Ayn Rand - Faith vs Reason. Ayn Rand, Objectivism, and Individualism. Ayn Rand is America’s most controversial individualist.
She was a bold woman who produced brilliant works fusing fiction and philosophy. Her best-selling novels, like Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, have sold millions of copies and continue to influence independent thinkers and celebrities the world over, from Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales to Angelina Jolie and Hugh Hefner. 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. — Ayn Rand, Appendix to Atlas Shrugged Rand cut a striking figure, with her long-stemmed cigarette holder and intense gaze.
She penned philosophical non-fiction works of such originality and power that she was credited by a small group of stunned intellectuals as having single-handedly solved an ancient philosophical puzzle. The new philosophy which she founded through her books and essays is called Objectivism. Ayn Rand, Anti-Communism, & the Left. Man is not the best of things in the universe.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, Chapter vii; 3-4 (H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 1926, 1982, p. 342) Ayn Rand (born Alice Rosenbaum) is a fascinating person and an inspiring advocate of freedom but a very mixed blessing philosophically. Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are still best selling introductions to the ideas of personal freedom and of the free market. As literature they may have drawbacks, but they are compelling "reads," which is certainly what Rand would have wanted. Who was Ayn Rand? - a biography, Playboy interview, 1964. PLAYBOY: Miss Rand, your novels and essays, especially your controversial best seller, Atlas Shrugged, present a carefully engineered, internally consistent world view.
They are, in effect, the expression of an all-encompassing philosophical system. What do you seek to accomplish with this new philosophy? RAND: I seek to provide men -- or those who care to think -- with an integrated, consistent and rational view of life. PLAYBOY: What are the basic premises of Objectivism? Where does it begin? RAND: It begins with the axiom that existence exists, which means that an objective reality exists independent of any perceiver or of the perceiver's emotions, feelings, wishes, hopes or fears. PLAYBOY: In Atlas Shrugged your hero, John Galt, declares, "I swear -- by my life and my love of it -- that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. " RAND: Galt's statement is a dramatized summation of the Objectivist ethics. PLAYBOY: You mean original sin?