearly this is not the case. This is why government must act as a "policeman" in "trade" as well as in other aspects of life; to protect victims from predators.

The main problem I have with modern Objectivism -- a philosophy which seems to be taken seriously only by disciples of Rand, and not at all by academic philosophers -- is that its followers have many of the aspects of cultists. I have seen it seriously suggested by Randians that everyone should re-read all of Rand's works every year -- even though they admitted that this would leave you with no time to ever read anything else again. It is this Rand-worship (which I am sure the author would have rejected) which turns me off to the Objectivists I have encountered.

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

One of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Well, I did enjoy her work, but not so much that I'd place it in a category with all of last century's writing gods. I did buy Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead in hard-cover, and recommend them, but there are much better authors.

2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

Sure. I largely agree with her philosophy. To me the objectivist 'philosophy' is simply an explanation that brings to light the underlying reasons why people act the way they do, not a life plan. I absolutely agree with number three, the "controversial one" listed above in Victoria's quote. But one doesn't need a plan or philosophy to act that way, one doesn't have to remind oneself of this concept at all because we all instinctively act that way. One needs a plan to properly direct it in beneficial and positive ways, but that doesn't require the insight of Ayn Rand...Millman and Covey are better for that. I think I was about six years old when it dawned on me that everyone does everything for their own 'gain'....even compassionate and loving things. But I've actually never met a 'Randian' myself, nor have I spent much time digesting their philosophy.

Edited to add: I think the reason Rand "glorifies selfishness" as a moral philosophy is because selfishness is often used as an excuse to take from people. Most don’t like to think of themselves as selfish (and we all are), yet it’s very important to their own personal philosophies to be able to paint others that way in order to obtain what they want (a selfish endeavor in and of itself). The Red revolution in Russia, where Rand is from, depended on it.

1.) Absolutely not. Compelling? Sure. Interesting ideas? Definitely. A great writer? God no. Ayn is one of the clumsiest writers to have any acclaim. The John Galt speech would be 3 hours long if spoken aloud. While I'm sure Ayn desperately wanted to be Dagny - she wasn't. Let's not even get involved in her love scenes... Despite her not being a great writer the force of her ideas makes her readable. Even when she clocks in over 650,000 words.

2.) Yes. There's nothing inherently evil about Objectivism to prevent someone from being moral and "good" and adhering to Objectivism.

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?
I've heard of her and her philosophy, but I've never actually read any of her stuff. My attention span is way to short.


2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

Going by Rand's statement of objectivism posted above by Victoria Silverwolf, I think it can prove difficult to live by objectivism and be a good person. For example, say you were almost late to an important business meeting and you walked by and saw an infant drowning in a puddle of water. According to the 3rd premise, it would be reasonable for a person to let the baby drown and go to the meeting. I can't see that as being morally sound or good.

Well, I think Objectivism held that 'selfishness' was not a code that one should live by, but the underlying reason for any action we make. (Although selfishness tends to get redefined to 'that which is good for the continuation of my family and way of life').

So, my point is that, under Objectivism, 9999 out of 10,000 people WOULD save the baby in the above example, but driven not by an abtract concept of morality, but by the fact that letting the baby drown would make us feel terrible about ourselves. So we do it primarily to avoid the pain of being someone who lets babies drown. (As to why babies drowning or not is of importance to us would then require going further into human instincts, social drivers etc etc).

I don't see why.



Well, what motivation is there to save a drowning baby in the first place? Because it's the right thing to do? Why wouldn't that be motivation under objectivist philosophy too? Helping others is in one's self interest....whether due to guilt or good feelings, or simply business and/or survival sense. No one wants to associate with a person who lets babies drown, and many would harm said person for that offense. And that's assuming letting babies drown in the first place is perfectly legal and won't incur a civil or criminal penalty. Furthermore, people like those who save babies and generally reward that behavior either directly or indirectly.

