| | Add my thanks, also. This was another thoughtful and therefore thought-inducing work. I think that this was one of Ayn Rand's pronouncements that sounded precise, but were only emotional descriptions. The statement is emotionally valid.
Rand described productive work as "the central purpose of a rational man's life, the central value that integrates and determines the hierarchy of all his other values" ...
But, I agree that taking a yoga class or an art studio class, or going to a movie, while it serves no immediately productive purpose, does indeed allow productivity later. It is an investment.
And there, the analogy might be that a theoretical "Objectivist" claim would seem to be that you must always invest all of your unconsumed cash in interest-bearing accounts. That you could hold on to extra cash would be condemned as "unproductive." Yet, you cannot do as much with $10 as with $100 and not as much as with $1000. So, it would be perfectly rational and an objective virtue to hold on to cash until you have a sizable sum to invest in a more productive means. Similarly, it would make sense to spend three hours a week at a social team sport like YMCA basketball so that you are healthy enough to carry out your productive career.
Consider the episode in The Fountainhead where Roark readily agrees to take a vacation on Wynand's yacht. Roark said that he was doing poor work (and with less excuse than most other architects) and needed a break.
Peikoff points out that intellectual pursuits, like knowledge or new skills, are not valuable in and of themselves. They are of value when they are translated into physical action and productive achievement. Knowledge for its own sake is not a noble ideal.
Of value to whom? And for what?
Both von Mises and Rand said that the creative genius is not concerned with production or the production of values for others. By Peikoff's standard, much of Roark's work was unproductive and Peter Keating was the virtuous creator of material values.
The so-called "imaginary" numbers had no reality for hundreds of years until the invention of alternating current electrical power distribution. Speaking of electricity, can you think of anything more basic than Ohm's Law? Yet, it was rejected when proposed. His creative effort was unproductive. ... until it was not...
Right now, I am reading some works of Gottlob Frege. One thing that attracted me as I browsed the stacks at the university library was Frege's graphical presentations of logical statements. I saw that they might (not sure: might) have application to the design now of computer programming. So, again, his "unproductive" pure knowledge may bear fruit.
By the literal claims of Rand and Peikoff, Frege and Euler would have been more "productive" working in factories than as mathematicians.
Here we come to what I think is the real problem with this view of productiveness. There are two ways of viewing the virtue. Either the virtue includes every pursuit of value in your life, no matter how far removed from material wealth or your career, or it only includes a subset.
That said, for the rational person, for the rationally selfish person, a true egoist, then "the virue [of productivity] includes every pursuit of value in your life...." That is what it means to be integrated, to have integrity.
"To highlight this view of productiveness, we can focus on values that are almost never seen as "productive": rest and relaxation. These are often seen as the opposite of productiveness. They are viewed as laziness, or a waste of time. But if you recognize that these are objective values, important to your life, then pursuing these values is productive. Like all values, it can be irrational to pursue them when more important values exist, but sometimes these are the most important values.
...
But the problem is a moral virtue that dismisses legitimate values as "not productive".
As a numismatist, I often cite Ayn Rand's essay for Minkus on stamp collecting, a closely related hobby.
The pleasure lies in a certain special way of using one's mind. Stamp collecting is a hobby for busy, purposeful, ambitious people...because, in pattern, it has the essential elements of a career, but transposed to a clearly delimited, intensely private world.
[. . .]
In the course of a career, every achievement is an end in itself and, simultaneously, a step toward further achievements. In collecting, every new stamp is an event, a pleasure in itself and, simultaneously, a step toward the growth of one's collection. A collector is not a passive spectator, but an active, purposeful agent in a cumulative drive. He cannot stand still: an album page without fresh additions becomes a reproach, an almost irresistible call to embark on a new quest.
http://ellensplace.net/ar_stamp.html
... but it is not marketable production... It could be - collectors do buy and sell for a profit -- but for Ayn Rand it was not.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 7/05, 7:46pm)
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