Greg Salmieri
speaker
1,054 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2013
last heard Jan 2021
Greg Salmieri’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Elucidations · Episode 73: Greg Salmieri discusses Ayn Rand's moral philosophy · 15 Jul 2015
podcast
And I think there were two aspects to it.
You could think of what she's doing, but I think it would be a mistake, as taking all the higher values in life, or the things that we might think of as higher values, like art, which she has a book on, and like reasoning and like science, and making them servile and slavish, all in the service of a full stomach and the bottom line.
And I think this is how someone like Aristotle would take at first glance a theory like this.
And there's a sense in which that is what she is doing.
She's saying that all of these things, art and philosophy and science, do help you survive.
But on the other hand, she's also taking a lot of the things that those people dismissed as slavish, earning a living, technology, you know, just regular productive work, and elevating them, saying these things are good, they have the kind of goodness of art, science, philosophy.
They're on a kind of at a more abstract level, they're the same.
And the way she sees it, it's not really the case that.
Or that a full stomach is for the sake of science.
Rather, the goal is the whole life.
And we're understanding all of these things as components of it.
So if you take a dog's life, you wouldn't say that it runs around and eats for the sake of cellular metabolism.
It would be just as right to say it it engages in cellular metabolism, other plant-like activities for the sake of being able to run around and eat.
But what we really have to do to understand
The dog's life is understand the whole process that has a kind of structure to it.
And the structure in the case of the dog's life is going to be organized around something like perceptual desire and predation, right?
Because dogs are carnivores and they perceive their food and run after it, and that's how they get food, and that's the kind of essence or centerpiece of a dog's life.
Rand thinks a human life, what's playing that role is reason.
reason in its role as identifying knowledge that enables us to identify things as values and to identify ways to produce them.
But it's not that any part of that cycle is for the sake of the other any more than it is for the dog.
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