Governmentgirl1943lp

Idea Log 13052011

ESTHETICS in OBJECTIVISM:

"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements." The purpose of art is to concretize the artist's fundamental view of existence. Ayn Rand described her own approach to art as "Romantic Realism": "I am a Romantic in the sense that I present men as they out to be. I am Realistic in the sense that I place them here and now and on this earth." The goal of Ayn Rand's novels is not didactic and artistic: the projection of an ideal man: "My purpose, first cause and prime mover is the portrayal of Howard Roark or John Galt or Hank Rearden or Francisco d'Anconia as an end in himself-not as a means to any further end."

Recommended writings of Ayn Rand on ART and Literature:

The Romantic Manifesto (1969): Ayn Rand's philosophy of art, with a new analysis of Romantic school of literature. Essays include: "Philosophy and Sense of Life." "The Psycho-Epistemology of Art," and "What is Romanticism?"

 

For more information on the Ayn Rand Institute please contact:

The Ayn Rand Institute

P.O. Box 51808

Irvine, CA 92619-1808

www.aynrand.org

Idea Log 12052011

"

A farmer will not invest the effort of one summer if he's unable to calculate his chances of harvest. But you expect industrial giants-who plan in terms of decades, invest in terms of generations and undertake ninety-nine-year contracts-to continue to function and produce, not knowing what random caprice in the skull of what random official will descend upon them at what moment to demolish the whole of their effort. Drifters and physical laborers live and plan by the range of a day. The better the mind, the longer the range. A man whose vision extends to a shanty, might continue to build on your quicksands, to grab fast a profit and run. A man who envisions skyscrapers, will not. Nor will he give ten years of unanswering devotion to the task of inventing a new product, when he knows that gangs of entrenched mediocrity are juggling the laws against him, to tie him, restrict him and force him to fail, but should he fight them and struggle and succeed, they will seize his reward and his invention."

- Ayn Rand, (Atlas Shrugged, Pg 974) 

Idea Log 10052011

"If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve a career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbour's child and let your owm die, it is.

If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthlesss stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort, it is only a partial virtue according to this sort of ; if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself- that is the virtue of sacrifice in full."

-Ayn Rand, ( Atlas Shrugged, Pg 941)

Idea Log 09052011

"Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action. He cannot obtain his food without a knowledge of food and of the way to obtain it. He cannot dig a ditch- or build a cyclotron- without a knowledge of his aim and of the means to achieve it. To remain alive, he must think".

- Ayn Rand, (Atlas Shrugged~Pg. 926)

Idea Log 21042011

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters

Francisco de Goya

The faculty of reason, rationality, or the faculty of discursive reason (in opposition to "intuitive reason") is a mental ability found in human beings and normally considered to be a definitive characteristic of human nature. It is closely associated with such human activities as language, science, art, mathematics and philosophy.

Reason, like habit or intuition, is a means by which thinking comes from one idea to a related idea. But more specifically, it is the way rational beings propose and consider explanations concerning cause and effect, true and false, and what is good or bad. In contrast to reason as an abstract noun, a reason is a consideration which explains or justifies some event, phenomenon or behaviour. The ways in which human beings reason through an argument are the subject of inquiries in the field of logic.

Reason is closely identified with the ability to self-consciously change beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and institutions, and therefore with the capacity for freedom and self-determination.

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He who will not reason is a bigot, he who cannot reason is a fool, and he who does not reason is a slave.          

- Henry Louis Vivian Derezio was a 19th century teacher and poet. 

Read more: http://governmentgirl1943lp.typepad.com/blog/2011/04/idea-log-18042011.html#tp

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"I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."  

- Ayn Rand,  Russian-American 20th century novelist and philosopher.

Read more: http://governmentgirl1943lp.typepad.com/blog/2010/09/idea-log-15092010.html

 

 

Idea Log 16042011

"God help us, ma'am! Do you see what we saw? We saw that we'd been given a law to live by, a moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it- for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Your honesty was like a tool left at the mercy of the next man's dishonesty. The honest ones paid, the dishonest won. How long could men stay good under this sort of a law of goodness? We were a pretty decent bunch of fellows when we started. There weren't many chiselers among us. We knew our jobs and we were proud of it and we worked for the best factory in the country, where old man Starnes hired nothing but the pick of the country's labour. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn't an honest man left among us. That was the evil, the sort of hell-horror evil that preachers used to scare you with, but you never thought to see it alive. Not that the plan encouraged a few bastards, but that it turned decent people into bastards, and there was nothing else that it could do- and it was called a moral ideal!

...

