Aristotle, Plato, and Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged - The Metaphsycial Divide

It is useful to point out that Atlas Shrugged is written in three "parts." The first is called "non-contradiction," the second, "either or", the third "a is a." These three titles are a reference and an homage to the three great sections of Aristotle's metaphysics. In these titles, Ayn Rand is taking a "stand" on the side of Aristotle in the classic philosophical battle between Plato and Aristotle which I will outline here.

Aristotle is the father of most of the "sciences" that we work in today, including botany, zoology, meteorology, and others, and his work on epistemology, ethics, and politics are seminal in western philosophy.

Aristotle wrote as a contemporary of Plato, back in the fourth century B.C. However, whereas Plato suggested that the world of our senses (physical reality) is only a "shadow" of another/ideal world which is "really real," Aristotle said that the world we experience through our senses is the "real" world. Further, he suggested that we gain knowledge about the world by studying it as clearly and directly as possible, not through some type of mystical revelation open only to the spiritual elite.

While Aristotle's ideas provided a foundation for a more scientific approach to reality, the mystical elements of Plato made him very attractive to the mythical believers of various religious cults. With the rise of Christianity, the platonic worldview took dominance, and the works of Aristotle were repudiated, destroyed, and lost, plunging us into what is typically referred to as the Dark Ages. Fortunately, 30 of Aristotle's reported 150 treatises were preserved by the Arabs, and eventually brought back to Europe through trade and conquest, leading to the European Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries. As Aristotle was rediscovered, and integrated into educated worldview, Europe began to come out of the dark ages and began a new philosophical era of science.

This "battle" between Plato and Aristotle, between sensory reality as a shadow, versus sensory reality as "reality," was well understood in the times of the Renaissance. The great painter Raphael depicted this in a world famous painting "The School Of Athens" which I show below. In it, the two great masters of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle are surrounded by various onlookers. Plato is pointing up towards the heavens, while Aristotle has his hands pointed down towards the earth.


When it comes to science, the Aristotelian worldview has won the battle. When it comes to morality, politics, aesthetics, and the "humanities" (including most of philosophy), the platonic worldview is still very much all the rage. Ayn Rand repudiated the philosophy of Plato, and understood herself to be reviving and clarifying the works Aristotle. She worked to extend this "objective reality-based" worldview into these additional realms. She argued that it is for us, their legacy, to complete the work they started, and extended onward and upward into a new set of possibilities for human society, and human... being.

To this end, Atlas Shrugged is her great gift to us, her legacy, as we use her clarity and insight as a foundation on which to build yet higher.

These three ideas, non-contradiction, either or, and they is a, become the themes and the liet motifs that recur constantly throughout the book. In many ways, Atlas shrugged is a Symphony by Ayn Rand using these themes as its central melodies. However, Ayn Rand goes far beyond Aristotle in this work. Hence, other than pointing out the names of the parts of the book, it's time to get into SHE has to say...

Ecce Homo - Behold the Man-Made! Beauty Is In the Eye Of The Beholder - Ecce Homo

When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I was a wannabe hippie. Fresh out of college, I was a socialist, anti-industrialist, postmodernist, vegetarian who thought that human society was the pawn of advertising and big business. If there was an equation in my head, it was:

"natural = good. Human made = bad."

The irony of that thought being essentially a human creation never occurred to me, let alone how utterly ridiculous my self-righteous proclamations to this effect must have sounded out of my 22 year-old know-it-all mouth.

I had been taught, and had bought the "humanity as cancer" attitude that all the "enlightened" people I knew spewed or pretended to believe. Not that there is zero truth to these ideas, but I had ingested the overly-simplistic "everyone who disagrees is bourgeois/ignorant" version of the story.

In this sense, reading Atlas Shrugged had a profound effect on my sense of aesthetics and beauty. When I started reading it, machinery was a symbol for the ugliness of humanity, its disconnection from mother earth/gaia, the mechanization of the human soul. A sunset or a tree was beautiful. A sandblaster or a logging machine was ugly. There was no question about it. In fact, such a question was simply unthinkable. That is just the way it was.

As I read, however, I began to see the objects of human technology through the eyes of Ayn Rand's characters. Trains, tracks, signal lights, railroad ties, station platforms...these all became, not scars and blemishes, but embodied and concrete manifestations of human creativity and ingenuity. Steel mills, building girders, and paved roads became gifts from innovative minds, offered to me as a foundation and platform on which I could build my own vision of beauty. The tools of modern society, that I had taken for granted became living monuments that expressed the intelligence of hundreds and thousands of my fellow human beings, each of which offered their work in service of the thrival of everyone else. Society itself, in its unimaginable complexity became a tapestry of beauty and life, woven with the blood and brains of the human soul.

Now, I sometimes cry, not only at the beauty of a sunset, but also at a skyline, and even Spaghettios. Consciousness and creativity always expresses itself through content in a context. I thank Ayn Rand that she opened my mind to one of the most profound types of wonder in the world: the embodied human creativity we call technology.

Mark Michael Lewis
http://MoneyMissionMeaning.com

Introduction - The spirit of Atlas shrugged: An integral interpretation of Ayn Rand

Often, rationality and spirituality are considered hostile opposites. In this view, rationality subjects spirituality to harsh and ruthless criticism, while spirituality chides rationality for its blindness to higher values and transcendental experience. Both tend to deny the value of the other, throwing out the baby of their insights with the bath water of their misunderstandings.

Nowhere is this more obvious that of the work of Ayn Rand and her magnum opus Atlas shrugged. As an outspoken atheist and critic of religion and mysticism, Ayn Rand's followers tend to take an antagonistic view towards any talk of spirituality or religion. Religious or spiritual teachers, on the other hand, use ad hominem arguments against Ayn Rand and the "cult" of her followers to attempt to sidestep the criticisms that she levels of their beliefs.

As the proponent of a "rational" spirituality, I find both of these positions lacking. Rather, I find unending beauty and power and Ayn Rand's ideas and writings, including her devastating critique of religious and spiritual teachers and teachings. At the same time, I feel that Ayn Rand profoundly misunderstood a spirituality built on a phenomenological inquiry into the nature of human consciousness. In the same way, I appreciate the critiques of Ayn Rand's stance from such integral philosophers as Ken Wilber, and find his descriptions of a trans-rational spirituality to be both accurate and reasonable.

I intend, on this blog, to use many of the insights of Ken Wilber, especially his work on the "Pre-Trans fallacy" to 1) highlight and honor them many fundamental and monumental contributions that Ayn Rand has made to the human quest for self realization and knowledge, and 2) clearly differentiate between a pre-rational and trans-rational spirituality, highlighting how Ayn Rand's critique can both help us recognize our own self-deceptions around "spirit" and become a powerful tool in our own spiritual realization. In other words, I will go through both sides of the Pre-Trans fallacy, and help us transcend the misunderstandings, while including the insights of each.

While I believe event Ayn Rand's fans and followers will gain greatly through this introduction to a rational spirituality, I see even greater value for the "spiritual" among us who have yet to thoroughly confront and integrate Ayn Rand's ideas into their own lives. Welcome to Money Is The Root Of All Good - The Blog

Mark Michael Lewis
http://aGameWeAllCanWin.com