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

Nope. IMHO, she is a terrible writer (and I say this as someone who owns all of her books and has read them several times over). She espoused a fascinating philosophy but as a writer, I believe she thought herself much more skilled than she actually was (check out her book 'On Writing' --or something similarly titled--to see direct evidence of her hubris). Her writing failed, I believe, because she thought her readers too dumb to understand what she was trying to say. In either of her two greater epics, you'll find tens of pages at one time saying the same thing over and over again, as if repetition would bring clarity and acceptance. She was best a creating complex characters who loved to ponder the world. The problem is, her characters rarely changed, were more of a force for rallying against the masses, and thus were very predictable.


2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?
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Maybe. Any philosophy taken too far is a bad thing. I think her philosophy is flawed though--as much as we like to think we are rational, we are not and cannot be totally devoid of emotion. And Objectivism easily lends itself to selfishness. But sure, in theory, I think an Objectivist could be a morally/ethically sound person.

So you're saying objectivism should be taken as a commentary/theory on fundamental human nature as opposed to a moral ideology? The distinction between those two frameworks that I think you are drawing here makes objectivism seem more reasonable. How and why people are motivated to behave in certain moral situations is one thing, but how they should be motivated is another. Objectivism falls apart when it goes into the realm of what people "should" do.




I say that because objectivism taken as an ideal moral philosophy, how people should decide in moral situations, allows for people to make what I consider to make objectively reprehensible decisions, which disqualifies them from being a good person (of course a moral relativist or nihilist would deny my implicit assumption that there are objective good and evil). That's where the drowning baby/business meeting comes in. It presents a scenario where it is possible to serve one's greater self interest (thereby meeting the criteria of the 3rd objectivist premise) and let the baby drown (objectively reprehensible decision).

Each of the possible baby-saving motivations you mention are all ways that a person can act in their own greatest self interest and save the baby. But that has no bearing on my position because I'm not saying that it is not possible for someone to serve their greater self interest and save the baby i.e. I'm not saying that a person following objectivism is precluded from being a good person. I'm saying that it's possible for a person to follow objectivism and be a bad person.

This potential to be a bad person while still operating within the confines of objectivism as a moral ideal is the source of the "difficulty" I mentioned in my original post.



You are imposing external variables to the scenario. I made no mention of the law or the media or anyone else having any knowledge of the decision. Guilty and good feelings also vary widely between individuals, especially when compared to the opportunity cost of the missed business meeting. Here's another example: hit and runs. Say someone darts into the street and gets accidentally hit by a car. It would be in the driver's best interest to flee the scene (provided he never gets caught), which is within the confines of the 3rd premise of moral objectivism.

Better yet, sociopaths are moral objectivists and can be very bad people.

Well on a very small scale the universe seems to be able to go into superposition in which basically you have "weird" stuff happens that still boggles peoples minds many decades later. In one current concept is that via decoherence you can obtain I guess some form of possible objective understanding or knowledge such as exposure to extreme cold over time can lead to frostbite. Personally I still follow more basic constituents of science such as natural selection, though for the most part the understanding of this at large in the public is so horribly abused its actually scary. So do I follow with a particular philosopher, well no not really. I think objective understanding is possible, much like extinction. I think though that it takes very serious events to hammer this home for the sake of the reality that reality can be far better to a person when it can be anything that person wants. Most of the time anymore I think global warming could only be of benefit to people worldwide actually if not life in general. For a bonus question how do you get conservation of probability from superposition? I am very scared upon measurement, or hindsight.

the philosophy is bunk in that it does not reflect the reality of human psychology

lets take 2 of the 4 concepts


2) Most of our actions are not governed by reason - for good reasons - Reasoning takes too long in a lot of situations including survival. The greater proportion of our actions are learned responses to stimuli . And when I say learned I dont even mean conciously or rationally. We then tend to use alot of reason to justfy responses after the event. Most rationalisation of actions to be governed by selfish reason are after the action. We mostly react first and reason afterwards.

3) Man is a social animal, It comes together in groups for group benefit just like for any intelligent social animal Dogs, Dolphins, primates to name but a few. It works - its proven over a bit longer time than Rands philosophy. We can argue about the size and governance of the groups man should work for but making it a group of one abandons the advantages evolution has given us.

