Ranking some philosophers

Ranking is, using Rand's terminology, teleological measurement.  It helps keep one's mind limber.  One ranking I've spent maybe too much time thinking about is the following:

Babe Ruth
Willie Mays
Ted Williams
Ty Cobb
Honus Wagner
Mickey Mantle
Hank Aaron
Barry Bonds (pre-1999)
Mike Schmidt
Lou Gehrig
Rogers Hornsby
Stan Musial
Rickey Henderson
Joe DiMaggio
Yogi Berra
Johnny Bench
Joe Morgan
Albert Pujols
Ken Griffey, Jr.
Pete Rose

(Where Mike Trout fits in here yet is not yet determined, but I assume it is probably in the top five.  And pitchers seem to require a separate ranking.)

Or there's this ranking:

Ludwig van Beethoven
Johann Sebastian Bach
Wolfy Mozart
Gustav Mahler
Dmitri Shostakovich
Franz Schubert
Anton Bruckner
Jean Sibelius
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Joseph Haydn
Johannes Brahms
Bela Bartok
Igor Stravinsky
Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Frederic Chopin
Claude Debussy
G. F. Handel
Robert Schumann
Gyorgy Ligeti

(I don't know where to rank opera composers (e.g., Wagner) or atonal composers (e.g. Schoenberg.))

But a (teleologically) more important ranking would be one like this (more or less aggregated from numerous sources):

Aristotle
Immanuel Kant
Plato
David Hume
Rene Descartes
G. W. F. Hegel
Ludwig Wittgenstein
G. W. Leibniz
Baruch Spinoza
Friedrich Nietzsche
John Locke
Thomas Aquinas
Gottlob Frege
Karl Marx
Thomas Hobbes
J. S. Mill
Bertrand Russell
Martin Heidegger
Michel Foucault
Soren Kierkegaard
Arthur Schopenhauer
Edmund Husserl
C. S. Peirce
John Dewey
W. V. O. Quine
Augustine
Plotinus

(For the above aggregation-based ranking I'm not including Ayn Rand, and although I gather that Chrysippus might very well be top-3 material, there are almost no extant works by him.  (A parallel case might be Negro Leaguer Oscar Charleston, for whom no good stats/records are available.)  Also what about Socrates?)

So, I've studied the ideas of Rand for quite some time, enough to be an expert I'd say.  That includes all of the original materials.  For the other figures I've relied a bunch (or in the case of Hegel, entirely) on secondary materials.  Among the secondary materials on some of the highest-ranked philosophers above, the ones I've found really helpful are the Oxford Handbooks series.  I've gone through a half dozen Handbooks so far, and have another half dozen or so in the reading queue somewhere.  For the top dozen listed above, there are two (Kant and Locke) for whom Handbooks have not been published yet.  I'm just over 3/4 through the Nietzsche one; I put the Leibniz one on pause about 30% of the way through; in the queue are Wittgenstein, 'Descartes and Cartesianism', and Aquinas.  That leaves the following which I've gone through, and for which I provide a ranking based on my overall impression of each philosopher's merits (to be explained in due course):

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Nietzsche
Leibniz
Hume
Spinoza

Some inchoate remarks: I liken Aristotle to Babe Ruth; he's like the god-status figure of philosophy. [Note: adjustments need to be made for era (as per baseball historian Bill James) in which a philosopher/player flourished.]  Plato was the first systematizer and recognized the inherent dignity of philosophical activity over and above mere drives, pleasures, inclinations, opinions, or the 'mundane.'  Hegel is something like an abstruse version of a modern-period Aristotle in matters of pure philosophy.  (More context/details.)  Nietzsche's career was cut tragically short at age 44; how might the world have turned out differently otherwise?  (After enough time how would he have avoided a reckoning with Aristotle?)  Leibniz is a serious metaphysician (conversant with Aristotle) whose range of learning/expertise might be compared to Aristotle's.  Hume is a philosopher of 'common sense' and 'mitigated skepticism' with no pretense to metaphysical speculations.  (Blackburn's essay in the Hume Handbook was most useful and one I'd go back to.)  Spinoza requires you to accept his definitions if you're going to accept the system he purports to spin from them; his career was also cut too short.

I'd put Rand at least on the level of (shortened-career-)Nietzsche or Hegel; her mostly-lousy polemics only bolster the proposition that she developed so many common sense positions on the strength of first-hand inductions independent of the 'canon/tradition.'  Her key strengths are in method, aesthetics, political philosophy, and ethics.  She's a plainspoken 'popular philosopher' and as such performs an extremely valuable service to a philosophy-starved public or a newcomer seeking a springboard into the world of 'advanced, technical' philosophy with the aid of her/Peikoff's methodological strictures.  It's hard to imagine a more unjustly smeared or dismissed figure in the history of ideas (on the basis of motivations that IMO are quite nakedly political and therefore highly toxic).  I see no excuse for the professional (sic) neglect of her aesthetic theory much less her theory of method.  She's probably unsurpassed as a political thinker and it's really hard to overstate her contribution to the strongest variants of contemporary libertarian thought (see here for some details).  She also had a fine grasp of the importance of philosophy to the flourishing (or lack thereof) of a culture, and as such she (and Peikoff) should be taken seriously as a metaphilosopher.  (I can only assume that based on the now-available inductive evidence of the viability of philosophy for children, that she'd be all over that at least as much as anyone else - with, I am sure, some qualifications, e.g., that philosophical activity (even of the most 'speculative' variety) should proceed on an inductive/concretizing and context-keeping basis, and consciously and explicitly so.)

Now, if I were to include in the ranking the other top-half-dozen philosophers for whom I've yet to read an Oxford Handbook, as well as Rand and Socrates, my current impression is that the ranking might turn out roughly as follows:

Aristotle
Plato
Hegel
Rand
Nietzsche
Kant
Leibniz
Aquinas
Locke (probably Rand's equal as a political philosopher?)
Wittgenstein
Socrates
Hume
Descartes
Spinoza

You might tell that I'm not exactly a fan of rationalism as methodology; almost surely that dislike was effectively beaten into me by many hours of Peikoff-course listening.  (Also, I'd like to raise the distinct possibility of Hume's being a methodological rationalist while not being a substantive empiricist.  He sure seems to be doing some dubious deducing about 'sense impressions' as definitive of all we have access to.  As for Cartesian mind-body dualism as I understand it, it reflects a destructive methodology, quite explicitly in reaction to Aristotelian dialectic and (therefore) hylemorphism.  Dualisms like mind/body and is/ought seem to suppose that if you can't eliminatively 'reduce' one to the other, they have to be kept separate.  But what about mind as, say, supervening on sufficiently complex natural/physical stuff?  Or in the case of is/ought, the ought as supervening on sufficiently complex natural facts?  (Or suppose that the 'ought' supervening on an 'is' is a species of potentiality supervening on actuality?  We wouldn't, after all, have trouble with the 'is' lining up nice and neat with actuality; this leaves us with whether we should conceptualize 'ought' in terms of potentiality, and whether what is and what ought to be are one and the same - that they reach a sort of 'dialectical unity' as it were, instead of some unbridgeable duality or dichotomy - when some species of potentiality is being actualized....) That's a prospect that Parfit quite disappointingly doesn't investigate in On What Matters (well, I still need to get to Volume Three...), instead pursuing some line about non-natural truths that might not even exist in "an ontological sense," whatever that's supposed to mean.  I think Aristotle might very well go for a supervenience sort of explanation on such things; incidentally, Hurley mentions supervenience early in Natural Reasons, but she loses me pretty quickly after that.  I mean, would you look just at those sentence constructions, much less what's in them?  I'm not worthy, I guess.)  Also, very high up in my reading queue is the Handbook for Marx, although higher still and to be read very soon is the Handbook on Virtue.  Speaking of which, how thoroughly/completely/perfectly will it cover the place of perfectionism in the virtue-ethics tradition?  I really, really want ethical philosophers to get this one right.  After all, how does one possibly improve upon perfectionism, and Aristotelian/intellectualist perfectionism in particular?  I glean an explicitly intellectual-perfectionist strand from Aristotle, Aquinas and Rand, but not so much from all that many of the others ranked above, however much they were pretty much all putting the principle into practice....

