Focusing on the Negative

[Selene]

TANSTAFO.

[caroljane]

TANSTAFO.

OK, I give up, what is TANetc?

[Selene]

TANSTAFO.

OK, I give up, what is TANetc?

It is Phil's concept of a clever take off of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch [TANSTAAFL] which is a great concept developed by Robert A. Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress which is a libertarian manifesto.

But what? I have no clue.

I renew my plea for a suspension of all alphabet statements for the month of April in honor of the release of Atlas Shrugged the movie.

Adam

[kiaer.ts]

IBTWISI

[Jonathan]

There have been many threads and discussions on errors Rand made, most recently not just in her life, but finding literary flaws. These sometimes spring from our 'radar' picking up on things Rand's fervent religious, philosophical, and political enemies have wanted us or the world of ideas to focus on or respond to. They can manage to make these the 'hot' new topics of conversation.

Let's stick with the literary or esthetic area for a moment. Speaking personally, when I have seen or read or experienced a great work, something that has lifted me up, made me see the world freshly, taught me something --- the things I most want to talk about, write about, to re-process, to integrate are the positives.

Your comments make me wonder why Rand didn't appreciate the greatness of Kant's writings on aesthetics, but instead focused on what she believed were his negatives. As I've demonstrated elsewhere on OL (though it turns out that others had beaten me to the observation by a decade), the essence of Rand's art is Kant's notion of Sublimity. With as much as she had in common with Kant's aesthetics, why did she choose to focus on what she (erroneously) interpreted to be the negatives of his aesthetics?

Yet not a lot of the prevalent discussions seem to be on the positives, but on looking for the flaws. (Just to take Atlas Shrugged or the Fountainhead as examples, let's just say flat out that in any massive literary work there obviously will be mistakes in something of that lenght, stretches or characters that don't work, overdoing of x, or under-doing of y.)

I think that part of the problem you're having, Phil, is that you don't seem to like it when Rand's methods of "objective esthetic judgment" are applied to her work.

Can someone explain to me why the exploration of the literary or personal or "formulation" flaws seem so often to have primacy?

I think it's very virtuous for people to want to understand and correct mistakes, including Rand's. Personally, I think that Objectivists who want to sweep Objectivism's doorstep first are doing much more for Objectivism than those who prefer to sweep Objectivism's problems under the rug.

That which needs fixing naturally attracts people's attention more than that which doesn't. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. I think that denying that things need fixing, and smearing the fixers as being obsessed with negativity and with tearing down greatness, is a sign of weakness and vice.

J

[Selene]

IBTWISI

I'll believe it when I see it also.

I think there is one too many "T"'s or one too few "I"'s in your version though.

Adam

[Philip Coates]

> It is Phil's concept of a clever take off of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch [TANSTAAFL] which is a great concept developed by Robert A. Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress which is a libertarian manifesto. But what? I have no clue. [Adam]

I just love to torture you guys....

[long pregnant pause]

[another pause]

Since I was writing about how Objectivism is hard and takes work and doesn't come automatically TANSTAAFO means....

[slight pause]

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Objectivism"

--Signed, JBAS

[Philip Coates]

Whoops I left out one 'A'.

No wonder no one got it.

--Signed, Dummy

[Selene]

Whoops I left out one 'A'.

No wonder no one got it.

--Signed, Dummy

Phil:

There was no torture. I knew that was what the "O" stood for because you are extremely predictable and contextually, it was about 99% that the "O" was going to be Objectivism.

My problem was that knowing that it was Objectivism made absolutely no contextual sense, nor did it flow well, so that is why I thought there might be a 1% chance that you meant something else by the last "O."

Finally, I realized that you left out one (1) of the "A's" which does not make you a dummy, we all do it.

Adam

[kiaer.ts]

IBTWISI

I'll believe it when I see it also.

I think there is one too many "T"'s or one too few "I"'s in your version though.

Adam

I'll Believe That When I See It

[Selene]

IBTWISI

I'll believe it when I see it also.

I think there is one too many "T"'s or one too few "I"'s in your version though.

Adam

I'll Believe That When I See It

Ah...got it.

[caroljane]

TANSTAFO.

OK, I give up, what is TANetc?

It is Phil's concept of a clever take off of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch [TANSTAAFL] which is a great concept developed by Robert A. Heinlein in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress which is a libertarian manifesto.

But what? I have no clue.

I renew my plea for a suspension of all alphabet statements for the month of April in honor of the release of Atlas Shrugged the movie.

