is he just a hedonist?

[kluss]

isnt he just a pilospher that are trying to make andy rnad be more clean for other pilsopher`?

try to build a pilkosphy sytemns  that other then juts fiction?

that try to make a utoppia wher you hvae rhigths and your rhigt to be a induvlaisitc hedonist writtien into the constetctuion?all his accercer are just to write book to make objectivism  understood be other intelectuells?

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Kluss,

I'm sorry, I don't understand this.

I realize you have dyslexia, so we will be patient. This one is too difficult, though.

Michael

[kluss]

try to make academic books out of  Objecvtism fiction books so those not suoprt andy rand can undertsand what she wrote by facts 

and try to make objectvist hedonist a new system of objectvism a system of each perosn have the right to be as hedonsitic as he want ?

and a basic law that protect those rightes ?

 

[Mikee]

Kluss,  Ayn Rand wrote many non fiction books about Objectivism.  Tibor Machan was a fan of Ayn Rand, lectured and wrote many books and articles about liberty and free societies.  He died this year in March,  He was one of the founders of the Reason Foundation.  Hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure, is not the same as egoism and individualism.

[jts]

hedonism -- Ayn Rand Lexicon

hedonism -- Atlas Society

My understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding, of ARL is the difference between hedonism and Objectivism is:

hedonism:   I like x; therefore x is good.

Objectivism:  x is good; therefore I like x.

Seems to me Ayn Rand was a hedonist, even tho she would deny it. At least where x is sex or smoking or food. I'm not saying her philosophy implies hedonism.

In order to be an Objectivist, instead of a hedonist, where x is sex or smoking or food, you would need some reason to say it is good other than you like it. I don't think Ayn Rand had a reason for saying these are good other than she liked them.

How can you say smoking, which most people agree is bad for health, be good prior to liking it? How can smoking enhance your life, apart from the pleasure of smoking? Controlled fire sounds to me like a rationalization, not a legit reason.

Also I suspect Ayn Rand's food choices were based mostly on taste, not on health and nutrition considerations. And I suspect this is true of most people, judging from food that is served in restaurants.

I think there are applications of Ayn Rand's philosophy that she simply didn't think about.

 

[jts]

I have a theory that might qualify as hedonism or not, I don't know.

I am simple minded enough to believe the sense of taste should be a guide to what is good and what is bad. So as a rough rule of thumb, what tastes good is good and what tastes bad is bad. As a rough rule of thumb. But the theory must be refined a bit.

Refinement #1:  It is possible due to bad eating habits to cause the sense of taste to become corrupt in such a way that good things don't taste good and bad things don't taste bad. To the extent that the sense of taste is corrupt, it is less able to perform its natural function of telling us what is good and what is bad. One of the effects of fasting is that it tends to restore the sense of taste to its uncorrupted state.

Refinement #2:  Some substances can deceive even an uncorrupted sense of taste, thereby defeating it. One of these substances is MSG which is a taste enhancer. Its sole purpose is to make food taste better than it deserves to tastes, better than its health and nutritional merits justify. Most people see this as a positive; I see this as a negative. You probably could make dogshit taste good by putting enough MSG on it. I hold to the idea that any food that does not taste good on its own is not fit to eat.

 

[Jon Letendre]

Hedonism is the pursuit by other people of things for which we ourselves feel little or no allure.

[BaalChatzaf]

11 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Hedonism is the pursuit by other people of things for which we ourselves feel little or no allure.

In short, "hedonist" is a put-down word. 

[turkeyfoot]

12 hours ago, Jon Letendre said:

Hedonism is the pursuit by other people of things for which we ourselves feel little or no allure.

Thus, the zen of motorcycle maintenance. 

[Jon Letendre]

10 hours ago, turkeyfoot said:

Thus, the zen of motorcycle maintenance. 

I was probably influenced by that book more than I realize. I was 17 when I read it and still have that copy. I just read some summary stuff online since you posted, I had forgotten so much of it. I have loved wrenching and tinkering since I was small, so it was easy taking his side in the practical/romantic divide. I love wrenching my own bikes, it's a huge part of the felt connection. I get excited when something I own breaks. Excited about the adventure of it. I hope to be stumped, to struggle, and to understand something by the end that I don't know about yet.