(BTW, there's a chapter on order of rank in the Nietzsche Handbook, but the chapter I'd rank the most highly among the book's first 26 chapters is almost surely the one by Jacob Golomb about what Nietzsche meant by 'will to power.'  (Oooh, there's an article by him about Nietzsche contra Trump in search results.)   Also, I just so happen to have my eye on the newly-published Handbook on Expertise.  1300 pages, eh?)

Lisa Duggan, Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019)

From University of California Press - Yikes!

I've commented on Duggan before here, focusing mainly on an online summary-excerpt of Mean Girl, as well as here, showcasing how Duggan (contemptuously and dishonestly) responds to challenging inquiries about her work: she is a poison tree from which one cannot expect honest fruits.  Having now had the opportunity to see the entirety of Mean Girl, I can point to a number of facts about this book that objectively demolish her intellectual and scholarly credibility.

Duggan quite perfectly epitomizes a subspecies of creature I dub the Rand-basher.  I've never encountered an honorable Rand-basher, and no one ever, ever, ever, ever, ever will, for one simple reason: Rand-bashing is an inherently dishonorable activity given the degree of value in Rand's work.  I'll name a few telltale characteristics of the Rand-basher, but the fundamental underlying one explaining all the rest is: intellectual dishonesty.

Here are discreditable tactics Rand-bashers invariably engage in:

• Intellectual laziness, or forming opinions without having done one's homework
• Evasion of available evidence running contrary to their opinion; lack of any curiosity to discover such contrary evidence or opinion
• Strawman argumentation style; rejection of the principle of interpretive charity
• Refusal to have a meeting of minds with proponents of an opposing viewpoint, not just on matters of what views they actually hold, but why; neglecting to acknowledge or address the aspects of the opponents' worldview that the opponents consider most fundamental
• Exclusive focus on the weaker proponents of opposing viewpoints when stronger proponents are readily discoverable
• Selective and one-sided acknowledgment or recognition of data points, especially when plenty of other data points providing an alternative or opposing perspective are available
• Replacing substantive argument with any number of informal fallacies or slimy tactics including ad hominem, goalpost-shifting, appeal to or abuse of authority, insults, reckless smears, sneering/snideness, overall nasty tone, obvious bad faith

I begin the list above with reference to laziness, because to any actual expert in Rand's thought, laziness is the strikingly obvious if not defining feature of Duggan's so-called scholarship.  There is a now-sizable body of philosophically serious Rand-scholarship, going back decades, which I catalog in rather extensive detail here.  Duggan cites from or references pretty much none of what's listed there.  That's a serious red flag right there.

You might think that a putative scholar of Rand's thought, whose thesis is set out in a title like Mean Girl, would want to take some care to counter the community of scholars who don't share that opinion.  The fact that she makes pretty much no effort whatsoever to engage these scholars is a red flag that this putative scholarship shouldn't be taken seriously.

And it's not like Duggan doesn't consult and cite numerous sources in the endnotes and bibliography.  In fact - given that her main focus is on Rand's literary and cultural influence - she does include in the bibliography the three volumes edited by Mayhew (a member of the Ayn Rand Society's steering committee, and acknowledged among the community of Rand experts as an expert) on Rand's three major novels.  But not only does she not quote, reference, or cite any of these volumes or its several contributions in the main text or the endnotes, while quoting and citing all kinds of negative comments on these novels, there is no evidence whatsoever that she is seriously familiar with what is in these volumes.  (Just for instance, the Gotthelf and Salmieri contributions to the volume of essays on Atlas Shrugged, focused in particular on the Galt speech that is the philosophical centerpiece of the novel, are indispensable contributions for anyone not already familiar with their thematic content.  Indeed, there is really no indication whatsoever in Mean Girl that Duggan has any familiarity with the underlying philosophical structure of Objectivism.  In that regard, she is not an intellectually serious commentator.  Her "summary" of the Galt speech is all of one brief paragraph and conveys none of the philosophical fundamentals in any serious or insightful way beyond anything else she had already said in Mean Girl.)

The only notable additions to the bibliography of secondary sources besides the three edited by Mayhew, are the two volumes Sciabarra is involved in, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical and Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand.  Now, any expert on this stuff knows how thoroughly (well, exhaustively) researched Russian Radical is - its reference sources include all the Peikoff courses up through the Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (I'll get to Peikoff more in a moment, since doing so is downright unavoidable in this context) and lots of other taped material besides - and any expert in this arena is also aware that Sciabarra delves deep into those philosophical fundamentals, particularly Rand's philosophical method (something something "dialectic as the art of context-keeping"; for some details in this blog see here and here) within which all her specific positions/theses, formulations, and applications are inextricably embedded.  But Duggan's only mention of this book is as a source for early biographical Rand information (which would be in the first section of Russian Radical).  Her only mention of Feminist Interpretations is almost merely in passing and with superficial reference to only a couple of the pieces.

Speaking of mere-in-passing mentions, Peikoff comes up in only two places.  The first is one brief paragraph as it relates to all the people Rand supposedly "alienated" thereby leaving "only" Peikoff around to inherit her estate.  (Amazingly enough, Duggan manages not to sink to the usual Rand-bashing low of mentioning that Rand accepted Social Security benefits in old age; usually the Rand-bashers do so in a gleeful "gotcha" manner as supposed proof of hypocrisy without bothering to mention or learn about her 1960s essay on government grants and scholarships.  Given the general pattern of dishonesty on Duggan's part, perhaps this was a lapse on her part so to speak, or perhaps I missed it.)  The other is an inclusion in a "Key Figures" section before the bibliography along with about 10 other people, with about 2 or 3 sentences provided for each.

Now, any serious scholar and expert on Rand knows about the importance of Leonard Peikoff to knowing what's what in Objectivism, including especially that stuff about method (context-keeping, integration, hierarchy, etc.).  To mention it for the umpteenth time, she give her very-high-bar-to-clear authorization and endorsement of the 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course, the most complete and definitive statement of her philosophy in her lifetime.  It's not like this and other courses (e.g, Understanding Objectivism) haven't been available, for free, on the Ayn Rand Institute website for some years now, or that Understanding hasn't been available in book form since 2012.  The book based on this course (which, not insignificantly, Peikoff considers the definitive statement of Objectivism) is Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (1991) (a.k.a. OPAR).  This isn't among the works listed in the bibliography.

One might think that critics of Rand, interested in getting it right, would be curious to see what a course or book titled Understanding Objectivism by Rand's most qualified student and endorsed teacher/interpreter, is all about.  But I have never once encountered the slightest curiosity from Rand-bashers in this regard when I've told them about it and that pretty much all serious long-time students of Objectivism attest to its importance.  Such a pattern of behavior falls under any number of the bullet points above.

Listed in the bibliography, meanwhile, is Slavoj Zizek's borderline-to-downright silly article in the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies.  It's the only evidence that Duggan is so much aware that this journal exists.  (There are some not-so-silly articles that have appeared over the years in that journal, including this one.)  Now, if Duggan were a serious, honest, not-lazy scholar, she would have done her homework by inquiring into what besides Zizek appears in that journal.  There are, after all, plenty of pieces in there analyzing Rand from a literary and cultural perspective.

Duggan goes to great lengths in Mean Girl to portray Rand as having a contempt or disregard for "inferior" people, selectively and one-sidedly marshaling "evidence" to that effect (most if not all of it is slippery and snide insinuation based on assuming-the-worst readings of the original texts - this falls under the Strawman bullet-point above).  Given the mainly literary context in which Duggan is operating, she draws connections here between Rand and Nietzsche.  Now, a couple things Duggan says in connection with Nietzsche: First, he's among the 10 or so included in the "Key Figures" section; the first sentence under his name is, "The work of German philosopher Nietzsche has exerted a profound influence on Western intellectual history," and then mentions that Rand initially admired his critique of religion and Christian morality and his concept of the "Superman," before later rejecting him.  But guess who's not included in the "Key Figures" section: Aristotle.  Now, Duggan does mention at least a couple times in the main text that Rand was really big on Aristotle.  Perhaps the omission of Aristotle from the "Key Figures" section is just another piece of evidence of laziness and/or sloppiness on her part.

