TomMiovas

Sorry for the long delay in replying to this reply, but the thread got rather active and I wanted to do some research on Epictetus, which I found here. I think there is a limit to telling a military man that he ought to do something simply because it is his duty, regardless of what they are taught in war college. Since our military forces are the most advanced military on earth, they need to be taught how to think in a combat situation. Especially as the enemy may be doing things right now in the field that the military advisors are not aware of, making giving moment to moment orders inefficient while engaging in war. We don't need souped up Robocops in the field of war, we need morally intransigent fighters; men and women who are fighting for the right ideals, which means for the right values. If our war college professors are teaching duty apart from moral idealism, then where is the motivation coming from -- simply because the soldier is told to do such and such? This strikes me as very inhuman, which, of course, Kantianism is. And why should they be teaching the military non-motivations of a country -- Germany -- that we defeated anyhow? I can understand studying their tactics for future reference, but turning our own soldiers into goose-stepping non-humans won't give them much to fight for. Regarding Stockdale and Epictetus: I can see where a captured soldier might take solace in the writings of Epictetus; at least to the extent that he said that no one other than oneself has control over one's moral character, regardless of what is done to you by someone else. However, there is a certain defeatism in Epictetus, since he draws no distinction between losing values due to natural disasters versus losing values due to the actions of men. In either case, Epictetus says that we shouldn't desire those things we lost so much, and then we won't be outraged or fall into depression due to the losses. I'm not suggesting that a prisoner of war throw a temper tantrum or anything like that, but since I haven't read Stockdale's book or taken his course, I think it would be wrong to simply accept the capture and ride it out, saying all along to oneself that what one lost -- especially one's freedom -- doesn't really matter that much, or say that it is all simply a test of one's moral rectitude regarding how much punishment one can take. In other words, I don't think a captured American soldier should "Take it like a man" stoically, but rather be more like John Galt: Fight the bastards every way you can with your moral rectitude and make them wish they had never captured you in the first place!

I haven't read this entire thread, so please excuse me if I am not in keeping with the entire context of this discussion, but I think Jack Wakeland brought up some good points. If you are thinking in terms of time scales of twenty or so years and looking for world-wide cultural changes based on that, then I would have to say that your ruler isn't big enough. Philosophic changes take place over hundreds and even thousands of years. And I think we need to thank Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas for the amount of civilization that does still exist. While one can say that Kant rules the intelligentsia, he does not yet rule all the way down to the common man the way Plotinis and Augustine ruled all the way down to the common man leading to the Dark Ages. When Communism took over a large part of the world, it was against factual human nature, and the rational part of the people being suppressed knew this implicitly because of all the misery they suffered under Communism. But Communism wasn't really a philosophic movement, not the way, say, early Catholicism based on Plotinis and Augustine were. In other words, Communism wasn't philosophic enough to take hold all the way down to the common man because it didn't say that what you perceive is not really real, which would be Kant's position. Communism made this-worldly promises that it couldn't fulfill -- i.e. a good life on earth if we all become communist -- but it never fully validated in philosophic terms that one's misery on earth was unimportant because life on this earth is unreal. Plotinis and Augustine did persuade people that life on this earth was unreal, and that the really real reality is run by God, who we can't understand, but must accept on faith, and that the best way to achieve salvation was to overlook one's misery on earth for eternal life with God. Of course, an argument like that can't be answered except philosophically, and by the time Plotinis and Augustine came along the rationality of Aristotle's this-worldly views were not being taken seriously; in fact they had been lost due to neglect. Aristotle and Aquinas are not yet lost to us through neglect, and so they still hold some sway. When that common Communist man said to himself, "What the heck is going on here? The Revolution has come and gone, we won, and yet we are still miserable" he was counting on logic -- i.e. Aristotle -- to back him up for why he was still miserably poor, when he should have been, according to the Communist Manifesto, basking in luxuries. So, it was logic, in effect, that destroyed Communist idealism. There was no counter ideology to confront Plotinis and Augustine -- not philosophically. The people at that time were counting on faith, not logic, because Aristotle was no longer being taught. And they weren't told it was bootleg proletariat logic that they should be counting on; they were told to count on faith. So, to the extent that even the common Communist was wondering why things weren't making any sense, it was due to the influence of Aristotle and Aquinas. Kant simply hasn't had time to wipe them out all the way down. However, before Ayn Rand came along with Objectivism, there was no philosophic answer to Kant, and so he would have won eventually. I don't think he will win, because I don't think the common man takes Kant as seriously as the people after Plotinis and Augustine took them seriously (over a period of hundreds of years). It's been two hundred years since Kant wrote, and yet the idea that what you see in front of you is not real, while bantered about in the face of optical illusions and such, doesn't strike the man on the street as being correct, say, when they drive to work and do the work of the day, thanks to Aristotle and Aquinas. That's not enough to save them in the long-run, but, as we have seen with the collapse of Communism, there is still some life-on-earth is relevant in their thinking. It might seem a little unfair to say it, since Aristotle didn't know about Kant; but Aristotle didn't provide a complete answer -- Ayn Rand did. It's just a question of whether or not people will accept it all the way down -- and we don't have the answer to that one, yet. To answer the question posed as the title of this thread. Is it WWIII, like Newt Gingrich suggests? It's a far bigger war than he can conceive of. And unfortunately I can say that about anyone running for political office as the President of the United States.

Warning: Some spoilers follow. I need to clarify this statement. My shudder was not one of enjoyment, but rather of revulsion precisely because the guy had been a doctor in real life. The laying on of hands is such a primitive form of folksy "healing" that I nearly lost all interest in the movie. Maybe if someone had some sort of psychosomatic illness he could be "cured" by a sympathetic touch; but I doubt it could be this simple, despite those fantastic scenes at some church gatherings. The fact that she was actually cut up and nearly dead, yet her wounds were healed by a touch, took the movie too far into the unbelievable, except symbolically. However, my interest peaked when the beast was dumb struck by a steady glance, because evil is impotent and looking it squarely in the eye can defeat it. I would have preferred for the beast to have just withered and died in the face of that courage, but then there would not have been a role for those tree-dwellers of the fable to play. And, philosophically, I'm against the idea that mankind can only be saved by something other than man's own knowledge. I mean, in reality, do we really need water-dwelling people to save us? Not if we retain reason and reality. So, I think this movie is similar to The Matrix: Taken literally, it is anti-man; taken symbolically, it gave me a boost.

Warning: Some spoilers follow. I do not want to overly praise Lady in the Water, but I think some of the issues brought up by Jay P need to be answered. I agree with this, even though I shuddered when the doctor healed the girl by simply laying his hands on her. Again, this is very anti-conceptual, but it needs to be taken as symbolic that the doctor began healing once again. With that said, I wish someone with the story-telling abilities of Shyamalan would come along and do some real romantic realism that I could enjoy at the movies. I'm not against fantasies, and I have written a few of my own, but one cannot fully concretize an abstraction via fantasy because it requires contradicting reality to some degree. However, it can be a way of expressing something that one may not have fully grasped conceptually and on explicit terms.

Lady In The Water, the new movie by M. Night Shyamalan, is not your typical movie where the characters are cast from ready-made schemes that have been done so many times that one can predict what is going to happen as soon as the first fifteen minutes have been viewed -- and you don't want to miss those first fifteen minutes of this movie nor Shyamalan's answer to his movie critics. One has to keep in mind that this movie is not romantic realism nor is it naturalism, and it's not intended to be either, so it has to be judged by different standards. Lady in the Water is a fable, a type of fantasy, in which things happen that cannot occur in real life. While this is a philosophic drawback to this movie (and other M. Night Shyamalan movies) and while I would love to see movies whereby everything was real or could really happen, one should ask oneself: Did the movie concretize the abstraction? Did M. Night Shyamalan make the fable seem real? He most certainly did. And for that I have to congratulate him. Certain things were occurring in the movie that made me wonder if anything significant was going to happen. A guy who used to be a doctor finds a girl who is quite evidently in a state of shock with a big gash on her leg in plain view, and yet he doesn't do anything about it. A kooky guy only exercises his right arm to the point where it is three times as large as his left arm. A very dead pan guy moves in and he's is going to review movies, with no spark of life in his features or in his voice. A group of girls are scared silly by a bug. A big dog is running loose. An older woman who can't speak English is frustrated with her daughter who keeps asking her about a bedtime story. A guy is writing a book -- well, sometimes. And the other characters living in that apartment complex are about as exciting. I mean, so far, this could be taking place just about anywhere. Who cares? But this story takes these lose threads and weaves them into a tapestry. I think it is unfortunate that the tapestry is a fantasy, or rather that the story is based on a fantasy. However, the movie does concretize certain real abstractions in that fantasy: the psycho-epistemological need of art, the importance of discovering one's hidden talents, curiosity, overcoming lethargy, perseverance, and courage. So I definitely recommend seeing the movie.

