My own deconversion was prompted by realizing that Rand sucked at psychology. Most of her ideas about how humans should think and behave fail repeatedly and embarrassingly as you try to apply it to your life and the lives of those around you. In this way, the disease gradually cures itself, and you eventually feel like a fool.
It might also help to find a more powerful thing to call yourself, such as Empiricist. Seize onto the impulse that it is not virtuous to adhere to any dogma for its own sake. If part of Objectivism makes sense, and seems to work, great. Otherwise, hold nothing holy.
Michael Huemer explains why he isn’t an Objectivist here and this blog is almost nothing but critiques of Rand’s doctrines. Also, keep in mind that you are essentially asking for help engaging in motivated cognition. I’m not saying you shouldn’t in this case, but don’t forget that is what you are doing.
With that said, I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. The idea that you shouldn’t be ashamed for doing something awesome was (for me, at the time I read it) incredibly refreshing.
“Assume that a stranger shouted at you “Broccoli!” Would you have any idea what he meant? You would not. If instead he shouted “I like broccoli” or “I hate broccoli” you would know immediately what he meant. But the word by itself, unless used as an answer to a question (e.g., “What vegetable would you like?”), conveys no meaning”
I don’t think that’s true? Surely the meaning is an attempt to bring that particular kind of cabbage to my attention, for as yet unexplained reasons.
I don’t think that’s true? Surely the meaning is an attempt to bring that particular kind of cabbage to my attention, for as yet unexplained reasons.
That’s a possible interpretation, but I wouldn’t say “surely.”
Some other possibilities.
The person picked the word apropos of nothing because they think it would be funny to mess with a stranger’s head.
It’s some kind of in-joke or code word, and they’re doing it for the amusement of someone else who’s present (or just themselves if they’re the sort of person who makes jokes nobody else in the room is going to get.)
If I heard someone shout “Broccoli” at me without context, my first assumption would be that they’d actually said something else and I’d misunderstood.
But this doesn’t seem particularly different from the ambiguity in all language. The linked site seems to suggest there’s some particular lack of meaning in isolated words.
My reaction to Rand is pretty emotional, rather than “I see why her logic is correct!”, which I think justifies the motivated cognition aspect a little bit.
Some of Huemer’s arguments against Objectivism are good (particularly the ones about the a priori natures of logic and mathematics), but his arguments against the core of Objectivism (virtue ethical egoism) fall short, or at best demonstrate why Objectivism is incomplete rather than wrong.
His arguments against her ethical system seem… confused.
She pretty much acknowledged that life as a good thing is taken as a first principle, what he calls a suppressed premise—she was quite open about it, in fact, as a large part of her ethical arguments were about ethical systems which -didn’t- take life as a good thing as a first principle.
His arguments about a priori knowledge, however, are fatally flawed. What he calls a priori knowledge only seems intuitive once you’ve understood it. Try teaching addition to somebody sometime. Regardless of whether a priori truths exist, we only recognize their truth by reference to experience. Imagine you live someplace where addition and subtraction never work—addition wouldn’t be intuitively true; it would be nonsense. Do you think you could get a child to grasp addition while you perform sleight of hand and change the number of apples or whatnot as you demonstrate the concepts? He’s regarding knowledge from the perspective of somebody who has already internalized it.
You have to have a strong grasp of abstract concepts before you can start building the kind of stuff he insists is a priori, concepts which are built up through experience with things like language. Mathematics wasn’t discovered, it was invented, just as much as an electric motor was invented. (You can suppose that mathematics exists in an infinite plane of possible abstractions, but the same is true of the electric motor.) That we chose the particular mathematics we did is a result of the experiences we as a species have had over the past few dozen thousand years.
(Or, to take a page out of Descartes—what would his a priori knowledge look like if a devil were constantly changing the details of the world he lived in? Playing sleight of hand with the apples, as it were?)
The idea of a priori knowledge is not that it’s intuitive, but that it is not dependent on experience for it to be conceivable. Though addition may be hard to teach without examples, it abstractly makes sense without reference to anything in the physical world. Similarly, the truth of the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man” does not require any experience to know—its truth comes from the definition of the word “bachelor”.