But there's also an awfully dubious claim Duggan makes in an endnote (ch.2, note 26) in connection to Nietzsche: "Rand was not a close reader of Nietzsche, but more of a fan, until she eschewed his influence...".  Now, in Wiley-Blackwell's Companion to Ayn Rand (Gotthelf and Salmieri, eds., 2016, included in my extensive cataloging of Rand scholarship linked above), Nietzsche scholar/expert Lester Hunt writes a chapter on Rand's relation to Nietzsche.  It begins by quoting Rand from author-information material she submitted ca. 1935 to the publisher of We the Living that Also Sprach Zarathustra was her "bible" and that she could never commit suicide as long as it exists.  Does that sound like someone who isn't a close reader of Nietzsche?  Or: how did she ever happen upon the "noble soul" aphorism from Beyond Good and Evil that she discusses in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead (which Duggan obliquely refers to in the same footnote quoted above), without doing some pretty close reading?  Not only was Duggan evidently too effing lazy to know about the Companion and its contents, but how can she keep her story straight that a not-close-reader would know about such an aphorism?  This is Duggan characteristically playing fast and loose with the facts.

Here's another point of evidence of Duggan's lack of thoroughness and care: she does quote numerous times from Rand's Journals (including a context-omitting discussion of Rand's early comments on the serial killer William Hickman, whom Duggan blatantly-dishonestly asserts in the book's Overview section was an initial basis for Rand's "ruthless 'heroes'"), but there is no mention anywhere in the book of Rand's Letters!  There's a shit-ton of material of interest in the Letters.  This has direct bearing on the quality of Mean Girl's "scholarship."  For instance, in the Overview section there are a couple or so sentences describing the main points of each of the chapters, accompanied by bullet-pointed key concepts or names for each chapter.  For chapter 2, covering roughly the 1930s and 1940s of Rand's life/work, one of the bullet points, in addition to ones like 'Marriage to Frank O'Connor,' 'Anthem,' and 'The Fountainhead', is 'Isabel Paterson.'  Now, for one thing, the mentions of Paterson in the chapter are pretty much in passing, conveying merely that she was the main mentor-figure to Rand in the '30s and '40s, and that she wrote a book titled The God of the Machine (1943).  Now, in the Letters, there are two sizable chapters containing Rand's correspondence with two key figures: Paterson and John Hospers.  (Hospers isn't mentioned in Mean Girl.  Suffice it to say that this well-respected professional philosopher, expert in aesthetics, and big fan of Atlas Shrugged didn't regard Rand as "mean," whatever criticisms he did have of her.)  One of Rand's letters in connection with Paterson was one praising The God of the Machine as the best book in political philosophy in 300 years and a decisive antidote to The Communist Manifesto.  Duggan declares somewhere in Mean Girl that Rand's understanding of capitalism and markets is fundamentally deficient, but it's safe to say that Rand's understanding aligns with that of God of the Machine.  It's also safe to say that Duggan is too lazy to have known about this, or what's in that book.  Also in the Letters is Rand's ca. 1980 letter of reference for Leonard Peikoff as eminently qualified to teach her ideas, although I doubt Duggan cares to know this or its relevance.

In her discussion of Atlas Shrugged, Duggan neglects to mention its theme ("the role of the mind in man's existence."  Gallingly, she makes reference to the novel's "civilizational theme" as echoing the one that "shapes Anthem."  About Anthem, Duggan manages to at least make reference to "individual initiative" and "innovation," and then says, "The civilizational framework and character descriptions in Anthem are inscribed in a pervasive hierarchy [this is the prose of a pretentious twit, BTW] of mental and physical ability that intertwines with racial, class, and moral differences in all Rand's fiction."  So even when she kind-of touches upon the role-of-the-mind theme running throughout Rand's work, she poisons it with a discussion of a supposedly "racial" makeup to Rand's heroes (which she does at numerous points throughout Mean Girl, it's pretty disgusting).

When she bothers to discuss Rand's nonfiction writings, she does the following:

It's evident that she didn't bother to go through Rand's 'Objectivist Newsletter/The Objectivist/Ayn Rand Letter' collections, but rather only the anthologized books.

Now, she shows familiarity with at least the first essay in For the New Intellectual (1961), but also in FTNI are the speeches from her novels introduced by explicit discussions of their themes, which as I've said Duggan neglects to show any deep familiarity with.  (Ask Rand-bashers what the theme of Atlas Shrugged is, without cheating, and they'd never properly guess it in a million years.  I know this from experience.)

When she discusses The Virtue of Selfishness (1964) anthology, the one essay she discusses is the "Racism" one.  Duggan used this as an opportunity to bring up in the usual smeary Rand-basher ways Rand's supposed views on "the erasure on indigenous peoples, restriction on immigration from more 'primitive' parts of the world, and the persistence of sharp racial inequality in the 'private' economic and social spheres [as] part and parcel of her system of rational morality, even as she opposed state-imposed racial (and sex) discrimination."  Actually, an honest scholar discussing what is part and parcel of Rand's system of rational morality would at the very least make mention of the general points of the lead essay in The Virtue of Selfishness, "The Objectivist Ethics."

The same vice marks her treatment of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1967).  Instead of demonstrating real and serious familiarity with the lead essay, "What is Capitalism?", she focuses instead (for a short paragraph) on the essay "The Wreckage of the Consensus," only to mention  Rand's positive reference to Reagan's speech nominating Goldwater in '64 "as a promising new direction for electoral politics - a new direction her influence helped to shape."  Big whoop.  What's really the meat and bones is what's in the lead essay.  For one thing, Rand gives her definition of capitalism there.  Duggan doesn't mention this definition anywhere, although she provides her own in the Glossary.

If all the laziness and sloppiness weren't in evidence enough, her discussion of The Romantic Manifesto (1969/1971), a work one might reasonably think is crucial to grasping Rand's literary aesthetic, is all of one sentence.

This is growing tiresome.  It's all too obvious that Duggan doesn't possess the intellectual/philosophical wherewithal to provide an insightful analysis of Rand's philosophy.  She leaves out way too many crucial sources that would shed a positive light on, and foster understanding of, Rand.  The length of the book is all of about 100 pages, and many topics are covered all to briefly to provide much if any useful information for serious inquirers.  A book accomplishing that task would have to be considerably longer than this, and there are already numerous books on Rand out there that provide way more value than this one does.  If there were constraints on publishing length limiting this to 100 or so pages, on that basis alone it is perhaps better that it not be published at all.  Or, if one were to assign Rand to a scholar in some academic 'Brief Introductions' series without butchering the subject, I can think of many - even relatively mediocre ones - who are way more qualified than Duggan.  No serious expert on Rand's thought can possibly think this book meets even minimum quality standards.  The dishonest title, if nothing else, is a dead giveaway that it's nothing more than a hatchet-job rather than a minimally decent attempt at being fair, objective, enlightening, or anything of the sort.  Its only use is as a foil case contra serious Rand scholarship and a lesson in how not to be taken seriously (which is the only point in going through the trouble of making this post).  I'll link again to another post demonstrating what high-quality Rand scholarship looks like.

In this post I haven't done much to show what Duggan actually does say about Rand in Mean Girl, but I've already discussed the gist of that in the post linked at the beginning of this one, and there's plenty there to show just how shoddy her work is - along with that second link revealing the level of intellectual and moral character behind this work.  Along with fundamental dishonesty, her other main character flaw, along with so many other leftists and "progressives," is hubris.

I'm going to close by removing any possible remaining doubts about Duggan's honesty and credibility.  The key context of Duggan's hatchet-job is that, like most Rand-bashers, and most of the very worst and nastiest of them, she is a leftist/anti-capitalist.  The very same dishonest tactics these creatures use to recklessly attack and smear Rand are used likewise to attack and smear capitalism.  If the following isn't the last nail in the coffin as far as Duggan's (and their) credibility goes, I don't know what is.

In the preface, Duggan asserts (as does the typical nasty leftist) that "From the 1980s to 2008, neoliberal [i.e., more or less capitalist] politics and policies succeeded in expanding inequality around the world.  The political climate Ayn Rand celebrated - the reign of brutal capitalism - intensified."  Now, aside from the rather ludicrous claim that Rand's philosophy in its actual neo-Aristotelian essentials has even so much as come close to exerting its proper neo-Aristotelian influence on the culture (as in, what actually would take place if everyone absorbed and practiced the principles espoused in Galt's speech and OPAR), the factual claim about expanding global inequality is false and can only be the product of a reckless and willful ignorance of the data.

