Facets of Ayn Rand by Sures on the web


Michael Stuart Kelly

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Ellen,

Do you deny that Sures was insinuating that Barbara's picture of Rand was falsely presented?

I do not deny that lesser values are entitled to their 15 minutes of fame, but I think it is petty to try to insinuate false images within those 15 minutes. That's the way of humanity, though. The reason that greater values have much more than 15 minutes is that they shine their own light, they do not scrap and scramble for the light others.

Michael

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Ellen,

Do you deny that Sures was insinuating that Barbara's picture of Rand was falsely presented?

I do not deny that lesser values are entitled to their 15 minutes of fame, but I think it is petty to try to insinuate false images within those 15 minutes. That's the way of humanity, though. The reason that greater values have much more than 15 minutes is that they shine their own light, they do not scrap and scramble for the light others.

Michael

Lesser values are a lot like roaches, they think they are powerful in the dark, but just turn on the lights and they scatter. lol

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So long as we are looking at dates, there is something very curious that I think bears verifying. ARI has a timeline of Rand's life. According to the timeline:

1957 Finishes writing Atlas Shrugged (March 20)

Atlas Shrugged published (October 10)

Now, according to the auction papers in the report I did (see Entry 5874), take a look at the following message in Rand's handwriting on the published jacket of Atlas Shrugged:

5874AtlasShruggedinscribedtoDaryn.jpg

August 20, 1957???

This is really strange...

But one thing I learned personally from being a subscriber to The Ayn Rand Letter. Making dates correspond to events apparently meant very little to Rand. She was constantly late, often with a date on the Letter months before it was published and I received it, bearing a statement that the Letter was written after the date published on it. The Objectivist also fell behind, but the dates published on the issues were wrong, being given earlier than actual publication.

This is a weird habit seeing that the philosophy is devoted to not faking reality.

Michael

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So it was an advance copy. Her Letters establish that she also sent one to FLl Wright a few months before the official publication date.

My understanding of the book business is that it's seasonal; publishers reserve (and use) presses months in advance in order to deliver product for the fall or the spring season.

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Peter's right. Of course it was an advance copy. Books are printed in advance of the official pub date. All the advertising and the shipping to retailers has to be in place (if the publishing company has done its job) as of the official pub date; meanwhile advance copies have been sent to reviewers and other folks.

Peter's also right about the scheduling. At least that was how it was done back then, prior to desktop publishing. I think it is still done that way, with two seasons, even though the printing procedure is different than it was.

Ellen

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Speaking of advance copies, one of my favorite things when I was working full-time at the New York trade offices of Lippincott was those moments when the production manager would come into my office, extracting a bound copy from the small box of books sent directly for the editors from the first batch off the press, and announce "It's a book!" The newly bound pages would still smell of the printing process. I liked the smell, along with the thrill of seeing/holding/crackling open a finished book after the whole process of nursing the book to completion.

The next few minutes would often contain a bit of a downer when, upon my thumbing through the pages, I'd promptly spot a typo or two which had escaped notice until then and would seem to leap out as if waving a flag. All the same, the high of the finished book in my hands normally far outweighed the aggravation of noticing an error. Except in one sickening case. A young girl who'd joined us that season as copyeditor -- she'd come recommended by the Grade School Textbook Division but she turned out not to be adequate as a trade copyeditor -- had altered what she thought was a typo in the final page proofs of Trial Valley by Vera and Bill Cleaver. A phrase in the last sentence was supposed to refer to "my least one," i.e., the youngest and smallest of the children Mary Call was raising, a very Cleaveresque form of expression, beautiful in the context. Without mentioning to anyone that she'd done it, the young copyeditor changed "least" to "last." Doom and gloom when this mistake was noticed; but fixing it would have been too expensive by then, so we had to let it go. Fortunately Vera -- who had a notorious temper -- took the contretemps in reasonably good stride and didn't dynamite the offices.

Ellen

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I own several advance copies of books, including one of The Passion of Ayn Rand Kat got somewhere, but none came with dust-jacket or even look like the final product. (I have owned many such books over my life.) They are uncorrected advance copies for reviewers, book publishers, etc., and they are papercover.

For instance, with Passion, the advance copy is an actual book, but it is smaller than the printed work, papercover, and there is the phrase "Advance uncorrected proofs" on the front cover. On the very first page there is the following text from Doubleday's Publicity Deaprtment (including other information like the telephone number of the publicity agent, editor overseeing the book, etc.):

IMPORTANT: This is an uncorrected proof.

TO ADVANCE READERS: In quoting from this book for reviewers, or any other purpose, it is essential that the final printed book be referred to, since the author may make changes on these proofs before the book goes to press. Written permission must be obtained from the publisher for quotation, except for brief excerpts used in reviews.

