By “value of life in general” I meant value of one’s own life for oneself (the “in general” qualifier was there to mark the absence of “qua man”).
Playing the essentialism card allowed her to smuggle in a boatload of values masquerading as implicit in the choice between life and death. The requirements for your concrete life get subordinated to the standards of Man’s life qua Man. And then it’s “Man can’t live as this, Man can’t live as that”, no matter how many men have managed to do so.
That’s what I find most annoying and in the same time bizarre with Objectivism. On the one hand, it asserts that my life belongs to me and nobody else, on the other hand it prescribes what I am entitled to do with my life and what not, lest be considered a looter. Among other freedoms, I want my freedom to be altruistic if I choose to.
Free to be altruistic. Wouldn’t that be nice. But freedom is precisely what most everyone would deny you, including Rand. Some say you have a duty to be altruistic, while says you have a duty not to be, but both agree that you’re evil unless you submit and do your duty.
If you want a philosopher who leaves you free to be an egoist, you want Stirner, the egoist. Egoism isn’t the opposite of altruism, it is the opposite of theism, the belief the you were born a slave to a cause not your own. Rand says she doesn’t believe in God, but does she believe in Good any less than the most fanatical theist believes in God? Does she condemn those who won’t serve her Good any less harshly?
Youtube atheists had a big stink over the definition of atheism—is it disbelief in God, or a lack of belief in God? And round and round they went. And both sides were wrong, because they took belief in the sense of “belief in the existence of”, which really isn’t the point with respect to theism. There have been no end of people worshiped as gods by other people. It wasn’t that these “gods” didn’t exist for their respective atheists, it’s that their atheists did not believe they were born slaves to these gods. In Paradise Lost, Satan certainly knows God exists, but does it make any sense to thereby call him a theist? Isn’t he an atheist precisely for his refusal to be a slave, his Non Serviam?
Rand actually started off very close to really being an egoist. Anthem and We the Living were just assertions of freedom over people and ideologies who demand your submission. IMO, it wasn’t enough for her to be free, she wanted to be right, and for other people to be wrong. A will to power, even in philosophy.
And while Nietzsche was all for that, and went about consciously trying to impose his vision on others, I don’t think Rand got the joke. She was a true believer in her truth, Stirner would say possessed by it, and wasn’t consciously serving her own will, but dutifully served her truth instead.
it asserts that my life belongs to me
Funny you should put it that way. Stirner’s “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum” is alternately translated “The Unique One and His Property”, or “The Ego and His Own”. It’s about what you can own, and what it means to have an attitude of ownership to your own life and the world. Your life may or may not belong to you, but that depends on you and the attitude you take toward it.
By “value of life in general” I meant value of one’s own life for oneself (the “in general” qualifier was there to mark the absence of “qua man”).
That’s what I find most annoying and in the same time bizarre with Objectivism. On the one hand, it asserts that my life belongs to me and nobody else, on the other hand it prescribes what I am entitled to do with my life and what not, lest be considered a looter. Among other freedoms, I want my freedom to be altruistic if I choose to.
Free to be altruistic. Wouldn’t that be nice. But freedom is precisely what most everyone would deny you, including Rand. Some say you have a duty to be altruistic, while says you have a duty not to be, but both agree that you’re evil unless you submit and do your duty.
If you want a philosopher who leaves you free to be an egoist, you want Stirner, the egoist. Egoism isn’t the opposite of altruism, it is the opposite of theism, the belief the you were born a slave to a cause not your own. Rand says she doesn’t believe in God, but does she believe in Good any less than the most fanatical theist believes in God? Does she condemn those who won’t serve her Good any less harshly?
Youtube atheists had a big stink over the definition of atheism—is it disbelief in God, or a lack of belief in God? And round and round they went. And both sides were wrong, because they took belief in the sense of “belief in the existence of”, which really isn’t the point with respect to theism. There have been no end of people worshiped as gods by other people. It wasn’t that these “gods” didn’t exist for their respective atheists, it’s that their atheists did not believe they were born slaves to these gods. In Paradise Lost, Satan certainly knows God exists, but does it make any sense to thereby call him a theist? Isn’t he an atheist precisely for his refusal to be a slave, his Non Serviam?
Rand actually started off very close to really being an egoist. Anthem and We the Living were just assertions of freedom over people and ideologies who demand your submission. IMO, it wasn’t enough for her to be free, she wanted to be right, and for other people to be wrong. A will to power, even in philosophy.
And while Nietzsche was all for that, and went about consciously trying to impose his vision on others, I don’t think Rand got the joke. She was a true believer in her truth, Stirner would say possessed by it, and wasn’t consciously serving her own will, but dutifully served her truth instead.
Funny you should put it that way. Stirner’s “Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum” is alternately translated “The Unique One and His Property”, or “The Ego and His Own”. It’s about what you can own, and what it means to have an attitude of ownership to your own life and the world. Your life may or may not belong to you, but that depends on you and the attitude you take toward it.