The only serious question remaining at this point is how someone like Duggan and her ilk (this includes all the ignorant fools - willing if not eager dupes - who positively blurbed this trash) could have ended up with the positions in the academy that they occupy, filling publications and student's heads with garbage.  It is precisely because of entities like these that the academy has taken the widely-loathed, ever-leftward and therefore ever-inbred and pro-dishonesty path of recent years.  Upon comprehensive exposure of their blatant dishonesty, I recommend sardonic ridicule as the next appropriate course of action.  Is it really too much to ask that these creeps clean up their act?

Some good stuff

I have (of course) noticed that many of my posts of late have been political-polemical.  Here are some positives:

Coleman Hughes, black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia, making any number of eminently admissible arguments about race issues which it appears (here come the polemics again...) the American left is neither prepared nor has the good faith to take on.  If he's right, then the American left has been shitting the bed for long enough that even a single undergrad philosopher can run circles around them, more or less.  Nothing that I've seen in the comments sections of his articles (I went through the entirety of the comments for this one, just to see...) would suggest that the American left has much in the way of rebuttals that would make any reasonable and duly informed person think that the American left has anything like a monopoly on good arguments on race issues.  (Much as with the Trump-Clinton election, the American left would have you think that it's some kind of knock-down, not-even-a-close-call argument in favor of the leftist viewpoint on this and a wide range of other issues.)  I did google 'criticism rebuttal response to coleman hughes' and the search returned all of one result of any usefulness, also a thoroughly admissible entry into the discussion.  However...

In the course of reading a number of Hughes-related posts, I encountered this article, "Why Does Racial Inequality Persist? Culture, Causation, and Responsibility," by Glenn Loury, and it is about as thoughtful and humane an article as I've ever seen on the subject of America's Racial Problem.  But it is most certainly not a leftist article - and it's the kind of article that I would be surprised to find the left having the courage, integrity, honor, good faith, etc., to take on (which would require admitting that the left, by narrowing its focus to only certain causal factors, has been shitting the bed for decades).  So basically it's either-or: Either Hughes and Loury (and numerous other often-black conservatives who've studied and written about this topic indepth) have eminently admissible arguments, in which case the American left has been shitting the bed, Or the American left's MO has been reasonable, normal, dialectically accountable, honorable, etc.  Take your pick.

Hughes and Loury are, in effect, throwing down the glove to issue this challenge: "Okay, leftists, let's do talk about the legacy of Jim Crow and redlining and ongoing systemic injustices.  And you, lefties - you get to address the problem of the sky-high rate of single-parent families in the black community.  Deal?"  Concerted silence/evasion in the face of this offer/challenge is what I expect from the American left.  (Implicitly contained in the challenge is what I've alluded to above: that the American left acknowledge how badly it's been shitting the bed and make a hearty effort to prevent further bed-shitting.  I don't expect that to be forthcoming any time soon, i.e., I would be rather surprised - pleasantly so - if that were to happen.)

On to another positive, without the polemical implications this time (except those pertaining to the ecologically oblivious/their enablers...):

I recently read The River Why by David James Duncan, which I spotted on a home bookshelf.  It's both fun and thought-provoking, and made an impression that books rarely do for me.  (A few other titles of lasting interest for me: Mises, Socialism; Letters of Ayn Rand and The Romantic Manifesto; Norton, Personal Destinies; Nozick, The Examined Life; Rasmussen and Den Uyl, Liberty and Nature; Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment.)  Then again, I'm not especially well-read when it comes to books and I'm not a particularly fast reader; for building my reading list I have to use my sense of quality/importance over the pursuit of quantity.  As for The River Why, one might get a good sense of its qualities from the goodreads users' reviews.  I just wanted, at the least, to provide a pointer in its direction (just in case I kick the bucket before the next blog posting, etc.).

Peikoff's The DIM Hypothesis: a review

This posting probably wouldn't fit the usual formal standards of a book review, but that's not my concern.  I want to get my comments out there, in whatever order they come out.

(Some context for newbies: Leonard Peikoff is heir to Ayn Rand's estate and her foremost interpreter.  If people understood Objectivism as well as he and Rand did, the world would be a heck of a better place.  The DIM Hypothesis (2012) is the latest of his books.)

First off, it's an important book to read if only because it's very much thought-provoking in its basic thesis, i.e., that modal inquiry helps us to figure out large-scale historical trends.  Dr. Peikoff actually makes some rather modest claims on behalf of this work in the preface/intro part of the book, apparently under the (correct) belief that his hypothesis at the very least needs to be put out there and mentally chewed however much it need be chewed.  I think it would be hard to come away from this book not having one's thinking forever altered in regard to understanding history in terms of modal change.  This is not to say that Peikoff gets it right in his analyses as to all the specific modes - what they are, when and how they apply to a given culture - but one almost surely cannot help thinking that there is contained in his analyses significant germs of truth.

So what is this talk of modal inquiry all about?  As you might have guessed or already know, Peikoff divides modes or methods of integration into three main categories: I for integration, a process which seeks a (conceptual) One in the (perceptual) Many, based purely on secular sense evidence, a mode for which Aristotle is the prime exponent; M for mis-integration, a mental process that leads ultimately in essence to a focus on the (supernatural) One at the expense of the (natural, perceptual) Many, a mode for which Plato, with his Form of the Good, is the prime exponent; finally, there is D for disintegration, a modal opposite (if you will) of M, which is a secularized approach to knowledge focusing on (perceptual) concretes at the expense of any unifying theory, which Peikoff says was brought about as a distinctively modern approach by one Immanuel Kant.  D would be the flipside of the religionist coin which holds that if God is dead, everything is permitted, only the D mode in its extreme or pure form would reject God or the supernatural in favor of "everything goes."

Peikoff makes further distinctions within the two "bad" modal types, the M1 and D1 versions being unstable mixtures of I and M and I and D, respectively, and the M2 and D2 modes being the "pure" variant which would be brought about by consistent application or implementation of the Platonic/M or Kantian/D modes, respectively.  The Renaissance, for instance, was characterized by M1, a mixture of secular and supernaturalist modes, following the Middle Ages which was a pure M2 period and preceding the early modern (still M1) and Enlightenment (I) periods.  There's a handy table on the very back page of the book that provides the "standing on one foot" version of the DIM hypothesis as applied to nine different major epochs of human history.  Only ancient Greece and the Enlightenment receive the I designation.

Peikoff spends the first half of the book explaining how, in a few of the major epochs (Greece, Rome, Middle Ages, Modern), the mode dominant in each culture translates into representative cultural products, namely literature, education, science or physics, and politics.  Here is where I began to get wary because many of the examples he offers as indicative of a culturally dominant mode have such a contrived flavor to them.  Okay, just for instance: totalitarianism is said to emphasize a One (the state, the ruler, the Volk) taking precedence over or dominating the many (the individuals).  What's more, not only does Peikoff say that modern eastern and central Europe was characterized by an M2 mode (associated with Communist ideals - socialist realism in literature, dialectical teleology in science, and "instilling communism" in education) and was "therefore" totalitarianism in politics, but he also says that the Middle Ages, also M2, was politically totalitarian (the One societally being the Church as God's representative, with a One politically being a King).  Now, maybe Peikoff has it correct and the mainstream historians have it wrong, but nowhere else (except perhaps in New Atheist-type literature) have I seen the western Middle Ages as being characterized by totalitarianism politically.  Now, sure, the culture was authoritarian and repressive but . . . is this splitting hairs?  I suppose we could look to the socio-cultural structure of modern-day Islamist theocracies as examples of the M2 approach; are they totalitarian, or something else?  Are they importantly different from western medieval theocracies, which had a more "Greek" relative to "Abrahamic" influence?  Does the person of Jesus vis a vis the person of Mohammed make a crucial difference to the overall flavor of their (measurements-omitted) respective authoritarian cultures?

