Ayn Rand Centenary
In St. Petersburg. Russia, of all places, the beginning of the end came, 02 February 1905. A child was born, a child destined to change the world. We came to know the child as Ayn Rand. She lived until 1982. Her legacy lives on and on, widening, deepening, and taking in more and more of the world.
So many tributes have been written about Ayn Rand that I want to try to write what she means to me instead. Superficial people condemn almost every real and imagined aspect of this woman and her work, whether they have read anything she wrote or not. Some very fortunate persons have read, absorbed, studied, digested, and applied the principles she presented so clearly, and their lives have changed greatly, for the better. Some have tried to take on the principles she wrote about by short-cutting the learning process, and they crashed, sourly joining her detractors.
I found Ayn Rand in 1965, in my senior year of medical school. I read Atlas Shrugged, her tour de force and last novel. I was never the same again, thankfully. Over the years, I read and re-read it all many times, listened to it, and took in everything her associates ever had to offer. My mind grew beyond adequate description as I came to understand reality in terms of principles. She wrote them, but I made them mine. Over the decades, I had to rework a lot of mixed premises absorbed since birth, but oh, the sunlit universe I have experienced and continue to experience to this day.
My gratitude cannot be expressed the way I want. I just have to feel it and sort of tell you about it. It is open to you also, in fact to anyone, willing to pay the only price it requires: to think. Thinking is hard work, and it takes continuous application across time, which is probably why some bail out so easily.
I gloat just thinking about Ayn Rand's role in the future. Alas, I will not live long enough to see it. I have been fortunate enough to be there in the early stages. And, as a conceptual being, I can project today into tomorrow.
Part of my gloating comes from knowing her place already in the history of thought. In all of the history of Western civilization, there have been three, and only three, builders of full philosophical systems. The first was Plato, and he had profound influence, and still does. The second was his pupil, Aristotle, the thinker who gave us the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, America, and capitalism. The third was Immanuel Kant who launched the Counter-Enlightenment Revolution, spawning all sorts of anti-reason mystic philosophers of great influence through the 19th and 20th centuries, and made inevitable both Nazism and Communism. Immanuel Kant more than any other thinker has almost destroyed post-Enlightenment progress and culture. His current heirs infest the colleges and universities as postmodernist deconstructionists, flowering nihilists all--corpse flower, of course.
The point here is that systematic philosophers move civilizations while their lessers just influence cultures to some extent. Think of the profound impact three thinkers have had in human history. And, they have been only three in number. Kant died in 1804, and he was the last. Thinkers of this import are scarce.
Ayn Rand is the fourth systematic thinker, and she is in the tradition of Aristotle. She is the antidote to the diseases of Western civilization unleashed by Kant and his intellectual father, Plato.
Tomorrow has great hope and promise, much more than today has. Tomorrow belongs to Ayn Rand and to all of those whom she will return to reality, reason, freedom, invidualism, and full capitalism. With the birth of Ayn Rand came the beginning of the end of the stranglehold that Kant and his intellectual spawn have had on Western civilization.
If anyone doubts, just one fact alone should bring that doubter to his or her knees. The fact is that Ayn Rand in her many works remains a best seller to this very day, one hundred years after her birth. Only sales of the Bible rival hers.
She loved the works of Victor Hugo, and I know she would enjoy the truth and the joke in something Hugo said because it applies so totally to her: "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come."
Thank you, Ayn Rand.
So many tributes have been written about Ayn Rand that I want to try to write what she means to me instead. Superficial people condemn almost every real and imagined aspect of this woman and her work, whether they have read anything she wrote or not. Some very fortunate persons have read, absorbed, studied, digested, and applied the principles she presented so clearly, and their lives have changed greatly, for the better. Some have tried to take on the principles she wrote about by short-cutting the learning process, and they crashed, sourly joining her detractors.
I found Ayn Rand in 1965, in my senior year of medical school. I read Atlas Shrugged, her tour de force and last novel. I was never the same again, thankfully. Over the years, I read and re-read it all many times, listened to it, and took in everything her associates ever had to offer. My mind grew beyond adequate description as I came to understand reality in terms of principles. She wrote them, but I made them mine. Over the decades, I had to rework a lot of mixed premises absorbed since birth, but oh, the sunlit universe I have experienced and continue to experience to this day.
My gratitude cannot be expressed the way I want. I just have to feel it and sort of tell you about it. It is open to you also, in fact to anyone, willing to pay the only price it requires: to think. Thinking is hard work, and it takes continuous application across time, which is probably why some bail out so easily.
I gloat just thinking about Ayn Rand's role in the future. Alas, I will not live long enough to see it. I have been fortunate enough to be there in the early stages. And, as a conceptual being, I can project today into tomorrow.
Part of my gloating comes from knowing her place already in the history of thought. In all of the history of Western civilization, there have been three, and only three, builders of full philosophical systems. The first was Plato, and he had profound influence, and still does. The second was his pupil, Aristotle, the thinker who gave us the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, America, and capitalism. The third was Immanuel Kant who launched the Counter-Enlightenment Revolution, spawning all sorts of anti-reason mystic philosophers of great influence through the 19th and 20th centuries, and made inevitable both Nazism and Communism. Immanuel Kant more than any other thinker has almost destroyed post-Enlightenment progress and culture. His current heirs infest the colleges and universities as postmodernist deconstructionists, flowering nihilists all--corpse flower, of course.
The point here is that systematic philosophers move civilizations while their lessers just influence cultures to some extent. Think of the profound impact three thinkers have had in human history. And, they have been only three in number. Kant died in 1804, and he was the last. Thinkers of this import are scarce.
Ayn Rand is the fourth systematic thinker, and she is in the tradition of Aristotle. She is the antidote to the diseases of Western civilization unleashed by Kant and his intellectual father, Plato.
Tomorrow has great hope and promise, much more than today has. Tomorrow belongs to Ayn Rand and to all of those whom she will return to reality, reason, freedom, invidualism, and full capitalism. With the birth of Ayn Rand came the beginning of the end of the stranglehold that Kant and his intellectual spawn have had on Western civilization.
If anyone doubts, just one fact alone should bring that doubter to his or her knees. The fact is that Ayn Rand in her many works remains a best seller to this very day, one hundred years after her birth. Only sales of the Bible rival hers.
She loved the works of Victor Hugo, and I know she would enjoy the truth and the joke in something Hugo said because it applies so totally to her: "Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come."
Thank you, Ayn Rand.
posted by George Mason @ 2/02/2005 03:30:00 PM
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