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In my previous post to this topic, I have expressed my unwillingness to reply to Duelist's rebuttal of my skepticism. I have weighed my option to do this carefully over the past month, and have ultimately determined that it would be better for me to state my mind, than to merely remain silent. Especially considering that no one else has responded to this topic, my defense of my skepticism will not intrude on anyone else's conversations here.

Duelist, I have encountered the issue of Objectivism before in these form, and, in so doing, I have always stated that I believe overall in the rights of each individual to express his or her beliefs, and therefore have abstained from criticizing Ayn Rand's philosophy directly. I also realize that you and I have become amicable, fellow intellectuals in the Realm, perhaps as a result of this tacit truce on my part. However, after much debate, I have concluded that it would be better for us to address this issue openly, rather than merely pretend that it does not matter, for, truth be told, your Ayn Rand quote in your signature reminds me constantly of our philosophical differences, if not also your Objectivist views expressed so often in these fora. I would prefer an open hostility to a false peace, and so I make the following response. I regret to intimate that this response, due to my own struggles with Ayn Rand, is far less elegant, and far more vehement, than my last.

Duelist wrote:
And thank you for your beautifully written response.

It is quite sad that your "Philosophical eye is ... dim" as every man's life is defined by the philosophy he follows. Plants live with passivity, animals by the brute force required of their existence, and man by his reason. To assume that one cannot know anything is to assume that you are not what you are. As a creature of reason, any man should trust that faculty, one that is bred into us through natural selection as surely as feathers.

Is there anyone else?

Firstly, human beings, the last time I checked, lacked feathers.

That aside, though, you have politely ignored much of what I have said above: true, I might have come to the conclusion that no philosopher I've ever examined thus far has helped me answer my deepest questions, but do you honestly think that I came to this conclusion simply out of passive concession? You seem to forget, Duelist, that I did not merely concede to my skepticism--in fact, I base that more on "empirical evidence" than on anything else! I examined various philosophers before committing to my skepticism, after all, not after. The one who would concede that the rational faculty is useless would be the one who would reverse this order, who would presume skepticism before examining the thoughts of other thinkers. That they cannot help me solve my problems in no way is a denial of my own reason; it is instead a denial of theirs. You cannot be so tyrannical as to presume that Ayn Rand's philosophy, after all, is the "one and only" path to reason; to do so would be to commit a fallacy no better than the fundamentalist Christians in their blind following of the Bible. I chose to reject Ayn Rand because, upon examining her reasoning, I discovered that her philosophy contradicted itself on a number of points. Upon further thought, I rationally came to the conclusion that Rand's philosophy requires one to believe it fully: its clause against the notion of compromise prevents one from "halfway" believing it. It was on account of this, therefore, that I declared myself a "Looter" in Ayn Rand's eyes, and therefore abandoned her philosophy to continue my search.

Perhaps there is some philosophy that exists that can answer my questions; perhaps my own experience, and time, will tell me what to believe. Right now, though, I have no choice but to believe those few conclusions I hold dearest, those few that have yet to be disproved. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before they, too, change, or erode altogether. Regardless, I have not given up the pursuit of reason, or the pursuit of truth: that I am still engaging in this pursuit should serve as the ultimate proof of my humanity. Ask your local plant whether it can boast to *that*.
alright.... firstly, stating my opinions as a rational (or seemingly so) human, it would be foremost to classify myself as something of a looter as well.... I believe that philosophy is a deeply personal choice, and should be come to by personal conclusions. for example, if I were to file my taxes and it were to ask my religion, i would be wont to title myself as a Zen Buddhist. I believe that while suffering is a natural and dually quite amicable and humanly despicable part of existence, the only way to come to the greater conclusion is through a complete and total truth. I don't believe, anymore at least, that all existence is suffering (as I'm in love now, which is a topic which I've found, excuse the abrasiveness of tone, quite fucks up a lot of philosophical reasoning) but I have through the years come to realize that the only way to truly realize happiness is through the admission and search of total and utter truth. I believe one must search for this truth with a total and utter lack of ego.

