Ann Rand: What is the essence of her philosophy? I have been told it is considered radical by many.?

Answer 1

Ayn Rand is considered an objectivist. From what I learned in philosophy, she felt that a person should not be concerned with altruism and similar ideals because it would detract from pursuit of their own life goals and happiness. She basically felt that humans should pursue their own happiness based on self-interests.

Answer 2

I highly suggest reading Atlas Shrugged, her seminal work and is still referenced to this day. Some people do consider her philosophy radical, but then again, in this day and age that's more of a compliment than an insult. She was an individualist and believed in personal freedoms and personal choice. She could be considered a Libertarian by some. Someone else considered a "radical" by many, but was no less a genius IMHO, was Murry Rothbard. Some would call him an anarchist, but once again, he really wasn't, He just believed that people should be free to act and make decisions for themselves, without the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong (very much like Ann Rand). It's really interesting topic and once you delve more into it, it becomes less and less "radical".

Answer 3

Just heard someone mention in a forum that helping unfortunate people, i.e. homeless, extreme poor is a useless endeavor. He went on to say to the host (who was a homeless people advocate) that he should read books by A. Rand (apparently how he formed his disconnected opinion). After hearing his mantra-like babble, I know now I have no use for A. Rand's books or "teachings", thank you very much.

Answer 4

It is worth investigating if your a philosophy major ; but her unwillingness to accept a priori knowledge dooms her. Her lack of empathy lead her down the path that required her to say atruism is useless. Cleary not a philosopical genius! If she understood that altruistic behavior really evolved out of self preservation, she could have fit it nicely into her thought processes. She's left with" we all should aquire more than we need, then you can help people" my statement not hers! Such a contradictory, way to live. She remains an Icon for the polictcal right-wing.

Answer 5

It is called 'Altruism'!

Answer 6

Rand's Objectivist philosophy encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics. Along with Nathaniel Branden, his wife Barbara, and others including Alan Greenspan and Leonard Peikoff, (jokingly designated "The Collective"), Rand launched the Objectivist movement to promote her philosophy.


Philosophical influences
She was greatly influenced by Aristotle. Some have observed parallels with Nietzsche, and she was vociferously opposed to some of the views of Kant. Rand also claimed to share intellectual lineage with John Locke, who conceptualized the ideas that individuals "own themselves," have a right to the products of their own labor, and have natural rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and property,[27] and more generally with the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. She occasionally remarked with approval on specific philosophical positions of, e.g., Baruch Spinoza and St. Thomas Aquinas. She seems also to have respected the 20th-century American rationalist Brand Blanshard, who, like Rand, believed that "there has been no period in the past two thousand years when [both reason and rationality] have undergone a bombardment so varied, so competent, so massive and sustained as in the last half-century."[28]


Aristotle
Rand's greatest influence was Aristotle, especially Organon ("Logic"); she considered Aristotle the greatest philosopher.[29] In particular, her philosophy reflects an Aristotelian epistemology and metaphysics — both Aristotle and Rand argued that "there exists an objective reality that is independent of mind and that is capable of being known."[30] Although Rand was ultimately critical of Aristotle's ethics, others have noted her egoistic ethics "is of the eudemonistic type, close to Aristotle's own...a system of guidelines required by human beings to live their lives successfully, to flourish, to survive as 'man qua man.' "[31] Younkins argued "that her philosophy diverges from Aristotle’s by considering essences as epistemological and contextual instead of as metaphysical. She envisions Aristotle as a philosophical intuitivist who declared the existence of essences within concretes."[32]


