Who is John Gault? Reason's Role in Certainty
... affair with one man comes to an end for vaguely explained reasons when he tells her he’s made a decision that may make her feel as though he had betrayed her, without mentioning specifically what that decision is. Also, many of her best employees similarly disappear with little or no explanation, forcing her to recruit weaker, less capable men to work in their stead. As her difficulties in running the railroad company increase, she begins to realize that the problem is more far-reaching than she had originally thought. Both the plot and her suspicions thicken when a scientist she had hired to create a motor that would totally revolutionize her business suddenly quits, explaining that he is completely unwilling to give such a gift to the world, as it was fundamentally corrupt and he does not wish to support it any longer. He retires and Dagny follows him in hopes of tracking down the source of all of her problems, as she has imagined that there is some singular “destroyer” of industries that has gained influence over so many others, a man who was persuading intellectuals to retire in protest against corrupt institutions and altruism. Surely enough, she finds him. John Galt leads Dagny to a town whose entire population consists of retired intellectuals and industrialists. By coming there, they hoped to demonstrate how much civilization would suffer without them, as they were the collective driving force behind progress and innovation. Ayn Rand constructs charges of good against evil throughout the novel, depicting society as being in desperate need of heroes like Galt to liberate by introducing reason and epistemology. His character is strong and unwavering, as are his convictions, and the idea that this one man could “stop the motor of the world” indicates just how much faith Rand has in the ideas she had propagated through him in her writing. His infallibility comes through his capacity for reason, the extent to which he accepts and fulfills his role as a rational being. Galt and those like him are immune to fear, guilt, and many other negative emotions and therefor have a heightened capacity for passion and joy. Even when facing torture from the government, John Galt remains true to these qualities and refuses to submit. Rand is claiming that those who are certain in their convictions can also acquire this immunity to negativity by using similar reasoning. However, in order to do so, it is necessary to assume responsibility for several facets of this mental capacity. “Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process” (Rand 5). In other words, understanding takes effort. It is not possible to passively observe an object and claim to truly know it. Active human reasoning involves awareness of the relationships among objects more than simply recognizing the objects themselves. As we know from studying deconstruction, the interpretation or definition of terms becomes more difficult as the terms themselves move towards the abstract. Personal life experiences often play influential roles in our interpretations as well. The developments in thought surrounding how we find meaning indicate a sense of something like anxiety about understanding and engaging in the world and how we shape our lives around interpretations. Society is increasingly moving from the concrete to the abstract as well, becoming more chaotic and corrupt in nature, and Rand was one of those concerned with introducing a way to return from this descent. She claimed that certainty did not come through omniscience, but instead through drawing conclusions from some concrete evidence observed and interpreted with confidence in human faculties of reasoning. Understanding elements of reasoning and logic provides for certainty because you can trace the steps taken back to (what is generally considered to be) something real. Breaking down the way the human mind functions allows for a better grasp of the reasoning process. A trademark component of thinking is that it is an action; it does not happen to a person, that person makes deliberate efforts in the process. Author James Sedgwick uses an example of comparing pets to people to illustrate this point: while all animals have senses that are capable of sensing differences, what distinguishes man from beast is that pets are incapable of looking for differences—humans are more in charge of their minds (home1.gte.net). Being equipped with this free will also carries with it a sense of responsibility of searching for these differences and making interpretations instead of automatically accepting someone else’s. John Galt labored to free the men working in the industries by teaching them to think thusly instead of passively accepting the condition of the world around them. Without active thinking and acceptance of responsibility for using free will, these men were essentially going through the motions of living until Galt redirected them with a new and more meaningful purpose. Beyond free will, another crucial factor of reasoning involves “…the fundamental concept of method, the one on which all others depend…logic” (Rand 36). Evaluating logical statements involves taking into account their truth values (for example, using truth tables). Ayn Rand has often been subject to criticisms by those who claim that she was not a philosopher in a strict sense—in fact, the head of the philosophy department at a major university once denounced her by claiming that she was “the worst philosopher in the entire history of Western Civilization” (Smith 193). By such standards as his, she may have appeared to be so; however, Rand did not necessarily intend her audience to be composed of such educated philosophers, as she was not extremely well-read on the subject herself. This lack of formal education in the field works in her favor in that she came to these conclusions mostly by her own terms and reasoning instead of consciously interpreting someone else’s concepts. Her arguments are inherently original, despite the fact that they also contain elements of other similar points made by her peers and predecessors. She shares many strong opinions with some of the foremost names in the field As Smith claims in ...