For the New Intellectual: Library Edition

Rating:
Summary: Give me the "old intellectual" any day
Review: "Blanshard's personal demeanour," concludes the _Oxford Companion to Philosophy_ entry on Brand Blanshard, "was one of extraordinary graciousness." As far as I have been able to determine, Prof. Peter H. Hare's entry on Blanshard is the _only_ one to comment on the personal manner of a philosopher. And with good cause; Blanshard's seamless unity of style and substance in the service of reason was all but unique in intellectual history.

Even Ayn Rand's most die-hard followers were not able to eulogize her in this way, and this book unfortunately demonstrates why. The self-proclaimed paragon of reason here adopts a bitter, badgering, hectoring tone; "illustrates" the history of philosophy with cartoonlike stereotypes ("Attila and the Witch Doctor"); and follows her opening agitprop essay with long excerpts from the most "speechifying" portions of her overblown, melodramatic meganovels. The fawning, sycophantic conclusion -- "Who Is Ayn Rand?" by Nathaniel and Barbara Branden -- vastly overstates Rand's own minuscule role in the history of philosophy at the expense of everyone else, including her own unacknowledged sources (e.g. Nietzsche).

Even Aristotle comes in a distant second to this intellectual diva -- who, stunningly, arrived at her unspeakably irresponsible views of Immanuel Kant without ever so much as cracking open one of his works.

Blanshard, who was _genuinely_ intellectual, could never have written a book like this. His own careful and thorough expositions of philosophical history display real sympathy and generosity toward opposing positions; never once does he lapse into stereotype or name-calling; and his own views are developed and presented with the utmost urbanity and grace.

Rand claimed to be an admirer of Blanshard's philosophical works. If so, it doesn't show here; for all that she may have admired what Blanshard called the "rational temper," she displays precious little of it herself.

Objectivism -- which, for all that I have said here, does contain some good ideas -- is better introduced elsewhere. Try _Philosophy: Who Needs It_ instead; it isn't perfect either, but it's a lot better than this pile of prephilosophical polemic.

Better yet, read Blanshard before you ever go anywhere near Rand. As even she herself must have dimly recognized, he exemplifies her avowed ideals far better than she ever did.

Rating:
Summary: The light at the end of the tunnel of philosophy
Review: A must buy for rational thinkers. Rand supports conclusivly her stands on morality from their metaphisical bases in self-evident and undeniable axioms in her title essay. She goes to give a call to arms for all egoists, a sort of anti-commuist manifesto. She calls for the New Intellectuals to rise forth and to fight for reason and reality. Then she gives an apendix of the greatest intellectucal amunition, her famous speeches. An incredible summary of objectivism, second only to Atlas Shrugged itself.

Rating:
Summary: Dire, vacuous and bitter.
Review: This book is a compression of Rand's philosophy with chunks taken from her other works. It achieves its goal in terms of providing a summary of her "philsophical" work, but on the down-side it quickly becomes apparent that she has little to offer. Her understanding of Western philosophy is surprisingly poor - she adores Aristotle and loathes Plato and seems to miss many of the similarities between the two. Worse, her metaphysical claims are the very worst of amateur philosophizing.

If you're serious about addressing libertarianism at its best, I recommend you read someone like Nozick instead. He offers intelligent, often compelling arguments for a minimal state, while Rand simply offers slogans, dogma and resentment.

Rating:
Summary: The best portrait of objectivism as a viable philosophy
Review: Both novice and expert objectivism enthusiasts can find this book as a clear reference and practical tool to study this fascinating philosophy within our worlwide reality.
Students and teachers can benefit of superb commented excerpts from Ayn Rand's works, with magnificent examples of applicability and analytical clues to further readings.
The reading of this book leads to a more profound understanding of the active role of the individual in responding to today's political, cultural, artistic, religiuos and philosophical challenges claiming that philosophy and thinking are old fashioned, denying its value and purpose for both individuals and mankind.


Rating:
Summary: one of the best
Review: This is definitely the best book I read in a long time. Ayn Rand's Objectivism philosophy is fascinating to anyone that loves freedom, capitalism, and reason. This is not a book that any closed-minded socialist-like thinker should read (i.e. people that believe in increased federal government control over our lives). This book rightfully criticizes the intellectuals of the 20th century that promoted socialist programs and even socialism itself. Ayn Rand was a real thinker that reminded me of how great this country was and still could be if we return to what we were when this country was created by our democratic, capitalist, and intellectual founding fathers. I am looking forward to the Atlas Shrugged movie that is in the making.

Rating:
Summary: An Introduction to Rand and her novels
Review: I consider three stars to be above average.
The book itself is a good introduction to Rand's philosophy, to her idea of the function and faculty of philosophy in the intellectual, academic and business worlds (as well as that which concerns the "spiritual" or metaphysical in man himself).


If you've never read philosophy before and are interested in Rand or in the subject of philosophy, this is a good place to start. The language is simple and the concepts easy to understand.

Never-mind whether or not you will agree with the book (one should hardly make that their criteria for reading or not reading another person's words or ideas), the first objective is that the reader engage with the text, and this text is very much written for that purpose (to provoke the reader, to challenge his/her world view, etc.).

Rating:
Summary: Rand: Yes, This Particular Book: No.
Review: I hold Ayn Rand in high esteem although I don't care for most of her fan club (and her critics). It appears to me that many of the negative reviews were made by people who are determined to convince others not to read Rand. Why? It is because they want to distort her views without being challenged, so that they may articulate some uninspiring inanities. Why don't they encourage others to read Rand even though you disagree with her? After all, no one is going to appreciate their criticisms unless they knew what Ayn Rand said in her own words. It appears that some want us to believe that Rand was wacky on faith or their assumed authority. I say read Rand and also her critics (the intelligent and principled ones).

Anyhow, I generally shy away from fiction so this particular book was not to my taste. It mostly contained recycled material with a new cover. I like the title of the book though. I would refer interested parties to her other titles.

Rating:
Summary: Where did Rand go wrong?
Review: This book consists of an introductory essay, followed by several philosophical essays originally published as integral parts of Ayn Rand's various novels.

Ayn Rand's core philosophy was ultimately motivated by hero-worship, an emotional need to idolize men (and it was always men!) of grand gestures and great achievements. Although the protagonists of her novels (Dominique Francon in "The Fountainhead," Dagny Taggart in "Atlas Shrugged," and Kira Argounova in "We the Living") were generally women, the heroes of the books were always men (Howard Roark, John Galt, and Leo Kovalensky/Andrei Taganov).

Rand's life-long goal was to create in the real world a new sort of man, a man unlike those she saw all around her, a man she could honestly admire and worship. Hence the title of this book -- ii is written for her hoped-for "new intellectual."

She failed.

Anyone who has run into "Randian cultists," whether in real life or on the Internet, will realize why the phrase "Randian cultists" is apropos: I have yet to meet a single one who is a model of rationality and achievement. Is it a coincidence that the best-known Randian in the real world is Alan Greenspan, the evasive, self-serving, simpering bureaucrat who brought us the "dot com" debacle and who yet manages to survive under Democratic and Republican Presidents alike?

What went wrong?

Part of the answer, I think, is that Rand and her followers suffer from an enormous emotional and social insecurity, a huge lack of self-esteem.

For example, in the final essay in "For the New Intellectual," Rand furiously condemns government scientists who "scorn the use of their science for the purpose and profit of life, they deliver their science to the service of death, to the only practical purpose it can have for looters: to inventing weapons of coercion and destruction."

This deserves applause as a brilliant and scathing condemnation of the military-industrial complex. But, in real life, I have never seen Rand or any of her core followers condemn the actual American military-industrial complex, the actual government scientists who created the atomic bomb in "the service of death," or the actual American drive for world hegemony.

Rand's and her insecure followers' eagerness to identify with and feel part of the ruling regime prevents them from actually materially and openly challenging that regime.

Another part of the problem is that Rand, with a novelist's attention to symbolism, allowed symbolism to overpower reality. Although she denounced taxation in any form and defended laissez-faire capitalism, she eulogized the government-created, tax-financed American manned space program. You see, symbolically, the manned space program was a great symbol of human rationality and achievement, even though, in reality, it was scientifically pointless political propaganda which actually retarded the development of an economically viable free-market space industry. (As to the symbolism, Tom Wolfe's phrase from "The Right Stuff," 'spam-in-a-can,' is actually a scientifically apt description of the early American astronauts!)

