Ayn Rand and a Discussion of Objectivism

[Mr. Tea]

I was talking mainly about their predeliction for pretty slave boys, but it applies to other things too.

 

[tate]

I studied Attic Greek for three years. Epsilon gamma omega IS THE GREEK WORD FOR "I"

Yes indeed. Homeric Greek also shows a final -nu in places. In Doric Greek (e.g., Laconian) there's a final nu and eta, even.

Must be the same in both languages, then - they're both Indo-European after all, and have quite a lot of common vocabulary.

This is the right answer. The same word shown here in Greek and Latin has cognates for the same item in Sanskrit, Avestan, Old Latin, Hittite, Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, and Gothic (possibly Old Lithuanian too, depending on how you explain the absence of Winter's Law and final devoicing). The ubiquity suggests inheritance, not borrowing.

 

[nomadologist]

I always thought Hellenic Greek might be a little more fun to learn than Attic, in terms of vocabulary--every exercise we did for the first two years used the same 40 basic nouns ("soldiers" and "battle" were big)...

 

[hundredmillionlifetimes]

My biggest problem with Rand is not even really her thing about empowered individualism (I'm American, I live in a country that runs on the idea on an ideological level)

Yeah, except that this notion of 'individualism' is of course completely contradicted by taking refuge in nationalistic stereotypes ("I'm an American!" etc), not to mention that her notion of the individual is itself a purely alien capitalist construct, its mere agent of replication.

which does seem to make more sense if you read her work in the cultural context of its time--

Or less sense Does her subsequent replicant, Margaret Thatcher, make 'sense' in her cultural context?. Just as Rand's (then marginal) ideology has now become mainstream institutionalized, so has Thatcher's, hubristic Oedipods.

it's her flagrant misapprehension of what "the Ego" is in a first-hand psychoanalytical sense. I really blame her for the pop-psychological term "ego" that Americans use to mean "self-image" or "self-worth" that has nothing to do with Freud's original notion of the "Ego" as reality principle.

(fwiw, "ego" just means "I" in Greek...)

Sure, though I wouldn't necessarily scapegoat her. Ego at its purest does correspond to the Imaginary (the result of Lacan's Mirror Stage), but increasingly today the ego-ideal/ideal-ego has become indistinguishable from the (symbolic) Big Other itself. The (non-existent) Big Other is all that exists for many of today's ego-maniacs ...

[Oh, I see that Tate is an unreconstructed classicist: that explains his intellectual terrorism elsewhere ...].

 

[nomadologist]

Yeah, except that this notion of 'individualism' is of course completely contradicted by taking refuge in nationalistic stereotypes ("I'm an American!" etc), not to mention that her notion of the individual is itself a purely alien capitalist construct, its mere agent of replication.

I was just saying her way of thinking about "individualism" is deeply rooted in obvious historical referents like, say, the Puritans or American democracy.

Or less sense Does her subsequent replicant, Margaret Thatcher, make 'sense' in her cultural context?. Just as Rand's (then marginal) ideology has now become mainstream institutionalized, so has Thatcher's, hubristic Oedipods.

Yes, Thatcher makes a whole hell of a lot of sense as a zeitgeisty 80s Reagan-contemporary/ideologue.

 

[zhao]

In ever worse news, that mad, reactionary cult known as 'Ayn Rand' has now moved centre-stage in US mainstream society, Hollywood too now jumping on the bandwagon, with the vacuous Angelina Jolie playing the title role

i was avoiding this thread for the longest time and now i know why