TO ALL REVIEWERS: In quoting from galleys please indicate in the margin the galley number on which quotation appears to enable editor to check review against the printed book.

This is how I have normally seen advance copies. This ensures that reviewers actually get to read the book prior to writing a review and the review can come out close to the launch date. Maybe back then they did this differently and a reviewer would read Atlas in, say, two days (or even a week) and write a review right afterwards. I find that implausible. I also find it implausible to sit on product for many months unless a launch is specifically being delayed for marketing reasons.

Of course, logistics is a real issue and published books need time for shipping and stocking, so it is understandable that an author would have a copy of the finished product before the public launch date. It is true that presses are seasonal due to holiday product gluts that book them to the limit.

I find it incredible that Rand finished Atlas in March and in August there was a printed copy at all. That is not how I have seen publishing normally work. Usually I see a year or more go by, even nowadays in the age of informatics (except for celebrity books that are usually ghost-written and cranked out in no-time to cash in on the topic of the hour). I am not sure what typesetting technology was used back then, but I imagine they still used movable type with a lot of stuff being done by hand.

It was a long book for that technology and that short amount of time.

That Rand did not even take into account the so-called publishing date (which apparently is what the launch date is called here in the USA) when she autographed it shows, in action, what she thought of these things.

Michael

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Speaking of advance copies, one of my favorite things when I was working full-time at the New York trade offices of Lippincott was those moments when the production manager would come into my office, extracting a bound copy from the small box of books sent directly for the editors from the first batch off the press, and announce "It's a book!" The newly bound pages would still smell of the printing process. I liked the smell, along with the thrill of seeing/holding/crackling open a finished book after the whole process of nursing the book to completion.

The next few minutes would often contain a bit of a downer when, upon my thumbing through the pages, I'd promptly spot a typo or two which had escaped notice until then and would seem to leap out as if waving a flag. All the same, the high of the finished book in my hands normally far outweighed the aggravation of noticing an error. Except in one sickening case. A young girl who'd joined us that season as copyeditor -- she'd come recommended by the Grade School Textbook Division but she turned out not to be adequate as a trade copyeditor -- had altered what she thought was a typo in the final page proofs of Trial Valley by Vera and Bill Cleaver. A phrase in the last sentence was supposed to refer to "my least one," i.e., the youngest and smallest of the children Mary Call was raising, a very Cleaveresque form of expression, beautiful in the context. Without mentioning to anyone that she'd done it, the young copyeditor changed "least" to "last." Doom and gloom when this mistake was noticed; but fixing it would have been too expensive by then, so we had to let it go. Fortunately Vera -- who had a notorious temper -- took the contretemps in reasonably good stride and didn't dynamite the offices.

Ellen

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Thank you Ellen. You just helped me connect a few dots in a theory I have been working on. "It's a book!" compared to a project I had worked on, intensely, for a specific period of time.

To "birth" a project is quite primal. To take a concept, a theory, etc. and "project" it into reality is fundamentally an erotic dance which creative folks step too.

Adam

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I own several advance copies of books, including one of The Passion of Ayn Rand Kat got somewhere, but none came with dust-jacket or even look like the final product. (I have owned many such books over my life.) They are uncorrected advance copies for reviewers, book publishers, etc., and they are papercover.

For instance, with Passion, the advance copy is an actual book, but it is smaller than the printed work, papercover, and there is the phrase "Advance uncorrected proofs" on the front cover. [....]

There indeed are such things as uncorrected advance proofs sent to certain select reviewers, especially those from whom the company is trying to get quotes to put on the dustjacket. However, what was being talked about here was finished books which are available before the publication date -- which after all have to be available before the official publication date if sales are to start on that date.

Ellen

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Thank you Ellen. You just helped me connect a few dots in a theory I have been working on. "It's a book!" compared to a project I had worked on, intensely, for a specific period of time.

To "birth" a project is quite primal. To take a concept, a theory, etc. and "project" it into reality is fundamentally an erotic dance which creative folks step too.

Adam

I read you, loud and clear. ;-)

Ellen

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Now, according to the auction papers in the report I did (see Entry 5874), take a look at the following message in Rand's handwriting on the published jacket of Atlas Shrugged:

5874AtlasShruggedinscribedtoDaryn.jpg

August 20, 1957???

This is really strange...

As has been explained in subsequent posts, it isn't strange. They printed 100 thousand copies on the first printing and had "an enormous advance sale" according to Cerf's autobiography. The printing and shipping would have taken awhile.

In that same report, the photo above shows Rand's inscription on the flyleaf of the copy she gave to Barbara. That's dated August 15, 1957.

