Cody Mork - 2021-05-04 00:59:23
Dear Mr. Newberry,
First, I hope that you, your family, and friends are all healthy and well after all things 2020 and beyond.
I’m not sure if this is the appropriate channel in which to proceed with the following request, but I am writing to see if I could ask you the very generous favor to read over a paper I wrote that presents what I believe is an original development and application of Ayn Rand’s theory of esthetics. I recently listened to an impressive interview you gave several years back, and in addition to the quality of your artwork, any criticism or feedback from someone of your artistic and philosophical caliber would be a great privilege and honor.
For a brief intellectual foregrounding, I first read Ayn Rand 23 years ago when I was 15, and since then I have read and listened to nearly all of the available Objectivist literature and courses, including work from Kelley, Hicks, Peikoff, Binswanger, Salmieri, Ghate, Smith, and many others. My undergraduate degree is from UC Berkeley where I studied economics, and since then I have devoted a great deal of time to the study of philosophy, psychology, esthetics, and art.
Although the paper is just over one hundred pages in length, there is a seven-page introduction that offers a condensed summary of the paper’s most significant argument and should give you an idea if going through the rest is worth the requisite time and effort. Also, I’m sure you are extremely busy and have other pressing concerns during this time, but still, I just wanted to see if there was the possibility of receiving any potential feedback or criticisms, something for which I would be greatly appreciative.
Lastly, if I may present one brief highlight of my paper to perhaps better entice you to give it a look, one of the most potentially important identifications I make in this paper, (which I also highlight in the short introduction and devote the longest chapter to in the paper), relates to the esthetic experience of benevolent interactions between strangers. In short, I argue that such benevolent gestures—from holding a door to helping someone in need—can be, and most often are, experienced esthetically, and the positive, end-in-itself valence that such gestures can generate is rooted in the fact that they are able to concretize MVJs related the importance of man's independence, individuality, civility, the harmony of interests among men, and the value of human life as such. Indeed, this is an identification that I argue is implicit in many places in the Objectivist corpus—from literary examples such as Roark saying that he would help Keating because"...it was a building and he had to save it, as others could not pass a drowning man without leaping in to the rescue," to more technical implicit examples such as where Tara Smith writes (in her Normative Ethics book) that such gestures between strangers are a way of saying "we-human beings-are special," and are an "affirmation of...the value of human life as such."
Other theories that try to explain the positive valence of such acts are either, I argue, inadequate or false, and it is the perceived inadequacies of the utilitarian/materialist explanations that have led people to seek out and embrace one of the many variants of a mystical, intuitional, or instinct-driven explanation, ranging from those proposed by Buddhism to Jordan Peterson. I propose that Rand’s esthetics provides a third alternative, one that is non-mystical/non-instinct driven, one that goes beyond the more common (and sometimes rational) utilitarian/materialist explanations, and one that is, preeminently, spiritual/conceptual in nature.
I am very open to being proved wrong on this above point and would gladly welcome any such critique. However, if I am correct that there is an esthetic dimension to such benevolent interactions, I believe, and argue in the paper, that this has very important implications for both the Objectivist ethics and the wider cultural spread and acceptance of Rand's ideas--something that has been one of the major motivating factors for me to write this paper and contact you today.
If interested, I can email you a copy of the paper, but if you’re not interested or don’t have the time, no worries at all and thank you for the consideration.
All my best, love the art, and keep up the good fight,
-Cody Mork
(617) 880-9988 AUTHOR: Cody Mork AUTHOR EMAIL: codymork@gmail.com AUTHOR URL: SUBJECT: [Michael Newberry] Contact IP: 108.215.211.251 Array ( [1_Name] => Cody Mork [2_Email] => codymork@gmail.com [3_Message] => Dear Mr. Newberry,
First, I hope that you, your family, and friends are all healthy and well after all things 2020 and beyond.
I’m not sure if this is the appropriate channel in which to proceed with the following request, but I am writing to see if I could ask you the very generous favor to read over a paper I wrote that presents what I believe is an original development and application of Ayn Rand’s theory of esthetics. I recently listened to an impressive interview you gave several years back, and in addition to the quality of your artwork, any criticism or feedback from someone of your artistic and philosophical caliber would be a great privilege and honor.
For a brief intellectual foregrounding, I first read Ayn Rand 23 years ago when I was 15, and since then I have read and listened to nearly all of the available Objectivist literature and courses, including work from Kelley, Hicks, Peikoff, Binswanger, Salmieri, Ghate, Smith, and many others. My undergraduate degree is from UC Berkeley where I studied economics, and since then I have devoted a great deal of time to the study of philosophy, psychology, esthetics, and art.
Although the paper is just over one hundred pages in length, there is a seven-page introduction that offers a condensed summary of the paper’s most significant argument and should give you an idea if going through the rest is worth the requisite time and effort. Also, I’m sure you are extremely busy and have other pressing concerns during this time, but still, I just wanted to see if there was the possibility of receiving any potential feedback or criticisms, something for which I would be greatly appreciative.
Lastly, if I may present one brief highlight of my paper to perhaps better entice you to give it a look, one of the most potentially important identifications I make in this paper, (which I also highlight in the short introduction and devote the longest chapter to in the paper), relates to the esthetic experience of benevolent interactions between strangers. In short, I argue that such benevolent gestures—from holding a door to helping someone in need—can be, and most often are, experienced esthetically, and the positive, end-in-itself valence that such gestures can generate is rooted in the fact that they are able to concretize MVJs related the importance of man's independence, individuality, civility, the harmony of interests among men, and the value of human life as such. Indeed, this is an identification that I argue is implicit in many places in the Objectivist corpus—from literary examples such as Roark saying that he would help Keating because"...it was a building and he had to save it, as others could not pass a drowning man without leaping in to the rescue," to more technical implicit examples such as where Tara Smith writes (in her Normative Ethics book) that such gestures between strangers are a way of saying "we-human beings-are special," and are an "affirmation of...the value of human life as such."
Other theories that try to explain the positive valence of such acts are either, I argue, inadequate or false, and it is the perceived inadequacies of the utilitarian/materialist explanations that have led people to seek out and embrace one of the many variants of a mystical, intuitional, or instinct-driven explanation, ranging from those proposed by Buddhism to Jordan Peterson. I propose that Rand’s esthetics provides a third alternative, one that is non-mystical/non-instinct driven, one that goes beyond the more common (and sometimes rational) utilitarian/materialist explanations, and one that is, preeminently, spiritual/conceptual in nature.
I am very open to being proved wrong on this above point and would gladly welcome any such critique. However, if I am correct that there is an esthetic dimension to such benevolent interactions, I believe, and argue in the paper, that this has very important implications for both the Objectivist ethics and the wider cultural spread and acceptance of Rand's ideas--something that has been one of the major motivating factors for me to write this paper and contact you today.
If interested, I can email you a copy of the paper, but if you’re not interested or don’t have the time, no worries at all and thank you for the consideration.
All my best, love the art, and keep up the good fight,
-Cody Mork
(617) 880-9988
[email_marketing_consent] => [entry_title] => Contact [entry_permalink] => https://newberryarchive.wordpress.com/contact-2/ [feedback_id] => b9d6f869db732fd318bf9d9b0615959e )