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Death Mystery

I was looking about and for the life of me couldn't find a general thread for philosophical ramblings. I being the curious math major that I am would like to know one thing:

What is everyone's philosophical point of view?

I am an objectivist through and through. Objectivism is the philosophy put forth by author, Ayn Rand. Politically this is about as left as the far right gets. I believe that reality is, that things are what they are and no amount of belief or thought can change that. I believe that one's senses are the only windows to reality and that the only way to knowledge of said reality is through reason. As such all things are objective and everything is absolute. A final law is that of non-contradiction. If everything follows logically from reality then any contradiction is the fault of a false premise.

I believe that the only economic system that can work is laissez-faire capitalism and that the only function of the government is to protect individual rights.

Every individual has the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, inasmuch as every man does what is in his/her own rational best interest.

So any questions, comments, arguments should be posted here. Tell us all what you think so that we can all end up with better ideas about how the world works.

I suppose I should begin where Duelist left off and intimate henceforth that I am quite familiar with the view of Ayn Rand. I have read both Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, wrestled with Objectivism for two years of my dear and precious life, and have only found in the end that I am incurably one of those people whom Rand contemptuously calls the "looters"--i.e., as she would have it, I am a parasitic and spineless worm that feeds off the ideas and contributions of all "worthy" human beings.

Of course, if there is one small thing I have taken with me after my losing battle with Rand, it was that I must learn to love myself. I am uncertain as to how much I choose to do so, but I can at least say that I only resemble vaguely the "looters" she presents in her novels--I suppose Ellsworth Monkton Toohey from The Fountainhead presents himself as the nearest parallel to me, namely in that he's a man of letters, an orator modeled after the real-life author Thomas Carlyle. Toohey, of course, also uses his intellectual influence to sway all artists and thinkers to his following and flatters himself the whole while with the notion that he is being apotheosized by his popularity, as he preys upon such intrepid characters as Howard Roark and Dominique Francon throughout the 702 pages of that particularly mighty tome.

But, all literary details aside, I at least have retained the self-esteem enough to believe that I am slightly better than Toohey in that, much as I might revel in gathering around myself people whose intellect I deem comparable to mine, I do not deem my own intellect comparable to theirs. I do not fancy myself an intellectual idol, nor even a leader: the only flattering illusion--if it is that--that I chose to espouse is that I am merely better than the average. Perhaps it is true, perhaps it is not, and, quite frankly, the bugbear of "the average" is a creature I have tried only in vain to track.

Now I am dithering, waltzing with these metaphors of mine to no end, and am likely muddling whatever it is I am trying to say in the process.

I am Socratic, in that I believe it is safer for me to assume that I do not know than to assume otherwise, and something of the same view applies to most of my endeavors. I believe that the proud person affirms him or herself, is filled with a sense of his or her own imperfections, yet strives beyond them nevertheless, and undauntedly. It is the arrogant soul that claims to know more than him or herself, that claims there is "one way" to think about the world and that--oh, yes!--*you all* should follow it! Such creatures come in all shapes and sizes, from priests to politicians to philosophers, but, underneath their magnificent rhetoric and their respectable words lies that same delusion, that they think more of themselves than what they are. Build your castles of air if you like; until there is physical proof of what you say, my skepticism for you is endless.

Of course, in my infinite aversion to arrogance, I forget to mention that I, too, am smitten by it. My experiences this past semester in college have revealed to me more than ever that I have lost sight of who I am, and have become far too bedazzled by what I want to be. It is useless to attempt to improve oneself if one becomes blind to what needs be improved, after all. And now I find myself looking in the fragments of my own broken mirror, trying to discern in its glimmers that ghost of what I desire, and that corpse of what I am.

It is likely that my views will be refuted, or that I shall be criticized for being so vague. My philosophical eye is clouded and dim, and the more I squint, the more uncertain and skeptical I become, and the less I see. I can recite colorful descriptions of many philosophers, from Aristotle to Ayn Rand, and can say that not a single one of them has helped this blind eye see. I only wish that I had more to offer you than these obscuring clouds of smoke and broken mirrors.

Picasso had it right: seeing all sides of things produces the most incomprehensible picture, and yet seeing only one side of things produces the shallowest. I am lost, as always, somewhere in between.

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