MUSINGS OF THOUGHTFUL MINDS
YOUNG PEOPELE, according to Ayn Rand, do
seek a comprehensive view of life, i.e., a philosophy, they do seek meaning,
purpose, ideals --- and most of them take what they get. It is in their teens and early twenties that
most people seek philosophical answers and set their premises, for good or
evil, for the rest of their lives. Some
never reach that stage: some never give up the quest; but the majority are open
to the voice of philosophy for a few brief years. These last are the permanent, if not
innocent, victims of modern philosophy.
Ayn Rand believes that such teenagers are
not independent thinkers not intellectual original; they are unable to answer
or withstand the flood of modern sophistries.
So some of them give up, after one or two unintelligible courses,
convinced that thinking is a waste of time---and turn into lethargic cynics or
stultified Babbitts by the time they reach twentyfive. Others accept what they hear: they accept it
blindly and literally; these are today’s activists. And no matter what tangle of motives now
moves them, every teacher of modern philosophy should cringe in their presence,
if he is still open to the realization that it is by means of the best within
them, by means of their twisted, precarious groping for ideas, that he has
turned them into grotesque little monstrosities.
Ayn Rand concludes: Now what happens to the
better minds in modern universities, to the students of above average
intelligence who are actually eager to learn?
What they find and have to endure is a long, slow process of
psycho-epistemological torture.
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Social relationship, says poet Mohammad
Iqbal, is a blessing to the individual.
His latent capacities are hereby actualized. Individual attains respect through
society. Society gets its organization
through its members. His power of
self-expression and his capacity for self-measurement flow from society. The individual becomes saner through social
contact so that the one becomes many.
Individual alone, unaware of ideals and value judgments; his capacity
for self-activity tends to deteriorate.
----
The traditional view, according to Karl
Marx, in which man is always conceived of as the purpose of production, seems
to be much more sublime than the modern world, in which production is presented
as the purpose of man and wealth as the purpose of production. But hat is wealth – when stripped of its
bourgeois form --- but the universe of the needs, powers, enjoyments,
productive forces of individuals? The
full development of the human sway over natural forces, those of so-called
nature as well as those of his own nature?
The complete emergence of his creative potentialities?
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An organized instrument of administration
which is called the Government, says AurobindoGhosh, is nothing else than human
development in the individual and in the group.
The individual, standing alone, cannot develop; he depends on the
support and assistance of the group to which he belongs. The group itself cannot develop unless it has
an organization by means of which it not only secures internal peace and order
and protection from external attack but also proper conditions which will give
free play for the development of its activities and capacities – physical,
moral, intellectual. The nation or group is not like the individual who can
specialize his development and throw all his energies into one line. The nation must develop military and
political greatness and activity, intellectual and aesthetic greatness and
activity, commercial greatness and activity, moral sanity and vigour; it cannot
sacrifice any of these functions of the organism without making itself unfit
for the struggle for life and finally succumbing and perishing under the
pressure of moral highly organized nations.
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