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Thursday, September 2, 2004 - 12:07pmSanction this postReply
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You have definitely piqued my curiosity. I am ordering this cd. By the way, I love the line about Rand's writings being "subtley self-correcting." It made me think of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and how the contradictions in these documents naturally lead to corrections.

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Thursday, September 2, 2004 - 3:32pmSanction this postReply
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I dislike that line. All it seems to refer to is the fact that Rand usually wrote carefully and used words exactly, not saying any more than she meant (or less). If a reader finds that her writing is “subtly self-correcting,” it means that the reader was not reading carefully the first time.

Another problem with such a statement is that it hands ammunition to those who, à la Daniel Barnes, the Popperian, accuse Ayn Rand of uttering “tautologies” that evade refutation by means of underhanded verbal tricks and question-begging.

For both writers and those who comment on them, the watchword is: “Say just what you mean.”

 


(Edited by Rodney Rawlings on 9/02, 5:12pm)

For the record, Irfan wrote:

“Western man,” wrote Ayn Rand in her 1971 essay “Art and Cognition,” “can understand and enjoy Oriental painting; but Oriental music is unintelligible to him, it evokes nothing, it sounds like noise” (Romantic Manifesto, p. 54). Most of it, she continues a few pages later, induces a “paralyzing, narcotic effect on man’s mind…a trancelike stupor, a loss of context, of volition, of self-awareness…evoking that psycho-epistemological state” which Oriental philosophy regards as “proper and desirable for man” (RM, p. 62).

There’s an unquestionable element of truth in this description: a fair amount of “Oriental music” really does meet this description, and does so precisely for the reason Rand cites.

But the passage also involves a series of overgeneralizations. The first is Rand’s uncritical use of the anti-concept “Oriental,” which subsumes under one concept several cultures and forms of art that bear no essential similarity to one other. Indeed, it’s not even clear what the concept “Oriental” was meant to refer to in the first place. The second is Rand’s obvious unfamiliarity with the genre she is discussing: since she had never traveled to any “Oriental” country, and very little “Oriental” music was available in the U.S. ca. 1971, she couldn’t have had a representative sample from which to generalize; in any case, not speaking any “Oriental” languages, and being unfamiliar with the relevant cultures, she would likely have lacked the cultural basis from which to appreciate anything she had heard.

Having criticized the passage, however, it’s worth noting that (as is so often the case) Rand’s writing turns out to be subtly self-correcting. The very language of the passage prompts the reader to ask whether some “Oriental” music might be more similar to “Oriental” painting than it is to the “Oriental” music that Rand had in mind. If “Western” man can appreciate the one, might it not be possible to “him” to enjoy the other? And if some quirk had made it possible for the “Orient” to produce enjoyable painting, might it not have been possible for it by a similar quirk to have produced enjoyable music?

(Edited by Rodney Rawlings on 10/19, 5:55pm)


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