Sunday, October 26, 2014

Harry Binwsanger on Ayn Rand

Harry Binswanger has always come across as a little cultish in  his praise of Ayn Rand.  Here is something from 2009.

I think there’s something that nobody here is getting: It’s not that Ayn Rand had three or four ideas, and the question is whether or not a given person understands them correctly. Ayn Rand wrote extensively, systematically on hundreds of topics in philosophy, and many in related fields. She developed, over a period decades, a rich, deep, multi-tiered philosophical structure.
If by "hundreds" we take to be a minimum of 300 and systematically we take to be around 10 pages, then we are talking about 3000 pages of writings.  I don't think Rand wrote that much pure philosophy at all.

The one area of philosophy which Rand treated in a systematic way was her theory of concepts.

Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life

Interesting article from a racial realist site.

Sunday, October 19, 2014

The Obscolesence of Ayn Rand, or so says the American Conservative

Essay in the American Conservative.


Baker argued that Rand would see the industrious factory worker as more virtuous than a crony capitalist industrialist, and that valuing of work and productivity is a virtue that even Christians can admire in Rand’s thought.

The problem with rehabilitating Rand at this point in the course of human events isn’t that she was a militant atheist, a celebrant of narcissism, or any other of her manifestly evil qualities and positions. It’s that she doesn’t matter. Rand is an artifact of the industrial age, when Hank Rearden could smelt his steel with manly independence and grant himself delusions of standing apart from and above the world as a “maker.”

The economy of the 21st century looks increasingly likely to be an economy of service. Instead of “laboring and producing” his sustenance on this earth, man receives his goods from the machines that grow his food at astonishing efficiency, and produce his goods at previously unthinkable rates. What does he do with himself after that? Some on the left would like to grant him a basic income, an annual cash grant to every person to liberate him from the tyranny of necessity. Others on the right continue to labor under the idea of entrepreneurial production, whereby a man will pull himself up by his bootstraps by producing. Neither of these options are suited to an economy of service.