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When the Harvard Objectivist Club brought the Ayn Rand series to campus last semester, we knew we would encounter disagreement. Realizing that new ideas, especially radical ones, are always a hard sell at first, we even anticipated a certain degree of hostility. We certainly did not expect to see in The Crimson an attack like Chris H. Kwak's "Critique of Pure Nonsense" (January 30). Kwak's fact-free, sarcasm-laced rant would not normally warrant a response, but given that it and a similar diatribe printed December 17 seem to represent the only kind of coverage The Crimson...
Some may be surprised to hear this, but Objectivists knows full well that Ayn Rand did not originate the concepts of reason, egoism or laissez-faire capitalism. They also know full well that she was the first philosopher to integrate these concepts into a wholly consistent system of thought, one which is increasingly breaking through the decades-old wall of silence desperately maintained by Establishment philosophers. Witness the existence of the Ayn Rand Society of the American Philosophical Association, or the more than 1,000 professional philosophers who requested complimentary copies of Miss Rand's most technical philosophical work...
First, objectivism has as many adherents as it does because Rand's fiction (We the Living, Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) continues to influence high-school and college students, most of whom I suspect have had only a superficial exposure to philosophy. This privileges them to conclude rather wrongly that Ayn Rand is an original and deep thinker. Second, her books are accessible to the lay-reader while Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are not. Third, objectivism is sexy because it has appropriated the term "selfishness" to mean everything heroic...
...already labeled yourself an objectivist, acid might be the next thing you'd like to trip on. You're beyond help. But if you're one of the many who's read a work or two by Ayn Rand and is intrigued by her "philosophy," should you spot a poster for an objectivist lecture and choose to attend, please go with a critical mind and a modicum of skepticism because the "lecture" part of their advertisements is a misnomer. Objectivist speakers do not teach; they indoctrinate and propagandize. If you're not careful, you just may be tricked into handing...
...Cult of Moral Grayness," Rand deconstructs the logic of those who assert life is more gray than black and white: "If there is no black and white, there can be no gray--since gray is merely a mixture of the two." How perfectly poetic! How superbly simplistic! (Rand must have been exempt from Lit. & Arts A.) Try mixing yellow, blue and red, my dear...