Sulphur on 17/8/2009 at 16:18

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There's this entire bunch of people on the Bioshock subforums who I'm sure can help you out with that.

I've never read her because I was introduced to Neil Peart's Rush lyrics first. Unfortunately. Anyway, you may want to correct the thread title. It's Ayn, not Ann.

henke on 17/8/2009 at 16:22

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I listened to The Fountainhead on audiobook last summer. Usually when I listen to audiobooks I'll listen while I'm out walking but with The Fountainhead I'd go for a walk, come home, sit down in the couch and keep listening for hours afterwards. Captivating as hell. The whole objectivism thing does sounds appealing. I'm sure every artist wants to go Howard Rourke sometimes and tell customers where to stuff their stupid ideas about how a project should be done. But... I'd be out of a job pretty soon that way. :erg:

demagogue on 17/8/2009 at 17:09

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I never studied her stuff in any detail, but I'm always one to at least have read about the big currents of thought out there.

I did think it's interesting to compare her with Nietzsche because both are advocating a form of virtue ethics ... ethics should should be about what you can do, not a list of things you can't -- and things like the emphasis on authenticity and being original, accepting only the best from yourself and not tolerating the compromises of the "lesser minds" of the masses.

And then the part she played in a circle of influential people (like Greenspan) is interesting in its own right as an historical thing in understanding post-War American thinking and culture.

At least two things that struck me as red flags...

- Sort of a techy philosopher's complaint ... I never like it when an issue that's supposed to be generalist is made to heel to ideology, the big one here being epistomology, the theory of knowledge. Objectivists and Marxists both do it in the same annoying way, where they have this strange theory of knowledge, about what humans can know about the world and how they should act in it, that's not at all shared by people actually doing epistomology professionally and that looks like it's completely driven by their respective dogma. What's off-putting is that they never raise questions about, you know, how actual humans actually know things. And if you try to throw how human minds actually work back at them, they get huffy and throw the ideology back at you as if it were an answer in itself, like you're just trying to limit the freedom and ingenity of great humans (or for Marxists, the working class's liberation) with all these so called "facts". To put the point more simply, I don't like the idea of a separate Objectivist epistomology or Marxist epistomology or Post-modern; there's just plain epistomology, plain human brains that can know some thing about the world better than others. No need to throw in all this ideology crap to talk about how brains work; we just look at them, not ask these arbitrary questions about how "great minds" or "blue collar workers" are going to be affected by the answer.

- I always found a sort of contradiction in virtue ethics being tied with capitalism. The thing is a capitalist system, by itself, gives the greatest incentives to works that appeal the biggest markets, i.e., the masses and their herd mentality; it saves its biggests rewards exactly for the preoccupations of small minds. So right at the center of her whole thinking is this paradox, or what looks like a paradox, or at least there's a piece missing there. Sure great minds need freedom from external controls to do great works, but they also need spiritual and material support to actually do them... And capitalism is largely about conservative shareholders that want to do works that give them the biggest dividends (appeal to the greater # of smaller minds) and financially root out the competitors that try to do anything better (appealing to the smaller number of greater minds). Great works get punished under capitalism, even if they are legally free.

The piece missing is a kind of cultural atmosphere where great ideas can get still material support, like an indie niche market, but even there you read articles all the time about the assault on indie markets also having to cater to small-mind preoccupations through the back door. Capitalism of course has the advantage that at least the government doesn't have its hand in there legislating what it thinks is good or not, but it's still not much help, no matter how legally sanctioned, for great minds that still need real material support to make their ideas concrete.

Another thing that needs explaining is how it is that so many of the greatest idea-makers of the last century tended to be communist ... Picasso, Breton, Sartre. Even the "capitalist" ones, like Dali who loved the idea of great art on cheap postcards in American gift-shops (and couldn't bear to be left out of his homeland under Franco), did his best work under Breton and his work started suffering in its "capitalist" phase ... although to be fair none of them could have done what they did in an actual Socialist society, so they benefited from the free hand whether they liked it or not.

the_grip on 17/8/2009 at 18:41

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Interesting you say that b/c the in-book ads for the Ayn Rand "joinusjoinusjoinus... go to [email]joinus@aynrand.com[/email]" etc. highlight a quote about seeking one's own happiness as being the epitome of virtue. Sure, I could make that work, but it does sound quite a bit more like justification than substance.

PeeperStorm on 18/8/2009 at 01:55

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There's a not too serious collective opinion on Ayn Rand (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AynRand) at TVTropes. I've been able to successfully avoid reading her writings directly, although she did manage to indirectly turn me off of the Sword of Truth series after a couple of books.