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 Objectivism. I hope that I did not misunderstand the quotation; I sought to give it its plain meaning. Once again, I suggest that there exists an objective standard beyond mere existence by which to measure morality, namely the creation of that which conforms to universal, non-arbitrary patterns of beauty and perfection.

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 "right" patterns of beauty, the creation of which would be the proper Objectivist standard of morality. By the way, since I'm new here I'll say "hello" to you all.

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 pleasure emotionally ought to be conceptually explicable. We shouldn't have to always rely on our feelings to tell us what's good, or reduce our standard of value to subsistence when relying on objective concepts to tell us what's good. Suppose however that there is something else going on that our feelings can sense but that is beyond our current knowledge. Suppose that there are objective patterns in the universe that are part of us - mathematically precise, orderly, and non-random, and these patterns objectively define what is good. Our achievement of them pleases us emotionally, and could be understood conceptually. Objective beauty is one way to express this, and it can be manifest in many ways - visually, musically, mathematically, verbally, and so forth. Thus happiness is not subjective; nor is it mere survival; rather it is a state of existence which conforms to patterns that are beautiful, joyous, and right. If we could better understand these "patterns of greatness" within nature and ourselves, we could describe them objectively and proceed to create them deliberately, with knowledge and not just feeling. That Rand failed to explicitly describe such patterns does not mean that they do not exist; they merely await our discovery, so that we can use them to create greater happiness. Thoughts?