Nathaniel Branden on Ayn Rand
Jay McCarthy links to an article by Nathaniel Branden, The Benefits and Hazards of the Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
My own position is that Ayn Rand was a genius. That doesn’t mean she was right about everything. The fact that she had flaws only means that she was human. That does not take away from her genius, it only reminds us that geniuses are human beings. That’s what’s so remarkable about them: they are not Gods but humans. They are humans who are way ahead of their time in their capacity to understand the world we live in.
No human can be a God, the best he/she can aspire to is genius. One cannot be a genius without first being a human being.
I highly recommend that you read the whole article or at least Jay’s more extensive quotes. I only want to address one thing that Branden says:
We must be guided by our conscious mind, Rand insisted; we must not follow our emotions blindly. Following our emotions blindly is undesirable and dangerous: Who can argue with that? Applying the advice to be guided by our mind isn’t always as simple as it sounds. Such counsel does not adequately deal with the possibility that in a particular situation feelings might reflect a more correct assessment of reality than conscious beliefs or, to say the same thing another way, that the subconscious mind might be right while the conscious mind was mistaken. I can think of many occasions in my own life when I refused to listen to my feelings and followed instead my conscious beliefs — which happened to be wrong — with disastrous results. If I had listened to my emotions more carefully, and not been so willing to ignore and repress them, my thinking — and my life — would have advanced far more satisfactorily.
When I read Ayn Rand’s The Art of Fiction I was particularly struck by her discussion of the process of concretizing your abstractions and abstracting your concretes. She said that if you did that properly, your subconscious would do much of the work for you in writing a piece of fiction. She said the result would seem like “intuition” but it was really a rational process being done in the background by your subconscious mind.
When it came to writing her fiction, and she regarded herself as the greatest writer of her time, Rand put her faith in the subconscious mind.
I think this process is similar to what Branden has described above. Our emotions are important information and many of those “gut level” responses have been programmed into us by millions of years of evolution. They are background processing–genetic wisdom. They are to be trusted, but as Branden suggests, not blindly. They are simply more data that we must process along with all the “external” data coming from outside our bodies.
This is all part of being a human being. And one must be a human being before one can be a genius.
Our perceptions of the “outside” world and our inner emotions and processing of the data form our Unique Consciousness of Universal Reality (UCUR.)
Universal reality is not dependent upon our consciousness for its existence, but our unique consciousness is dependent upon our existence for its existence. Universal reality is processed by each individual in his own unique way, his own unique consciousness.
Universal reality–existence–is what we all share, it’s our common ground. Our unique consciousness is our own domain, nobody else can share it. It is our own private universe. It dies when we die. Universal reality lives on.
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