« Posts tagged ayn rand

The Romantic Manifesto

August 21, 2015 / posted in Business, dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Romantic ManifestoThe Romantic Manifesto by Ayn Rand
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book more clearly explains Ayn Rand’s position than any other book of hers I’ve read in the past.

Rand is often hotly contested; but it’s not enough to say that something nonsensical or stupid because to truly understand something we should be able to explain what it is or why something is dismissed. Not only that but we should also be able to explain how a view is (in)valid. In a sense, Rand often fails to explain what is detestable in others, resorting to words like “evil” or “irrational” to carry an emotional weight in her argument.

(Un)surprisingly though, there is much in here that is admirable. After all, anyone who can inspire and move people like she does must say something somewhere that is correct.

What is interesting is that there is much basis for similarity between herself and other thinker’s conclusions she would dismiss as they argue from a very similar basis. As hinted before, I do believe that she is a bad reader of Kant, for example.

She is correct, that Kant is the root of what she detests in modernism, but Kant’s concept of will, reason and pragmatics leads him to very nearly the same structure that Rand poses. Kant sees reason as being a tool for will finally, because Kant dismisses “pure reason” as being inherently undecidable. Rand doesn’t see things this way. She believes will is a tool for pure reason because “a=a”; that functionality is purpose therefore a consistency in reason will work itself out if we have the will to do so. This last point of reason and will being only positive is perhaps the biggest flaw for her philosophy.

In this way Rand is actually alot like Heidigger. Both Heidigger and Rand believe that language is reasonable, and non-contradictory in-itself. Both believe that ironing out consistency in languaged reason will result in successful and fulfilling lives.

This makes them both throwbacks to early modernism, towards a kind of Cartesian truth-value. This signifies a break because it is Kant who provides the initial break in his critique of pure reason that demonstrated a gap inherent within things-in-themselves and a gap within our relationship with those things. The gap with our relationship with those things formulates a basis for science and for existentialism. Unfortunately not many understand that the split also echos within reason itself, so that reasoning through sheer consistency will undeniably lead to contradiction.

Given a post-Kantian view, of which society has progressed towards, there can be no point of view from which the world will be stable, without consistency, because the world is not consistent in a human fashion. It is this last point which Rand seems unwilling to grasp resorting instead to calling all that is thought to be rational (including Classism) as subjective and arbitrary. She is correct. All views are inherently subjective and arbitrary, including her own. What makes Kant non-arbitrary though, is that he grounds human behavior and a will to maxims in his critique of practical reason that is in the supersensible. This gives up reasoning in this world as a coherency in favor of a faith, which is what makes Kant still a christian philosopher.

Rand of course, cannot stand this. From her assumption that functionality in the world is purpose, and that making one into a functional person will result in purpose she proves remarkably consistent in her assessment of the arts throughout this small book. What makes her irritating to read however, is that she is unable to express herself beyond calling positions she dislikes evil or irrational. It is in her style to insist on a singular view that is ultimately arbitrary… without providing a neutral grounds to assess what is meaningful we cannot help but judge everything else as being arbitrary to something else. Rand does seem unable to explain herself philosophically — hence she does so artistically to give us feelings of purposefulness.

Unfortunately for her, if the adherence to will as a resolution of being in existentialism is irrational then her art/philosophy in which characters will themselves to a resolution of function and purpose must also be equally irrational.

Calling something philosophy or rational doesn’t make it rational if you cannot provide a cogent basis from which to assess everything else including your own work. After all, if continual self insistence is adequate than it should be equally adequate for anything and everything else as well…and given a modernist aesthetic in which there can only be one truth and language can only mean one thing this last “equally adequation” would be inherently unacceptable!

But I doubt that Rand has the ability to express why language should be a seamless and complete consistency (a=a) with reality other than “it is”

Still, despite my disagreement and all the holes I’ve just poked at her work, I do admire the clarity with which this book is written. After all, without this clarity I would have had a harder time finding the conflicts inherent in her own writing.

View all my reviews

The Fountainhead

May 10, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The FountainheadThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to Ayn Rand about ten years ago. I found her works distasteful and naive… but I was largely also responding to what many of her fans were saying about her works, to support capitalism and conservativism. So imagine my surprise when I read this book, and found out that it was amazing.