At our local OPAR study group meeting we discussed the role of definitions, tying concepts to existence, and floating abstractions. I will probably write a longer article on this later this week, but one thing I'd like to point out about floating abstractions is that they tend to make the ideas mean anything to anybody because it isn't tied to objective reality. By tying our concepts to that which we perceive we are grounding our concepts in the facts of existence. One useful way of tying ideas to existence is by following the chain of abstractions both up and down the conceptual hierarchy, which means either starting with the facts and working our way up to the higher-level abstractions (induction) or starting our way down the from the higher-level abstracts to their roots in that which is perceived. One useful way of grounding our ideas to existence is by means of art that concretizes the higher-level abstractions. One example of a floating abstractions was the way most people hold the concept "virtue" in their minds -- like "being nice to others" or "doing the right thing." Notice that these attempts at grounding the concept of "virtue" doesn't get one very far, and so virtue to these people remains tentative at best. There is a tie-in of this type of thinking with many religious outcries against idolatry (i.e. the Muslim riots), for it is idolatry (the artistic concretization of an ideal) that makes it possible for the human mind to grasp what that idea is first-hand by means of the senses. Without this, the proposed ideal can mean anything to anybody, because no one will be able to point to some aspect of existence and say: "THIS is what I mean when I say virtue." And one consequence of having floating abstractions is that the person claiming to hold the virtue firmly in his mind actually become concrete-bound -- i.e. he can point to a list of Do's and Don'ts, and maybe some specific incidences of the virtue as they have been presented in a historic document, but he won't be able to apply these consistently and will feel frustrated in not being able to convey what he thinks a virtue is (either to himself or to others). When one has subjugated one's mind to the concrete example (instead of an idea) and retains the idea as a floating abstraction, he will necessarily feel fearful that he is not applying the virtue (or more generally the idea) correctly; and will thus feel irritable when he is confronted by situations that requires a specific virtuous response. Thus we see fundamentalist Muslims having riots and Western leaders mostly trying not to offend them further. In this case, both the religionist and the non-objective leaders (who tend to be religious themselves) feel uncertain in their stance, though the rioters will grow more violently assertive because they are not given an intellectual backlash they deserve -- i.e. condemnation for ruining their minds and attempting to take others down that path with them. This is a very similar situation to how Ayn Rand analyzed the riots of the 1960's, whose hippy rioters similarly had both floating abstractions and were thus concrete bound. See "The Anti-Industrial Revolution."

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I wouldn't refer to the main characters of Enemy of the State or The Man Who Knew too Much as anti-heroes. They were actually very heroic, even though they didn't intend to be that way. To use an Aristotelian phrase, they didn't start off doing those things "for the sake of" breaking up an espionage ring, but they did eventually do just that. In other words, they were ordinary Americans caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Unlike, say, Matt Helm or James Bond, they didn't make it their life's work to go after the bad guys, but once their lives or loved ones were threatened, they took the appropriate action. This is the American sense of life writ large -- the desire not to be pushed around; and the desire not to be told what to do. They simply wanted to live their lives without interference by others, and when they found their lives being interfered with in a big way, they responded in kind -- and gave the bad guys a run for their money, and eventually destroyed them. Similar motivations can be found on the more positive side -- i.e. not fighting against an enemy, but by being extraordinarily productive -- in movies like Gung Ho and others like it where the company they work for is about to go under, but they put their minds to use in a productive manner and save the day and their jobs. These individuals didn't go to work in the morning "for the sake of" saving their company, but decide to do so when the circumstances demand it.