Anyway, that's kind of a side note.  What I really want to object to is the continuation of very bad "Objectivist polemics" against Immanuel Kant.  How right (or wrong) Peikoff gets things about Kant plays a significant role in Peikoff's modal analysis as applied to the post-Kant modern world.  Looking at the book's index under the entry for Kant, we get "father of nihilism, [pp.] 38-39, 174-175, 350n15" and then "in ethics, self-sacrifice for its own sake, [p.] 37".  Now, perhaps there is some historical narrative that points to a Kantian influence leading to the nihilism that Nietzsche takes up the challenge of overcoming, but I doubt that it's a narrative you'd see coming from Objectivist circles who insist on buying into the anti-Kant polemics that bear little to no resemblance to interpretations of such Kant scholars as Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, or Allen Wood.  Getting from Kant as arguer for how the categories are employed in uniting the world of sense into an orderly Nature, or as arguer for reason as the source of the Categorical Imperative in its two formulations, to Kant as father of nihilism, would be so convoluted on its face as to invite derision.  Kant's influence did indeed spawn a number of different philosophical traditions or schools, be they German idealism, or Nietzsche-as-foil, or Pragmatism, or Rawlsian contractualism, or post-modernism and its offshoots (definitely not a good thing, IMHO; if you want D2 in concrete manifestation, it's a prime candidate), . . . or sensible and straightorward scholars like Guyer et al.  What's more, once the analytic-synthetic dichotomy was widely (though not universally) abandoned in philosophy in the wake of Quine's "Two Dogmas," and when Aristotle and others have made a resurgence in the academy, Kant has ended up being - while still greatly influential on modern philosophizing - more like a foil if not punching-bag for many.

Peikoff is careful to point out that there are a lot of contributing factors to historical change, not merely the presence of a dominant mode.  The modal analysis might suggest something on the order of a necessity between an underlying dominant mode and historical cultural shifts, but to take the example of the Greeks, the dominance of the Aristotelian-style approach was ended by historically-contingent displacement brought about by military conquest.  (That left M1 to assert its dominance in the West over the next few hundreds years, which paved the way for M2 Christianity.)  The modal analysis can generate "prediction" only in terms of probabilities, as Peikoff reminds the reader in the last chapter (which I'll get to in a moment).  Anyway, the notion that Kant's philosophy paved the way for late-modern culture almost surely ends up being complicated by a significant number of factors, enough to render it close to implausible.  It carries with it about as much plausibility as the leftist notion that Ayn Rand's ideas have had a significant impact on the culture in Washington D.C. (i.e., District of Cynicism) much less on Wall Street.  How much attention does the general public (in America especially) pay the intellectuals?  Okay, so a better question to ask would be: how has the intellectual culture indirectly impacted on the general culture?  But what is that intellectual culture?  Is it really so Kant-influenced as to be D1-ish?

As perhaps the most glaring instance of clumsy fact-handling amidst an otherwise intriguing presentation of theory, we get this on p. 304: "Today, however, the ideas of Aristotle are absent from Western culture and have been so for well over a century."  Good lord now, really?  I mean, a lot really does stand or fall on the truth-status of that claim, so we'd want to be damn sure to get it right in pursuit of non-shoddy analysis and prediction.  There are enough dubious claims like this throughout the book that one would have to do a lot of independent fact-checking and study and general observation of concretes to integrate into an explanatory whole, and that's what it ultimately comes down to in thinking about whether Peikoff's translation of modes into cultural manifestations (literature, science, politics, education) really lines up with the best explanation of the facts.  The virtue of this is the food-for-thought element; how much Peikoff's specific analysis throws us off the scent of perfectionistic correctness is another matter.

Peikoff's analysis leads him to a (probabilistic) prediction in favor of an M2 religious totalitarianism in America sometime in the coming decades.  (Not if I have anything to say about it!)  The signs of this are the apparent revival of religion in America in reaction to an intellectually-weak (because disintegrative?) secularism.  People do need a sense of all-encompassing order and explanation as a requirement of cognitive efficacy, yes, and since they're not getting that from the "progressive" establishment or agenda, the only supposed alternative is M of some variant.  (His relating of the "material-prosperity-eschewing" New Christian movement to the "anti-material-prosperity" environmental movement, as a potential or actual alliance, is extra-dubious; it certainly doesn't correspond to the universe of facts I've been integrating.)  He does bring up Ayn Rand's philosophy as the I antidote to this trend, but - given our divergent perspective of the facts of the matter - I think he way underestimates the potential of Rand's ideas to help effect a reintroduction of the I ethos to the west.  I mean, what else does $10 per Peikoff lecture course (a 95+% markdown from before) mean for the future?  Does he not fully realize just how many aspiring Randian-Aristotelian grad students will be generated and fortified by these courses?

I also find it highly dubious that late-modern science/physics (physics being the most abstract, all-encompassing and fundamental of the sciences) is predominantly a D phenomenon, but unfortunately I haven't (yet) all the conceptual tools on hand necessary to effectively counter Peikoff's characterization in this regard.

I'd like to propose an alternative explanation for historical trends.  The theme of Atlas Shrugged is "the role of the mind in man's existence."  Peikoff and I both accept this fundamental, but we probably differ in its application to historical analysis.  Let's say that broad historical and cultural change is effected by a uni-dimensional analysis, namely in terms of this criterion: just how well and to what extent has the potential that is the human intellect been actualized at any given point in history?  Let's take Peikoff's proposed M2 mode as an example to reinterpret in these terms: M2 represents a compartmentalized integration: if you look at the mode of integration of the medieval scholars, it's all very vigorous and intellectually-adept . . . within its restricted domain.  Being that it was restricted so, it served as an impediment to a more full actualization of intellectual potentialities.  With the introduction of Aristotle's secular mode of analysis (via Thomas Aquinas), we had an opening-up of the realms of "permissible" inquiry.  Peikoff would characterize Thomism as M1 - as a mixture (of some sort) of religious and secular modes of thought, but let's say that an unambiguously perfected Thomism adopts the key Aristotelian principle that the key to human flourishing is the maximal perfection of the intellectual capacity.

Peikoff is of the belief that an I mode has to be purely secular or else it's some variant of M, i.e., mis-integration.  It's highly doubtful a Thomist intellectual would buy into that (and especially not on the basis presented in the Objectivist literature), but does or should a Thomist intellectual accept the key Aristotelian-intellectualist (what I call perfectivist) principle?  (At the least, the Thomist should.)  That would make the Thomist essentially an ally on behalf of what Peikoff calls the I mode.  If both Jefferson (a deist) and Franklin (a Christian) exemplify (as I believe they both do) the same key intellectualist-perfectivist principle, and if they both clearly exemplify what Peikoff called the healthy I mode of the Enlightenment, then the fundamental division here isn't a secular/religious one, but an intellectualist/nonintellectualist one.  Perhaps in terms of this fundamental division, we can understand various non-I modes as shortcomings in some way or other, perhaps even as I modes just waiting to be lured out.  (I'm reminded of this line from Full Metal Jacket: "Inside every gook is an American waiting to get out.")

Besides, with some exceptions, religious intellectuals who've come up against Aristotle have performed the proper integration as Aquinas did.  There's also the secular aspect of the key American Framers that the right-wing religious propaganda surely cannot succeed at blinding a critical mass of Americans to.  And doesn't someone like Glenn Beck represent a significant non-M2 (non-totalitarian) cultural force in America today?  Peikoff's doom-and-gloom scenario, based on extrapolation from the conglomeration of facts he cites about today's religious right, looks (to me) to be quite incomplete and selective (likely unknowingly on his part).  If we interpret human history in light of the intellectualist analysis I suggest, and therefore in terms of a not-always-steady progress from the primitive hunter-gatherer days, and in conjunction with the actual and growing presence of Aristotelian ideas in American culture, then there is much cause to be optimistic about the future.  I suppose we can use the coming decades as a testing grounds for these respective explanatory hypotheses.  (If I were a betting person, I'd bet things will end up more Aristotelian than religious-totalitarian, compared to the present.)

