"Ayn Rand's Image of the Virtuous Egoist" by Tara Smith

[@teamkimba]

This was great! I wish she had even more. I have two of her books.

[@samscherer9291]

Wow. I am amazed at how clear Tara Smith is every time I listen to her speak. If I was new to objectivism I’d have been very intrigued. Hopefully these students were 😁

[@ju2067]

100% agree. I wish she did more work in some of the other areas of Objectivism.

[@ryam4632]

A good inductive lecture

[@nickrosado7900]

Very cool 💡 Is the Q&A available anywhere ?

[@drstrangelove09]

Mother Teresa did not help people. See Christopher Hitchens' book and comments.

[@brickwitheyes1710]

So she described what egoism isn't but never really said what it was, funny because Rand called it objective. It also seems Rands philosophy can fail to infinite calculations. Also she didn't represent it the way Rand did with her characters in her novel. Seems more of a Rand apologist

[@mikeg2482]

Hello Reid. If you have an interest in hearing another viewpoint, I'll offer you just a few brief reflections which may apply to your statements in a helpful way. If you watch 60 seconds of the video from approx 6:30 to 7:30 I think that you will hear Smith summarizing how Rand was defining egoism. When you mention infinite calculations, if I am interpreting your meaning correctly Smith nicely addresses important aspects of this question in her mentioned book from pages 221 through 246. Book title is . . . Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics written by Tara Smith. She provides a good explanation, and I gained important clarity for myself as a result of how Smith addressed this question. Rand repeatedly expressed that her own first priority was to be a novelist, not a philosopher. Her primary aim was to create a type of character that would demonstrate and emphasize her image of an ideal man. She wanted to use storytelling to characterize the types of dynamics, environmental challenges, and required personal traits that would likely be present while an ideal man made the necessary choices and efforts to go about living their own life as a normal person without moral compromise. My recall is that Rand's non-fiction books were written after her fiction books. I recall that Rand found all prior historical efforts at philosophical teaching to be noticeably inadequate, or self-contradictory, or irrationally mystical, or irrelevant to any person who wished to be living this life on Earth. She found prior philosophers to be negligent in important ways with how they refused to integrate their own philosophical elements to ensure no self-conflicts. She therefore realized that she must generate a fresh philosophical framework that allows for and celebrates man as a heroic being and an unpretentious being who rightfully builds and earns a normal moral life and enjoys living while he is alive. The prior philosophies seemed to openly not allow for nor encourage man to think of himself as having a nature which ought to be celebrated and enjoyed. My understanding is that as a result of her fiction books generating such an enormously positive impression on people mostly through word of mouth, she then later made more organized efforts to present her integrated practical philosophical viewpoints in her later non-fiction books. Fountainhead took 7 years to write, and Atlas Shrugged took 12 years to write, and the two books together add up to something like 2,000 pages, and I think that she achieved what she wanted to achieve in fiction through that enormous sustained effort. While she was writing her novels, she created Objectivist philosophy for herself, and in order to serve as a kind of necessary personal tool that would enable her to write her fiction books properly. I am unclear about what you mean when you say Rand apologist, but I'm happy to talk with you about this comment if you're willing to clarify what you mean. Cheers, Mike.