There is a pinnacle of living that Objectivism makes possible, which depends in part on understanding and practicing the philosophy. It depends on having the philosophy psychologically real to you.
You’ve seen the pinnacle of human living that Rand presents.
Galt is the way he is because he understands and practices Objectivism. The philosophy is integrated into his mind: it’s instantly available, informing his emotional responses to things. It isn’t a distinct context he has to get his mind into (like getting oneself back into a project one has set aside for some time). It’s always there, immediately accessible.
This is what makes Galt Galt: he feels the certainty that comes with his knowledge, the pride that comes from creating his motor and winning Dagny, the serenity at having a consistent way of life. This is one of the major values a philosophy has to offer: that it shapes and animates our minds and our emotions.
The only philosophic ideas that function this way are the ideas that we’ve integrated and see to be true, ideas that we fully understand. To understand what I mean by this, consider abstract knowledge, like math or physics.
There are many gradations of understanding.
- You can understand nothing.
- You can seemingly understand the lectures, but have the homework problems be baffling.
- You can memorize the formulas, but not be able to use them.
- You can memorize the formulas and be able to use them on one very specific kind of problem.
- You can understand the lectures and be able to do something on the homework, but still have many questions.
- You can use the formulas for a variety of different problems, manipulating them as needed.
- You can explain why the formulas are the way they are. If you had to, you could recreate them just from looking at a situation in which you need it.
- You know the topic so thoroughly that you can give the lecture on it, and answer any questions you get from the audience.
- Finally, the information is readily available to you in real life; if you encounter a situation in which you need it, you can recall and utilize the knowledge with little to no confusion or uncertainty.
You can be at different levels with any particular piece of information you possess. You might be at the very first one with something like quantum physics, but the last with basic addition. You probably didn’t know how to reach that final state in at least one subject, and so you probably didn’t reach it.
The thing that makes such understanding possible is a particular approach to the learning. In other words, some things helped you understand the material better than others: going to office hours, doing practice problems, asking lots of questions in lecture, etc. Those things were vital to your truly grasping the material.
It’s things like this that you need to figure out for learning Objectivism.
The problem is figuring out and doing the things you need to in order to reach the height of understanding Objectivism, so that you can reap the rewards of an Objectivist life. That’s the problem this website is designed to solve.