The idea of a priori knowledge is not that it’s intuitive, but that it is not dependent on experience for it to be conceivable.
If I am understanding your statement here correctly, you are saying that a priori knowledge hinges on the idea that concepts can be acquired independently of experience. If that is what you are saying, then you would be incorrect. Very few philosophers who accept the idea of a priori knowledge—or more appropriately: a priori justification—think that human-beings ever acquire concepts innately or that they can otherwise conceive of them independently of experience. A proposition is knowable a priori if it is justifiable by appeal to pure reason or thought alone. Conversely, a proposition is knowable a posteriori if it is justifiable in virtue of experience; where any relevant, constitutive notion of experience would have as its meaning (a) some causally conditioned response to particular, contingent features of the world, and (b) doxastic states that have as their content information concerning such contingent features of the actual world as contrasted with other possible worlds.
Somebody defined the operation of addition—it did not arise out of pure thought alone, as is evidenced by the fact that nobody bothered to define some other operation by which two compounds could be combined to produce a lesser quantity of some other compound (at least until people began formalizing chemistry). There are an infinite number of possible operations, most of which are completely meaningless for any purpose we would put them to. Knowledge of addition isn’t knowledge at all until you have something to add.
“Qwerms are infantile eloppets.” Is this a true statement or not? I could -define- a qwerm to be an infantile eloppet, but that doesn’t represent any knowledge; in the pure abstract, it is an empty referential, devoid of meaning. Everything in the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is tied to real-world things, whatever knowledge is contains there is experience driven; if the words mean something else—and those words are given meaning by our experiences—the statement could be true or false.
Kant, incidentally, did not define a priori knowledge to be that which is knowable without experience (the mutation of the original term which Ayn Rand harshly criticized), but rather that which is knowable without reference to -specific- experience, hence his use of the word “transcendent”. If putting one rock and another together results in three rocks, our concept of mathematics would be radically different, and addition would not merely fail to reflect reality, it would not for any meaningful purpose exist. Transcendent truths are arrived at through experience, they simply don’t require any -particular- experience to be had in order to be true.
In Kantian terms, a priori, I know if I throw a rock in the air it will fall. My posterior knowledge will be that the rock did in fact fall. There are other transcendental things, but transcendental knowledge is generally limited to those things which can be verified by experience (he argued that transcendental knowledge could not extend beyond those experiences we can anticipate). Without going into his Critique of Pure Reason, which argues for some specific exceptions (causality and time, for example) as bootstraps to get the whole mess moving, future philosophers by and large completely ignored what he had written about transcendental knowledge in general, and lifted it out of the realm of experience entirely. (With some ugly results, as you’re left with nothing but tautologies.)
Somebody defined the operation of addition—it did not arise out of pure thought alone, as is evidenced by the fact that nobody bothered to define some other operation by which two compounds could be combined to produce a lesser quantity of some other compound (at least until people began formalizing chemistry). There are an infinite number of possible operations, most of which are completely meaningless for any purpose we would put them to. Knowledge of addition isn’t knowledge at all until you have something to add.
The problem here is that you seem to be presupposing the odd idea that, in order for any proposition to be knowable a priori, its content must also have been conceived a priori. (At least for the non-Kantian conceptions of the a priori). It would be rare to find a person who held the idea that a concept be acquired without having any experience related to it. Indeed, such an idea seems entirely incapable of being vindicated. If I expressed a proposition such as “nothing can be both red and green all over at the same time” to a person who had no relevant perceptual experience with the colors I am referring to and who had failed to acquire the relevant definitions of the color concepts I am using, then that proposition would be completely nonsensical and unanalyzable for such a person. However, this has no bearing on the concept of a priori knowledge whatsoever. The only condition for a priori knowledge is for the expressed proposition be justifiable by appeal to pure reason.
Laughs I’m an Objectivist by my own accord, but I may be able to help if you find this undesirable.