But perhaps Rand's greatest error, which her followers propagate, is her claim, stated clearly in "For the New Intellectual," that "there is no such thing as 'non-practical knowledge' or any sort of 'disinterested' action..." Aside from the fact that this is obviously false, it has disastrous consequences. When one judges ideas only by their uses and consequences, one loses sight of the ideal of disinterested truth. This is the grand totalitarian temptation, to which the twentieth-century succumbed. Whether in the form of Marxism, social-democratic pragmatism, or Rand's own "Objectivism," it means the death of the mind and of the spirit of man.

This error is, I think, integral to her system. Aristotle began the "Metaphysics" by stating that "all men by nature desire to know." While Aristotle certainly did not despise putting knowledge to practical use, he viewed knowledge for its own sake as an end, indeed the highest end, in and of itself.

But, the solitary disinterested seeker after truth cannot satisfy Rand's need for hero-worship. A Randian hero must build, control, and dominate the natural and social world. To merely seek enjoyment, beauty, and understanding of the world, to quietly live one's own life with one's friends and family, is not to be fully human in the Randian perspective.

Such a perspective is inhuman. As Murray Rothbard once remarked, there are no children in Ayn Rand's imaginary worlds: a Randian world would survive only one generation, after which the human race would be extinct!

When I first read "For a New Intellectual" as an adolescent, I found it exciting and intellectually stimulating. It raises a host of questions which need answering. Much of Rand's assault on the prevailing culture -- both popular culture and high-brow culture -- is on-target.

I heartily recommend reading this book. But it must be read critically and with caution. Rand captures an important side of human life -- her emphasis on reason as the key tool of man's existence is absolutely correct (and, of course, goes back to Aristotle's definition of man as the "rational animal"). She is right that the twentieth century was a vast intellectual wasteland, and that we do indeed need "new intellectuals."

But those new intellectuals need more than the writings of Chairman Ayn. They need to refamiliarize themselves with the whole heritage of civilization which the twentieth century so cavalierly swept aside -- the existentialism of Aquinas, the humanity of Aristotle, the decency of Catholic just-war teachings, the anarchism of Henry Thoreau, etc.

Uncompromising rationalism, untrammeled free markets, individual liberty, strictly limited government, on all of this Rand was right. But she was wrong to worship achievement, to allow symbolism to trump reality, and to accept in practice a ruling regime that she condemned in principle. She was wrong to believe that humans should live solely to work and to dominate. She was wrong to ignore the human need for loving families or the disinterested human interest in knowledge.

This book is, at best, a launching pad for the "new intellectuals." They must soar far beyond it if they are to succeed.

Rating:
Summary: For the New Traditionalist
Review: Back in 1982, when I first read this tome, I was enamoured with a Devo album called "Freedom of Choice," the spudboys' anthem to radical libertarianism in a one-size-fits-all world. Thus, were some of my fellow petrochemical rocker friends and I also susceptible to the lilting iconoclastic strains of one Ayn Rand, who with her book "The Fountainhead," carved out her own Nietzsche (pun intended) among uebermensch, one Howard Roark, a prototypical punker before his time.

So, put on your thinking caps, energy domes or plastic pompadours and your anti human-element suits and delve into this pussaint tome by Miss Rand.

You will be doing neck salutes as you read her introductory essay of the same title as the book. After writing four major novels of varying philosophical degrees, Miss Rand finally sticks her toe into the swimming pool of profundity with this essay, and tries to stake out her territory vis-a-vis the writers of the great books (according to the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, at least). Voila! By her own objective analysis, she kicks the pants off of them, and conveniently categorises them into either one of two columns: "Attilas" or "Witch Doctors."

The Attilas (big daddy zeros, in Devo-speak) are the proverbial gang of thugs who stifle thought and proscribe against actions resulting from independent agents. They carry around clubs and grunt like high school football jocks and generally make life miserable for artistic coffee house types who affect an air of bored sophistication.

The Witch Doctors (Mystics of the Mind, the corporate media types of pesudo-intellectuals who pander to the masses in order to control them, sort of like Rod Rooter of Big Entertainment) are basically your monolithic hucksters who lure in otherwise smart people to carry out their evil deeds. Think Josef Goebbels, Jim Jones, Herf Applewhite, the Unibomber and Jerry Falwell here. They mouth slogans like "Duty Now For the Future," and reduce humanity to the level of mental mutants.

The rest of the book is Rand's greatest hits, philosophically-bent speeches from her novels. The best are from "Atlas Shrugged," because the neo-industrialists delivering them always leave their opponents in the dust.

Whip It. Whip it Good!