| | Joshua Bradley wrote: "... talk about stealing heavily from the great thinkers of the enlightenment. I can't believe so many of you hold Ayn Rand in such high regard. She did nothing but spin old ideas into ... "
You are not the first person to say that. Back in the 1960s, National Review took Rand to task for this several times. However, being who they were, the attacks were obtuse. More understandable were comments in the mainstream media along the same lines.
* Rand claimed to be an atheist, but validated conservative religion when she claimed that man is defined by the ability to reason and the possession of free will.
* She called Aristotle the greatest of all philosophers despite his faults but had nothing good to say about Kant despite Kant's assertions on individualism and natural rights.
* Starting from "the virtue of selfishness" Rand backed off into a defensible position of "benevolence."
* Claiming individualism, she constructed a utopia where everyone lives together in a valley and they all get along by being nice.
Let me take the last case first. In Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun (and the other "spacer" novels in the "robot" series) we meet the society of Solaris (if I have that right), which is comprised of people thinly spread out on huge estates, served by intelligent machines, who never come in contact with each other, except by hologram. Now that is an individualist utopia.
Discussions here point to scientific reports about the conceptual abilities of animals. Of course, these are limited abilities. Of course we have massive brains. It would be surprising if no other animal could hold even one concept. Rand, however, never dealt with this. She did sneer at attempts to feed planaria nuclei to planaria to see if learning could be ingested. She derided it as savage cannibalism, just as she denigrated Hubert Humphery for "looking like a kewpie doll." In short, Mrs. Logic could be quite illogical.
The problems with all of this fall into two classes: confusing the author with her works; and expecting novelty in the same old places.
1. Whatever Rand's quirks, she was who she was and calls for perfection in her life and writing are just that: the debater's fallacy of calling for perfection.
2. Boy meets girl... boy loses girl... boy finds girl... Greek myths, the Bible... Plato, Aristotle... Pretty much most of what we think about what we think has been said before.
Is light a wave or a particle or both or neither? Democritus and Empedocles wrestled with the same ideas. Actually inventing the light bulb is another trick entirely. So, whether or not man is a rational animal or the only rational animal or whether or not you really can get kinetic energy from static electricity, putting it all into at least two (if not four) major works of literature is something that was not achieved by Mill or Bentham or Russell or whomever. Sartre might have done it, but I just cannot read anything called "Nausea."
Which brings us to SOLO. It is true that Ted Turner, Bill Gates and Donald Trump need explaining. But we are not responsible for them. Certainly, I am not. Personally, for whatever criticisms I have of Introduction to the Objectivist Epistemology, I had to start with IOE to get to that point. As a teacher, I know that my professional life got much easier when I re-read the book from the point of view of a professional with a specific need to understand concepts in order to teach them. So, I am pretty happy being an Objectivist.
I have held many kinds of jobs, done many kinds of work, and sell many kinds of services. In every case, I invest myself totally in what I do. My hobbies include numismatics -- the buying and selling of money for fun. The reason that I can appreciate the artistry in money is that I hold money as a high moral ideal based on rational metaphysics. Ayn Rand wove all of those thread together. No other philosopher did that.
I also fly. Aviation is its own challenge and reward: an unequivocal and complicated task done well. The fiction of Ayn Rand -- made possible for her by her own philosophical framework -- made that real for me.
Much in life is personal. Objectivism might be a formal philosophy for someone else. For me, it is an artistic style.
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