The shortest—her derivations from her axioms have a lot of implicit and unmentioned axioms thrown in ad-hoc. One problematic case is her defense of property—she implicitly assumes no other mechanism of proper existence for humans is possible. (And her “proper existence” is really slippery.)
This isn’t necessarily a rejection—as mentioned, I am an Objectivist—but it is something you need to be aware of and watch out for in her writings. If a conclusion doesn’t seem to be quite right or doesn’t square with your own conception of ethics, try to figure out what implicit axioms are being slipped in.
Reading Ayn Rand may be the best cure for Randianism, if Objectivism isn’t a natural philosophy for you, which by your apparent distress it isn’t. (Honestly, though, I’d stay the hell away from most of the critics, who do an absolutely horrible job of attacking the philosophy. They might be able to cure you of Randianism, but largely through misinformation and unsupported emotional appeals, which may just result in an even worse recurrence later.)
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that she also did some variant of “Spock Rationality”. More precisely, it seems to me as if her heroes have one fixed emotion (mild curious optimism?) all the time; and if someone doesn’t, that is only to show that Hero1 is not as perfect as Hero2 whose emotional state is more constant.
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.
Both feature characters with super-human focus / capability (Rearden and Valentine Micheal Smith). And they have totally different effects on societies superficially similar to each other (and to our own).
There’s more to say about Rand in particular, but we should probably move to the media thread for that specifically (Or decline to discuss for Politics is the Mindkiller reasons). Suffice it to say that uncertainty about how to treat the elite productive elements in society predates the 1950s and 1960s.
The (libertarian, but not Randian) philosopher Michael Huemer has an essay entitled “Why I’m not an objectivist.” It’s not perfect, but at least the discussion of Rand’s claim that respect for the libertarian rights of others follows from total egoism is good.
The writing, I agree, is pretty bad, and she has an odd obsession with trains and motors. I can just about understand the “motor” part because it allows some not very good “motor of the world” metaphors.
The appealing part is the depiction of the evil characters as endlessly dependant on the hero characters, and their view of them as an inexhaustible source of resources for whatever they want, and the rejection of this.
The obsession with trains is probably because in era when Ayn Rand lived, people working with trains were an intellectual elite. They (1) worked with technology, and often (2) travelled across the world and shared ideas with similar people. If you worked at a railroad, sometimes you got free rides anywhere as an employment benefit. It was an era before internet, where the best way to share ideas with bright people was to meet them personally.
In other words, if she lived today, she would probably write about hackers, or technological entrepreneurs. John Galt would be the inventor of internet, or nanotechnology, or artificial intelligence. (And he would use modafinil instead of nicotine.)
Can you explain what you mean by this? I ask because I don’t know what this means and would like to. Others here clearly seem to get what you’re getting at. Some Google searching was mostly fruitless and since we’re here in this direct communication forum I’d be interested in hearing it directly.
I read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where she sets out her philosophical views.
I found them worryingly convincing. Since they’re also unpleasant and widely rejected, I semi-jokingly semi-seriously want people to talk me out of them.
I don’t have a link, but I remember reading somewhere that originally the altruism was defined as a self-destructive behavior—ignoring one’s own utility function and only working for the others—and only later it was modified to mean… non-psychopatology.
In other words, it was the “egoism” which became a strawman by not being allowed to become more reasonable, while its opposite the “altruism” was allowed to become more sane than originally defined.
In a typical discussion, the hypothetical “altruist” is allowed to reflect on their actions, and try to preserve themself (even if only to be able to help more people in the future), while the hypothetical “egoist” is supposed to be completely greedy and short-sighted.
Auguste Comte coined the term “altruist”, and it’s been toned down considerably from his original version of it, which held, in James Feiser’s terms, that “An action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone except the agent”
It’s a pretty horrific doctrine, and the word has been considerably watered down since Comte originally coined it. That’s pretty much the definition that Ayn Rand assaulted.
In other words, it was the “egoism” which became a strawman by not being allowed to become more reasonable, while its opposite the “altruism” was allowed to become more sane than originally defined.
