Emotional Frequency

[Skip Berkes]

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?

Edited September 28, 2009 by Skip Berkes

[dan_edge]

Skip,

Some of the answers you are looking for can be found in the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand. In it, she discusses the method used to measure emotional responses, specifically ordinal measurement. An example of this kind of measurement, in an excerpt from the ITOE, can be found here. Ms. Rand poses the question: "Can you measure love?," and answers in the positive. The Online Lexicon, linked to above, is a great place to start in general. You might try the entry on measurement as well as a primer.

Good Luck,

--Dan Edge

[phibetakappa]

Ayn Rand has said that man's life is a sum.

Reference please. Where does she say this, and what is the surrounding context?

For example on page 563 of Atlas Shrugged Dagny is thinking

"It is not proper for man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to..."

Or

Here Dagny is thinking of the power plant,

"She stood looking up at the structure, her consciousness surrendered to a single sight and a single, wordless emotion—but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind, and what she now felt was the instantaneous total of the thoughts she did not have to name, the final sum of a long progression, like a voice telling her by means of a feeling..." (AS, 674)

Or

When James Taggart evasively runs to try to forget what a worthless rotter he is,

"This was the way he had lived all his life—keeping his eyes stubbornly, safely on the immediate pavement before him, craftily avoiding the sight of his road, of corners, of distances, of pinnacles. He had never intended going anywhere, he had wanted to be free of progression, free of the yoke of a straight line, he had never wanted his years to add up to any sum—what had summed them up?—why had he reached some unchosen destination where one could no longer stand still or retreat?" (AS, 798)

The "sum" she continues to refer to is a purposeful progression, i.e., when one has an end goal and heads towards it, accomplishing all the intermediary steps; which then become the basis for further progression onward. She is talking about the "sum" of building on some aspect of one's life, part by part, heading towards and end-goal, i.e., the progression of self-sustained and/or self-generated action.

For man, this progression is inescapable because of the nature of man's distinctive volitional consciousness. James Taggart serves to dramatize a man trying to escape the responsibility of one's volitional consciousness, which Rand uses to concretetize the fact that a choice to evade one's requirement of choice, is still a choice. So that, in the end, even a man attempting to evade choice, still possesses the character and/or life (lack there of) caused by the choices he failed to make.

Positively, Dagny, Rearden, Francisco, Galt and the other's character and/or life, have been build consciously, each taking responsibility for their own consciousness, and as a consequence their own lives by selecting their own long range, productive goals (careers), and progressively moving step by step towards accomplishing them. Thus, when any one of their lives is viewed at any given point in time, all the actions leading up to that point, "sum" together to create where that person is, i.e., the prior steps were the consciously chosen means to that point in time in that persons progression towards their end-goals.

Finally, Ayn Rand in VOS, states the overall idea that "Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him."

"Man cannot survive, like an animal, by acting on the range of the moment. An animal's life consists of a series of separate cycles, repeated over and over again, such as the cycle of breeding its young, or of storing food for the winter; an animal's consciousness cannot integrate its entire lifespan; it can carry just so far, then the animal has to begin the cycle all over again, with no connection to the past. Man's life is a continuous whole: for good or evil, every day, year and decade of his life holds the sum of all the days behind him. He can alter his choices, he is free to change the direction of his course, he is even free, in many cases, to atone for the consequences of his past—but he is not free to escape them, nor to live his life with impunity on the range of the moment, like an animal, a playboy or a thug. If he is to succeed at the task of survival, if his actions are not to be aimed at his own destruction, man has to choose his course, his goals, his values in the context and terms of a lifetime." (VOS, 26)

This thesis that "Man's life is a continuous whole," is probably her most refined statement of the point. This is the sense of "sum" she means, i.e., the sense of life being a unified whole.

Note: when she explicitly states "Man's life" she means it. She means specifically man's life because she is alluding to man's distinctive means of survival, i.e., his volitional / conceptual consciousness, as opposed to an animal's life and it's kind of consciousness.

The title essay of the book "Virtue of selfishness" is entirely dedicated to elaborating this point and its implications.

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?

The way you are using "math" here is not really in accordance with how Ayn Rand uses the concept of one's life being a sum.

O'ism is not some implicit formulation of Utilitarianism, which seems to be the underlying current of your inquiry.

I would also recommend you read ITOE regarding the nature of measurement and the relationship of mathematics to man's consciousness.

For example, Does it assert an attempt at a sort of Equanimity of Happiness?

"Equanimity of Happiness" is a very strange locution, that does not apply to anything I've read about O'ism.

Edited September 29, 2009 by phibetakappa