Overall I'd give Peikoff's book a B- grade, a 6.5 out of 10.  In sum, the shortcomings have to do not with the concept, but with the execution.  There will continue to be shortcomings in any Objectivist literature that adopts the polemical style practiced by Rand and Peikoff.  As long as one can mentally abstract this and other weaknesses from the thoughtful and thought-provoking stuff, then I'd give this book a solid recommendation.  But since I think this sort of project could be carried out quite a bit better than in its current manifestation, I can give it only a lukewarm recommendation.

Given the potential significance of this book and my curiosity as to what I may have missed in it, I've enabled comments (with minimal common-sense moderation) for this posting.  Thoughtful comments a big plus. ;-)  I'm figuring out how to enable comments on this posting.  It appears not to be so simple as changing blog settings.  (I've also been trying to change the stylization of this blog - or at the very minimum experiment with stylization, preview changes, etc. - with little luck there as well.  I guess that goes with the territory of a free blogging platform....)

Books, CDs, and DVDs as units

This blog entry's subject is unit-economy.  Its theme is: unit-economy as key to cognition.

(I'm writing this in a Saganized state.)

I was looking down at a hard copy of Morton Hunt's The Story of Psychology and it finally hit me in a completed/perfected form: Books (i.e., their entire contents) as units.  Then I generalized to other units in my immediate sensory vicinity - CDs and DVDs, meticulously organized to criteria I won't go into here at this point in time.  (Dramatic intrigue to ensue; see P.S. below [currently in my mind but yet to put down on digital screen].)

The Hunt book was grouped in with other "empirical psychology" books.  They can be grouped together as units in that regard in accordance with conceptually fundamental similarities.  (See: Rand, "Fundamentality, Rule of" which I see is right over there in the large white-cover well-worn copy of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, similarly grouped in with other concepts according to fundamental-level similarities (which I won't name at this point in time - dramatic intrigue, again).  This process of generalizing falls, I think, under the general category of "induction."  (Now I look over at the Harriman book and also physical copies of Peikoff's "Objectivism Through Induction," which I've barely even listened to yet.)

(I've just had another important unit enter my perceptual field, but I'm sure as shit not going to tell all of you right now.  Just a moment.)

Gist: The task now is to condense (units and concepts being condensatins of concretes, with mental units serving as concretes with respect to higher-level integrations/condensations) all the units in my perceptual view, as well as all those other higher-level units rolling around in the ol' noggin), into a philosophically compelling, dramatic narrative to culminate a few months from now.

P.S. 4/20/2013.  "Mark it, Dude."  Possible title: There Will be Bud.  Details to come, of course.  (Are you hooked on my every word yet?  I know I am. :-)

P.P.S. I think I can present a pretty good case against digitizing much less pirating all information/entertainment units. ;-)

P.P.P.S. Ain't integration fun? / You can't refute perfectivism. :-)

P.P.P.P.S. What Would Howard Stern/Seth MacFarlane/David Shore Do?  shifaced

P.P.P.P.P.S. UP asks: So am I the first to figure all this out or am I just now catching up with everyone else?  (Hi there year 2100 readers! :-D )  lmao

P.P.P.P.P.P.S. Best 10 bucks I ever spent lol.  Plenty more material where that came from. :-o

Some "desert island" books

[UPDATED below.]

I figured that I would do this sort of thing once in a while, in order to chart a course of progress over time, to reminisce from points in the future, etc.  This is a listing of books that "I'd take with me to a desert island" (a hypothetical that doesn't really tell you what would be most useful for you on a desert island, but rather illustrates something else, namely, the small number of books you'd want on hand over any others).  It does not, at this point, include fiction, since I have yet to really explore that written world.  Also, these are not synonymous with "favorite" books - though there is some overlap - but rather those books which I think I might come back to the most.  Some I have not even gotten to reading but want to have them on hand as much as I can, just in case.  It's not a perfect list; the point is to make it become more perfect over time. ;-)

David L. Norton, Personal Destinies
Alan Gewirth, Self-Fulfillment
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning and Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning
The Essential Plato
The Basic Writings of Kant
A Spinoza Reader
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
Basic Writings of Nietzsche and The Portable Nietzsche
A Kierkegaard Anthology
The Marx-Engels Reader
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia
John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement
The Essential Epicurus
Epictetus, The Art of Living
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Saint Augustine, Confessions
Erich Fromm, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
Albert Ellis, A New Guide to Rational Living
The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader
Thomas Jefferson, Writings
Benjamin Franklin, Writings
Thomas Paine, Collected Writings
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary
Strunk and White, The Elements of Style
The Ayn Rand Lexicon and Letters of Ayn Rand
Leonard Peikoff, Understanding Objectivism
Alan Dershowitz, The Best Defense
Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty
David Friedman, The Machinery of Freedom
Thomas Karier, Intellectual Capital
The Essential Jung
V.S. Ramachandran, Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind
Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works
Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat & Other Clinical Tales
Morton Hunt, The Story of Psychology
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach
Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge
Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener's Guide
Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
Ursula Vaughan Williams, R.V.W.: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet
Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis

Nov. 4, 2012 additions:

The Jefferson Bible
Thoreau, Walden and Other Writings
Ruth Garrett Millikan, Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories
Henry Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics
Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings
Walter Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy
A. John Simmons, The Lockean Theory of Rights and On the Edge of Anarchy: Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society
Charles Taylor, Hegel, Sources of the Self, and A Secular Age
Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations
Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons and On What Matters

Blog Resumption?

I may return to normal blogging soon; the insane "debt-ceiling debate" and the fiscal trainwreck ahead is tempting enough in its own right to comment on.

I'd like to mention a recent read that I found highly readable and "entertaining": Noam Chomsky's Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky. It's a great introduction for the layperson to the workings of a brilliant mind. (The footnotes themselves are hundreds of pages worth, compiled at the book's website.) I don't agree with some of his analyses on economics (namely, that corporations almost universally benefit at the expense of peoples), but he is nonetheless very perceptive about the dynamics of power in the world today, even were we to assume a pro-capitalist, pro-corporation-in-principle point of view. It is true: corporations have managed to buy elections and work in conjunction with states to exploit peoples around the world. It's not something Ayn Rand and other advocates of capitalism would support. I did catch two instances where Chomsky states facts in a misleading way: (1) That slaves as 3/5 persons is "in the Constitution." By the same token, Prohibition is "in the Constitution," but so what? (2) That under Clinton, the defense budget exceeded the Cold War average. But it certainly didn't as a share of GDP, even if it did in absolute terms. A ton of other facts he cites I simply am not up on, but I suspect some of them are stated misleadingly.

I also schlepped through Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment recently. I may have something substantive to say in reaction to he book in due course, beyond pointing out the fact that it's very dry and tedious, that it sets forth an intriguing theory of rights to freedom-and-wellbeing, and that it is argued very thoroughly. I just wish it were argued way more accessibly. Sigh.

I tried Nozick's Philosophical Explanations and The Examined Life; the former was not all that accessible, while the latter had a hard time holding my attention.

I also went through the post-1950 portion of Anne Heller's Ayn Rand and the World She Made; among other things I discovered that a Daryn Kent was most likely the unnamed young woman "put on trial" as described in Barbara Branden's biography of Rand. Another thing I can't really do at this point is to form a coherent, context-sensitive picture of Rand the person based on all the things others have said about her. There are a total of 100 accounts in 100 Voices that conflict with some 100 or so accounts in Heller's book. If you see Rand the way Leonard Peikoff sees her, you see someone of staggering genius, insight, rationality, and character, who could argue anyone she met into a corner. If you see her as a good number of NBI-days ex-Objectivists and ex-close-associates see her, you see a domineering diva who's nonetheless a staggering genius. And it's all things other people have said. (Heller basically sides with the latter crowd, since she didn't have much of the former type to rely on as a source. She said she was denied access to the archives because she didn't agree with Rand's ideas; I think it had more to do with the fact that she was going to the Brandens as a leading source. Heller does get a good number of facts wrong that more meticulous fact-checking would correct, BTW.) The Ayn Rand I know is the Rand that appeared in print and in some public forums, including the Donahue show. The Rand I see on the Donahue show is one I find enjoyable to watch. The Ayn Rand that might be and ought to be is, of course, the Ayn Rand we'd all want to know, and there's a shit-ton of that Ayn Rand in her writings. (I still think she gets some things wrong about, e.g., Kant, and I'm still not up on what's great about the speech-filled dialogues in Atlas, but I'll spiral back to all this in due course.)