In a typical discussion, the hypothetical “altruist” is allowed to reflect on their actions, and try to preserve themself (even if only to be able to help more people in the future), while the hypothetical “egoist” is supposed to be completely greedy and short-sighted.
Yeah, that’s the point. To get the answer “egoism”, one defines egoism as enlightened self-interest, and altruism as self-destructive behavior. To get the answer “altruism”, one defines altruism as enlightened pro-social behavior, and egoism as short-sighted greed. Perhaps less extremely than this, but usually from the way these words are defined you understand which one of them is the applause light for the person asking the question.
(I typically meet people for whom “altruism” is the preferred applause light, but of course there are groups which prefer “egoism”.)
I’ve been reading Atlas Shrugged and seem to have caught a case of Randianism. Can anyone recommend treatment?
My own deconversion was prompted by realizing that Rand sucked at psychology. Most of her ideas about how humans should think and behave fail repeatedly and embarrassingly as you try to apply it to your life and the lives of those around you. In this way, the disease gradually cures itself, and you eventually feel like a fool.
It might also help to find a more powerful thing to call yourself, such as Empiricist. Seize onto the impulse that it is not virtuous to adhere to any dogma for its own sake. If part of Objectivism makes sense, and seems to work, great. Otherwise, hold nothing holy.
Michael Huemer explains why he isn’t an Objectivist here and this blog is almost nothing but critiques of Rand’s doctrines. Also, keep in mind that you are essentially asking for help engaging in motivated cognition. I’m not saying you shouldn’t in this case, but don’t forget that is what you are doing.
With that said, I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. The idea that you shouldn’t be ashamed for doing something awesome was (for me, at the time I read it) incredibly refreshing.
Quoting from the linked blog:
“Assume that a stranger shouted at you “Broccoli!” Would you have any idea what he meant? You would not. If instead he shouted “I like broccoli” or “I hate broccoli” you would know immediately what he meant. But the word by itself, unless used as an answer to a question (e.g., “What vegetable would you like?”), conveys no meaning”
I don’t think that’s true? Surely the meaning is an attempt to bring that particular kind of cabbage to my attention, for as yet unexplained reasons.
That’s a possible interpretation, but I wouldn’t say “surely.”
Some other possibilities.
The person picked the word apropos of nothing because they think it would be funny to mess with a stranger’s head.
It’s some kind of in-joke or code word, and they’re doing it for the amusement of someone else who’s present (or just themselves if they’re the sort of person who makes jokes nobody else in the room is going to get.)
The person is confused or deranged.
If I heard someone shout “Broccoli” at me without context, my first assumption would be that they’d actually said something else and I’d misunderstood.
But this doesn’t seem particularly different from the ambiguity in all language. The linked site seems to suggest there’s some particular lack of meaning in isolated words.
My reaction to Rand is pretty emotional, rather than “I see why her logic is correct!”, which I think justifies the motivated cognition aspect a little bit.
Some of Huemer’s arguments against Objectivism are good (particularly the ones about the a priori natures of logic and mathematics), but his arguments against the core of Objectivism (virtue ethical egoism) fall short, or at best demonstrate why Objectivism is incomplete rather than wrong.
His arguments against her ethical system seem… confused.
She pretty much acknowledged that life as a good thing is taken as a first principle, what he calls a suppressed premise—she was quite open about it, in fact, as a large part of her ethical arguments were about ethical systems which -didn’t- take life as a good thing as a first principle.
His arguments about a priori knowledge, however, are fatally flawed. What he calls a priori knowledge only seems intuitive once you’ve understood it. Try teaching addition to somebody sometime. Regardless of whether a priori truths exist, we only recognize their truth by reference to experience. Imagine you live someplace where addition and subtraction never work—addition wouldn’t be intuitively true; it would be nonsense. Do you think you could get a child to grasp addition while you perform sleight of hand and change the number of apples or whatnot as you demonstrate the concepts? He’s regarding knowledge from the perspective of somebody who has already internalized it.
