This essay won the First Prize in the all India The Fountainhead Essay Contest 1998. Ishani Majumdar is a student of class XI at the Springdales School, Pusa Road, New Delhi.
 

Topic: THE THEME OF THE FOUNTAINHEAD

First Prize Winner: Ishani Majumdar
 

Ayn Rand has based her novel, The Fountainhead on the projection of an ideal man.  It is the portrayal of a moral ideal as an end in itself.  She has placed 'man-worship' above all and has brought out the significance of the heroic in man. Man-worshippers are those who see man's highest potential and strive to actualise it.  They are dedicated to the exaltation of man's self esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.

The Fountainhead has brought out the greatness of man - the capacity, the ability, the integrity and honesty in man - as an ideal to be achieved.  It is based on the idea of romanticism which means that "it is concerned not with things as they are but with things as they might be and ought to be."

The Fountainhead is the story of an architect, Howard Roark-, whose genius and integrity were as unyielding as granite and of his desperate battle waged against the conventional standards of society.  It is a tale of hatred and denunciation unleashed by the society against a great innovator; of a man who has great conviction in himself; of a person who believes that man's first right on earth is the right of the ego and that man's first duty is the duty to himself, a man who redefines egoism.  An egoist, in the absolute sense, is not the man who sacrifices others to self.  He is the man who stands above the need of using others in any manner. Roark doesn't function through others. He needs no other men. His primary goal is to achieve perfection. He is a man with uncompromising values and integrity.

In order to make her philosophy clearer, Ayn Rand has simultaneously given an account of people like Peter Keating and Ellsworth M. Toohey.  Peter Keating - a man who cheats and lies but preserves a respectable front.  He knows himself to be dishonest but others think he is honest and he derives his self-respect from that.  His aim in life is greatness - in other people's eyes.  Other people dictated his conviction which he did not hold but he was satisfied that others believed he held them.  Others were his prime concern.  He didn't want to be great but to be thought great.  He borrowed from others to make an impression on others.  It is his ego, self-respect which he betrayed and gave up.  And yet he was called selfish.

Roark called such a man a second-hander - a man who didn't live for himself but for others.  But he didn't believe that Keating was a selfish man.  He said that it wasn't selfishness but precisely an absence of self.

Ellsworth M. Toohey - a great humanitarian, who professes love for the inferior and preaches altruism.  He declares that man exists in order to serve others. He preaches altruism which demands selflessness - that men live for others and place others above self.  He used altruism as a weapon of exploitation and reverses the base of mankind's moral principles.  He is actually, a frustrated bigot who clings to those less endowed, in order to establish his own superiority by comparison.  He and people like him are those who force their miserable personalities on every single person they meet.  They are power-crazy but they don't realise that only those people go after power who are weak within themselves - weak in their souls.  These are the worst of all second-handers because they want this prestige and power not for themselves but for others.

Such people suffer all their lives.  They seek happiness but never find it because they had never held a truly personal desire.  All their wishes, efforts, dreams, ambitions were motivated by other men.  They struggled for the second-handers' delusion - prestige.

In contrast, creators such as Roark are selfish.  It is the whole secret of their power that it is self-sufficient, self-motivated and self-generated.  They serve nothing and no one, they live for themselves and only by doing so they achieve the things which are the glory of mankind.  But their selfishness does not imply the use of other men and nor are they affected by the approval of others.  On the contrary, it is the others who benefit from them.

The character of Roark is that of a strongly marked individualistic nature. He doesn't believe in selflessness but in man's right to the pursuit of personal happiness. He believes that in all proper relationships, there is no sacrifice of anyone to anyone involved. This is the only possible form of relation between equals.  Anything else is the relation of a slave to master.  He believes that no work can ever be done collectively.  Each creative job is achieved under the guidance of a single individual thought.

As in the lines of the editorial written by Toohey regarding the Stoddard Temple built, by Roark,  "A person entering a temple seek release from himself.  He wishes to humble his pride, to confess his unworthiness, to beg forgiveness.  Man's proper posture in God's house is to bend on his knees.  Nobody in his right mind will kneel in Mr. Roark's temple.  The place forbids it.  The emotions it suggests are of a different nature - arrogance, audacity, defiance, self-exaltation.  It is not a house of God but a cell of a megalomaniac.........."

In a world where people (like Toohey) thought that man's highest act was to realise his own worthlessness and to beg forgiveness, and that man is something which needs to be forgiven, Roark saw the ideal man as strong, proud, clean, wise, fearless and guiltless.  He saw man as a heroic being.  He thought that self-exaltation comes from the consciousness of being guiltless, of seeking the truth and achieving it, of living up to one's highest possibility, of knowing no shame and having no cause for shame.  He didn't believe in religion.  He thought that a place built as a setting for man is a sacred place.  'Worship' means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man - taken as God.  But Roark thought otherwise.  He believed that if man himself can achieve nobility and grandeur, then why not worship that ideal man instead of God?  And thus he built the temple to the human spirit and not to God.

The standard of Howard Roark is so exalted and hard to emulate that even Dominique Francon, a highly individualistic woman who loved Roark desperately, could realise the futility of accomplishing Roark's standard in this mundane world and had thus initially distanced herself from him by marrying Peter Keating.  During the Stoddard Temple trial, when she said in the witness stand, "You're (Roark) casting pearls without getting even a pork chap in return." She had meant that Roark's buildings were so priceless that they didn't deserve to be built in a world of men who couldn't value and appreciate Roark's work enough.

Ayn Rand's daringly original philosophy of 'objectivism' is the base of The Fountainhead. The motive and purpose of her writing is to bring forward the most challenging ideas that man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress.
 

Copyright 1998, Liberty Institute, New Delhi.

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