Heller's book is also very wordy and repetitive, for what that's worth. Anyway, for the latest Rand-related gossip, it's a "good" source. It's not clear Heller has anywhere near the kind of grasp of Objectivism that a student of Peikoff's does, which definitely makes a difference in how one might perceive Rand the person (e.g., with one's method of judgment). That's one big context about Peikoff that Heller simply misses. If Rand says in a general letter of recommendation that Peikoff has a "superlative" understanding of Objectivism, one would do well to study Peikoff's work carefully to understand the philosophy better, and it's pretty clear Heller didn't do that. I'm still waiting for that other shoe to drop, the "definitive" biography from the ARI.

And I think I still have a book in the works; it is evolving into I-don't-know-what at this point. I want it to be pretty excellent, though, even if not absolutely, ahem, perfect.

(Next up on the reading list: Mayhew-edited volumes of essays on The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged - here and here.)

Quote of the Day

"If [Andrei Tarkovsky's] Sculpting in Time could be distilled to a single message, it would be this: Content and conscience must come before technique—for any artist in any art form."
(Los Angeles Times Book Review)

Essentialized Comprehensiveness

If you have a look at the selection of books in my Profile, you find that it has a lot of books by or about Ayn Rand, enough to take up about half of the intellectual-theoretical books listed there. The rest consists to a large extent of economic-theoretical works in the "Austrian" tradition. Why, if I aim for comprehensiveness, don't I include a massive selection of influential works from all across the spectrum of ideas? Because the list is essentialized for the sake of unit-economy. Unit-economy is a highly capitalistic principle. Ayn Rand's whole system is geared toward people who think like capitalists. She recognized the essential principle behind capitalism: that it is, unavoidably and undeniably, the system geared to the requirements of human life, i.e., of the mind. (Hint: It's the principle behind Aristotle's boundless intellectual activity and productivity.)

So, the list basically gives you all that you need to know, in essence, to figure out what's what, and then to flourish like you've never flourished before. The key is not in resenting the capitalists (and stagnating), but in becoming a capitalist (and growing). (The truth here is an exact inversion of Marx.)

In this, Rand was so far ahead of her time that, for the most part, and so very tragically, she was casting pearls before swine. (See, e.g., here.) Only swine turn away from the essential message of John Galt's radio address - the role of the mind in human existence - and of Ayn Rand's body of work. Only anti-capitalist uber-swine who call themselves "philosophers" would blank out this stark and glaring theme, and indulge the mainstream swine in their base and ignoble ignorance regarding the role of the mind in human existence. (To paraphrase a pearl cast heroically before so many swine, such "philosophers" should be provided a club and bearskin and a cave to dwell in, instead of chaired university professorships. The latter situation is fucking insane for an advanced civilized society.)

If you want an actual real-life instantiation of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, look no further than the widespread swinish reaction to Ayn Rand's pro-mind and pro-life ideas. Only swine run from the word "selfishness," for instance, without giving any sort of careful thought to meanings (intended or otherwise), or to context, or to hierarchy, or to integration. The swine have been conditioned to react to stimuli in certain ways (e.g., to words instead of concepts or ideas or essentials), so much so that they revolt even against a messenger who advises them to use their minds to the utmost so that they might then move past swinehood and into the adulthood of the intellect.

Unlike myriad academically-tenured destroyers of the mind, this here philosopher is no swine.

And things are going to change drastically for the better, and much faster than the out-of-it crowd could even begin to realize.

Mark my words.

:-)

David L. Norton's Personal Destinies

My current book project was initially conceived as something somewhat less ambitious (although the logic of it eventually led me to what it is now), and that was more or less a comparison between Ayn Rand's normative ethics and the ethics of David L. Norton's masterful Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism. I ended up making it my own personal destiny to write an ultimate book with the ideas of these two still at the substantive core, just teasing out the implications.

The very idea of connecting Rand to Norton in a close way seemingly hadn't occurred to anyone before, but you'd think it might have since the parallels are so compelling. They're both ethical individualists. They're both eudaemonists. They both have a compelling normative ethics - so darned compelling that were they widely known, understood, adopted and implemented, utopia would be automatic. So perhaps you can say that the mission of Toward Utopia is to make this normative-ethical vision so obviously compelling, so indisputable, so undeniable that a helluva lot of people ought to get on board right quick so that we fast-track right toward utopia.

Here's the gist of the program: We understand Ayn Rand's normative ethics as, in essence, a self-actualization ethics. The ground of virtue is the need to self-actualize, and we recognize self-actualization to be an inherently desirable thing. Rand and Norton conceive of the fundamental virtue in distinct but complementary ways (which can be integrated): Norton conceives of virtue as integrity to the self to be actualized; Rand conceives of virtue as rationality, or the optimal exercise of the human cognitive faculty, reason being the basic human mode of functioning. Rand's epistemology comes into play here because her entire philosophy is built toward a practical end, which is living our lives to the utmost. This is best achieved through mental unit-economy, which stems from following proper cognitive guidelines; the perfection of our cognitive faculty leads to optimal cognitive efficiency, effectively raising our IQ. (There is a genius, i.e., daemon, in all of us, see.) That fast-tracks us toward self-actualization, and when people cooperatively pool their now-enhanced cognitive resources, things get fast-tracked even more, which frees up yet more cognitive resources to enhance, and so forth. So I'm just playing my part in getting this avalanche started. After that, there is just no room for the cycnicism, pessimism, and defeatism (in addition to all that cognitive inefficiency and irrationality) currently holding us back from achieving a better world.

So this posting is about Personal Destinies. I don't intend it to be a review so much as a brief exposition and commentary in which I can barely hold back my fawning. If I had to name a single favorite philosophy book, it would be this one. There's a good reason why this is. First, my philosophical specialty is ethics, and ethics has a certain centrality in philosophy that the other branches of philosophy don't have. (Epistemology has a centrality of its own. Perhaps the contrast here is this: epistemology is more basic, while ethics is more central.) Second, it's expertly and beautifully crafted. Just brilliant. It also has the "cred" of coming from a leading university press, so there's no reason, no fucking reason, for academics to (continue to) overlook it. Third, it's true - chock full of true.

There's one downside: it is obscure. That is to say, it is written in an obscure style. I say this because some years ago, as I was in college and then in grad school, I tried on two occasions to venture into the book, and barely followed what Norton was saying. Now, when a graduate student in philosophy specializing in ethics reads this book and doesn't get what's going on, that's pretty good evidence that it's obscure. And I still say it's obscure. In fact, while there are parts of the book that I understand - and like a lot - there are still parts of the book quite hard for me to follow even on the basis of two recent readings. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, another tidbit as to how I re-encountered this book, if this is any clue as to the completist-perfectionist nature of the mental process involved.

See, when I first delved into the book way back when in school, I noticed that some chapters were devoted to critics of "recent eudaemonisms," including that of Nietzsche. The idea of Nietzsche as a eudaemonist struck me as odd and/or intriguing, which is why it stuck in the back of my mind for later retrieval. It was then a discussion in early 2010 on the SOLO forum in which Rand commentator Jennifer Burns and Rand-defender James Valliant were participating, where links between Rand and Nietzsche were discussed - I think it was about their respective celebrations of human excellence - and that's when it clicked. I had to go back and scrounge up my Norton book. Then I "got it." The first chapter (the most accessible) had me hooked.

(To even think of drawing the connection between Rand, Nietzsche and Norton requires a context of knowledge that only a few people possess. Hell, how did I even know about Norton to begin with? Only because he was mentioned in the works of Machan, Rasmussen and Den Uyl. And how many people have read them indepth? That demographic is limited to people interested in Rand, in ethics, and in academic-style philosophy. A small group to begin with. So what are the odds Norton's book would have fallen into total obscurity were it not for the works of these Rand-influenced philosophers? [Insert angry rant about Rand and the academy here.])

