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A COLLECTION OF AYN RAND’S WRITINGS “TO HERSELF”: ABOUT HER BOOKS AND PHILOSOPHY

Leonard Peikoff’s Foreword to this 1997 states, “Ayn Rand’s ‘Journals’---my name for her notes to herself through the decades----is the bulk of her still unpublished work, arranged chronologically. What remains to be published are two lecture courses on writing, presently being edited, and her old film scripts. The Journals contains most of AR’s notes for her three main novels… and some notes from her final decades… Aside from occasional pieces… the AR material in this book was written for herself, for her own clarity… nor did AR intend to publish it. Obviously, therefore, nothing in the book may be taken as definitive of her ideas… Despite its unedited character, however, the Journals is a treat to read, because it is the raw evidence of AR’s continuous growth … both as a philosopher and as an artist… in regard both to depth and to truth.”

In an early entry, Rand wrote, “Achievement is the aim of life. Life is achievement. The sense of achievement---breaking through obstacles… Achievement---give yourself an aim, something you WANT to do, then go after it, breaking through everything, with nothing in mind but you aim, all will, all concentration---and GET IT.” (Pg. 8)

In an early philosophic journal she began at age 29, she wrote, “I believe… that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from everyday life… I hold religion mainly responsible for this. I want to prove that religion breaks a character before it’s formed, in childhood, by teaching a child lies before he knows what a lie is, by breaking him of the habit of thinking before he has begun to think, by making him a hypocrite before he knows any other possible attitude toward life… Faith is the worst curse of mankind; it is the exact antithesis an enemy of thought… I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.” (Pg. 66-68)

In 1943, she wrote, “Altruism is spiritual cannibalism. If it is so wrong to eat another man’s body---why is it right to feed upon his soul for one’s survival? The man who wishes to live for others is merely confirming his inferiority. The infallible test of a man’s value is the degree of his indignation against the idea of compulsion and against the idea of being like others, of being unoriginal…Man is NOT his brother’s keeper… The altruist’s inevitable concern with the inferior---its reasons and results.” (Pg. 245)

In 1945, she wrote, “Not on altruism: in private and voluntary instances of help to another person (and this is only KINDNESS, not ALTRUISM) it works well ONLY when the recipient of help is a worthwhile person… who is temporarily in need, purely through accident, not through his own nature. Such a person eventually gets back on his own feet and feels benevolence (or gratitude) toward the one who helped him. But when the recipient is essentially a ‘passive’ person, chronically in need through his own nature, the help of another gets him deeper into parasitism and has vicious results: he hates the benefactor. Therefore, here’s the paradox about ‘helping another’: one can only help those who don’t actually need it.” (Pg. 270-271)

She states, “Regarding the golden rule:… This is used in support of altruism. In that way, it would imply that you must give out to charity because you want to be an object of charity yourself. Or---you must sacrifice yourself to others because you want them to sacrifice themselves to you. Actually, the golden rule can work ONLY in application to MY morality: you do not sacrifice yourself to others and you do not wish them to sacrifice themselves to you…. You DO NOT WISH to live as an object of charity---and you do not hand charity out to others.” (Pg. 277)

In 1946, she argues, “There is no anonymous achievement. There is no collective creation. No step was taken anywhere… by a group of men working in unison under the guidance of a majority vote. Every step in the development of a great discovery bears the name of its originator. Behind the most complex of modern inventions… There was no collective achievement involved. There never has been. There never will be. There never can be. There is no collective brain.” (Pg. 310)

Of the atomic bomb project in WWII, she comments, “Now we come to the part played by the government. What was the most significant thing about it? The fact that the government did not attempt to run the bomb project. The government and the Army took orders from the scientists---not vice versa. The government provided the means---and let the scientists do the work as they wished… The part played by the government in the bomb project is not the part people advocate when they speak of government control. A government project is RUN by the government. A private industry controlled by government takes ORDERS from the government. This is the exact opposite of what happened on the bomb project.” (Pg. 323-324)

She asserts, “Men’s intellectual capacities have always been so unequal that to the thinkers the majority of their brothers have probably always seemed subhuman… We may still be in evolution, as a species, and living side by side with some ‘missing links’… We do not know to what extent the majority of man are no rational… But we do know that mankind as a whole and each man as an individual has a CHANCE to survive and succeed only to the degree of their general and individual intelligence.” (Pg. 466-467)

In 1946, she explains, “the idea of writing a philosophical non-fiction book bored me; in such a book, the purpose would actually be to teach others, to present my ideas to THEM. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, and to the extent that they can.” (Pg. 479)

In 1953, she argues, “When we say that nobody actually believes in God, it is true, if by ‘belief’ we mean the equivalent of a rational conviction. But the … psychological ‘gimmick,’ of mystics is the fact that they do not ‘BELIEVE’ in reality, either… No, they do not ‘believe’ in God in the same way as they ‘believe’ in food, money or their material existence---but their material existence has no full reality for them, either---and THAT is some special state of consciousness, that is the root of the faking, the pretense, the going through an act, the unreality which I sense about most people and which I hate more than anything else, that is the form of their Death Premise, as if they do not merely wish to destroy existence, but have never even permitted existence to exist.” (Pg. 652)

In 1958, she wrote, “The real crux of this issue is that philosophy is primarily epistemology---the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge. Epistemology is the base of all other sciences and one necessary for man because man is a being of volitional consciousness---a being who has to discover, not only the content of his knowledge, but also the means by which he is to acquire knowledge…. ‘Existence exists’ (or identity plus causality) is all there is to metaphysics. All the rest is epistemology.” (Pg. 699)

This book will be of keen interest to those studying Ayn Rand and Objectivism.

So far I'm just reading the Atlas Shrugged section, since that is the novel I've most recently finished. This book is a collection of her working notebooks for her novels. If you'd like to see how one author determined her themes and then hashed out her stories to fit them, this is a fun read.

Writers Reference Book. This an awesome book for Ayn Rand fans and anyone aspiring to become a writer. It's a great reference guide with first hand notes of a great American writers.

The Journals of Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand (1999)

Thought behind fiction and philosophical writings.

I am falling deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole....