Aswad
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Joined: 4/4/2007
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Kirata
The most important reality that the Gorean must come to know is not the Objectivist reality but the subjective reality of his or her deepest and fullest human nature.
Hence "evolutionary objectivism", i.e. adapted to humans.
Reason dictates humans are animals of a particular kind, and happiness is a pursuit which requires a human foundation.
Objectivism has the same blind spot most other movements do: the creator of the work proceeds from a negative to a work of opposition to this negative, arriving at a lot of good things, but ultimately dragging along a lot of the same faults as what is being opposed, as much due to the bias as the lack of a positive vision. Ayn Rand is doing no better than most in this regard, and her theories are no more apt to work without modification than Gor is apt to work in a literal sense. Both touch on something, and the lines they follow converge on something congruent with both, but identical to neither. A positive vision.
When one posits reason as a fundament in a philosophy, that philosophy must apply reason to itself. Rand failed there. Opposition in the visionary work results in tilting at windmills, swinging pendulums and so forth: a lot of work with no real movement. Before proceeding to embrace the opposite of a negative, one must identify the axis one is trying to invert it about, and pin down the nature of the negative. In doing so, it is often apparent that the negative is something other than what one believed, and the positive consequently anchored not in the place one had intended, but another which usually proves to be shared with other principles. In this way, the vision turns elegant, as the underpinnings simplify through successive refactorings, and the substance divides into many smaller points that display characteristic organic network traits of multiplicative value by the number of edges between many small points in a low dimensional space, rather than having the additive value of summing a few, large, monolithic nodes in a more rigid, less organic and more topologicaly complex network.
Objectivism is neither organic, nor human, though it does have an element of beauty to it. I fail to see how it can be rational to disregard humans in the equation. Hence, I see reason as mandating a human element be added, an adaptation that is quite natural in my view. To do so doesn't yield a carbon copy of Gor, of course, but it gets awfully close in many areas. As it should: if we hold that Gor is intrinsically human on some level, then making something rational and honest into a human thing will have that much in common, at least.
Gor, on the other hand, often dismisses some of the uniquely human traits on the basis of how they have historically been implemented, a case of the same mistake of failing to identify the error to correct before setting out to correct it. Reason and technology are very natural, and exhibited by other species, as well, though usually not as developed as in humans. Language, however, is recognized as important, a lot of Goreans discriminating on that basis in the same manner we in the real world discriminate based on other axes of (dis)similarity. To take into account all the facets of human nature is, IMO, necessary to address what it is to be human.
Both philosophies are incomplete, but they are compatible and convergent, as far as I can tell.
And they seem to flesh each other out nicely, though the result is still not complete.
Health,
al-Aswad.
_____________________________
"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind.
From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way.
We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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RE: Atlas Shrugged - 
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