An unfortunate obstacle to appreciating the work of Ayn Rand (as someone who adores the “sense of life” portrayed in Rand’s fiction, while having a much lower opinion of her philosophy) is that when Rand praises selfishness and condemns altruism, she’s using the words “selfishness” and “altruism” in her own idiosyncratic ideological sense that doesn’t match how most people would use those words.
There’s a deep and important point here that probably deserves it’s own post.
Namely, that regardless of how famous a writer is, one should always be wary of idiosyncratic definitions.
Unless they explicitly claim to adhere to a standardized dictionary definition for words, such as the OED, Merriam-Webster, etc., or explicitly enumerate their definitions ahead of time.
In Rand’s defense, she does define the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
I assume you mean “in her works”, and “ad nauseam”?
If so, I don’t think the rate of readers who comprehend the idiosyncratic definitions are anywhere near 100% of even those who actually finish the first few chapters.
Maybe not even 90% of all readers, though of course this is just a hunch.
Just recognizing there exists some vague difference is not sufficient for comprehension.
The problem is not a purely literary issue but a logistical and logical one too, since altering even just one word is actually quite difficult, without introducing additional logical errors at least, when it’s enmeshed in a work of many hundreds of thousands of words that mostly adhere to the dictionary meaning.
The phenomena can even be seen on some far shorter LW posts of only a few tens of thousands of words.
There’s a deep and important point here that probably deserves it’s own post.
Namely, that regardless of how famous a writer is, one should always be wary of idiosyncratic definitions.
Unless they explicitly claim to adhere to a standardized dictionary definition for words, such as the OED, Merriam-Webster, etc., or explicitly enumerate their definitions ahead of time.
In Rand’s defense, she does define the terms “altruism” and “selfishness” i her works, at length, from every possible angle, at nauseam. Its impossible to read more than one page of her work and still confuse her definitions for standard ones.
The confusion usually comes up through a game of telephone, when people opposed to Objectivism comment on things written by fans of Rand, without ever actually reading the source material.
I assume you mean “in her works”, and “ad nauseam”?
If so, I don’t think the rate of readers who comprehend the idiosyncratic definitions are anywhere near 100% of even those who actually finish the first few chapters.
Maybe not even 90% of all readers, though of course this is just a hunch.
Just recognizing there exists some vague difference is not sufficient for comprehension.
The problem is not a purely literary issue but a logistical and logical one too, since altering even just one word is actually quite difficult, without introducing additional logical errors at least, when it’s enmeshed in a work of many hundreds of thousands of words that mostly adhere to the dictionary meaning.
The phenomena can even be seen on some far shorter LW posts of only a few tens of thousands of words.