Like Rand’s aesthetic, this book follows one over arching arc to explore as many facets of her philosophy as possible. To this end, her narrative is thick in order to create a world… though it is presented as a tour de force, an unstoppable motion.

The basic idea is that most people only acquire a sense of self through the creation of an ego, which is really the image that one maintains in order to position oneself among others. For Rand, this ego in most people, only exists through the validation of others. That is, most people are selfless in the sense that they can only find values mirroring and parroting one another. This externally based validation of the ego is similar to a cognitive psychology theory about the development of the ego. This theory is called spiral dynamics.

Rand’s exposition of ego and spiral dynamics share many things in common, although they aren’t the same. For example, Rand doesn’t explain how ego develops, or how it grows from nothing since infancy. (Spiral dynamics splits into two sets of stages, conventional and post-conventional.) While Rand does cover both sets of stages, this book feels stunted philosophically, in not covering how the ego develops. Still, Rand’s purpose is more illustrative and this book is great at exploring how people of different stages interact. Although Rand takes this idea literally, that some people are nothing more than their open attempt to pull validation from people by appeasing people, this book is still nonetheless interesting.

Validation from others comes from fitting in an image, being admired, being kind, being pleasant, being the complete image of status, success and sophistication. Often in real life, you do find people who lack some sense of self, and thus need to prove themselves. People who set out to prove themselves in all the conventional ways sometimes become successful, and it is those people who often become the leaders of our communities. This is why leadership is often conservative, because it needs the crowd it leads in order to define itself as leader. This is where Rand and political conservatives start to part, as for Rand, the internal image of a leader, as he sees himself, defines who he is, not the people he leads.

So whereas the main character and protagonist Howard Roake, finds himself a companion, Gail Wynand who is a “Creator” like him, Wynand occupies the position in what spiral dynamics calls the 4th stage, the last stand of conventionalism. Here, Wynand dominates the entire social landscape, although he never realizes it, his quest for power still creates an ego in him. His sense of self worth is based off of the money and power he’s attained, and in the end this explodes in his face when he tries to make use of it. Wynand ultimately realizes his true position, exactly that of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (although Rand doesn’t use these terms), when he realizes that his leadership is based off of the crowd’s values, not his own. He is a mirror of other people’s values just like everyone else. The 4th stage is the stage when success itself is understood as still finding validation outside the self… Wynand at that moment transcends that stage and enters the post-conventional stages…in which the ego starts to break free of the undergrid of meaning which cages egos. Wynand faces the dissolution of the ego, which is inherent in the post-conventional stages.

What’s particularly interesting about reading the Fountainhead is how the characters navigate the social hierarchy within titles and dialogue. This is much like real life, in which people show their mettle through witty conversation. Being a novel though, the characters do understand one another directly in the language Rand has developed, and when they position themselves, there is much dialectical twisting, in the form of Hegelian dialectics, because the values in question are significant inasmuch as they are sometimes also absent. Rand realizes this same structure later on as in Atlas Shrugged when she names the sections of her book “non-contradiction”, “either/or” and “a=a” although, of course, the structure is loose (most likely as it comes from a text of fiction and not a purely philosophical text).

But I digress. The characters in the Fountainhead don’t change much. Most of what they do in change is self reflexive, much like real life. They realize what they are (like Peter Keating) and stay stagnant. Other than Wynand, the only other character to go through change is Dominique Falcon.

Falcon is a problematic character. She’s obviously supposed to be the female counterpart to Roake, but lacks herself any sense of being. In fact, for much of the novel she isn’t his equal, simply because she has an ego… one form or another, in most of the novel, she tries to kill it off. She does this by attempting to fit in the various roles she’s landed (through marriage mostly). And that’s basically her thing. Roake at least seems to have a thing that he is (architecture) but Falcon has nothing but her body and her image as a woman. In fact, as woman, she confines herself to being prosopopeia to her man, by erasing the self… which is to say, wholly to support her man’s ego. Perhaps this is why, in part, Rand decided to give her character Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged a thing of her own.

