Ann Rand's Philosophy Of Objectivism

Rand’s novels lend us an insight into her unique philosophy of Objectivism. Her novels expound the concept of unity and integration of the mind and the body. Defying all set standards, Rand creates her ultimate heroes who follow their free will rather than conform to the accepted norms and moral codes set by society and religion. Rand’s philosophy suggests that the mind and body of an individual is inseparable and any individual who tries to separate the two, ends up suffering both mentally and physically. An individual is a sum total of his thoughts and actions but an organised society enforces its norms on the individual and forces him to behave in accordance with its standards. This leads to various layers of conflicts in an individual.
Man is the sum total of his thoughts and actions. In her novel “We The Living”, Andrei voices out Rand’s idea of man as a complete whole, in his speech to the Party club when he declares that ‘….man is born, alone, complete, an end in himself.’ In the process of evolution external forces have redesigned and reinforced certain set patterns of behaviour thus affecting the inherent nature of man. The control exerted on man’s thoughts made it difficult for him to act as per the whims of his body, gradually conditioning his emotional responses to what is deemed as morally and ethically sound. Behaviour was slowly categorized into ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’. This conditioning of responses to stimuli had a drastic impact on the individuality of man. As unique is every man, his responses to similar situations should also have been unique but social conditioning restricted his innate and inherent characteristics and urged him to behave in an accepted pattern. Thus individual responses gave way to social and collective
While this drastically affected the individual in general the damage has been profound on the women. In consequence to her role in the reproductive process and her primary position in safeguarding the traditional family system, the implications of the mind body split has been extremely oppressive. Moral transgressions that would have been forgiven in a man were considered unpardonable offence in a woman.
Rand’s philosophy which is explicit and the base of all her works aims at achieving a mind body integration. Objectivism does not treat mind and body as two separate types of entities. As Chris Matthew Sciabarra observes Rand’s ‘desire (was) to secularize the spiritual and spiritualize the material and her works, entails a total and unequivocal rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and all the false alternatives it engenders’.
Many a times man is confronted by feelings and emotions which are not in any way connected to external or physical circumstances. These might seem to threaten his emotional security and could hamper the clarity of his thought and action. The three different and equally important faculties of man namely- the body, mind and spirit may seem to be at war with one another and this could lead to the disastrous