The purpose of reading any book is always either to add to one’s knowledge, or mere leisure. I believe, if a book makes you think, its actual purpose is met then and there. Philosophy as a genre in books, is an incredible way of triggering critical thinking. One such book is “The Fountainhead”, by the famous novelist, philosopher, playwright, Ayn Rand. It took some time for the words on its pages to sink in and make sense in my head. When they did, it became a rather interesting thing to think about.
The book basically journeys the lives of a number of different people, who in some way or the other represented deeply, the ideas of the author. The book comes from an author who has introduced the idea of “Objectivism” as a philosophy. According to the Ayn Rand Institute, the essentials of objectivism include :
1. The existence of an “objective reality”, which means there’s an absolute reality which exists irrespective of how it is perceived.
2. “Reason”, that is logically and consciously making sense of things.
3. “Self-interest” as an integral living philosophy, wherein one focuses on the needs and decisions of self, over others.
4. “Capitalism” that roughly reads as : privately controlled and aimed at personal profit.
The protagonist of the book embodies all of the ideals of Objectivism in general. Apart from that, he has been portrayed based on the idea of the author of the ideal human. Howard Roark is an architect, who doesn’t bow down to popularly accepted notions of Modern architecture. Despite facing severe failures in the face of populism, he, at no point, compromises with his ideals. Roark initially comes across as stubborn, but through the course of the plot, builds up to a commendably strong person of principle. His engagements with other characters in the book are brilliantly described and seem very unreal. In the sense, these are not the kind of conversations, or scenarios we generally come across or engage in. That’s the whole point of the book. It broadly depicts an amplified version of an ideal, individualistic human being, in contrast to the “second-handers”. Which brings us to another interesting term coined by the author, “second-handers”. This term defines the people who have no individuality as such. All their ideas and beliefs are drawn from others. Instead of analysing reality by themselves, they look for it to be defined by others. They live to impress others and can go so far as to compromise their own beliefs, to do so. The character of Peter Keating has been represented as one of this type. His relationship with Roark blatantly shows the polarity between the two kinds. Other characters namely Gail Wynand, Ellsworth Toohey, Dominique Francon, are all very strong characters and leave an impact in a strange manner. It’s the kind of impact that you can only understand when you read through those hundreds of pages full of words put in beautifully.
Being a purely philosophical read, it made me introspect over a lot of simple words that are part of our everyday lives, but whose meaning we never critically think over. One such concept is altruism. Literally, it means ‘sacrificing something for others than for self’. The book introduces ideas which quash the fundamental meaning of altruism in practice. What is true altruism? If you do something for the good of others, you may receive some reward. Which, in this case, is personal gratification. That goes to oppose the very essence of altruism. While pondering over this idea, I recalled one of the episodes of the popular TV series, Friends. In one of the episodes, two of the characters have an argument over the idea that “There is no selfless good deed”. Here’s the link to the relevant video.
Altruism is generally contrasted to Egoism. The ideology that one should always choose to do things in one’s self-interest is the basis of egoism. It seems like a simple, rational thing to say, that we just ought to make decisions for our own welfare. “Egoism” is naively understood to be a vice. Critics suggest that given every person in society follows this philosophy, the society may fall to anarchy. That is simply a very far-fetched assertion to make. The naked truth is that society already is living this philosophy to a great extent, and it is working just fine!
A debate can go on and on, and a philosophical one? It has no bounds.
I leave it here for you to think.