I think you may have missed my point about the possibility of someone being a hero even if, in a sense, he is not the protagonist of the story. What I'm thinking of is something along the lines of the movies Enemy of the State or The Man Who Knew Too Much (or other Alfred Hitchcock movies), where the central character is certainly not the one to initiate the story -- he's just minding his own business and gets caught up in something that he doesn't know where it began or how to end it. However, over time he does begin to figure it out (often with the help of people who know more of what is going on -- especially how it all began and how the central character got involved). So, in this kind of case, the central character does not begin in the story as a protagonist, but he does become one -- and he is usually the one to put all the pieces together leading to a climax of the struggle and a resolution, which are key elements of a good plot. The better stories, however, are the ones where the central character is after something from the beginning of the story -- although it may just be a longing that he or she seeks to fulfill. And I agree that a protagonist can be either a moral character or an immoral character (based on the standards of the story writer).

I think I agree with your defining characteristics of an anti-hero; though I'm not sure why the mystic in Atlas Shrugged wasn't an anti-hero, except insofar as she wasn't the main character of the story. But I haven't read Crime and Punishment. I have it and have tried to read it a few times, but it doesn't keep my interest; since I prefer reading books that have real heroes. So, I can't say if Raskolnikov fits the definition or not. Movies are a bit easier to take if they are not centered around a hero, and I have seen Easy Rider, though it's been a while. As I've said before, it is possible for a central character to be a hero even if he isn't positively pursuing a defining value of his actions throughout the story. A drifter acting on the range of the moment is not pursuing a value -- maybe the psuedo-value of having nothing to tie him down, so to speak (i.e. a warped sense of freedom -- freedom from having to be anything specific -- almost freedom from life), but this is not what rational individuals consider to be a value. What is interesting in this context regarding Atlas Shrugged are two characters: the bum on the train (a physical drifter) and the wet nurse (an intellectual drifter). Notice that Miss Rand thought that even these types were salvageable: Dagny gives the bum a job, which he accepts; and the wet nurse does eventually try to defend Hank Rearden. Keep this in mind the next time you hear someone say that Ayn Rand was "cold hearted." Ayn Rand and Aristotle wanted people to excel, which is one reason they championed romanticism -- or things as they might be and ought to be.

I think you are correct, James Taggart did go through an effort to actually block and to confiscate the achievement of those better than him; making him a villain who used either force or fraud, instead of an anti-hero. Since Mr. Cox's character was a petty thief, I guess the same can be said of him. Probably the closest Miss Rand came to creating anti-heroes was the town of Starnesville, which was full of people who never did much of anything and were complaining about their lack of achievement. The woman who was a mystic is one actual character, while the others like her are implicit. There may be other characters who were explicitly anti-heroes, but I can't remember them. But what is the point of making such characters, except to show what happens when one is not rational -- i.e. not integrated to reality? And while this is an important message to get across, I don't think it would be valuable to read unless it is done in the manner of Dostoevsky, who did a ruthless dissection of evil. Still, a ruthless dissection of a non-being? Why bother?

This prevailing attitude among academicians is one reason I started a thread on the Forum regarding Epistemology and Hierarchy. It is a vile and evil attitude that didn't begin with Kant, but he was the first philosopher to take it as far as it could be taken. If one doesn't perceive existence, then all appeals to facts and reason are out -- and you should assume this is the attitude of your professor, since he has come right out and said so himself. However, don't despair, you have a whole semester to enjoy this class! And I will tell you how you can do this. You are going to have to be subtle, and keep in mind that you are not trying to convert your professor. Put on your best "poker face" and gradually put him on the spot in class. The next time he points to the chalk board and says "Look at this" ask him how you are supposed to know if he is really pointing to the board or doing flips? After all, you don't perceive existence, correct? Be careful not to laugh when he hesitates, because though he explicitly rejects the evidence of the senses, he is implicitly expecting you to go by the evidence of your senses when he gives a class assignment and expects you to read the material, correct? Be sure to keep up with the reading material, however, so that if he asks you a question about what so and so said, you can answer it. And be sure to regurgitate what he thinks is important on the tests. And if he asks you why you are doing this, just tell him that you are following in the footsteps of philosophy students; for it is said that when Plato defined the concept of "man" as a "featherless biped" some of Aristotles students plucked a chicken, threw it into Plato's class, and said "Here's another student for you!" Just in case some of you think that I'm not being serious, I am. This is real advise when one is being confronted with brazen irrationality. I've done it myself in many philosophy classes, and it works. After a while, the professor becomes hesitant to point to anything, which is just what he deserves because that's the state of mind he wants you to fall into. Oh, and if he is honest and is merely presenting material that he disagrees with (which sometimes happens when one has to teach classes even at universities), then he will get the joke and will be appreciative of it.

