frozenman on 18/8/2009 at 02:30
I always have to resist the urge to giggle when I see people reading Atlas Shrugged on a plane or at all. I enjoyed The Fountainhead and maybe someday I'll try to read it a second time, but there are very few books that make me give up and use their thin pages for a year-long supply of toilet paper.
heywood on 18/8/2009 at 03:58
Quote Posted by driver
While she managed to outline her ideas through her novel quite well, the success of her philosophy seemed to rely on everyone being perfect
That's pretty much true of any idealistic philosophy. Ignoring or dismissing human nature is always easier than understanding it.
What I find funny is that Ayn Rand is really quite similar to Karl Marx. They were both well educated Jews from good families who studied history, were expelled from university because of their counter-culture views (though they both did later graduate). They both came to reject religion. Both of their philosophies are humanistic and anti-authoritarian. And when you think about, they were both just reacting against the injustice & repression of the systems they were raised in, with Marx reacting against the industrial revolution and Rand reacting against communism. I wonder if they had been born in each other's shoes, would they have reached the same conclusions.
Muzman on 18/8/2009 at 04:46
My, admittedly not in-depth, reading of her stuff always led me to think that she was driven not by any sort of imagination but a desire to refute Marxist thought by taking the polar opposite view. It seems so precisely engineered to do that you'd swear she was commissioned by Ford and Rockefeller or something.
Collectivism! - Individualism!
Class war! - Personal responsibility or death!
Historical Materialism! - A = A!
(I think that's how it goes. been a while)
Dogmatic ideology by anyone is never a good thing, it's true. But on the whole Marxist thought has actually provided some interesting ideas and tools that add to the understanding of human relationships. Rand doesn't seem to have that. Any intellectual investigation that didn't fit objectivist precepts would not be morally worthy.
Rug Burn Junky on 18/8/2009 at 04:57
Quote Posted by demagogue
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.
Thing is, with Rand, the comparison to Nietzsche is always only ever going to be superficial. The Nietzschean morality is derived from the idea that the "good" is an end in and of itself, whereas objectivism, no matter what its proponents may tell you, blatantly derives its "good" as whatever communism isn't, as Muz points out.
It's hard to read Atlas Shrugged without getting the feeling that Ayn Rand is just a petulant teenager throwing a temper tantrum at Josef Stalin. Her philosophy is entirely reactive and juvenile.
I've always read her works as being second rate literature combined with second rate philosophy so ham-handedly as to embarrass fans of either aspect.
Aja on 18/8/2009 at 05:07
Second rate literature indeed. My only exposure to Ms Rand is through the Atlas Shrugged website, where I read the following excerpt:
Quote:
Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump, had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camel’s hair coat that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body. The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were unconscious of her own body and that it was a woman’s body.
and it goes on!
Quote:
She sat listening to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
FUCK no wonder this book is fourteen hundred pages.
Rug Burn Junky on 18/8/2009 at 07:57
It looks like a great intro. I rate Genealogy of Morals as the most important of his works to read, and Beyond Good & Evil a close second, and both of them are self contained enough that they work in a vacuum. Birth of Tragedy and Case of Wagner are great to read together, seeing the development of his application of aesthetic philosophy from the very beginning of his career juxtaposed against the end of it.
Zarathustra is his best known work and it is fantastic, but more of an expression of his ideals than an intellectual exploration of them. I'd recommend picking it up once you've worked through that anthology. It is best read once you are familiar with his basic philosophy (especially The Gay Science, which inspired Zarathustra). I'd save Ecce Homo, which is sort of his commentary on his whole career rather than an independent work, until you've read most of the other primary ones.
Oh, and unless you're fluent in German and can read the original text, make sure you read the Kaufman translations (which that anthology contains). They tend to be not only the most accurate, but the most lyrical as well. I've read other translations, and they're always clumsy.
Kolya on 18/8/2009 at 13:58
Quote Posted by Aja
Second rate literature indeed. My only exposure to Ms Rand is through the Atlas Shrugged website, where I read the following excerpt [...]
Ayn Rand sat in a train, happy to have escaped communism and feeling a bit sexy...
demagogue on 18/8/2009 at 14:49
For what it's worth, I think it's good to have a secondary commentary to serve as a guide, so you can put some context with the writings. This one served me well: (
http://www.amazon.com/What-Nietzsche-Really-Said-They/dp/0805241574) What Nietzsche Really Said. I had the author as a professor and he was really beloved ... and the successor to Kaufman as the English-language Nietzsche expert.
Aja on 19/8/2009 at 07:25
Well, I ordered the anthology, should arrive next week. I'll look into the companion depending on how everything goes.
also Kolya :D