This brings us to Howard Roake, who is the protagonist. He has no ego, cares not for what other people think of him, or what they think of at all. His embodiment is his work, and that’s all he is. He is 100% self. And this is where spiral dynamics and Rand part, at the last stage of post-conventionalism. If the self is wholly informed as to who it is, via the image of an ego, and the ego can only be the social position of a self in language, then says the theory, Roake cannot be as selfish as he is. Roake’s sense of person should dissolve in a major way, and be integrated into the experience of the universe… which is also missing from Rand… that ego and worldview are intimately tied. The less developed the ego, the more black and white the world. By assuming that the self is in fact completely separate from the world, and the world is obvious in its materiality, Rand has failed to take her understanding of selfhood far enough. In other words, even though Rand can see how language and social reality are intertwined with the ego and how the ego forms itself from the fabric of social reality, Rand fails to understand that all objects are in part languaged-objects and the external world is rightly, exists as it is only in service of humankind’s ability to create meaning, and define things in the world in terms of who we are… So when the ego changes who it is, the meaning of the self and world, and the world as the self sees it changes too.

In fact, his person taken literally, Roake should be nearly outside of language, incomprehensible in totality to all others… although in the novel he often says exactly what he is. Two alternate models of a self outside of language come to mind: Herman Meville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”, or an enlightened guru who has retreated to the tops of mountains to contemplate the eternal Tao (or something like that).

Of course, neither would make for a compelling story about ego relations in Depression era New York, so Rand decided to make Roake a solid self, a self that was completely architect, so that the reader can see him. And seeing him is important, so that in order to stablize the relations of ego, Rand has a language and a world that is full of consistent objects, not dissolved objects or selves with blurry post-conventional “ontologies”. In other words, the language of the Fountainhead is consistent because Rand needs to show us clearly how her characters interrelate in terms of ego and self, to hierarchialize her characters… which of course, maintaining social hierarchy is all about what stable unchanging controlled language is about, but alas, again I digress.

Also, don’t forget, that after all, architecture is the most resource intensive thing humans do, it’s also intersects political, economic and aesthetic interests… and has at its handle, all the range necessary for Rand to show off her ideas, which impact creation, industry, media, art, fashion, beauty, friendship and love.

So even while Rand doesn’t also show how the world changes with the self… her book still reads very well. Its driven, its clear and its engaging. After all, wasn’t it her goal in the first place to show how egos can change? Her goal is to show how most of humanity stumbles around on trying to please and placate itself while getting in the way of those few who seek progress. Having developed enough of a theory of ego, Rand does assume an external reality, one in which language is firmly what it is even if the ego isn’t, which is probably why all her characters and protagonists can exist as unchanging models on a never ending background. After all, if language changed depending on the strength of the ego, how would we understand who is winning? How would we understand what progress is, or what things mean? In this sense, Rand’s solid world, is a world that is the same no matter who is walking in it. Things will mean the same thing, because Rand means for us to see something in her novel greater than any of the characters independently.

It is by this measure of objectivity that a self unleashed by the bonds of society can be shown to be equal to the creative force of progress for the betterment of humanity… a triumph of human spirit… For if the background changes with the social tides it would be very easy to show that an individualist is simply the formation of a bad guy, which is the stance most socially free individuals tend to become… unless of course, society itself is ill… which in this case, society is in fact very very ill, making Howard Roake the hero and protagonist in extreme.

View all my reviews

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

February 21, 2012 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, life as we know it, Theory / No Comments

a debonair affluence of imprecision begets the kernel of being “a” rather than being “some”

OR

how being philo-subject is being psychoanalytical

basically getting ‘better’ means to shrink one’s self. we think of getting better as increasing in numeric value, like you are a level 1 and that’s where you start. when you achieve expert you are level 7, or something. or as with weaving there are 304 distinct levels. with vietnamese cooking there are 72 levels. with american ‘southern’ cooking there are 55. like that. with piano, there is 677. and they have marginal stages of increasing complexity and clarity.