You have to have a strong grasp of abstract concepts before you can start building the kind of stuff he insists is a priori, concepts which are built up through experience with things like language. Mathematics wasn’t discovered, it was invented, just as much as an electric motor was invented. (You can suppose that mathematics exists in an infinite plane of possible abstractions, but the same is true of the electric motor.) That we chose the particular mathematics we did is a result of the experiences we as a species have had over the past few dozen thousand years.
(Or, to take a page out of Descartes—what would his a priori knowledge look like if a devil were constantly changing the details of the world he lived in? Playing sleight of hand with the apples, as it were?)
The idea of a priori knowledge is not that it’s intuitive, but that it is not dependent on experience for it to be conceivable. Though addition may be hard to teach without examples, it abstractly makes sense without reference to anything in the physical world. Similarly, the truth of the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man” does not require any experience to know—its truth comes from the definition of the word “bachelor”.
If I am understanding your statement here correctly, you are saying that a priori knowledge hinges on the idea that concepts can be acquired independently of experience. If that is what you are saying, then you would be incorrect. Very few philosophers who accept the idea of a priori knowledge—or more appropriately: a priori justification—think that human-beings ever acquire concepts innately or that they can otherwise conceive of them independently of experience. A proposition is knowable a priori if it is justifiable by appeal to pure reason or thought alone. Conversely, a proposition is knowable a posteriori if it is justifiable in virtue of experience; where any relevant, constitutive notion of experience would have as its meaning (a) some causally conditioned response to particular, contingent features of the world, and (b) doxastic states that have as their content information concerning such contingent features of the actual world as contrasted with other possible worlds.
Somebody defined the operation of addition—it did not arise out of pure thought alone, as is evidenced by the fact that nobody bothered to define some other operation by which two compounds could be combined to produce a lesser quantity of some other compound (at least until people began formalizing chemistry). There are an infinite number of possible operations, most of which are completely meaningless for any purpose we would put them to. Knowledge of addition isn’t knowledge at all until you have something to add.
“Qwerms are infantile eloppets.” Is this a true statement or not? I could -define- a qwerm to be an infantile eloppet, but that doesn’t represent any knowledge; in the pure abstract, it is an empty referential, devoid of meaning. Everything in the statement “a bachelor is an unmarried man” is tied to real-world things, whatever knowledge is contains there is experience driven; if the words mean something else—and those words are given meaning by our experiences—the statement could be true or false.
Kant, incidentally, did not define a priori knowledge to be that which is knowable without experience (the mutation of the original term which Ayn Rand harshly criticized), but rather that which is knowable without reference to -specific- experience, hence his use of the word “transcendent”. If putting one rock and another together results in three rocks, our concept of mathematics would be radically different, and addition would not merely fail to reflect reality, it would not for any meaningful purpose exist. Transcendent truths are arrived at through experience, they simply don’t require any -particular- experience to be had in order to be true.
In Kantian terms, a priori, I know if I throw a rock in the air it will fall. My posterior knowledge will be that the rock did in fact fall. There are other transcendental things, but transcendental knowledge is generally limited to those things which can be verified by experience (he argued that transcendental knowledge could not extend beyond those experiences we can anticipate). Without going into his Critique of Pure Reason, which argues for some specific exceptions (causality and time, for example) as bootstraps to get the whole mess moving, future philosophers by and large completely ignored what he had written about transcendental knowledge in general, and lifted it out of the realm of experience entirely. (With some ugly results, as you’re left with nothing but tautologies.)
The problem here is that you seem to be presupposing the odd idea that, in order for any proposition to be knowable a priori, its content must also have been conceived a priori. (At least for the non-Kantian conceptions of the a priori). It would be rare to find a person who held the idea that a concept be acquired without having any experience related to it. Indeed, such an idea seems entirely incapable of being vindicated. If I expressed a proposition such as “nothing can be both red and green all over at the same time” to a person who had no relevant perceptual experience with the colors I am referring to and who had failed to acquire the relevant definitions of the color concepts I am using, then that proposition would be completely nonsensical and unanalyzable for such a person. However, this has no bearing on the concept of a priori knowledge whatsoever. The only condition for a priori knowledge is for the expressed proposition be justifiable by appeal to pure reason.
Are you looking to treat symptoms? If so, which ones?
Laughs I’m an Objectivist by my own accord, but I may be able to help if you find this undesirable.
The shortest—her derivations from her axioms have a lot of implicit and unmentioned axioms thrown in ad-hoc. One problematic case is her defense of property—she implicitly assumes no other mechanism of proper existence for humans is possible. (And her “proper existence” is really slippery.)
This isn’t necessarily a rejection—as mentioned, I am an Objectivist—but it is something you need to be aware of and watch out for in her writings. If a conclusion doesn’t seem to be quite right or doesn’t square with your own conception of ethics, try to figure out what implicit axioms are being slipped in.
Reading Ayn Rand may be the best cure for Randianism, if Objectivism isn’t a natural philosophy for you, which by your apparent distress it isn’t. (Honestly, though, I’d stay the hell away from most of the critics, who do an absolutely horrible job of attacking the philosophy. They might be able to cure you of Randianism, but largely through misinformation and unsupported emotional appeals, which may just result in an even worse recurrence later.)
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that she also did some variant of “Spock Rationality”. More precisely, it seems to me as if her heroes have one fixed emotion (mild curious optimism?) all the time; and if someone doesn’t, that is only to show that Hero1 is not as perfect as Hero2 whose emotional state is more constant.
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.
Heinlein? I found Stranger in a Strange Land to be an interesting counterpoint to Atlas Shrugged.
Both feature characters with super-human focus / capability (Rearden and Valentine Micheal Smith). And they have totally different effects on societies superficially similar to each other (and to our own).
There’s more to say about Rand in particular, but we should probably move to the media thread for that specifically (Or decline to discuss for Politics is the Mindkiller reasons). Suffice it to say that uncertainty about how to treat the elite productive elements in society predates the 1950s and 1960s.
Time Enough for Love is an even better anti-Atlas Shrugged.
Why?
I like my Heinlein, but I don’t see the connection.
The (libertarian, but not Randian) philosopher Michael Huemer has an essay entitled “Why I’m not an objectivist.” It’s not perfect, but at least the discussion of Rand’s claim that respect for the libertarian rights of others follows from total egoism is good.
Genuine question: What do you find appealing about it? I’ve always found the writing impenetrable and the philosophy unappealing.
The writing, I agree, is pretty bad, and she has an odd obsession with trains and motors. I can just about understand the “motor” part because it allows some not very good “motor of the world” metaphors.
The appealing part is the depiction of the evil characters as endlessly dependant on the hero characters, and their view of them as an inexhaustible source of resources for whatever they want, and the rejection of this.
The obsession with trains is probably because in era when Ayn Rand lived, people working with trains were an intellectual elite. They (1) worked with technology, and often (2) travelled across the world and shared ideas with similar people. If you worked at a railroad, sometimes you got free rides anywhere as an employment benefit. It was an era before internet, where the best way to share ideas with bright people was to meet them personally.
In other words, if she lived today, she would probably write about hackers, or technological entrepreneurs. John Galt would be the inventor of internet, or nanotechnology, or artificial intelligence. (And he would use modafinil instead of nicotine.)
Can you explain what you mean by this? I ask because I don’t know what this means and would like to. Others here clearly seem to get what you’re getting at. Some Google searching was mostly fruitless and since we’re here in this direct communication forum I’d be interested in hearing it directly.
Thanks!
I read the book Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where she sets out her philosophical views.
I found them worryingly convincing. Since they’re also unpleasant and widely rejected, I semi-jokingly semi-seriously want people to talk me out of them.
Think carefully through egoism.
hint: Vs rtbvfg tbnyf naq orunivbef qba’g ybbx snveyl vaqvfgvathvfunoyr sebz gur tbnyf naq orunivbef bs nygehvfgf lbh’ir cebonoyl sbetbggra n grez fbzrjurer va lbhe hgvyvgl shapgvba.
Ubjrire, gur tbnyf bs rtbvfgf qb ybbx qvssrerag sebz gur tbnyf bs nygehvfgf, ng yrnfg nygehvfgf nf Enaq qrsvarq gurz.
Fur svtugf fgenj nygehvfgf jvgu n fgenj rtbvfg ervasbeprq jvgu n pbng unatre be gjb.
I don’t have a link, but I remember reading somewhere that originally the altruism was defined as a self-destructive behavior—ignoring one’s own utility function and only working for the others—and only later it was modified to mean… non-psychopatology.
In other words, it was the “egoism” which became a strawman by not being allowed to become more reasonable, while its opposite the “altruism” was allowed to become more sane than originally defined.
In a typical discussion, the hypothetical “altruist” is allowed to reflect on their actions, and try to preserve themself (even if only to be able to help more people in the future), while the hypothetical “egoist” is supposed to be completely greedy and short-sighted.
http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/altruismrandcomte.pdf
Page 363 or so.
Auguste Comte coined the term “altruist”, and it’s been toned down considerably from his original version of it, which held, in James Feiser’s terms, that “An action is morally right if the consequences of that action are more favorable than unfavorable to everyone except the agent”
It’s a pretty horrific doctrine, and the word has been considerably watered down since Comte originally coined it. That’s pretty much the definition that Ayn Rand assaulted.
Depends on the discussion. Reasonable egoism is practically the definition of “enlightened self-interest”.
Yeah, that’s the point. To get the answer “egoism”, one defines egoism as enlightened self-interest, and altruism as self-destructive behavior. To get the answer “altruism”, one defines altruism as enlightened pro-social behavior, and egoism as short-sighted greed. Perhaps less extremely than this, but usually from the way these words are defined you understand which one of them is the applause light for the person asking the question.
(I typically meet people for whom “altruism” is the preferred applause light, but of course there are groups which prefer “egoism”.)
Juvyr ure ivyynvaf ner fbzrjung rknttrengrq va gur frafr gung crbcyr va cbjre hfhnyyl qba’g guvax va gubfr grezf (gubhtu gurve eurgbevp qbrf fbzrgvzrf fbhaq fvzvyne), va zl rkcrevrapr gurer vf n tbbq ahzore bs beqvanel crbcyr jub guvax dhvgr fvzvyneyl gb ure ivyynvaf. Enaq’f rknttrengvba vf cevznevyl gung vg vf ener gb svaq nyy bs gur artngvir genvgf bs ure ivyynvaf va crbcyr jub qb zbenyyl bowrpgvbanoyr guvatf, ohg ng yrnfg n srj bs gubfr genvgf ner gurer.
Gung’f fbzrjung orfvqrf gur cbvag, gubhtu. Znal crbcyr jubz Enaq jbhyq qrfpevor nf nygehvfgf ner abg yvxr gur ivyynvaf bs ure obbxf va gung gurl trarenyyl qba’g jnag gb sbepr bguref gb borl gurve jvyy (ng yrnfg abg rkcyvpvgyl). Vafgrnq, gurve crefbany orunivbe vf frys-unezvat (vanccebcevngr srryvatf bs thvyg, ynpx bs nffregvirarff, oryvrs gung gur qrfverf bs bguref ner zber vzcbegnag guna gurve bja, qrfver gb cyrnfr bguref gb gur cbvag gung gur ntrag vf haunccl, npgvat bhg bs qhgl va gur qrbagbybtvpny frafr, trahvar oryvrs va Qvivar Pbzznaq, rgp). Nygehvfz vf arprffnevyl onq, ohg nygehvfgf ner abg arprffnevyl crbcyr jub unez bguref—vg vf cbffvoyr naq pbzzba sbe gurve orunivbef/oryvrsf gb znvayl unez gurzfryirf.
Enaq’f ivyynvaf ner nygehvfgf, ohg abg nyy Enaqvna nygehvfgf ner ivyynvaf—znal ner ivpgvzf bs artngvir fbpvrgny abezf, pbtavgvir qvfgbegvbaf, onq cneragvat, rgp.
I think that most people find that it wears off after a couple of months.
What do you believe, and why do you believe it?
Alternatively: What do you value, and why do you value it?
We find that death grants a great deal of perspective!
Sadly no-one has reported back.