What I find interesting about the photo with the inscription to Daryn is that it looks as if it was written on the part of the cover where the flapcopy would go, and thus maybe on a prototype of the final cover, printed before the final jacket covers with the book blurb included.

Ayn Rand herself wrote the flapcopy. I always figured she had, from the first time I read the book, because of how well done the copy is. There are no review quotes on the cover. The blurb is continued from the inside front flap to the inside back flap. The back has only a photo of Ayn taken by Phyllis Cerf, under which is written:

"(See About the Author in back of book)"

(The About the Author copy, as we've discussed before, was also written by Ayn, in the form of quoted speech.)

Then below, in larger type, a sentence from About the Author:

"To all the readers who discovered THE FOUNTAINHEAD and

asked me many questions about the wider application of its

ideas, I want to say that I am answering

these questions in the present novel and

that THE FOUNTAINHEAD was only an over-

ture to ATLAS SHRUGGED."

The left lower corner -- white space above -- is occupied by her signature. It's a classy jacket design.

The two copies I have of that original hardcover -- both purchased, one for me and one for my mother, in June 1961 -- are fourth printing, an indication of the book's enormous sales figures by then.

Something I continue to wonder about each time I look at the photo on the back is how much slimmer -- about fifteen pounds slimmer -- and also several years younger Ayn looks in that photo than in ones I've seen clearly identified as having been taken circa 1957. I can only conclude that the appearance is indicative of Phyllis' skill as a photographer. (Phyllis was a very good photographer. Another photo she took of Ayn, used facing the frontispiece of Who Is Ayn Rand?, I think is the best photo of any in terms of making Ayn look bewitchingly brilliant.)

Ellen

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So it was an advance copy. Her Letters establish that she also sent one to FLl Wright a few months before the official publication date.

Thank you for that reference to the copy she sent FLW, Peter. Looking up the reference in Letters I've serendipitously found a clue of great interest to me.

The covering letter she sent to Wright isn't included, I assume because the estate couldn't find a copy of it. What's printed is a note about the letter he sent back. (Btw, the date of Wright's reply is only about a month before the pub. date.)

On September 19, 1957, Wright wrote to AR, thanking her for a copy of Atlas Shrugged she had sent him and wondering "why the long silence." He hoped she had not rejected her former thesis and that John Galt was still "the uncommon man!" "We look forward," he wrote, "to just what you have designed." At that time, he had read only the first chapter.

She replied:

October 5, 1957

Dear Mr. Wright:

Thank you for your letter. I will be very interested to hear your reaction to Atlas Shrugged and I hope that you will write to me, at the above address, when you will have read it.

Cordially,

.

There's no indication of further correspondence. Re his reference to "this long silence": judging from the correspondence included, the last he'd heard from her was December 30, 1946.

The detail I'm thanking you for appears as a PS to the previous letter to him, dated October 10, 1946. She says:

P.S. No, I have not read The Tragic Sense of Life by Unamuno, but I shall get it and read it.

This is supportive of my suspicion that her term "sense of life" was inspired by that book.

Ellen

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So it was an advance copy. Her Letters establish that she also sent one to FLl Wright a few months before the official publication date.

Thank you for that reference to the copy she sent FLW, Peter. Looking up the reference in Letters I've serendipitously found a clue of great interest to me...The detail I'm thanking you for appears as a PS to the previous letter to him, dated October 10, 1946. She says:

P.S. No, I have not read The Tragic Sense of Life by Unamuno, but I shall get it and read it.

This is supportive of my suspicion that her term "sense of life" was inspired by that book.

Ellen

Rand certainly could have been inspired to use the term "sense of life" by Unamuno's book. Or, it could be a matter of two or more instances of seeing the term in print that finally nudged her to doing it. In particular, I am wondering whether Susanne Langer, whose Feeling and Form both Jeff Riggenbach and I have given considerable attention in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was the penultimate influence. Here is an excerpt from my Vol. 7, No. 1 JARS essay on Rand, Camus, and Langer:

A Mystery Artist-Philosopher—Did Langer Linger Over Rand?

As Riggenbach (2001) pointed out in these pages, Rand and Langer have a significant overlap in their philosophical interests—notably, in epistemology and aesthetics. Indeed, as Riggenbach discloses, Langer anticipated Rand’s concept of “sense of life” by at least half a decade (280). [Note 8. For references to "sense of life," see Langer (1953) 291, 327, 331, 339, 351, 372. The calculation of "at least half a decade" is based on the 1953 publication date of Langer’s Feeling and Form and the 1960 date of Rand’s radio address, “Our Esthetic Vacuum,” which is the first occasion on which she is known to have expounded her concept of “sense of life.”]