"What was it we were supposed to want to work for? For the love of our brothers? What brothers? For the bums, the loafers, the moochers we saw all around us? ... We had no way of knowing their ability, we had no way of controlling their needs- all we knew was that we were beasts of burden struggling blindly in some sort of place that was half-hospital, half-stockyards- a place geared to nothing but disability, disaster, disease- beasts put there for the relief of whatever whoever chose to say was whichever's need.

"Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family, for a paint job on their house- it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.

taken from: <ATLAS SHRUGGED, Pg 611-612> <Part two: EITHER-OR> <ChapterX: The sign of the dollar>

Idea Log 07042011

Rearden smiled contemptuously. "Aren't you one of those damn altruists who spends his time on a non-profit venture and risks his life merely to serve others?"

"No, Mr. Rearden. I am investing my time in my own future. When we are free and have to start rebuilding from out of the ruins, I want to see the world reborn as fast as possible. If there is, then, some working capital in the right hands- in the hands of our best, our most productive men-it will save years for the rest of us and, incidentally, centuries for the history of the country. Did you ask what you meant to me? Everything I admire, everything I want to be on the day when the earth will have a place for such state of being, everything I want to deal with- even if this is the only way I can deal with you and be of use to you at present."

"Why?" whispered Rearden.

"Because my only love, the only value I care to live for, is that which has never been loved by the world, has never won recognition or friends or defenders: human ability."

Taken from the book: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, Pg 535...... finally at pg.560! about 5oo+ to go!

Idea Log 21032011

"Why would you want it, if it's not the truth?" he asked. "What for?"

"Now you see, that's the cruelty of conscentious people. You wouldn't understand it- would you?- if I answered that real devotion consists of being willing to lie, cheat and fake in order to make another person happy- to create for him the reality he wants, if he doesn't like the one that exists."

"No," he said slowly, "I wouldn't understand it."

"It's really very simple. If you tell a beautiful woman that she is beautiful, what have you given her? It's no more than a fact and that has cost you nothing. But if you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty. To love a woman for her virtues is meaningless. She's earned it, it's a payment, not a gift. But to love her for her vices is a real gift, unearned and undeserved. To love her for her vices is to defile all virtue for her sake-and that is a real tribute of love, because you sacrifice you conscience, your reason, your integrity and you invaluable self-esteem.

He looked at her blankly. It sounded like some sort of monstrous corruption that precluded the possibility of wondering whether anyone could mean it; he wondered only what was the point of uttering it.

"What's love, darling, if it's not self-sacrifice?" she went on lightly, in the tone of a drawing-room discussion. "What's self-sacrifice, unless one sacrifices that which is one's most precious and most important? But I don't expect you to understand it.

-Atlas Shrugged (pg.284-285) 

Idea Log 28022011

 

My Copy of 'Atlas Shrugged'! Below taken from Pg. 13

"The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree's presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength.

One night, lightening struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away along ago; there was nothing inside- just a think grey dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it"

...

"... his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal-the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that he had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since"

Idea Log 15092010

READ AYN RAND: World's Biggest Writing

The idea was conceived and "written" by one person, Nick Newcomen, during the spring and summer of 2010. All expenses were paid entirely by him.

The first step involved identifying on a map the route he would need to drive in order to spell out "Read Ayn Rand." Then he drove the route. He used a GPS logger (Qstarz BT-Q1000X) to record his "writing." He turned on the device when he wanted to write and turned off the device between letters. He then input the recorded GPS data into Google Earth resulting in the image you see above.

For documentation, he video recorded himself at dozens of different landmarks along the route.

<The reporting of this incident in the Globe and Mail about two weeks ago was the initial reminder that I wanted to read THE FOUNTAINHEAD but as you know I did watch the movie eventually  and have posted an entry about that. As you can see AYN RAND and her philosophical take on OBJECTIVISM is my latest obsession and I am egoistic enough to claim that it defines my philosophical take on life only now I feel more normal with actual data to support it>

WHO IS AYN RAND?

Ayn Rand was a Russian-American 20th century novelist and philosopher. She is best known for her novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as well as for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.
Objectivism is a philosopy created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982). Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that man has direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception through the process of concept formation and inductive and deductive logic, that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or rational self-interest, that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual rights, embodied in pure laissez faire capitalism, and that the role of art in human life is to transform man's widest metaphysical ideas, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form—a work of art—that he can comprehend and to which he can respond emotionally.

Rand originally expressed her philosophical ideas in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and other works. She further elaborated on them in her magazines The Objectivist Newsletter, The Objectivist, and The Ayn Rand Letter, and in non-fiction books such as Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness.

The name "Objectivism" derives from the principle that human knowledge and values are objective: they are not created by the thoughts one has, but are determined by the nature of reality, to be discovered by man's mind.

Philosophy: Ayn Rand characterized Objectivism as "a philosophy for living on earth", grounded in reality, and aimed at defining man's nature and the nature of the world in which he lives.

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged