| | Phil Coates wrote:
Can anyone who has read the Brandens' two books or other sources say if the issue of ***how she grew mentally and what her working and thinking processes were which helped her*** has been done...without "going off" on the Brandens or on other side issues besides the one I just raised?
I commented:
Sure, Phil. Just read Chris Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: the Russian Radical. You don't have to agree with his perspective, but it makes a helluva lot of sense to me in explaining Rand's particularly effective methodology. He traces it back to her college training, and his followup research articles in JARS show that she was exposed back then to a lot of methodology similar to her own approach.
Phil reacted:
That's it? His whole explanation? Many people had the same college training she did and didn't turn out to be Ayn Rand. Moreover, it would be grossly simplistic (if this is what Chris says or implies) to attribute all of AR's genius to 'dialectic'. To fully explain Ayn Rand's mind requires much, much more than a single event or period like college training.
I didn't realize, Phil, that you were looking for a complete, tied up in ribbons kind of explanation of how Rand got to be such a great thinker. You asked "how she grew mentally" and "what her working and thinking processes were which helped her." That suggests that you would be interested in -- perhaps even appreciative of -- any even partial lead to understanding where Rand "came from." Yet, you instead dismiss what I have offered because it does not "fully explain Ayn Rand's mind" or "all of AR's genius."
Well, for those who are not ready to dismiss my suggestion because it does not offer an omniscient, all-encompassing explanation of Rand's brilliance, here is some more background to what I noted above: in his Russian Radical book, Chris Sciabarra establishes that the opportunity was there, as it is for many college students, for Rand to "grow mentally" a great deal. College is a crucial time of intellectual growth for many people, and Chris's great service was to document the professors she studied under and the courses she took and why these contributed toward her unique perspective on the world and her way of tackling intellectual problems.
As for understanding even part of Rand's methodology and perspective in terms of dialectics, Phil is far from the first skeptical Objectivist on this issue. The best defense of this connection is in Chris's book, so I won't belabor that point here. But I just want to state for the record that the way in which Rand identifies and deals with false alternatives and false dualisms of all kinds, especially the mind-body dichotomy in all of its variants and the false dichotomy of the intrinsic and the subjective, is very dialectical. And by dialectical, I mean in the best sense, the Aristotelian sense (though Chris's modifications and purifications of it seem closer to Rand's approach than even Aristotle's was).
Objectivists who value their independent minds owe it to themselves to read Chris's book, rather than allow the skeptic non-readers and the outright bashers to scare them away from his book. The worst that can happen is that you will spend a few dollars and a few hours in reading about something that you ultimately think is incorrect or misguided. More optimistically, you might just learn something positive that others don't want you to know.
REB
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