Now, about the book. I mentioned the first chapter. The first chapter is enough to sell a reader on the basic idea. I knew just from reading the first chapter that there was a book project in the making. The chapter's title is "The Ethical Priority of Self-Actualization." Norton here is doing an ambitious integration of his own here: in a manner hardly at all accomplished in any of the other literature, Norton ties the ancient concept of eudaemonia to the 20th century concept of self-actualization popularized first and foremost by Abraham Maslow. I mean, how was that connection so badly missed outside of Norton's work? To top that, Norton mentions in his first footnote (in the Preface) that he uses the terms "eudaimonism" (his spelling) and "self-actualization ethics" and "perfectionism" interchangeably, and that "formally and inclusively" he he employs the term "normative individualism." It just all comes together!

Norton, in characteristically beautiful style, illustrates the concept of the "daimon" by analogy to the hollow clay busts of the semi-deity Silenus fashioned by ancient Greek sculptors, which contained inside them a golden figurine to be revealed when the bust is broken open. The golden figurine is akin to our inner daimon, i.e., the inner self. Our ethical task, in short, is to bring this self to outward actuality, so that (citing the passage from the Phaedrus which Norton quotes at the very beginning, before the Preface) the inward and the outward self may be at one. I mean, already you can tell this is an awesome ethical system. This is where the virtue of integrity comes in - you act so as to harmonize the inward and outward self. The parallels to Howard Roark are obvious to anyone in the habit of drawing integrations. Going back to the title of the first chapter: self-actualization has ethical priority. It is the chief and fundamental concern of ethics, from which other ethical considerations follow. Rand again! (How did so many miss this connection, again? HOW????!!!)

Norton is careful to distinguish self-actualization from self-realization. His claim is that the inward self is real whether actualized or not. It exists as potentiality. Moreover, Norton expands upon both Aristotle and Rand by emphasizing more than just the generic human potentiality of rationality; he uses the phrase (among the many wonderful phrase-coinings in this book) "innate distinct potentiality," which is the self. Each individual has his own "unique and irreplaceable potential worth" in virtue of his unique innate nature. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl would later distinguish generic and individuative potentialities, the actualization of both of which are necessary to self-actualization or eudaemonia. The normative enterprise consists, then, in self-knowledge or self-discovery and engaging in the work to progressively actualize that potentiality.

That's the basic idea, upon which the rest of the book builds. Chapters 2-4 critique "recent eudaemonisms," in turn: British Absolute Idealism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then the Existentialism of Sartre. I assume these chapters would be of interest to those who are reasonably well-versed in these thinkers, which admittedly I am not (for the moment, only for the moment). I do have a basic idea as to the differences between Existentialism and a Grecophile eudaemonism, namely, as to whether "existence precedes essence." Norton (and Aristotle, and Rand) affirm that we do have an essence or nature from the onset of our existence; this defines our potentialities to be actualized.

Chapter 5, titled "The Metaphysics of Individualism," is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the book; not having specialized in metaphysics, a lot of his discussion here goes over my head. (I should mention here that there's a silver lining to the difficult parts of Norton's book: it affords the opportunity to come back for subsequent readings and get something out of it. How many books can one say that about?) One very intriguing thing Norton does in this chapter is to address the meta-ethical question of goodness and "ought" in relation to natural facts. The gist of Norton's answer here consists in conceiving "ought" as potentiality in relation to actuality (thereby answering Hume, who treats fact in terms of actuality without discussing such concepts as potentiality), and in describing the basic promissory nature of human actions. (I think this latter aspect may correspond to Rand's "initial choice" upon which obligation is grounded, in connection with facts about, essentially, our potentialities.)

Chapter 6, "The Stages of Life," provides Norton's conception of the person as informed by developmental psychology, starting with childhood, then adolescence, and then maturation, and, finally, old age. There are distinctive principles of behavior applying to each stage, while the transition between stages involves what Norton refers to as "world-exchange" by the person. Childhood essentially involves dependency; the stage of adolescence is characterized by creative exploration of potentialities; maturation or adulthood is the "main phase" for which eudaemonistic principles see their application; old age is . . . well, it sounds kinda drab the way Norton describes it. I don't want to think about old age until I approach it.

Chapter 7, "Eudaimonia: The Quality of Moral Life in the Stage of Maturation," describes the condition of "living in truth to oneself," or "being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do." That sounds like a rare phenomenon in the present-day world, but the whole point is that we all have this daimon in us that can in principle be actualized under the right conditions. Norton refers to eudaemonia as a feeling and a condition; in the first chapter, he describes it as both a feeling and condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire, which distinguishes it from many prevailing conceptions of happiness (though in line with the ancient Greek conception of happiness). Eudaemonia is "marked by a distinctive feeling that constitutes its intrinsic reward and therefore bears the same name as the condition itself." My favorite part of this chapter - a fascinating one, at least - is the last part, where Norton discusses the "post-mortem life." To wit:

"...It follows that the individual who is living in truth to himself is ready to die at any time. The sense of this is conveyed in a report by Abraham Maslow of his feelings upon completion of what he identifies only as an 'important' piece of work. 'I had really spent myself. This was the best I could do, and here was not only a good time to die but I was even willing to die . . . It was what David M. Levy called the "completion of the act." It was a good ending, a good close.' What follows the good close is termed by Maslow 'post-mortem life.' He says, 'I could just as easily have died so that my living constitutes a kind of extra, a bonus. It's all gravy. Therefore I might just as well live as if I had already died.' What comes next in Maslow's account sounds a new note. 'One very important aspect of the post-mortem life,' he says, 'is that everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things -- just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.'

"For myself, I cannot imagine a better evocation of the wonder that must have filled Adam in the moment when he first opened his eyes upon the world. . . .

"By the eudaimonic individual death is not feared as the 'period' by which a tragic fate cuts short the unfinished sentence. In the biography of the good life every sentence is a fitting epitaph and is the epitaph until it is succeeded by the next sentence. . . .

"Therefore to the good life death is no stranger, no alien event opposed to life, and death does not 'take us by surprise, as Sartre says, nor 'alienate us wholly in our own life.' Death is life in its consummation, and because consummation is perpetually within the well-lived life, so likewise death is within that life. The conception of death as alien to life is the product of a death-aversion which, by attempting to banish death from the sphere of life, precludes to life its consummation and its worth." (p. 239-240)

(This reminds me of Lester Burnham's final monologue in American Beauty.)

Chapter 8, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," is also rather technical and difficult; he describes the process of "participatory enactment" in which we recognize in ourselves a world of possibilities only one of which is actualized in our own person, but this set of possibilities enables us to see those within others that are or can be actualized. I think the basic concept here is an explanation of how a self-actualizing individual recognizes and adopts a principle of universalizability, respect for persons, and taking an interest in the self-actualization of others.

This leads into chapter 9, "Social Entailments of Self-Actualization: Love and 'Congeniality of Excellences.'" Norton explains at length the distinction between love ("the aspiration to higher value"), passion, eros, and friendship, and brings up another wonderful phraseology, "diverse and complementary excellences," which is fairly self-explanatory. Chapter 10, "Intrinsic Justice and Division of Labor in Consequent Sociality" applies the social-entailment idea to the concept of justice. Here Norton brings up a principle of justice that I can't exactly describe as capitalistic, since he describes principles of justice in terms of what an individual is entitled to in virtue of his own distinctive excellence; this is presented as an alternative to the theories of justice advanced by Rawls and Nozick. Since I take the Nozickian principle to be the correct one, that has priority over what Norton says. Norton does have interesting things to say about what use a philosopher has for a sports car, though he seems to rule out that a philosopher can't also be interested in possessing sports cars. But it is plausible in the sense that philosophers, especially, aren't inclined toward seeking enrichment via material possessions such as sports cars. That idea is hardly new, and it may need modification (and certainly some kind of resolution with Rand's celebration of money-making).

Minor note: Norton uses the term "egoism" in a fairly standard sense, which is not Rand's, and rejects egoism in the standard sense as being morally inadequate. He does, however, commend the "egoistic" flavor of the ancient eudaemonists for rightly recognizing the priority of self (for which interest in others' self-actualization is an expression).

It is my hope that, in time, Personal Destinies will be mass-published and easily affordable; did I already mention that I think the world would be a better place if this book (or, say, a popularization of its ideas) were widely read? One thing's for sure: it has been a chief source of inspiration for me philosophically, as an example of how good a book can be.