Langer cites the Spanish Existentialist Unamuno ([1913]1921) who, four decades earlier, wrote about sense of life as an attitude or feeling “when life is viewed as a whole” (Langer, 351), as well as Centano (1941), who wrote about “Livingness...a sense of life, deep and intense...” (11). Just as Rand in her aesthetics stressed the relationship between art and sense of life, so too does Langer, who writes: “Every good work of art has, I think, something that may be said to come from the world, and that bespeaks the artist’s own feeling about life” (253).

It should also be noted that the passage quoted by Torres and Kamhi (2000, 341 n. 5) and highlighted by Riggenbach (2001, 280) as Langer’s having anticipated Rand’s concept of “sense of life,” also presages Rand’s concept of “emotional abstraction.” Langer (1953) states: "It is the continuity of thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for an individual’s passions” (372). Compare this with Rand (1966), who wrote: “[E]motional abstraction [is a process of] classifying things according to the emotions they invoke—i.e., of tying together, by association or connotation, all those things which have the power to make an individual experience the same (or a similar) emotion” (27).

With such striking mutual interests and commonalities in their approaches and conclusions, one naturally wonders whether Rand and Langer might have met and conversed or at least corresponded at some point relatively early in their careers, say, in the 1940s or early 1950s. Those who knew Rand’s aesthetic thinking best during the early years of the Objectivist movement do not recall her mentioning or discussing Langer or her ideas. Barbara Branden (10 Mar 2002) said that she didn’t recall Rand ever mentioning Langer, and that she didn’t believe they ever met or talked. Nathaniel Branden (14 Feb 2000) said that, to the best of his knowledge, Rand and Langer did not know each other. Hospers (13 Feb 2000) said that he didn’t “think Ayn Rand even so much as heard of Langer. I mentioned Langer to Ayn several times, but there was no name recognition.”

Yet, there is this haunting passage, suggesting that someone very much like Rand did make Langer’s acquaintance prior to 1953:

I once heard an excellent artist, who is also an articulate philosopher, say: “When I was a young child—before I went to school, I think—I already knew what my life would be like. Not, of course, that I could guess what my fortunes would be, what economic situations and what political events I’d get into, but from the very beginning of my self-consciousness, I knew what anything that could happen to me would have to be like. (390–91; emphasis in original)

This is so Randian in outlook and attitude that one wonders: Was this unnamed “excellent artist” and “articulate philosopher” Ayn Rand? This resort to anonymity by Langer is strikingly uncharacteristic of her. She was a very meticulous scholar and conscientious citer of her sources. (This is also eerily reminiscent of Hospers’ omission in both his 1967 encyclopedia article and his 1982 book of any mention of Ayn Rand or anyone else as a proponent of the art as “re-creation of reality” view.) Considering how unpopular Rand’s political and philosophical ideas were during this particular period, could Langer have been trying to use the quote for illustrative purposes, without compromising or diluting its effectiveness (or her own credibility) by revealing the speaker as someone out of favor in academic circles?

Perhaps buried in the holdings of the estates of Susanne Langer and/or Ayn Rand are the answers to these questions. This issue should already have been resolved, of course, with the publication of massive amounts of Rand’s personal writings in Letters of Ayn Rand (1995) and Journals of Ayn Rand (1997) but, alas, such is not the case. As has been carefully documented by Chris Matthew Sciabarra (1998b), Rand’s journals were subject to certain substantive alterations by their editor (134–36).

If Sciabarra’s unsettling revelations about Rand’s journals are just the tip of an iceberg of unknown size, there may be much more than a missing Rand-Langer connection lying hidden within the Ayn Rand Archives in Marina Del Ray, California. Consider, for instance, the major difficulties Sciabarra dealt with (1999a; 1999b) in attempting to gain the Ayn Rand Institute’s cooperation in researching Rand’s college career.

Given such impediments as currently exist, the prospects of gaining adequate access to the Archives for a realistic attempt to uncover the details of a Rand-Langer relationship (if it existed) are not encouraging. Still, one can hope that some day a more enlightened policy toward bona fide Rand researchers will emerge. [Note 9. Also see Kamhi (2003) 458-9.]

References

Branden, Barbara. 10 March 2002. Electronic instant message.

Branden, Nathaniel. 14 February 2000. Electronic mail.

_____. 28 February 2000. Electronic mail.

Hospers, John. 13 February 2000. Electronic mail.

Centano, Augusto, ed. 1941. The Intent of the Artist. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Edwards, Paul, ed. 1967. Encyclopedia of Philosophy. New York: Macmillan.

Hospers, John. 1967. Problems of aesthetics. In Edwards 1967, vol. I.

_____. 1982. Understanding the Arts. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Kamhi, Michelle Marder. 2003. What “Rand’s Aesthetics” is, and why it matters. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, 4, no. 2 (Spring): 440.

