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This thread has a few posts worth reading. (Also, the fact that Lindsay Perigo was proud of the fact that he had never read Nathaniel Branden was interesting.) Here are two of those posts:
Donald Talton:
I.N., you have hit the nail head and demolished it!
My belief is this is what causes the anxiety that is readily apparent in O'ism. People forsake the psychic self for the rational. The human brain is not completely rational. While a rational approach can be applied to many areas, there are needs to be fulfilled that cannot be iterated by grinding an issue throught the O'ist thought mill.
The Branden/Rand saga would be a great example. Even with my amatuer knowledge of psychology, alot of issues were readily apparent in "My Years with Ayn Rand." The moral justification of their interpersonal relationships is, for lack of a better word, retarded. Ayn's own denial of her rational self caused her to deteriorate into a "rational state of irrationality that was rational" to her. I believe her amphetamine use/abuse lead to this.
The key is a balance between the two. And to understand that at times you may behave outside the Mr. Spock way of thinking and cut yourself some mental slack. It is wholly healthy. I'm not endorsing emotions as tools of cognition, but rather intuition.
On a side note: is there any literature out there regarding Osim and the mind/body problem?
Rich Engle:
Donald found enough flat on the nail to give it another good smack:
My belief is this is what causes the anxiety that is readily apparent in O'ism. People forsake the psychic self for the rational. The human brain is not completely rational. While a rational approach can be applied to many areas, there are needs to be fulfilled that cannot be iterated by grinding an issue throught the O'ist thought mill.
Objectivism confines itself mainly to the intellectual center. What it does there, it does well, given that confine. One place where it is underdeveloped is in the integration of the intellectual, physical, and emotional centers. For that matter, even having consciousness of such a model. Objectivism does not look at man as a three-brained creature, or, if it does, it doesn't think much about what that means. If that is not taken into account, and worked on, it retards the process of developing awareness.
By example of awareness I can say that you can study Objectivism all you want, and it won't do much to improve the fact that you cannot sit still, clear your mind, control spontaneous body movements, be conscious of how your body feels to itself, and the surroundings you are in for maybe even less than a minute without the mind starting to associate. Objectivism does not address integration at the skin level.
Objectivism has not traditionally addressed areas such as emotional intelligence (work such as that by Daniel Goleman, another one of those zany psychology guys). For my money, this has something to do with why some Objectivists are inefficacious in the area of interpersonal skills.
It is much easier for an Ortho-O'ist to dismiss views like I outline above as being irrational, or pseudo-science. And, in that world, the world of intellect only, they are.
My belief is that when there is the anxiety you talk of (and it is there, along with other displays reflecting discomfort or frustration), it comes from finding out that Objectivism, for all its virtues, is not a one-stop solution after all.
rde
There are no free lunches.
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