Ayn Rand

I had no idea what I was getting into when I picked up a collection of Ayn Rand essays.

I knew her name, but nothing really of her work. But although I have only made it through a quarter of the book, but I can say that hands down, Ayn Rand is the rudest, most outrageous philosopher I have ever read. Until I read an essay by Ayn Rand, I had never SHOUTED at a printed page. Her style is brash rhetoric, brutally frank assessments, and completely infuriating assertions.

But despite some very deep differences in our worldviews, I keep reading. And I'm actually learning a great deal. I tend to gravitate toward subjectivism, and most of what I usually read skews to that mentality. So it's quite a wake-up call when confronted with a passionate objectivist such as Rand.

And of course, this is by intent. She is trying her hardest to wake-up all of the people who have been put to sleep by the very mention of the word "philosophy." She is not speaking only to people who are deeply concerned with philosophy, but to the masses who are not. And in that sense, I applaud the effort. We can find common ground in the fact that we both believe that philosophy is vitally important to every person. We both believe that man does cannot choose whether or not to have a philosophy, only which type of philosophy he will have.


One of my favorite quotes so far:

"A person of this [anti-conceptual] mentality may uphold some abstract principles or profess some intellectual convictions (without remembering where or how he picked them up). But if one asks him what he means by a given idea, he will not be able to answer. If one asks him the reasons of his convictions, one will discover his convictions are a thin, fragile film floating over a vacuum, like an oil slick in space -- and one will be shocked by the number of questions it had never occurred to him to ask.
This kind of psycho-epistemology works so long as no part of it is challenged. But all hell breaks loose when it is -- because what is threatened then is not a particular idea, but that mind's whole structure. The hell ranges from fear to resentment to stubborn evasiveness to hostility to panic to malice to hatred."