Rand, Ayn. 1966a. Philosophy and sense of life. The Objectivist (February). Reprinted in Rand [1969] 1975.

_____. 1966b. Art and sense of life. The Objectivist (March). Reprinted in Rand [1969] 1975.

_____. [1969] 1975. The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature. 2nd revised edition. New York: New American Library.

Riggenbach, Jeff. 2001. What Art Is: what’s not to like. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, 2, no. 2 (Spring): 265-90.

Sciabarra, Chris Matthew. 1998b. Bowdlerizing Ayn Rand. Liberty 11, no. 1 (September).

_____. 1999a. Investigative report: the search for Ayn Rand’s Russion roots. Liberty 13, no. 10 (October): 47-50.

_____. 1999b. The Rand transcript. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall): 1-26.

Unamuno y Jugo, Miguel de. [1913] 1921. Del sentimento tragico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos. (The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Peoples.) Trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch. London: Macmillan & Co.

[3/1/08 -- I have just fixed the omitted italics and corrected the page numbers for the Langer quote of the mystery artist/philosopher, and thanks to Ellen Stuttle's sharp eyes and brain for spotting the errors!]

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You live and learn. The Wikipedia entry on Langer says she spent most of her careeer in the northeast, some of it at Columbia. Maybe Isabel Paterson was the connection.

I've long suspected that she spent a fair amount of time with a Catholic priest. She mentions in the Q&A section of ITOE that she hit on her notion of measurement-omission during a conversation with a priest "some twenty years ago" (which would have been around 1950). Her understanding of Aristotle's teleology and of his "moderate realism" is reminiscent of how the medievals understood him. She had a certain soft spot for Catholicism. Peikoff says she planned at one time to include a priest among the strikers, and her denunciation of the encyclicals in the 60s has a certain tone of "I expected better than this from you."

(In her published notes on The Little Street in the 20s she uses "sense of living," which there means something like "passion for life," not what she later came to mean by it.)

Pending hard documentation, both connections are just speculation.

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Rand certainly could have been inspired to use the term "sense of life" by Unamuno's book. Or, it could be a matter of two or more instances of seeing the term in print that finally nudged her to doing it. In particular, I am wondering whether Susanne Langer, whose Feeling and Form both Jeff Riggenbach and I have given considerable attention in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was the penultimate influence. Here is an excerpt from my Vol. 7, No. 1 JARS essay on Rand, Camus, and Langer:

A Mystery Artist-Philosopher—Did Langer Linger Over Rand?

[....]

With such striking mutual interests and commonalities in their approaches and conclusions, one naturally wonders whether Rand and Langer might have met and conversed or at least corresponded at some point relatively early in their careers, say, in the 1940s or early 1950s. Those who knew Rand’s aesthetic thinking best during the early years of the Objectivist movement do not recall her mentioning or discussing Langer or her ideas. Barbara Branden (10 Mar 2002) said that she didn’t recall Rand ever mentioning Langer, and that she didn’t believe they ever met or talked. Nathaniel Branden (14 Feb 2000) said that, to the best of his knowledge, Rand and Langer did not know each other. Hospers (13 Feb 2000) said that he didn’t “think Ayn Rand even so much as heard of Langer. I mentioned Langer to Ayn several times, but there was no name recognition.”

Add Allan Blumenthal to the list of "Those who knew Rand’s aesthetic thinking best during the early years of the Objectivist movement [and] do not recall her mentioning or discussing Langer or her ideas."

From the other side, I asked Eliseo Vivas, rival aesthetician and collegial acquaintance of Langer's -- Vivas taught at Northwestern -- if he ever heard Langer mention Rand. Answer, no. (I use the description "collegial acquaintance" because he expressed dislike for Langer personally. He once came back with an amusing, in the context, ad hominem reply to a friend of mine who was taking a course with Vivas and had made a point pro Langer's theories to which Vivas didn't have a good answer: "But you don't know the old bitch," Vivas said, grinning. I told Henry Veatch this story, and he promptly started grinning and said, "Well...she isn't easy to get along with." None of which is relevant to the excellence of her theories, but I think of it with amusement any time I think of Vivas and Langer in the same sentence.)

Yet, there is this haunting passage, suggesting that someone very much like Rand did make Langer’s acquaintance prior to 1953:

I once heard an excellent artist, who is also an articulate philosopher, say: “When I was a young child—before I went to school, I think—I already knew what my life would be like. Not, of course, that I could guess what my fortunes would be, what economic situations and what political events I’d get into, but from the very beginning of my self-consciousness, I knew what anything that could happen to me would have to be like. (190–91; emphasis in original)

This is so Randian in outlook and attitude that one wonders: Was this unnamed “excellent artist” and “articulate philosopher” Ayn Rand? [....]

