Sunday, July 01, 2007
Altruism vs. Self-Respect
"Men are important only in relation to other men, in their usefulness, in the service they render. Unless you understand that completely, you can expect nothing but one form of misery or another. Why make such a cosmic tragedy out of the fact that you've found yourself feeling cruel toward people? So what? It's just growing pains. One can't jump from a state of animal brutality into a state of spiritual living without certain transitions. And some of them may seem evil. A beautiful woman is usually a gawky adolescent first. All growth demands destruction. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. You must be willing to suffer, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unclean-anything, my dear, anything to kill the most stubborn of roots, the ego. And only when it is dead, when you care no longer, when you have lost your identity and forgotten the name of your soul—only then will you know the kind of happiness I spoke about, and the gates of spiritual grandeur will fall open before you." ~Ellsworth Toohey (The Fountainhead, 364)
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4 comments:
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Is Ellsworth supposed to be a Buddhist? I don't know of any other philosophy that recommends losing one's identity.
Hey Jon: As a character in the book Ellsworth is not a Buddhist, but speaking generally within Rand's philosophy I think it's possible a person such as Ellsworth could be a Buddhist, especially since Rand seems to use Ellsworth to represent all that is "bad" with collectivism, spending much of the book developing the contrast between what she defines as collectivism versus individualism. I most definitely think she would agree Buddhism subscribes to a brand of the collectivism that Toohey represents.
The book has many interpretive possibilities that keep us guessing, but the underlying themes remain consistent throughout, don't you think?
That makes sense; I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of collectivism, and I guess I was making an unwarranted jump into religion/spirituality. I have a copy of The Fountainhead sitting on my shelf, and I intend to get through it before the year is over.
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