Adam

Oh well, I got it when 9th wrote it in Latin, and I figured out LMAO by myself but not much more is processable by my Victorian brain.As an incorrigible enjoyer of free lunches I am just not wired that way.

[Selene]

Carol:

The point of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch [TANSTAAFL] , is that when you go into a bar which advertises a "free lunch," the drinks are always higher, the Juke Box costs more per song...get it?

Adam

asking a socialist to understand this economic principle is like asking a blind woman to understanding Chinese Kaleidoscope

[caroljane]

Carol:

The point of There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch [TANSTAAFL] , is that when you go into a bar which advertises a "free lunch," the drinks are always higher, the Juke Box costs more per song...get it?

Adam

asking a socialist to understand this economic principle is like asking a blind woman to understanding Chinese Kaleidoscope

Wai?wai? free translation with government- guaranteed-round-the-clock service please? Thank you.

[Peter]

Phil wrote:

“There have been many threads and discussions on errors Rand made . . . .”

How about the philosophical side?

Discussing these errors is important. But why is it so important? I notice the occasional fan of Rand observing scornfully when Objectivists are pondering over one of Rand’s formulations as if it were the Torah, The Bible, or some other sacred text. Or the Objectivists seem, to the fans of Rand, to be poring over the tracts of Nostradamus for some clue as to what will happen next.

But in her intro to Atlas Shrugged and elsewhere, she does not declare her philosophy to be infallible. "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."

Reason is our only absolute, not her texts and not her formulations. We should apply the keen reasoning eye of the scientist to her philosophy, for it is contextual. “The same is true of definitions. All definitions are contextual, and a primitive definition does not contradict a more advanced one: the latter merely expands the former.”

On another thread I noted that Rand contradicted herself about how to finance a *just* government that reserves to itself the retaliatory use of force for the sole reason of protecting the individual rights of its citizens.

She wrote, “Consequently, the principle of voluntary government financing regards the government as the servant, not the ruler, of the citizens—as an agent who must be paid for his services, not as a benefactor whose services are gratuitous, who dispenses something for nothing.”

Government is “. . . an agent who must be paid . . .” implies that it is necessary that it be paid upon completion of a contract.

But Rand also wrote:

“In a fully free society, taxation, or to be exact, payment for governmental services—would be voluntary . . . . Since the proper services of a government—the police, the armed forces, the law courts—are demonstrably needed by individual citizens and affect their interests directly, the citizens would (and should) be willing to pay for such services, as they pay for insurance.”

end quote

She is an advocate of voluntary taxation. Those words “would and should pay” are intriguing. What if in Objectivist America a person did not pay their objectively estimated share of taxes for national defense?

So why is Ayn Rand so important? She is the best philosopher there is, after Aristotle, and one of the few modern philosophers worth reading. She is important because there are depths to her writing . . . and she was rarely wrong. Rand gives the reasoning person a rack upon which to hang their thinking cap.

Peter Taylor

[Selene]

So why is Ayn Rand so important? She is the best philosopher there is, after Aristotle, and one of the few modern philosophers worth reading. She is important because there are depths to her writing . . . and she was rarely wrong. Rand gives the reasoning person a rack upon which to hang their thinking cap.

Peter Taylor

Careful which rack you hang that thinking cap on Peter.

This should also be used for folks who refuse to use the quote function, or, who insist on using alphabet words in disregard of my appeal to refuse to use them during the month of April in honor of the release of Atlas Shrugged the movie.

Adam

carefully holding on to his own thinking cap

Edited March 29, 2011 by Selene

[Peter]

The cartoon of "the rack" startled me Adam. Good Show!

why don't I use the quote function? Half the time, the quotes are not sent to my inbox. So I use the link to OL, get the whole message, return to neverland, paste the letter,then increase the font size in the style "comic sans" for easier reading, and that way my eyes take longer to grow tired. As a courtesy to other readers, I leave the retrieved quotes if needed for my letter, with the letter, so that they can read their mail and know the whole story.

Peter Taylor

[Selene]

Wow. I understand that the quotes are not sent to your e-mail in box. Essentially, they are just notifications. So essentially, you use the link in your e-mail to get to the site?

If you do it that way, rather than open the site in a separate window, when you are on OL:

1) you open to new content;

2) decide to respond to a specific post;

then all you have to do is:

3) just hit the reply button and remove what you do not want to respond to and type below the last ".

You could do all of those editing operations right in the reply window in the OL site. Changing the font, etc.

And where is "neverland"? Please do not tell me it the pervert ranch or near where Tinkerbell hovers. Hmmm. come to think of it, they may both be the same place...lol.

Adam