Seeker

That was my interpretation of his quotation from the post preceding mine, "living doesn't mean anything fancy, and it is emphatically false that the ultimate goal of Objectivists is a happy life; it is, simply, life, meaning 'living'." By saying that happiness is not the goal, it seemed to take the side of the survivalists in the "survivalist vs. flourisher" controversy. As I tend to think that from Rand's perspective the dichotomy is false, i.e. that survival and flourishing are inseparable to man qua man, I wished to make the point explicit: a happy life is indeed the ultimate goal of Object

If the standard of morality is mere subsistence as DavidOdden here implies, then Rand's concept of the Ideal Man would be unintelligible, would it not? Her "sense of life" wasn't just coldly logical. It was passionate. It was romantic. It was filled with a feeling of love and joy that leapt off every page of her novels. For Rand, "life" meant life proper to Man, which meant a great deal more than just not dying. The question for me is how to objectify that beyond a resort to mere subsistence on the one hand, or subjective preference on the other. That's why I suggested the idea of universally

It seems to me that Rand's "survival" as "man qua man" wasn't concerned merely with preserving physical existence but with flourishing in the sense of achieving human greatness. But what then is greatness? It has to be more than mere subsistence. Why would Roark need to build the Stoddard Temple and not a shack? Is it his need for self-expression, such that happiness varies for each individual? That's subjective happiness, not necessarily susceptible to measurement-omission and thus conceptualization. But that's a problem from an objective point of view, for the creation of that which gives us