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When I say "cry", I mean to show emotion, stress, pain. Dagny never cried in Atlas Shrugged, if I remember correctly. I like to write stories, and I especially like the ones that really stir the audience's emotions when the hero shows pain when he suffers some sort of tragedy, so long as that tragedy is overcome by the end. I believe this is a good device to make the audience despise the villain or antagonist even more. A great villain can be defined by either what he stands for or by how hated he is, and when you require an emotional response from the audience when you see someone suffer due to another person's actions, you know something great is being made. My own villain's goal, for example, is to seek freedom in the sense that he wants to evade the consequences of his actions. Free will really means to be able to think and use your mind. He doesn't understand that, and the physical realm is not good enough for him. His physical limitations frustrate him. He believes in the soul/body dichotomy, and, in the story, he's figured out how to separate them. He wants to separate the soul from the body--a radical extreme in philosophical skepticism. Being an older man, he's experienced the loss of a loved one, and he's determined to get them back. What he does throughout the story was done with full intention, and he blanks out and ignores the consequences of his actions. The consequences imposed on one of the other characters is both tragic and quite depressing. In the end, he fails because nobody will serve him. |
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Emotion is no sin in Objectivist ethics, but rather "automatic results of man’s value judgments integrated by his subconscious." From the Playboy interview:
Some emotions can be irrational if they are premised on faulty values or inconsistent with reality. It's up to us, through introspection, to explore, define, and validate our emotions. |
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Objectivists are humans, so of course they routinely feel emotion like anyone would (barring some medical problem). You can see that reflected throughout Rand's stories because she's writing about humans. Exactly how someone reacts-to or acts-on his emotions is another matter. What Objectivism urges (naturally) is being objective about the proper relationship between cognition and emotion: these are both essential in a healthy human life, and it is crucial to not make the mistake of trying to substitute one for the other, denying either it's critical role. Err one direction and you'll suffer the effects of repression; err the other direction and you'll suffer the effects of emotionalism. What is emotionalism? I can't find an adequate definition online. From Merriam-Webster.com: Definition of EMOTIONALISM 1: a tendency to regard things emotionally 2: undue indulgence in or display of emotion First Known Use of EMOTIONALISM 1865Seems adequate to me. What might be missing or unclear? (It isn't a moral evaluation of whether emotionalism is good or bad, of course, nor whether crying by a fictional hero would clash with his heroism.) To add to Ideas' point, I would describe it as the policy of letting your emotions be in control of your life/actions rather than reason. Emotionalism means that if it feels bad/good then it simply is bad/good. But that's an abortive attempt to displace cognition: feelings are automatized responses (not volitional) and therefore by definition they can't be objective -- they may or may not be right, and the arbiter of whether they are is, of course, your thinking (volitional) mind. Emotionalism replaces thinking with an unquestioned, unexplored, out-of-context, nonobjective reaction.
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