| | | Mr. Ingram
I must say that your reference to LaVey made me laugh!
I'd suggest you read her explicitly worked out arguments, especially as found in Intro. To Obj. Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness rather than trying to extract it from her fiction.
Her objective morality is not based on duty or any command, but on the conditional statement that if you wish to live a happy life then you must act in accordance with your nature and accept the facts of reality which cannot be changed and chose which facts of reality (like your country of residence, choice of career) which are open to you to optimize in an integrated way. She does not say that happiness is available only to the ideal man, rather, that each man can be happy by living up to his own nature. Her art focuses on the ideal, since she sees art as something which, as it is optional, should also be optimal. That is, what are the motivations of a person who could be looking at Michaelangelo, but chooses to look at Magritte instead? What is that person's view of man and man's potential? It's certainly an understandable morality, and one that I might identify with if I believed in morality. However, it seems to be that Rand stated her morality in the form of an imperative - that is, that man must live life according to his nature, or else he is committing an immorality. Naturally, that's simply my interpretation of it, and I'm by no means well-read on her philosophy. I, on the other hand, believe that it is impossible for any animal, including man, to do anything but live out his nature, and so morality has nothing at all to do with it.
Further, is does not follow that reason is anything more than another psychological drive whose purpose is to ensure not only our continued survival, but our continued accumulation of power (power in the sense of increasing mastery both within and without our bodies - the Will to Power). Reason, when used as a tool, is fine; it is when it becomes enshrined as some sort of sacred metaphysical principle which governs
And art, rather than being an expression of an ideal, might instead be the expression of what is. If the ideal is equivalent to what actually is, then it seems to me that art, rather than showcasing a goal for all men to aspire to, should instead present to us an image of the various processes which make up human existence. This is why I prefer Dadaism, the anti-art: because it reflects the ongoing process of revaluation innate to the human experience. There are no longer any fixed ideas, because we have debunked all of them - and it thus follows that art, if it is going to be a presentation of what exists now, ought to reflect this process of Nietzschean destruktion and revaluation. Dada is thus far the only form of art to come close to recreating in a physical form the transvaluation of values which has been ongoing in Western society since the end of the First World War. This is the essence of the tragedic spirit in art, which is concerned not with law and order and light, but with chaos and change and affirmation in the face of uncertainty. For such an artform to have arisen required a catastrophe of monumental proportions - the First World War, which created in Europe a sort of celebratory atmosphere in the face of apocalyptic destruction.
My critique of the Objectivist aesthetic, of course, relies again on Nietzsche, and it is probably a weakness of mine that I am well-versed in only a few philosophers (Nietzsche, Foucault, Bataille, Derrida, Stirner, Camus, and to a lesser extent Sartre and Schopenhauer). With that out of the way, let me begin.
In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche divides the arts into two general expressions: the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as you probably know. The Apollonian is the expression of illusion - all plastic arts and idealistic artforms are Apollonian, as well as the dream-state. The Dionysian, on the other hand, is purely expressivist, and includes in its ranks music (particularly the chorus) and other forms of arts which, rather than expressing an external idea independent of the artist, instead reveals his inner creative atmosphere. The Apollonian is associated with tranquility and dreams, whereas the Dionysian is passionate and intoxicated. I view Romantic Realism as a surrender to the Apollonian, which regards the ideal and the virtuous as the highest order of expression, rather than a Dionysian movement, which would celebrate man and life precisely as they are.
This is keeping in the general spirit of Nietzsche, who regarded all ideals and "oughts" as little more than abstractions which not only were philosophically unsound (upon what firm, non-subjective foundations do these ideals rest?), but as fundamentally harmful to life.
And as for free will, she does not hold to the radical voluntarism of the existentialists. She identifies the freedom of the will with the "choice" of whether to expend effort in trying to understand or not, or trying to evade understanding or not. She does not hold that we can access the underlying mechanisms of the mind and thus choose anything. She does not hold that choice is separate from the body. She holds that just as entities don't just have attributes, but are the totality of their attributes, men don't have bodies and have minds, but that men are bodies and that minds are attributes of certain types of bodies. Which, again, is something I agree with - this seems to be a repitition of the Nietzschean concept of the physiological type (i.e. the priestly and the aristocratic-knightly types discussed at length in the opening chapters of The Geneaology). Our minds are not only inseperable from our bodies, but in fact are simply one aspect of our bodies. However, one should always beware of concieving of the mind as a static and immutable entity - Freud made the mistake of positing a single, fundamental drive at the center of the psyche, and in doing so did little to help destroy the Enlightenment self-conceptualization of it. Rather, one might instead concieve of it as a multiplicity of drives, each one attempting to gain primacy over the self at the expense of all of the others.
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Our differences are, of course, more aesthetic than anything else. Our only real point of contention is in the area of truth, which I - of course, in keeping with Nietzsche - regard as simply a lingual convention (his famous example of "leaf", which is simply a generalization for individual leaves which are different in form from each other, applies here). To observe truth independent of all subjectivity would require a God's-eye vantage point which simply does not exist in our world.
Many of our differences are the result of bad language. We agree that the world objectively exists independent of our perceptions of it, and that our freedom is limited by our genetics, our psychological constitution, our society, and many other things. In this sense, I am hardly an existentialist; I hold much more with the postmodernists and (especially) the anti-foundationalists. Where we disagree is at the ideal: I reject all ideals as subjective, and consider them to be baseless and harmful to a life of self-affirmation. Further, I tend to downplay the importance of rationality, viewing it as a tool to be used pragmatically in the service of life rather than as something to be valued independently of man. And, of course, I view it as a secondary attribute, not as important as spontaneity and self-esteem. It's odd that we accept so many of the fundamental things and draw radically different conclusions from them.
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