In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand upholds the exactitude of an emotional response through Richard Halley.
"Miss Taggart, how many people are there to whom my work means as
much as it does to you?...That is the payment I demand. Not many can
afford it. I don’t mean your enjoyment, I don’t mean your emotion—emotions
be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment
was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your
intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work
by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact
that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you
admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired…
I do not care to be admired causelessly, emotionally, intuitively, instinctively—or
blindly. I do not care for blindness in any form, I have too much to show—or
for deafness, I have to much to say. I do not care to be admired by anyone’s
heart—only by someone’s head. And when I find a customer with that invaluable
capacity, then my performance is a mutual trade to mutual profit. An artist is a
trader, Miss Taggart, the hardest and most exacting of all traders…"
And in The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand names again three cardinal values which make up the essential generator of The Objectivist Ethics. "The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one’s ultimate value, one’s own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride."
Reason without Purpose, being a default on Integrity. Purpose without Reason being the duty ethics. And an existence in total rejection of self-esteem being the insanity of absolute worthlessness.
If an emotional corollary is implied in the actions of any creator and happiness is man's most heroic purpose, then what [if anything] does Objectivism say regarding the frequency, duration, intensity, etc, of happiness and emotions as such? Ayn Rand has said that man's life is a sum. What does it say about the particular math to be done? For example, Does it assert an attempt at a sort of Equanimity of Happiness?