Toward a Moral Life

I discovered Rand’s work just after I left college, which was prior to electricity but after the mass extinctions of the Cretaceous Era. I was quite taken with her philosophical works (particularly her work in aesthetics).

I didn’t discover the real-world situations about her, her first followers, the schism that led to the destruction of the Nathaniel Brandon Institute, and the subsequent schisms that have divided objectivism followers over the years, for quite some time.

And what’s more–I don’t care about them.

I don’t care about what has happened to Nathaniel and Barbara Brandon, Leonard Peikoff, David Kelley, the politics and personalities involved, or who has the “purest” beliefs in objectivism.

I don’t even care about how erroneously Rand sometimes applied her own philosophy to the real world. (How can anyone claim that Beethoven’s compositions reflected a “malevolent world-view”?)

What do I care about?

I care about how easy it is to directly apply objectivism’s tenets to one’s everyday life. I take great delight in the simple, logical, rational way Rand took basic truths and built complex concepts that almost always ring with the silvery peal of truth.

Try applying Kant’s nomenal vs. phenomenal worlds to moral decisions, or Kierkegaard’s religious views into a rational life. You cannot directly apply much that Plato or Augustinian or Hume or Dewey or Nietzsche or Sartre propounded into daily situations. Too many people have nodded dumbly in agreement with philosophical rules and beliefs that make no sense in the real world.

Maybe that makes me the Joe the Plumber of objectivism–I don’t know. What I do know is that my life is much better and richer for having found Rand’s work and (for the most part) having ignored her followers.