I’ve mentioned this here before, but prior to reading Atlas Shrugged, I truly believed in Spock Rationality. I used meditation to eliminate emotions as a teenager because I saw them as irrelevant.
Atlas Shrugged convinced me that emotions were a valuable thing to have. So I don’t really see Spock Rationality in the characters.
The closest any of the characters comes to that is Galt, and it is heavily implied he went through the same kind of utter despair as all the other characters in the book. It’s more or less stated outright that the Hero characters experience greater emotions, in wider variety, than other characters, and particularly the villains; the level emotions of, for example Galt, is not a result of having no emotions, but having experienced such suffering that what he experiences in the course of the book is insignificant by comparison.
(Relentless optimism and curiousity are treated as morally superior attitudes, I grant, but I’d point out that this is a moral standard held to some degree here as well. Imagine the response to somebody who insisted FAI was impossible and we were all doomed to a singularity-induced hell. This community is pretty much defined by curiousity, and to a lesser but still important extent optimism, in the sense that we can accomplish something.)
Some explanation: Recently I watched the beginning of Atlas Shrugged: Part I, and there was this dialog, about 10 minutes from the beginning:
James Taggart: You’ve never had any feelings. I don’t think you’ve ever felt a thing. Dagny Taggart: No, Jim. I guess I’ve never felt anything at all.
I didn’t watch the whole movie yet, and I don’t remember whether this was also in the book. But this is what made me ask. (Also some other things seemed to match this pattern.)
Of course there are other explanations too: Dagny can simply be hostile to James; both implicitly understand the dialog is about a specific subset of feelings; or this is specifically Dagny’s trait, perhaps because she hasn’t experienced anything worth being emotional about, yet.
EDIT: Could you perhaps write an article about the reasonable parts of Objectivism? I think it is worth knowing the history of previous self-described rationality movements, what they got right, what they got wrong, and generally what caused them to not optimize the known universe.
I thought the exchange was supposed to be interpreted sarcastically, but the acting in the movie was so bad it was hard to tell for sure. Having read most of Rand during a misspent youth, I agree with OrphanWilde’s interpretation of Rand’s objectivist superheroes being designed specifically to feel emotions that are “more real” than everyday “human animals.”
For what it’s worth, in my opinion the only reasonable part of Objectivism is contained in The Romantic Manifesto, which deals with all of this “authentic emotions” stuff in detail.
I also read it as Dagny being sarcastic, or at least giving up on trying to convey anything important to James. (I haven’t seen the movie—Dagny was so badly miscast that I didn’t think I could enjoy it.)
I think a thing that’s excellent in Rand not put front and center by much of anyone else is that wanting to do things well is a primary motivation for some people.
I think a thing that’s excellent in Rand not put front and center by much of anyone else is that wanting to do things well is a primary motivation for some people.
Not to be snide, but… Plato? Aristotle? Kant? Nietzsche?
I’d have to buy another copy of the book (I have a tendency to give my copies away—I’ve gone through a few now), so I’m not sure. In the context of the book, this would be referring to a specific subset of feelings (or more particularly, guilt, which Ayn Rand utterly despised, and which James was kind of an anthropomorphism of). Whether that’s an appropriate description in the context of the scene itself, I’m not sure.
(God the movie sucked. About the only thing I liked was that the villains were updated to fit the modern era to be more familiar. They come off as strawmen in the book unless you’re familiar with the people they’re caricatures of.)
I initially thought she was being sarcastic. However on seeing this discussion I find the “specific subset of feelings” theory more plausible. She’s rejecting the “feelings” James has.
I’ve mentioned this here before, but prior to reading Atlas Shrugged, I truly believed in Spock Rationality. I used meditation to eliminate emotions as a teenager because I saw them as irrelevant.
Atlas Shrugged convinced me that emotions were a valuable thing to have. So I don’t really see Spock Rationality in the characters.
The closest any of the characters comes to that is Galt, and it is heavily implied he went through the same kind of utter despair as all the other characters in the book. It’s more or less stated outright that the Hero characters experience greater emotions, in wider variety, than other characters, and particularly the villains; the level emotions of, for example Galt, is not a result of having no emotions, but having experienced such suffering that what he experiences in the course of the book is insignificant by comparison.
(Relentless optimism and curiousity are treated as morally superior attitudes, I grant, but I’d point out that this is a moral standard held to some degree here as well. Imagine the response to somebody who insisted FAI was impossible and we were all doomed to a singularity-induced hell. This community is pretty much defined by curiousity, and to a lesser but still important extent optimism, in the sense that we can accomplish something.)
Some explanation: Recently I watched the beginning of Atlas Shrugged: Part I, and there was this dialog, about 10 minutes from the beginning:
I didn’t watch the whole movie yet, and I don’t remember whether this was also in the book. But this is what made me ask. (Also some other things seemed to match this pattern.)
Of course there are other explanations too: Dagny can simply be hostile to James; both implicitly understand the dialog is about a specific subset of feelings; or this is specifically Dagny’s trait, perhaps because she hasn’t experienced anything worth being emotional about, yet.
EDIT: Could you perhaps write an article about the reasonable parts of Objectivism? I think it is worth knowing the history of previous self-described rationality movements, what they got right, what they got wrong, and generally what caused them to not optimize the known universe.
I thought the exchange was supposed to be interpreted sarcastically, but the acting in the movie was so bad it was hard to tell for sure. Having read most of Rand during a misspent youth, I agree with OrphanWilde’s interpretation of Rand’s objectivist superheroes being designed specifically to feel emotions that are “more real” than everyday “human animals.”
For what it’s worth, in my opinion the only reasonable part of Objectivism is contained in The Romantic Manifesto, which deals with all of this “authentic emotions” stuff in detail.
I also read it as Dagny being sarcastic, or at least giving up on trying to convey anything important to James. (I haven’t seen the movie—Dagny was so badly miscast that I didn’t think I could enjoy it.)
I think a thing that’s excellent in Rand not put front and center by much of anyone else is that wanting to do things well is a primary motivation for some people.
Not to be snide, but… Plato? Aristotle? Kant? Nietzsche?
I’d have to buy another copy of the book (I have a tendency to give my copies away—I’ve gone through a few now), so I’m not sure. In the context of the book, this would be referring to a specific subset of feelings (or more particularly, guilt, which Ayn Rand utterly despised, and which James was kind of an anthropomorphism of). Whether that’s an appropriate description in the context of the scene itself, I’m not sure.
(God the movie sucked. About the only thing I liked was that the villains were updated to fit the modern era to be more familiar. They come off as strawmen in the book unless you’re familiar with the people they’re caricatures of.)
I initially thought she was being sarcastic. However on seeing this discussion I find the “specific subset of feelings” theory more plausible. She’s rejecting the “feelings” James has.