| | Rand, in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, regarding a misleading sentence:
"The possibly misleading sentence is in Roark's speech: 'From this simplest necessity to the highest religious abstraction, from the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man-the function of his reasoning mind.'
"This could be misinterpreted to mean an endorsement of religion or religious ideas. I remember hesitating over that sentence, when I wrote it, and deciding that Roark's and my atheism, as well as the overall spirit of the book, were so clearly established that no one would misunderstand it, particularly since I said that religious abstractions are the product of man's mind, not of supernatural revelation.
"But an issue of this sort should not be left to implications. When I was referring to was not religion as such, but a special category of abstractions, the most exalted one, which, for centuries, has been the near-monopoly of religion: ethics-not the particular content of religious ethics, but the abstraction 'ethics,' the realm of values, man's code of ethics, man's code of good and evil, with the emotional connotations of height, uplift, nobility, reverence, grandeur, which pertain to the realm of man's values, but which religion has arrogated to itself."
...
"Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing the outside this earth and beyond man's reach. 'Exaltation' is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. 'Worship' means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. 'Reverence' means the emotion of a scared respect, to be experienced on one's knees. 'Sacred' means superior to an not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
"But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral idea...
"It is this highest level of man's emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
"It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship."
"Just as religion has preempted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing the outside this earth and beyond man's reach. 'Exaltation' is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. 'Worship' means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. 'Reverence' means the emotion of a scared respect, to be experienced on one's knees. 'Sacred' means superior to an not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
"But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man's dedication to a moral idea...
"It is this highest level of man's emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
"It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man-worship." (Edited by Joe Maurone on 7/06, 7:25am)
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