The baby drowning scenario is one in point - people will not rationalise in such a scenario. They do not go through a decision tree of whether to save the baby or not they just react (a non reasoned response). An often reported reaction to such events is that the rescuer or would be rescuer relates that their reasoning side is telling them to run away yet they run towards the scene. It takes alot to overcome this reaction response. I had to tell the mother of a child who came on to my small yacht that if the child went in the cold atlantic and she went in after it, the likely outcome would the child would be saved but an orphan. Since I had a high probability of picking up one small child but a second adult person was iffy and being one down on crew just made the chances for the child worse as well. It took the heavy handed shock tactics of telling her that I was going to abandon her to drown in the ocean to save her child, and would make her child grow up alone, to even have a chance to overcome this reactive response.



I would suggest In writing such a philosophy one that only admits reason, Rand shows a detachment from reality

Well, again, I disagree with your overall point, though I understand your meaning a bit better now...and I do agree one could be a bad person and follow that philosophy too. That's true even of the golden rule (masochists and Stockholm victims, among others). But it isn't difficult to be a good person and simultaneously follow the objectivist philosophy. It's pretty simple in the overall scheme of things. You seem to be overlooking the second portion of the third premise. "Man must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself". Sacrificing others is just as anathema as living for others. To use your last example, if a sociopath were acting only in interest to himself, but simultaneously not sacrificing others to that end, I'd say he were acting as best as a sociopath can.

Mrs P



I seriously doubt that in a society of people a person could act in their own self interest with out "sacrificing others to himself". Of course, I could be interpreting that phrase wrong. Men who excel always have others to sacrifice unto themselves.

Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

A more interesting question might be "Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century?" but we'll let that pass. Even looking at English language writers only, we'd be comparing Rand to - off the top of my head - James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edith Wharton, George Orwell, Don DeLillo, Neal Stephenson, Toni Morrison, E.M. Forster, J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Gore Vidal, Daphne DuMaurier, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, Robert Heinlein, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, John O'Hara, Amy Tan, Cormac McCarthy, Saul Bellow, A.S. Byatt, Norman Mailer, Annie Proulx, Sinclair Lewis, Carson McCullers, John Updike, Henry Miller - I could go on. And I'd place any of those (and probably dozens of others) above Rand as a writer - and I haven't even touched on non-fiction. So... no. I doubt she'd make it to a "top 100" list of 20th century English-language authors, were I putting one together. If we're including writers in other languages, she wouldn't have a hope.

The "why or why not" isn't just based on comparisons, though. Rand is a pretty poor writer in her own right. I've only read We the Living, Anthem, and Atlas Shrugged (I could only take about forty pages of The Fountainhead, especially after Atlas Shrugged), but I've seen the movie - which is hilarious) - and that was all years ago. I also attempted one of her non-fiction works, For the New Intellectual, though, again I didn't get very far. My father was a huge fan of Rand - indeed her books, Barry Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative, and John Stormer's None Dare Call It Treason (as well as a number of Andrew Carnegie derived self-help type things: Napoleon Hill, Og Mandino, and so on) are the only books I know of that he read in his adult life - which is probably why I read any of her stuff.

On the basis of my reading of her works, I have to say that her prose sucks. The characters are unidimensional, the plots are turgid little pot-boilers (no matter how over-extended), the dialogue is ludicrous and totally unconvincing, and the integration of "objectivist philosophy" is awkward, heavy-handed, and preachy. BA suggested that the John Galt speech would run about three hours if spoken aloud. I'm not convinced. It took me about three weeks to get through it. He's right, though, that it's best to avoid talking about the "romantic scenes" at all - if virtual rape can be considered "romantic".

There's an extent to which Rand is a product of her times, though - especially as "the horror of collectivism" seemed much more immediate and threatening. I expect her writings would be considerably different were she still at it - the sexual politics alone would almost have to have undergone considerable evolution - so I think we need to take some of her criticism with a grain of salt.

I tend to think of her as more of a historical curiosity than a pertinent political philosopher, but as a writer, Rand's novels are about as gripping as a textbook - and considerably less informative. I do recommend the film version of The Fountainhead (with Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal), though. It's a real hoot - and the underlying Manichean elements of her philosophy are melodramatically transparent.

Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

I don't see why not. People have embraced all kinds of philosophies and still managed to be relatively ethical. I'm not quite sure one could live their life entirely according to objectivism, though. The world isn't as black and white as it would appear in an Ayn Rand novel - and the "better angels of our nature" can sometimes override even the most "self-interested" philosophical beliefs. If not for at least partially altruistic purposes, for example, why does John Galt found his supremely unlikely enclave in the first place?

That is an interesting point as to me it seems almost impossible to state that no person on earth really does not live by her philosophy one way or another. I think a simple point would be the broad variance in religions doctrines one can adopt in life to basically having any sort of a code at all or individual appreciation of reality. In my earlier post I basically just took the stance of objective reality as reality outside of subjective scope. Such as regardless of personal opinion drinking large amounts of mercury is a bad thing. This is different from the form of objective thought at hand, and personally I do not agree with the philosophy all to well as it seems extremely loaded with paradoxes in nature to be honest, but such an opinion, how do I back it outside of merely being an extension of the definition of objectivism supported by Rand? Again all I could do is go back to my firm belief that an objective reality exists, one that existed before the human species came about and so on.

As for any particular play on human nature I think its somewhat easy to see maybe where Rand may have gotten her ideas. I think an easy example is language, which for what its worth is a perfect example of the nature and nurture debate which to make things simple this debate heavily hinges upon. Biologically speaking humans are "wired" for language, this does not however mean that babies develop and come out the womb speaking only English, or Russian for example. I also think Rand would be heavily challenged to find a way out of dealing with global warming, I say this because accepting the reality of such goes outside the scope of being anything tied directly to one person, or for that matter anything subjective as a objective reality comes to apply then.

Tonyman

I'm not sure it was ever intended to even address the issue of what people 'should do'. I think it operates on a far more deterministic / objective level - i.e. people behave in certain ways because they follow certain rules, these behaviour patterns extend to concepts of morality....




Although if you were following Objectivism, presumably you wouldn't really accept the existence of goodness or badness - which are highly subjective concepts / social constructs anyway.

1.)Was Ayn Rand one of the greatest writers of the 20th century? Why or why not?

No, she wasn't even a good writer. Werz pretty much summed up my feelings about her writing talents. I tried to read Atlas Shrugged, and half way through I shrugged. Never finished that flat piece of trash.

2.)Could a person live their life according to Objectivism and be a good, morally/ethically sound person? Why or why not?

I doubt it. Parenthood would really screw up the old philosophy of self-interest. Falling in love could do it. Becoming a sacrificial lamb (figuratively) could do it. Experiencing war could do it. Actually, just coming across the enigmas and contradictions inherent in chaotic life has to do it.

Philosophy itself is an attempt to wrap chaos up in order. It's a common human trait, probably a survival instinct.

It's like the commandment not to murder. Fine, but murder still happens and quite often. Is that an act of self-interest? Is it an objective act? Might it be projection in the extreme? Why do suicides often follow murders (except for pros)?

I don't know why. I'm also not certain why grass is green and not purple (yet some grasses are purple), or why the universe ever happened. I do know that we are subject to the same laws of nature as everything else in existence, and if we are somehow special, we aren't the omega of specialness. We might be beta though. There are obvious differences like opposed thumbs and the apparent need for philosophy of some sort, kind of like an ECL mainframe CPU going into a spin loop to keep warm for real work.

Anyway, I found Rand to be not so much painful to read as boring and uninspiring. I think that's because she tries to shoehorn reality to fit philosophy, which is bass-ackwards thinking. I got enough of that from my childhood religion.

It's like the guy who wrote about the end of history because of the end of the Cold War. Huh? How arrogant can you get! History will continue long after the human species vanishes from the universe.

Good writers know they don't know squat. Great writers say so, in so many prolific words. It's nice if there's a story too. I really liked Christopher Moore's Fluke, which is about whales and other watery critters. It's a story about how things aren't always as they appear and has lots of surprises in the plot. The underlying premise is pretty good too.

Ayn Rand liked Aristotle. Aristotle was Alexander the Great's teacher. Now there has to be a story in there somewhere . . . Rand just never got it.