Resendable Greetings - Literature Aisle

Mr. Whitehead presents an intriguing story of a young elevator inspector trapped in the conflict between the "intuitionists" and "empiricists." A split that has dominated the politics of the elevator's inspectors guild for a generation. (A conflict somewhat reminiscent of the conflict between Intuitionists and Logicists in the mathematics community - see Morris Kline's The Loss of Certainty).

Empiricists believe that elevator safety inspections should be based on the cold, dry hard measurements. Intuitionist seeks to understand the nature of the elevator, and base their inspections on their internal understanding on the elevatorness of the vertical shafts they inspect.

This conflict of ideas mixes in with the power politics of the elevator inspector's guild, the mob dominated elevator mechanic's union, and city hall. Definitely a unique work, and worth reading. On the downside, Colin Whitehead way over emphasizes race politics, detracting from an otherwise wonderful story.

Written in 1927, Steppenwolf provides some insight into the nightmare of mid century German Intellectualism. With minds full of Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Cantor and Marx, a German intellectual goes over the deep end.

Many college students are forced to read this book. As a result, there usually is an over abundance of this book in used bookstores.

After reading the Fountainhead, I was finally able to answer that decade old question: "Where did all this bad architecture come from?" Living in a suburb, where every quonset hut was built with the motto "form over function," It was strange to read a book idealizing the banality of modern American architecture. Architecture theory aside, Ayn Rand's works: The Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged belong in everyone's must read list. The books, however, are a little bit strange.

Ayn Rand was raised in Russia, and forced fed Marxist ideology. Marx, of course held that modern history was explained as a conflict between the working class "the proletariat" and the owners of production "the bourgeoisie." Communism, the worker's paradise, was a synthesis of this thesis and antithesis.

Seeing the horrendous abuses perpetrated by the communist state, Ayn Rand rebelled against the Marxist thinking, and developed a new thinking. In this this new thinking, all of history can be explained as a conflict between the individual and the collective. She is basically taking the standard Hegelian / Marxist approach to history, but placing it on a different conflict, and developing a very interesting world view.

In many ways, the conflict between the individual and collective is far more profound than the conflict between social classes. An individual actually has a conciousness, and a soul. An individual can think and create. When given freedom, the individual works to make their world a better place. The collective, on the otherhand, is simply a power structure. When it gets out of hand, it becomes an extremely destructive force.

Any Rand's works are extremely positive. They encourage people to stand up against group thought, and to take personal responsibility. There is far more to Objectivism than to Socialism. Even so, both philosophies fall short.