Ayn Rand - For the New Intellectual: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

Table of Contents

This book presents the essentials of Ayn Rands philosophy for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence. In the title essay, she offers an analysis of Western culture, discusses the causes of its progress, its decline, its present bankruptcy, and points the road to an intellectual renaissance.

Ayn Rand raises the standard of reason, individualism, and capitalism against todays prevalent doctrines of mysticism, altruism, and collectivism. The novels that present her unconventional views have become modern classics.

THE GENIUS OF AYN RAND

Introduction by Leonard Peikoff. First published in 1957, this epochal novel has been a bestseller for more than four decades as well as an intellectual landmark. Peopled with larger-than-life heroes and villains, and charged with towering questions of good and evil, it is a philosophical revolution told in the form of an action thriller. 0-451-19114-5

Afterword by Leonard Peikoff. Vividly written and boldly original, The Fountainhead has been a phenomenal bestseller since it was first published in 1943. As explosive and dazzling today as it was when it was written, this novel reinvents man the heroand exposes the evil of those who try to destroy him. 0-451-19115-3

Ayn Rand explains what selfishness is, and why the pursuit of his own rational self-interest is every individuals highest moral obligation. 0-451-16393-1

Edited with an introduction and additional essays by Peter Schwartz. Ayn Rand identifies the intellectual roots of political correctness, urging people to repudiate its mindless nihilism and to uphold a philosophy of reason, individualism, capitalism, and technological progress. 0-452-01184-1

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PREFACE

This book is intended for those who wish to assume the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.

The full system is implicit in these excerpts (particularly in Galts speech), but its fundamentals are indicated only in the widest terms and require a detailed, systematic presentation in a philosophical treatise. I am working on such a treatise at present; it will deal predominantly with the issue which is barely touched upon in Galts speech: epistemology, and will present a new theory of the nature, source and validation of concepts. This work will require several years; until then, I offer the present book as a lead or a summary for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence. They may regard it as a basic outline; it will give them the guidance they need, but only if they think through and understand the exact meaning and the full implications of these excerpts.

I am often asked whether I am primarily a novelist or a philosopher. The answer is: both. In a certain sense, every novelist is a philosopher, because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a philosophical framework; the novelists only choice is whether that framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions consciously or subconsciously. This involves another choice: whether his work is his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or whether he originates a philosophical framework of his own. I did the second. That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it, because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific meaning of the term.

For those who may be interested in the chronological development of my thinking, I have included excerpts from all four of my novels. They may observe the progression from a political theme in We the Living to a metaphysical theme in Atlas Shrugged.

These excerpts are necessarily condensed summaries, because the full statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means of the events of the story. The events are the concretes and the particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations.

When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I do not mean to imply that my full system is still to be defined or discovered; I had to define it before I could start writing Atlas Shrugged. Galts speech is its briefest summary.

Until I complete the presentation of my philosophy in a fully detailed form, this present book may serve as an outline or a program or a manifesto.

For reasons which are made clear in the following pages, the name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.

AYN RAND

When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind, range-of-the-moment expediencynot daring to look ahead, wishing no one would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save them somehowor they can identify the situation, check their premises, discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.

America, at present, is following the first course. The grayness, the stale cynicism, the noncommittal cautiousness, the guilty evasiveness of our public voices suggest the attitude of the courtiers in the story The Emperors New Clothes who professed admiration for the Emperors non-existent garments, having accepted the assertion that anyone who failed to perceive them was morally depraved at heart.

Let me be the child in the story and declare that the Emperor is nakedor that America is culturally bankrupt.

In any given period of history, a culture is to be judged by its dominant philosophy, by the prevalent trend of its intellectual life as expressed in morality, in politics, in economics, in art. Professional intellectuals are the voice of a culture and are, therefore, its leaders, its integrators and its bodyguards. Americas intellectual leadership has collapsed. Her virtues, her values, her enormous power are scattered in a silent underground and will remain private, subjective, historically impotent if left without intellectual expression. America is a country without voice or defensea country sold out and abandoned by her intellectual bodyguards.

Bankruptcy is defined as the state of being at the end of ones resources. What are the intellectual values or resources offered to us by the present guardians of our culture? In philosophy, we are taught that mans mind is impotent, that reality is unknowable, that knowledge is an illusion, and reason a superstition. In psychology, we are told that man is a helpless automaton, determined by forces beyond his control, motivated by innate depravity. In literature, we are shown a line-up of murderers, dipsomaniacs, drug addicts, neurotics and psychotics as representatives of mans souland are invited to identify our own among themwith the belligerent assertions that life is a sewer, a foxhole or a rat race, with the whining injunctions that we must love everything, except virtue, and forgive everything, except greatness. In politics, we are told that America, the greatest, noblest, freest country on earth, is politically and morally inferior to Soviet Russia, the bloodiest dictatorship in historyand that our wealth should be given away to the savages of Asia and Africa, with apologies for the fact that we have produced it while they havent. If we look at modern intellectuals, we are confronted with the grotesque spectacle of such characteristics as militant uncertainty, crusading cynicism, dogmatic agnosticism, boastful self-abasement and self-righteous depravityin an atmosphere of guilt, of panic, of despair, of boredom and of all-pervasive evasion. If this is not the state of being at the end of ones resources, there is no further place to go.