but in fact the increase in numeric value represents not an increase in height (if you think 2 dimensionally) but in fact, an increase in density if you think within an additional dimension. what i mean to say is that as one gets better one gets more condense. you discriminate more between what was previously ‘the same’ and your margin for preciseness shrinks. as a result, as you become a more specialized attorney, your area of practice gets more niche and your ability to draw meaningful divisions is more refined into smaller and smaller tools. this is true of coding as well. when you are a generalist programmer you draw broad strokes. but when you get into the nitty gritty, you need to do more with less lines. the lines themselves stand for more, and you take less moves to do the same thing.

like wise, it is as though an artist who has mastered it can do with one stroke what a new artist might take with twenty. or a poet can say with one line what a klutz might grumble on and on about. you get what i am saying.

so we tighten our belts and sink into the same. it’s like, you take the modules for granted but then, you eventually learn to take those modules apart and deal directly with them too.

this extra dimension might be dealt with as a spiral too; going up. if you see it in two dimensions, it’s a constant return, a swaying, an oscillation between two poles. but in fact, you are overcoding one side as you overcode the other. when we have arranged this west end with the new paradigm, the east end must be arranged. and when the east has been arranged with the new consequences, the west must also be arranged. this oscillation is our attention returning to one and then returning back to the other, as change ripping throughout the block. as the block becomes more complex, its grains noted in ever smaller detail, so must we always return back to basics. our foundation shifts ever so slightly.

often, a single oscillation is needed as the theme, then variation and then recapitulation. a sonata or rondo must repeat its A and B themes if it is to complete itself. you start at home, go on a journey in which you introduce variations and different moves, and then return home to reincorporate those moves into a new kernel.

sometimes we want more than a single oscillation. in ravel’s bolero , with each return, we get a louder, more present presence, one in which we can note what was single birds to be a gigantic bird, with the feathers in your face, up close and without the framing of a concert.

this intensive view, this microscoping of a particular was mistaken in phenoemnology of spirit by hegel to be the becoming universal of a particular. and when you are swallowed by the particular up close, thrown into the void like alice through the rabbit hole, you are in it, and it is empty as it is spacious — completely enveloping you as the Notion. be it a religious universality or a cultural whole for which you are both citizen and state, one with the community, one with itself A:A if you like ayn rand.

blast those particulates though. when you zoom back you, you at once see it is a liebnizetian game, each particular a monad running through other monads, commenting and interlocking, intertextual and at once phenomenological and transcendental as we can note monads overwriting monads like a web of individuals in a community, influencing each other, a shifting complex of community consciousness we suppose, as in the movie magnolia. magnolia is another modernist story, one in which we both investigate the graininess of the images and come out of that investigation with a supramacy of kernel, of intensiveness that we can only note as a ‘thing’ a unified whole as characters are commentators on one another, each a progressive level of difference, embedded in one another as a density, a unit you cannot escape, self contained, finite and yet boundary-less.

so depending on how you want to cut your rabbit hole, you can be big alice or small alice, and in either end of the jaberwocky you have either too crampt a house or too empty a room. either a/the Notion or the/a particular.

i suppose the question is often answered within the context of its functionality. if it goes together, and best juxtaposes one another then it is a unit. fingering on a piano is hard to separate from understanding the layout of her scales. and a pianist is hard to divide from the piano especially as the piano continually molds the pianist into her shape-becoming- like a lover who has a favorite position he insists on so the other lover eventually gets to being in it. one is hard to separate from the other so that they are most easily referred to as one.

in that way it is appropriate that lovers have offspring, be it homo or hetereo, when they self-organize into units that become-… best expressed in a new subject, a confluence of tangents that uniquely entwine, carrying with them, the comments of the foundation where they were level 1. in this sense, the reaction of an offspring is still the legacy of the parent. so we return too, to that headspace in how each of us is an interwoven complexity, a multitude of indeterminate, indistinct successions, best known to go with one another as me.

i got a little off topic, but so, the with each oscillation be it a meaningful distinction, a deeper delving of each grain requires additional geometric or even exponential energies to microscope. one resists that attention even as one desires it, as shrinking into a smaller space requires alice to shed herself, what was unnecessary to that smaller space.

indeed it is hard and harder to become experter and experter.