I, too, was struck by the Randian "outlook and attitude" of that "haunting passage" upon first reading it in 1967.

Ellen

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The quote:

"I once heard an excellent artist, who is also an articulate philosopher, say: 'When I was a young child—before I went to school, I think—I already knew what my life would be like. Not, of course, that I could guess what my fortunes would be, what economic situations and what political events I’d get into, but from the very beginning of my self-consciousness, I knew what anything that could happen to me would have to be like.'" (190–91; emphasis in original)"

is so uniquely like Ayn Rand in concept that I cannot imagine it being anyone else. Even much of the rhythm and the structure of the sentences, the placement of the words, is Rand's particular literary rhythm and structure and placement of words, and idiosyncratically typical of the way her mind worked.

I have a suggestion about how Rand and Langer, two women who presumably never met or talked or corresponded, could nevertheless have influenced each other in certain narrow ways. Rand was an avid reader, for many years, of The New York Times, where probably Langer was reviewed and/or discussed; she might have seen there quotes from and about Langer's concept of "sense of life." And Rand appeared on a number of radio shows, and sometimes talked about her childhood and the evolution of her ideas; Langer might well have heard one or more of these shows, and been struck with Rand's statement.

Barbara

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[....] And Rand appeared on a number of radio shows, and sometimes talked about her childhood and the evolution of her ideas; Langer might well have heard one or more of these shows, and been struck with Rand's statement.

Barbara

But, Barbara, the problem with the thesis is: Did Rand appear on such shows prior to 1953, which is when Feeling and Form was published?

Btw, Roger, you have a typo in the page numbers. It's pp. 390-91. I looked it up because I wanted to check where the italics were which didn't get registered in your copying the quote.

The passage in the original reads:

Feeling and Form

pp. 390-391

"When I was a young child—before I went to school, I think—I already knew what my life would be like. Not, of course, that I could guess what my fortunes would be, what economic situations and what political events I’d get into; but from the very beginning of my self-consciousness, I knew what anything that could happen to me would have to be like."

Ellen

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Addendum: My suspicion is that Unamuno is the root -- as in a bifurcation of an evolutionary "tree" -- of both Rand's and Langer's picking up the term "sense of life." Langer didn't reference Unamuno in Philosophy in a New Key; her referencing Unamuno and then using "sense of life," mostly with quote marks, tracks the page numbers Roger gave from Feeling and Form, except for the typo in the page numbers for the quote which sounds so much like Rand.

I sure would be interested in any further details which might come to light on this one!

Ellen

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Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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I found an on-line e-text of Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life (here). It's part of the Gutenberg.org project. The text used is the Dover 1954 reprint of the English translation by J. E. Crawford Flitch originally published by Macmillan and Company, Ltd., in 1921. Unamuno worked closely with Flitch in producing that translation.

Here are some excerpts from the first chapter, The Man of Flesh and Bone.

I think that if Rand read even that chapter, it would have influenced her. She would have disagreed with his view of the relationship of reason and feeling. Nonetheless, see if you don't detect a kindredness of thought...

[my highlight]

Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the world and of life, and as a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward attitude and even to outward action. But the fact is that this feeling, instead of being a consequence of this conception, is the cause of it. Our philosophy--that is, our mode of understanding or not understanding the world and life--springs from our feeling towards life itself. And life, like everything affective, has roots in subconsciousness, perhaps in unconsciousness.

It is not usually our ideas that make us optimists or pessimists, but it is our optimism or our pessimism, of physiological or perhaps pathological origin, as much the one as the other, that makes our ideas.

[....]

That which determines a man, that which makes him one man, one and not another, the man he is and not the man he is not, is a principle of unity and a principle of continuity. [....] Memory is the basis of individual personality, just as tradition is the basis of the collective personality of a people. We live in memory and by memory, and our spiritual life is at bottom simply the effort of our memory to persist, to transform itself into hope, the effort of our past to transform itself into our future.

[....]

For myself I can say that as a youth, and even as a child, I remained unmoved when shown the most moving pictures of hell, for even then nothing appeared to me quite so horrible as nothingness itself. It was a furious hunger of being that possessed me, an appetite for divinity, as one of our ascetics has put it.

To propose to a man that he should be someone else, that he should become someone else, is to propose to him that he should cease to be himself. [....]

Man is an end, not a means. All civilization addresses itself to man, to each man, to each I. What is that idol, call it Humanity or call it what you like, to which all men and each individual man must be sacrificed? For I sacrifice myself for my neighbours, for my fellow-countrymen, for my children, and these sacrifice themselves in their turn for theirs, and theirs again for those that come after them, and so on in a never-ending series of generations. And who receives the fruit of this sacrifice?