This validates my suspicions. Why in the world would anyone think that writing what amounts to literary gibberish think that they are "completing" anything at all -- let alone Miss Rand's work? Besides, if someone wanted to present such a non-inspiring non-story, all one would have to do is to show some of the movies that came out in the 70's. Not only did he not complete a legitimate and rational theory, he spews contempt at heroism! "Things as they might be and ought to be" means that the central character of the story must be trying to accomplish something because man has volition and his values are not achieved without rational effort -- which means the story needs a plot. But even stories which don't contain a plot can have heroes, witness Calumet K (Miss Rand said this was her favorite story because it showed an efficacious man) and Anthem (which definitely contains a hero, even though he wasn't trying to accomplish anything specific for the length of the story). So, even if a character only reacts rationally to events that are happening around him, there may not be a plot, but he can still be heroic. Why go through the effort to create an anti-hero who is not even a capable villain? Did the author attempt to explain this? Actually, just before I submitted this post I realized that Miss Rand did have such a character in Atlas Shrugged -- his name was James Taggart, who never did anything to achieve anything and who spat at John Galt to his own demise by the end of that story. So, even an anti-hero can have his place in a long story that can support a very wide range of characters to fully concretize the theme. The theme of Atlas Shrugged was the meaning of man's mind -- and James Taggart abdicated his mind, and therefore his life.

A further thought on this issue: Ayn Rand had a lot of characters in her stories who were not morally perfect -- i.e. the villains (Ellsworth Toohey), and those who were of mixed premises (Peter Keating). So she certainly didn't insist that all literary characters be morally perfect. In fact, it is logically necessary to have the full range of characterizations centered around the theme of the story in order to make the abstraction of the theme fully concretized. One does this by creating individual characters depicting the logical variations of the theme. Miss Rand was such a master of this logical creation of characters that she even went so far as to have variations of the theme within the sub-set of heroism. Notice that the various heroes of Atlas Shrugged were variations (or added emphasis) on the theme of the rational virtues: Hank Rearden represented the virtue of productiveness, Francisco D'Anconia represented the virtue of pride, etc.

I haven't read anything by this author, but, based on the above quotes, I have to wonder how familiar he is with Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto; because in that book, she justifies her views of art (and especially of literature) on the volitional nature of man's consciousness rather than on anything that anybody else said about art. In other words, like most everything else Ayn Rand wrote about, she came to her conclusions about art inductively. She did give a lot of credit to Aristotle regarding literature, but the author, himself, seems to show that Aristotle did have an understanding of literature that was very similar to Ayn Rand's. It's been a while, but I have read Aristotle's Poetics and I thought the general ideas were pretty much in accord with Miss Rand's regarding literature. But what troubles me most about the quotes from the author is him saying "One of the most important, and most troublesome, elements of Rand's theory of literature is her insistence on morally idealized characters." And I think his views regarding the relationship between Aristotle and Miss Rand is more of a rationalization than a reason for not trusting her understanding or misunderstanding of Aristotle. Just based on that one sentence, he seems to be a person who is against heroism. It takes a tremendously virtuous and courageous writer to come up with a morally idealized character, because one is then putting one's own understanding of morality "on the line," so to speak, for the whole world to see -- while realizing that the reader will either accept or reject the author's view of heroism (regardless of whether or not those heroes are ultimately successful). In short, I'd be leery of what an author who finds morally idealized characters troublesome might be smuggling in about literature and heroism.