[MD] Alternatives to the scientific method

[ian glendinning]

Craig, Platt,

Yes, I get that point Craig, the philosophic novel is not a new
concept to me - but sometimes I feel I have to exaggerate to get Platt
to notice a point ;-) Sorry.

A million words, a few thousand, a few hundred, whatever. Some of her
work is more formal - the edition of Atlas Shrugged I read actually
had an appendix with a sizeable explicit summary of her philosophy,
and web-links to other sources, and I've read her West-Point address
and others. It was Atlas Shrugged that Platt claimed included
important messages for me. I'm still waiting.

She says - Freedom is good - imposition of control is bad - and take
personal responsibilty for your own philosophy of life. To which you
have now added Craig "ideas have consequences, that having a
particular philosophy/morality makes a difference in how one acts, in
what kind of life one leads" but that just expands what I meant by my
Socratic "take responsibility" summary - So what do I have against
Rand ? She's just stating the easy bits. She fails to address 99% of
reality - the hard bits.

She says nothing (that I could see) about the values of imposition
where freedoms come into conflict with reality. Unlike Pirsig, she
grossly oversimplifies and dangerously mis-represents how "freedom"
works in reality. A kind of "cartoon" of freedom which only means
anything in comparison to the totalitarian cartoon of socialism she
left behind. Her "institutional" characters are all corrupt, her
"free-market" characters are all "noble". Cheap cartoon rhetoric. Good
guys vs bad guys. Oh look the good guys are the ones in
white-Teflon-coated shining armour with the green light-sabres ;-) In
fiction only.

What does she say about values, where the freedoms and morals of
different interests conflict ? (That's not a rhetorical question.)

Ian
PS you'll have to explain the altruist / cruelty remark ?

On 8/14/07, craigerb at comcast.net <craigerb at comcast.net> wrote:
> [ian]
> > Did it need a million words and a dozen books to express [Rand's point in her writings]?
>
>
> Ian.
> You're missing the point.  Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead, etc. are novels.  Rand could have (& did in her non-fiction) made her point more sustinctly.  But she wanted to reach an audience that would read a (philosophic) novel (however long) but not a philosophic treatise (however short).  She, like Pirsig, embedded her point in a story/stories.  Part of what she wanted to show was that ideas have consequences, that having a particular philosophy/morality makes a difference in how one acts, in what kind of life one leads.  Her characters purposely are shown to act in ways predictable from their, well, character.  In real life, being an altruist doesn't mean being cruel to animals.
> Craig
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