Ayn II

Alex's Wednesday post of one sort of a thumbnail biography of Ayn Rand was timely. On the one hand, because we're approaching February 2, 2005, her hundredth birthday. On the other, because the column he linked to was published on the very day that I posted my bio on this new blog. (25 Jan at 23:14 MST, as I now note the blog has moved to eastern time.)

The author of the unappreciative vignette lamented the dearth of publications on this notable anniversary. While it's true that the event will garner somewhat less attention than, say, the private life of Brittney Spears, there are important things being said about it if you care to look for them. A friend has saved me some trouble, sending me a link to the essay, 'Ayn Rand: A legacy of Reason and Freedom.' This is a rather different sort of biography. Namely, an appreciative one. It's neither long nor tedious so I encourage you to follow the link, but I can't resist highlighting two excerpts:

Ayn Rand understood that to defend the individual she must penetrate to the root: his need to use reason to survive. "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism," she wrote in 1971, "but of egoism; and 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." This radical view put her at odds with conservatives, whom she vilified for their attempts to base capitalism on faith and altruism. Advocating a government to protect the individual's right to his property, she was not a liberal (or an anarchist). Advocating the indispensability of philosophy, she was not a libertarian.
(...)
A sui generis philosopher, who looked at the world anew, Ayn Rand has long puzzled the intellectual establishment. Academia has usually met her views with antagonism or avoidance, unable to fathom that she was an individualist but not a subjectivist, an absolutist but not a dogmatist. And they have thus ignored her original solutions to such seemingly intractable problems as how to ground values in facts. But even in academia her ideas are finding more acceptance, e.g., university fellowships and a subgroup within the American Philosophical Association to study Objectivism."

This is Ayn Rand. Those who fault her for a few bad decisions in her personal life can generally be assumed to prefer that you not know anything of what you've just read.

Philosophy Posted by JohnGalt at January 29, 2005 2:22 PM