"For the New Intellectual" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

because one cannot present a picture of human existence without a
philosophical framework; the novelist’s only choice is whether that
framework is present in his story explicitly or implicitly, whether he is
aware of it or not, whether he holds his philosophical convictions
consciously or subconsciously. This involves another choice: whether his
work is his individual projection of existing philosophical ideas or
whether he originates a philosophical framework of his own. I did the
second. That is not the specific task of a novelist; I had to do it,
because my basic view of man and of existence was in conflict with most
of the existing philosophical theories. In order to define, explain and
present my concept of man, I had to become a philosopher in the specific
meaning of the term.

For those who may be interested in the chronological development of my
thinking, I have included excerpts from all four of my novels. They may
observe the progression from a political theme in We the Living to a
metaphysical theme in Atlas Shrugged.

These excerpts are necessarily condensed summaries, because the full
statement of the subjects involved is presented, in each novel, by means
of the events of the story. The events are the concretes and the
particulars, of which the speeches are the abstract summations.

When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I do not mean to
imply that my full system is still to be defined or discovered; I had to
define it before I could start writing Atlas Shrugged. Galt’s speech is
its briefest summary.

Until I complete the presentation of my philosophy in a fully detailed
form, this present book may serve as an outline or a program or a
manifesto.

For reasons which are made clear in the following pages, the name I have
chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.

AYN RAND

October, 1960



FOR THE NEW INTELLECTUAL

When a man, a business corporation or an entire society is approaching
bankruptcy, there are two courses that those involved can follow: they
can evade the reality of their situation and act on a frantic, blind,
range-of-the-moment expediency—not daring to look ahead, wishing no one
would name the truth, yet desperately hoping that something will save
them somehow—or they can identify the situation, check their premises,
discover their hidden assets and start rebuilding.