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Comment by lolcraft | Hacker News Reader

It is odd to me that people care one iota about Ayn Rand the person.

I'm not convinced that the ethics of any philosopher, a matter of praxis by definition, should be considered strictly apart from the values which that philosopher really acted by (as this article portrays). Not following your own ethics seems as dishonest as openly proclaiming "do what I say, not what I do", as dishonest as an evolutionary biologist advocating creationism in their free time. Because of this, IMO the article does not incur in ad hominem for presenting Rand's life.

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Would you expect Beethoven to be able to pick up a violin and deliver a top notch rendition of one of his concertos for violin?

That was actually the case, so the example is particularly wrong. That doesn't change the fact that living by your own teaching is the basic of a true philosopher (See Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Kierkegaard...). Rand was a wingnut, not a philosopher.

Trolling aside, how would one of the others live by their philosophy? What evidence do you have that they did other than hero worship?

Well, look at Socrates. Read Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. It's pretty clear that he believed his philosophy, and both lived and died by it. Although, if you insist on being doubtful, we only know about him through the dialogs which Plato recorded (or wrote), and he could have simply been used as a mouthpiece for Plato's views, though he certainly did exist in some form.

But really, if you doubt and think that the belief is hero worship, you should probably spend some time reading the wikipedia articles (or whatever else) on them, and come up with your own refutations. Figure out how their lives contradict their philosophies, and then come back and tell us.

That's my point, we know so little about them that it's impossible to compare.

Everyone, no matter how great/influential has a mundane, humdrum, petty aspect to his/her existence. We are just privy to the biographies of the philosophers you mention filtered through the lens of centuries of hero worship.

Rand lived in the television age. When I first saw her in a video interview after reading her books I was disappointed at first glimpse. It's inevitable. Nobody can ever live up to their creative achievements.

> Everyone, no matter how great/influential has a mundane, humdrum, petty aspect to his/her existence.

Sometimes, I think like you, and at some other times, I think this is just an easy excuse for us petty people :)

> Although, if you insist on being doubtful, we only know about him through the dialogs which Plato recorded...

And Xenophon, too. What stroke me reading them is that though Xenophon "philosophy" is much more shallow and dull than Plato's, Socrates' character appears extremely similar and /true/ both in Plato's and Xenophon's dialogs. He sounds real.

Plato spend decades trying to create the real "Philosopher king" with Dionysius I, then Dion, last Dionysius II); Descartes spent his life in science made possible by his philosophy; Kant life is known well enough and is a good story to know (he was late for his daily walk once in his life, because he has heard of the french Revolution) and so his Kierkegaard (the story of the love of his life is interesting enough to be the subject of many books).

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