Nietzsche
In her early life, Rand admired the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and did share "Nietzsche's reverence for human potential and his loathing of Christianity and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant,"[33] but eventually became critical, seeing his philosophy as emphasizing emotion over reason and subjective interpretation of reality over actual reality.[33] There is debate about the extent of the relationship between Rand's views and Nietzsche's, and over what seemed to be an evolution of Rand's view of Nietzsche. Allan Gotthelf, in On Ayn Rand, describes the first edition of We The Living as very sympathetic to Nietzschean ideas. Bjorn Faulkner and Karen Andre, characters from The Night of January 16th, exemplify certain aspects of Nietzsche's views. Ronald Merrill, author of The Ideas of Ayn Rand identified a passage in We the Living that Rand had omitted from the 1959 reprint: "In it, the heroine entertains (though finally rejects) sentiments explicitly attributed to Nietzsche about the justice of sacrificing the weak for the strong."[34] Rand herself denied a close intellectual relationship with Nietzsche and characterized changes in later editions of We the Living as stylistic and grammatical.

The destruction of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead is an example of her later view, a rejection of Nietzsche, that the great cannot succeed by sacrificing the masses: "her [1934] journals suggest a rejection of traditional false-alternative ethics. Her May 15 entry, for example, identifies the error of Nietzscheans such as Gail Wynand: in trying to achieve power, they use the masses, but at the cost of their ideals and standards, and thus become "a slave to those masses." The independent man, therefore, will not make his success dependent upon the masses."[33] Although Rand disagreed with many of Nietzsche's ideas, the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead concludes with Nietzsche's statement, "The noble soul has reverence for itself."


Kant
See also: Critique of Pure Reason

Her understanding of Kant's views on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics led Rand to consider him a "monster."Rand was deeply opposed to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Their divergence is greatest in metaphysics and epistemology, particularly with regard to Kant's analytic-synthetic dichotomy, rather than the ethics of Kant's well known categorical imperative (her critique of Kant's ethics is directly rooted in Kant's metaphysics and epistemology, and there is debate among non-Objectivists over whether the categorical imperative is compatible with Objectivism).[35] Rand and Kant had significantly different theories of concepts, identity and consciousness: In Objectivist epistemology reason is the highest virtue and reason and logic can be used to understand objective reality. Kant believed that we cannot have certain knowledge about the true nature of reality ("things-in themselves"), but only of the manner in which we perceive reality. For example, we can know for certain that we are unable to conceive of an object which is not extended--i.e., occupies physical space--but it does not follow that no object which is not extended can exist. Rand believed that if an object has an effect upon the senses, then that effect upon the senses gives us knowledge about the object itself. At the most basic level, it informs us that that object is of a particular character such that when it interacts with one's sense organs it causes a particular sensation; and, that is knowledge about a quality of the object itself. It is not in fact clear that Kant would have disagreed with such a weak formulation of realism. In Rand's view, Kant's dichotomy severed rationality and reason from the real world — a betrayal of the very nature of man. In Rand's words,

"I have mentioned in many articles that Kant is the chief destroyer of the modern world...You will find that on every fundamental issue, Kant's philosophy is the exact opposite of Objectivism."[36]

In the final issue of The Objectivist, she further wrote,

"Suppose you met a twisted, tormented young man and...discovered that he was brought up by a man-hating monster who worked systematically to paralyze his mind, destroy his self-confidence, obliterate his capacity for enjoyment and undercut his every attempt to escape... Western civilization is in that young man's position. The monster is Immanuel Kant."[36]

A more complicated difference between Ayn Rand's metaphysics and that of Immanuel Kant is the reality of space, time, and number. For Kant, these are merely built into the human mode of perception and are not present in any thing-in-itself. One might hope that the following analogy applies: Color is not present in an object, but is purely a construct of our minds. Yet this is not enough for Kant, because color corresponds to some objective quality (quality of the object) while space, time, and number have no such relationship to objectivity. (See Critique of Pure Reason B38-B45) Rand would most certainly have disagreed with this concept, taking the fact that our faculty of perception has a particular (limited) identity not to be a charge against it, but a demonstration of its objectivity. This is a subtle though not insignificant point of difference that cannot be uncontroversially explicated in a few words.