Atlas Shrugged Turns 50!

Has it really been 15 years since I first picked up Atlas Shrugged? I know it's been 15 years because I have the 35th Anniversary Edition of the work. It has been quite a 15 years for me. In recognition of this anniversary, I think I will continue the longstanding tradition of telling how I discovered Ayn Rand and how she influenced me.

In college I was majoring in recombinant gene technology and minoring in chemistry. One Spring semester I wanted to take a New Testament class with a particular, highly recommended Professor, Dr. Joseph Trafton. But his class was full that semester, so I signed up for another class that would fulfill the requirements I needed: Intro. to Philosophy with Dr. Ronald Nash. It turns out that Dr. Nash was a Christian libertarian philosopher, so in his class we read his book "Poverty and Wealth: A Christian Defense of Capitalism." I was only tangentially interested in the rest of the philosophy in the class (mostly Plato), but the economics fascinated me. I went to the university library and began reading everything I could find with the word "capitalism" in the title, and I read without caring who the authors were. However, I have a habit, when I read, of noting who the authors quote, and then using that to find other things to read. I found it curious that in one of the works I was reading, there was constant reference to a novel. Why would a work on economics talk about a novel? It must be quite some novel, I thought. And so I went out and found that novel, and read Atlas Shrugged.

I later figured out that the book that was recommending Atlas Shrugged was none other than Ayn Rand's book "Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal." But that didn't matter. I was hooked by Atlas Shrugged at the age of 21. As a consequence, I went out and read everything by her I could get my hands on. She provided a clarity of vision, of ideas, of the world I had never seen before. She loved Aristotle, so I read Aristotle. She loved Spinoza, so I read Spinoza. She hated Plato, so I read Plato. She hated Kant, so I read Kant. She loved, then hated Nietzsche, so I read Nietzsche.

And then I read Nietzsche. The philosopher who drove me into the abyss and helped me back out of it. The philosopher who transformed me utterly from being a scientist to being an artist-philosopher. It was after reading Nietzsche that I dropped out of my Master's program in molecular biology to become a fiction writer, meaning I went to the University of Southern Mississippi to get my M.A. in English (where I was exposed to the postmodernists), and then went to the University of Texas at Dallas to get my Ph.D. in the Humanities, where I discovered, through Alexander Argyros and Frederick Turner, what lay beyond postmodernism. But I never lost touch with Nietzsche -- I in fact took several philolosophy classes at UTD on Nietzsche -- who I came to realize was the philosopher who showed the way beyond postmodernism even before the postmoderns came along (and misused and misunderstood him). I came to realize too how deeply Aristotlean Nietzsche was, partcuilarly in his ethics. He railed against the mutually exclusive "good and evil" to make way for the complementaries "good and bad." He purposefully erected severe oppositions as counterpoints to the weaknesses he saw in society, hoping to correct those weaknesses by dragging people back toward the middle way (he would have been severely disappointed at the way those extremes have been taken, and taken out of context, by Nazis and postmodernists). I suspect Ayn Rand detected this strong Aristotleanism running through Nietzsche's work, but since Nietzsche masked it well, and since Rand was an absolutist and did not believe people changed their ideas, as Nietzsche clearly did over his lifetime, she became disillusioned with him. She is, of course, neither the first nor the last philosopher to have partial blinders on in regards to another thinker.

So in short, I have a M.A. in English and a Ph.D. in the Humanities because of Ayn Rand. Well, truth be told, it's because of Ronald Nash, whom I took the last semester he taught at WKU only because the class I wanted was full. A philosophy of economics book took me from molecular biology to economics to literature to philosophy to the interdisciplinary studies of the humanities, where I used all of these to write my dissertation (which, btw, I am posting on one of my other blogspot blogs: Evolutionary Aesthetics). But Ayn Rand was a huge part of this development. It was because of her that I became a fiction writer (beginning with really bad political fiction, but evolving toward much better stories and even poetry -- good political fiction is hard to write if you're not an Ayn Rand).

I have come to realize too, in my reading, that Ayn Rand could, and perhaps should, be classified as an Existientialist (if we're going to throw Heidegger, Camus, et al into the mix with Sartre). Why would I do such a thing? We can start with her statement that "Existence exists," one of the most existentialist statements I have ever come across. And we can look too toward her agreement with the existentialists that humans don't have any instincts and that we are born as blank slates, without an essence. If it is agreed that she cold be classified as an existentialist, then we can see that existentialism is compatible with capitalism, fascism, and communism. Perhaps, too, this existentialism is why some are uncomfrotable with what they see as totalitarian streak in Rand and in her sexual libertarianism (similar to Sartre's). Even her certain eschewal of being put in with the existentialists, of insisiting that her philosophy is hers alone, would make her one of them. Not to mention the atheism.

I do agree with Ayn Rand that Objectivism is her philosophy, and hers alone. Yet, her thoughts undoubtedly make up one of the foundation stones of my own world view. There she joins the likes of Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Lao Tzu, Epicurus, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Freiderick von Hayek, Walter Williams, Steven Piinker, Edward O. Wilson, Alexander Argyros, Frederick Turner, J. T. Fraser, Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, Fans de Waal, Richard Wolin, Ilya Prigogine, and innumerable novelists and poets. She's a strong part of my DNA, and I will be forever grateful for all she has done for me.