I too have studied my way around the old philosophical tables, and I once myself subscribed to objectivism. everything has a place and a time and a cause and an effect and everything fit logically into a perfect little world and everything that didn't quite fit was my fault for misinterpreting it. this leads to an extremely depressing path to the ultimate question - the meaning of life... such mechanism seemed devoid of true happiness, like the feeling I got from every ayn rand book I read -- it seemed like it was set in a dull and ever-reddening machine, one which, while functional, didn't really seem to hold a better purpose. I personally believe that while you're on earth, you should try to be happy. truth be known, I can be one of the most depressing people you've ever met. if I were to make an obscure reference that nobody would likely understand, I make shinji look like a happily brainwashed cult member going off on his magic space-ship to rule his own planet in peace and love forever. (i.e. I make shinji look like a mormon.)

But what I've come to realize is that while the cold machinery of objective thought is interesting and very functional, it lacks the definitive capability of a truly understood hope... to it, the best hope is to understand the world better than anybody else, and then die... I realize that perhaps it's just me, as I am a stupidly incurable romantic, but I want more than existence and then death. perhaps I'm just greedy.

I guess what it all boils down to is that I agree with Altair. there is no one correct way to arrive at philosophical conclusions, and, while objectivism certainly does have a good deal of very valid points, it also lacks the ideas behind what a human truly needs.

This romanticism is probably quite illy met by a good deal of my fellows. being the person I am, one would expect me to embrace the easy, lines-is-lines, clearly bounded philosophy of total logic. it, by itself, works fine. you tell your machine what to do, it does it. that's why mathematics always works, because it is, as itself, a machine, and nothing more. 2+2 will always equal 4 unless you're doing geometry in Riemann space and then you've curved it around some sphere and it stretches depending on some tangent somewhere and god-it's-been-a-long-time-since-i-did-any-worthwhile-mathematics. but you get my point.

a human, however a machine, is capable of realizing its machinality, and thus supercedes it, like some robot in an asimov novel that eventually explodes because it can't comprehend its lack of comprehension or it's thrown into an infinite loop because it can't lie to two people at once because that breaks the laws of robotics or some such... this, however, might be construed as being off-point. I assure you, when you think about it, it's really not so fetched.

i rest at this - a human is a machine that knows it's a machine. this leaves only higher ground to be trodden. thus, objectivism, being a philosophy of easily understood machination, is both correct and incorrect as a function of philosophical thought.

that may have been quite confusing... if so, I apologize, as I tend to write as my mind thinks.

as for myself, I'm an eclectic philosopher. I think there's good stuff from all sorts of realms of thought and religion, and I like to pick and choose from this and that to make up my rag-tag philosophical ideas. while it may seem contradictory to alot of the things I just said up there, I tend to think of the world as a program, only programmed in an incomprehensible sort of analog processing scheme, and that humans have the Turing comprehension needed to understand this scheme (kind of going along with the Buddhist theory of bodhi essence - the essential ability within all of us to be perfect) but simply do not usually piece everything together. I believe that while one's philosophy should follow logical conclusions (a somewhat objectivist theorem) that there are also things that we, as humans, are simply not normally made aware of.... kind of like a programmer's Easter egg.

all this known, yet unknown. I cannot say with any surety at all that what I think is correct. I have as dim an eye as Altair, quite rightly, anybody else. it I as li tzu said: "the fool thinks himself a wise man, yet the wise man knows himself a fool." I think there are two truths in life, one because it is the only way to make sense of philosophy as a whole, and the other simply because I know this feeling in my heart surpasses whatever natural boundaries the gods have imposed.

1. philosophy is infinitely debatable.
2. love is truth, and truth love.

past this, I can't really tell you anything for sure. but you've obviously already seen a great deal of my opinion. take it for what you will, and I encourage all of you to think for your own, only taking what others say into consideration in your own head, and not following blindly like the super-Baptists of this excitingly boring southern portion of the country the dogmas of some guy saying a couple things that sound good and a lot of other stuff that doesn't make all that much sense.

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