[turkeyfoot]

I have the book, but have not read much. I wasnt ready to digest the ideas, I found it a confusing stream of consciousness, written by an author who said he had a mental breakdown. What that meant to Persig, I dont know. He was expelled from college and had a troubled relationship with his son perhaps all stemming from confusion as he was coming to grips with ideas confronted with studies.

More than his writing I have to congratulate him for traveling 17 days on a '64 Honda CB77 (305cc) Superhawk going 2,000 mi. from Minnesota to California in '68. )

Non motorcyclists typically view bikes as dangerous and vapid wastes of time. Im content, having spent more time with machines and wrenching than with people. The more intricate, time pressured and valuable the work to me, the better. You cant fix people. ;)

Im a part time thrill seeker. Full on hedonism is too much work.

[Jon Letendre]

I wasn't ready to digest most of the ideas, either. I suspect most of what he is trying to say flew over my head because I didn't get his analogies. When I did understand what he was getting at, I disagreed, (except the practical/romantic approach to mechanical things.) His manner with his son is dickish and inept. I cracked the book open last night to examples of that on the first page I opened to. I was close to the age of Chris and recall thinking that I wouldn't like that father at all.

All of us read the book for a Critical Thinking college class I took while in high school. He also assigned The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas. The course was at a state uni an hour from the main campus with night classes for working adults (and me.) The prof was from a nearby Catholic college. He wasn't a priest, but he was stuffy and didn't know what to do when I would raise my hand and say things like: "this is pure collectivist crap, you shouldn't make us read this." Within a couple weeks I think he was liking the color I brought to his Tues and Thurs evenings, and would come right back: "Yes, it is, well spotted. Your classmates look confused though, so please explain to them what collectivism is and how Thomas makes a case for that crap in this essay." I got an A.

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

On 12/30/2016 at 2:15 PM, Jon Letendre said:

When I did understand what he was getting at, I disagreed, (except the practical/romantic approach to mechanical things.)

Jon,

I read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance ages ago. Pirsig spacing out on the concept of quality--far out, dude.  Even back then, I got the analogy where he kept the abstraction level of the philosophers he discussed equivalent to the terrain as a kind of traveling metaphor. For instance, I remember him talking about Kant when he was going along mountain tops where the air was thin and so on.

However, two things stuck with me that I found useful along my life.

The first is how he described taking apart a motorcycle in a manner he could put back together again, that is, laying out the parts on a huge spread of papers on the floor in the order he took them off the bike, starting top left and making a new line every time space ran out. That way, reassembling meant going back in the opposite direction and you wouldn't forget anything. 

I've used this system for clocks and gadgets of all sorts. It's worked, too, unless some dork came along and threw everything into a box when I wasn't around. (You can get to levels of pissed you didn't know you were capable of.) 

The second was that a piece of aluminum beer can is great shim stock for handlebars. This one is not so useful these days, though. I stopped drinking alcohol, I rarely drink soda pop, and I hardly ever need a shim for anything anymore.

Michael

[Brant Gaede]

On 12/28/2016 at 7:12 PM, jts said:

hedonism -- Ayn Rand Lexicon

hedonism -- Atlas Society

My understanding, or perhaps misunderstanding, of ARL is the difference between hedonism and Objectivism is:

hedonism:   I like x; therefore x is good.

Objectivism:  x is good; therefore I like x.

Seems to me Ayn Rand was a hedonist, even tho she would deny it. At least where x is sex or smoking or food. I'm not saying her philosophy implies hedonism.

In order to be an Objectivist, instead of a hedonist, where x is sex or smoking or food, you would need some reason to say it is good other than you like it. I don't think Ayn Rand had a reason for saying these are good other than she liked them.

How can you say smoking, which most people agree is bad for health, be good prior to liking it? How can smoking enhance your life, apart from the pleasure of smoking? Controlled fire sounds to me like a rationalization, not a legit reason.

Also I suspect Ayn Rand's food choices were based mostly on taste, not on health and nutrition considerations. And I suspect this is true of most people, judging from food that is served in restaurants.

I think there are applications of Ayn Rand's philosophy that she simply didn't think about.

If her philosophy doesn't imply hedonism your understanding of hedonism doesn't imply philosophy.

--Brant