Those who talk to us about this fantastic sacrifice, this dedication without an object, are wont to talk to us also about the right to live. What is this right to live? They tell me I am here to realize I know not what social end; but I feel that I, like each one of my fellows, am here to realize myself, to live.

[....]

And what all the objectivists [by which he means positivists, etc.] do not see, or rather do not wish to see, is that when a man affirms his "I," his personal consciousness, he affirms man, man concrete and real, affirms the true humanism--thehumanism of man, not of the things of man--and in affirming man he affirms consciousness. For the only consciousness of which we have consciousness is that of man.

The world is for consciousness. Or rather this _for_, this notion of finality, and feeling rather than notion, this teleological feeling, is born only where there is consciousness. Consciousness and finality are fundamentally the same thing.

And all this tragic fight of man to save himself, this immortal craving for immortality which caused the man Kant to make that immortal leap of which I have spoken, all this is simply a fight for consciousness. If consciousness is, as some inhuman thinker has said, nothing more than a flash of light between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence.

There is something which, for lack of a better name, we will call the tragic sense of life*, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself and of the universe, a whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less conscious. And this sense may be possessed, and is possessed, not only by individual men but by whole peoples. And this sense does not so much flow from ideas as determine them, even though afterwards, as is manifest, these ideas react upon it and confirm it.

[....]

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess this tragic sense of life. I recall now Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, _René, Obermann_, Thomson,[9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard--men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.

And there are, I believe, peoples who possess this tragic sense of life also.

It is to this that we must now turn our attention, beginning with this matter of health and disease.

.

___

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Thanks, Neil. Here's an easier-to-read link to the first part of the essay -- which Johnson picked up.

Re his comment: "Third, I will follow up on suggestion of Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi that Ortega's 1957 book On Love may have influenced Rand's concept of 'sense of life.'":

(1) Do you know if he did carry through with the rest of the piece?

(2) Although the '57 Ortega book might have been an influence, I think Rand's basic idea was in place well before then. Recall, she asked Nathaniel when he first met her in 1950 if he viewed the universe as "benevolent" or "malevolent" and it seems she used the term "sense of life" in conversation while Atlas was being written.

Ellen

PS: I'm going to have to take a break from posting for a few days. In addition to my eyes starting to go haywire from too much recent computer-screen reading, I have a busy schedule through Wednesday: a meeting tomorrow, and then a big do at the university Wednesday with Christopher Monckton speaking here on global warming issues, Larry as host... Darn, just when I'm really hot to re-read Langer, a project I've wanted to get around to for several years.

___

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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Re [Johnson's] comment: "Third, I will follow up on suggestion of Louis Torres and Michelle Marder Kamhi that Ortega's 1957 book On Love may have influenced Rand's concept of 'sense of life.'":

....Although the '57 Ortega book might have been an influence, I think Rand's basic idea was in place well before then. Recall, she asked Nathaniel when he first met her in 1950 if he viewed the universe as "benevolent" or "malevolent" and it seems she used the term "sense of life" in conversation while Atlas was being written.

I checked Rand's published Letters and Journals and found only one reference in writing prior to 1959, and that being not to "sense of life," but to "sense of living." The date given was "c. 1928" and was in reference to one of the characters in her story "Little Street." I did a Google search and found that both Emily Dickinson in the 1800s and T. S. Eliot in the early 1900s used the term "sense of living." I'm sure others must have, too.

The next written reference in the Journals, this one to "sense of life," came 700 or so pages later and was dated February 10, 1959, being in reference to her unwritten book "Lorne Dieterling."

Just prior to that, in 1958, Rand had given her lectures on fiction writing, which are now published in severely abridged form as a book, and are also available in somewhat censored and abridged form as taped lectures. In those lectures, she introduced and developed the concept of "sense of life."

I'm not aware that Rand used the term "sense of life" prior to that. Even if she did use it during discussions while she was writing Atlas Shrugged, I'm still of the opinion that she was influenced into focusing on it and using it by Susanne Langer's Feeling and Form, which was published in 1953. I think this for two reasons I'd like to discuss further: (1) The quote of the mystery artist/philosopher and (2) Langer's own comments about the nature of sense of life.

First, refer back to that quote of the mystery person. Two comments here:

1. Langer didn't identify the artist/philosopher, either by name or by gender. Why not? Simple, if it was Rand. Being a woman, she was probably the ~only~ artist/philosopher in America at the time, and giving the gender would have given away Rand's identity. And why not reveal it was Rand? Perhaps Langer admired Rand but felt that there was a considerable deal of antagonism toward Rand's ideas, and that her point would be made with the least extraneous controversy by just presenting the comments and not the identity of the speaker. (Perhaps Rand even authorized Langer to quote her on condition that Langer not identify her.)

