The Romantic Manifesto
a philosophy of literature.
by Ayn Rand · first published 1969
9mentions
4recommended by
6HN commenters
2008–2016first – last mentioned
67% recommend17% neutral17% critical
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…be unfounded. In the first case people who follow the herd go down with the herd; in the second case one who goes against the herd succeeds. On the same note, her best non-fiction book is the obscure Romantic Manifesto, a set of her essays on art. Her philosophical essays aren't as bad as some people make out, but she oversimplifies and makes false dichotomies, and there isn't much which is original in her political…
on “Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority” ↗Its naive only becaue it is idealist. If you have read her non-fiction, The Romantic Manifesto might give you the reasoning behind it. Art is the realm of the ideal, not the real. (I often give the analogy of the cave painters wasting their time painting skinny meatless cattle (which may have been…
…another look at her philosophy. If you're still here, any books you'd recommend? Is Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology worth the read? I read Virtue of Selfishness which was OK -- I preferred the Romantic Manifesto as I felt her ideas in there were better worked out.
on “Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority” ↗…comment history you'll see I talk about her a lot on HN, and that's because I think computer scientists will gain immense value from studying her works. Introdution to Objectivist Epistemology and The Romantic Manifesto contain her deepest writings on consciousness and cognition and are the books I'd recommend. http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/consciousness.html is a good taster. http://aynrandlexicon.com/ayn-rand-works/introduction-to-obj...…
on “The Challenge of Consciousness” ↗I'd be curious to know your background such that The Romantic Manifesto was an "easy" read. It was not easy for me. As for the difficulty of that book, the topic is one of the widest possible integrations in that she explains the psychological purpose of art, something I…
on “Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority” ↗…reason and force were essentially the only two means of dealing with men, making non-initiation of force the fundamental social principle. (For said honest readers, the books which persuaded me were The Romantic Manifesto and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, though Virtue of Selfishness is probably the easiest starting point. Once I studied Nozick's famous criticism of Rand, I concluded that he was someone very…
on “Italian court rules food theft 'not a crime' if hungry” ↗…anti-Dostoevsky. (Dostoevsky was a polar opposite kind of conservative to AR, if she can be called conservative, and boy would he have had a field day with this.) Rand was a fan of Dostoevsky (see The Romantic Manifesto http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451149165). (By comparison, she couldn't stand Tolstoy, and considered Anna Karenina one of the (morally) worst books ever written.) Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical…
on “How to hack the beliefs that are holding you back” ↗…At the very least, if you can find it at a bookstore, read the intro because it does a good job of setting the historical context on why the theory of concepts is so important. BTW, in some ways The Romantic Manifesto which you mentioned is more difficult than the ITOE.
on “Review: Ayn Rand’s ‘Ideal’ Presents a Protagonist Familiar in Her Superiority” ↗…newcomers to avoid Scientology recruiters, a college freshman finds it difficult to avoid the Objectivist Club recruiters. Thus, later in the same year I had a brush with Rand again. I tried reading "The Romantic Manifesto" and found it unintentionally hilarious, in the same way Sarah Palin's press conferences are hilarious.
on “No Gods or Kings: Objectivism and Ayn Rand in BioShock” ↗