2. Barbara and Ellen both seem to be presuming that Langer might have ~heard~ Rand speak those words somewhere, perhaps on the radio or in a lecture. Even though Langer did say "I once heard," I still disagree with this theory. First of all, these comments were made in 1953 or earlier, and it's highly unlikely to me that Langer would have recorded them and played them back later; and unless she had phonographic memory or well-honed stenographic skills, it's even more unlikely to me that she remembered them well enough from hearing them in a live or real-time setting to be able to quote them verbatim as she did. Secondly, look at where the italics begins: "....from the very beginning of my self-consciousness I knew
what anything that could happen to me would have to be like
." Unless this is just a mis-italicizing by the publisher, it indicates to me that Langer was faithfully reproducing something that was ~written~, not spoken. That is a ~very~ odd place for spoken italics to begin, don't you think? (If I were speaking it with emphasis, I would probably begin it two words earlier.) Based on this, I suspect that she and Rand had a correspondence, and that she was trying to cover up that fact by leading the reader to think that she had actually ~heard~ someone ~speak~ those comments. As I said in my JARS essay several years ago, this may be one of those facts that finally comes to light when the right researcher unwraps the right bundle of letters currently stored in the Ayn Rand Archives.

Secondly, I think it's clear that by 1953, Langer was not just using the term "sense of life," but had a very good handle on the concept itself. In a discussion of how static artworks (e.g., painting, sculpture, architecture) can express "vital experience" (which is a dynamic phenomenon), Langer wrote:

[C]ertainly in human life the intellectual and imaginative functions have a controlling share of influence on waking activity...This mental activity and sensitivity is what chiefly determines the way a person meets his surrounding world[/i]...[it] is the continuity of thought that systematizes our emotional reactions into attitudes with distinct feeling tones, and sets a certain scope for an individual's passions. In other words: by virtue of our thought and imagination we have not only feelings, but a life of feeling. That life of feeling is a stream of tensions and resolutions. Probably all emotion, all feeling tone, mood, and even personal "sense of life" or "sense of identity" is a specialized and intricate, but definite interplay of tensions--actual, nervous and muscular tensions taking place in a human organism. [371-2, emphasis added]

This is not ~identical~ to Rand's own view of sense of life, but it is close enough that, along with the mystery artist/philosopher quote, I think it provides tantalizing evidence for the hypothesis that Rand and Langer might have even had discussions about all this, though on a confidential or private basis. And I would suggest the time frame was sometime after the fall of 1951, when Rand and her husband moved to NYC, but before the 1953 publication of Feeling and Form. Langer taught at a number of colleges and universities on the East Coast, lecturing as late as 1950 at Columbia University in NYC, then not taking another teaching position until after F&F was published. I tried to Google for Langer's political affiliation (on the outside possibility that she was a political conservative and thus someone that Rand might have associated with during her first year or two in NYC) but found absolutely nothing. Anyone else want to try digging for that particular bit of data?

Another interesting detail of timing is Langer's seminal essay, "The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art," The Hudson Review, 3 (1950): 219-33, which discusses what Samuel Bufford (in his essay "Susanne Langer's Two Philosophies of Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 1. (Autumn, 1972), pp. 9-20) calls her "perceivability" theory of art: "it is the task of works of art to make perceivable or more perceivable to us aspects of our own experience or of the world around us." (Compare this with Rand's later formulation in "The Psycho-Epistemology of Art": the function of art is to concretize metaphysical abstractions -- i.e., abstractions about fundamental aspects of the world and life.)

As Ellen, I will be intensely interested to hear of any further details about a possible connection between Langer and Rand.

REB

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The following is a stretch, but there might even be a connection between Rand and Langer regarding epistemology. Langer's An Introduction to Symbolic Logic (1937) talks about concepts, abstractions and algebra, in addition to logic methodology and symbols. There is even a chapter called "The Algebra of Logic." Granted, Langer's book is based on Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell, but Rand was familiar with some of Bertrand Russell's work.

In the 70's, when I was struggling with ITOE, I also bought this book and pored over it for hours (not understanding a word back then, either :) ). Now that some of this stuff makes sense to me, I might resume study of this work. But I will have to buy it again. My copy got lost somewhere in Brazil in the tumult of my life.

Rand's whole theory of concept formation is based on an algebra-like approach. So even if there is no historical connection between her and Langer, there is possibly a parallel here. I wonder what Langer's theory of concept formation was.

Michael

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I couldn't resist looking, though I must go to bed!

Roger, It's an intriguing possibility that Langer and Rand corresponded, but then why wouldn't Rand have shown name recognition when Hospers mentioned Langer to her?

Nite, all...

E-

___

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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