Socialism vs. freedom, in a nutshell

In a nutshell?  Socialism in its original sense means the abolition of private property "in the means of production," to be replaced by some form or other of social control of "the means of production."  If you see the modification of the term at the supplied google search link - a necessary modification to reduce the perceived moral and economic ugliness of the idea - the meaning has mutated into "production, distribution and exchange [being] owned or regulated by the community as a whole."  In other words, if there is a considerable amount of regulation of an economy, then it (apparently) now falls within the range of socialist ideas, although I prefer the term "socialism-lite" so as to highlight the morally odious socialist elements of a broadly leftist/"progressive" vision of a just economy.

In her landmark essay, "What is Capitalism?", Rand presents a shortened, nonfiction version of much of the "Galt speech" in Atlas Shrugged.  The theme of Atlas Shrugged?  "The role of the mind in man's existence."  The strength of Rand's case for capitalism stands or falls with her arguments concerning the role of the mind in human existence -- in the case of capitalism, the role of the mind in the process of economic production.  It is this role that socialists of whatever stripe seem to have a very poor grasp on.  Evidence of this poor grasp is how socialists/leftists tend to react to Rand's writings themselves (i.e., quite cluelessly, resting content with caricatures or downright smears), but a wider body of evidence is available: how do socialists treat the subject of entrepreneurial creativity and vision?

Many of the richest people in capitalism-lite societies of today are visionary entrepreneurs, who create value-added using rare and hard-to-replace skills.  At the margins, these value-added skills are rewarded handsomely, which is how (in this age of advanced wealth accumulation) the top-net-worth individual[*] can surpass the next individual on the list to the tune of billions of dollars.  It is this combination of skills and the usual monetary incentives that explains how we now have four "tech" companies well within striking distance of $1 trillion market capitalization each.  (In the true spirit of Making America Great Again, we should be following the lessons from the successes of the MAGA giants, i.e., Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon.)

In the literature of the Austrian economists, entrepreneurship is front and center in explanation of market processes in constant 'disequilibrium' moving toward 'equilibrium' as, e.g., arbitrage opportunities are discovered and exploited.  (Israel Kirzner is one such economist who treated this subject in much detail, applying basic Misesian observations.)  Rand adds the dimension of creativity to the entrepreneurial process.  Creativity is a unique function of human consciousness: in essence it involves taking existing elements and generating some new or original combination of them.  (The following is a tentative characterization of creative action.)  Creativity happens in almost any human endeavor where abstract thought is involved; from there it is a matter of magnitude, and some humans have demonstrated greater aptitude in this process than others.

In other words, what Rand was getting at with Atlas and "What is Capitalism?" is: the primary means of human economic production is the human mind or intellect or reason.  All the other means of production in form of (the productive value of) land, labor, and capital are consequences of this primary.  (We're assuming, of course, a value-added situation beyond that of the primitive humans.)  It is this basic feature of human economic life that socialism of every variety fails to recognize or appreciate.  In consequence, what socialism involves is some measure or degree of control over the human mind.  As Rand put it, via Galt, "When you clamor for public ownership of the means of production, you are clamoring for public ownership of the mind."

As she put it elsewhere, "a free mind and a free market are corollaries."

(I like to play games in my head along the lines of "What's your all-time starting five" and not just when it comes to NBA basketball.  So, like, in the NBA a good lineup of candidates for the starting five would be Russell or Abdul-Jabbar at Center, Lebron James and Larry Bird at the Forward positions, and Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson at the Guard positions.  Now, what are good candidates for an all-time starting five in the realm of "intellectual defenders of the capitalist system."  They would include: Rand, Mises, Hayek, Nozick, Friedman.  Now, if we liken it to another sport, hockey or soccer, we would have a goalie, and I'd have Rand at goalie.  Every argument against capitalism you might come up with would have to get past Rand-the-goalie.  When you get to Rand -- assuming you somehow managed to get past the Mises-Hayek-Nozick lines of defense -- she'll have a response invariably along the lines of "Man is an end in himself."  Or: "Man has a right to exist for his own sake."  Or: "My life isn't yours to dispose of."  The rest is the anti-capitalist going through various rationalizations to either deny these statements or mutate them somehow into a defense of socialism(-lite) along these very same morally-undeniable lines.  "Doesn't the capitalist dispose of the lives of a company's employees?" etc.)

What is to happen with entrepreneurial talent/vision in a socialist framework.  More pointedly: how does one go about providing incentives for entrepreneurial talent to be forthcoming?  Even under a "market socialist" framework (basically, a mutation of socialism from its original meaning - central ownership, planning, control - to something involved "social ownership" but subject to market processes, as a supposed response to the Mises-Hayek criticism of central planning), if what is sought is long-term economic prosperity, certain rare and marginally-very-valuable talents will have to be involved, and the judgment involved has to be exercised freely in accordance with the requirements of the creative intellect.  If what is sought is efficient financing of production projects, you need financial talent and incentives sufficient to bring that talent to market and directed toward its most optimal uses.  How does all this happen without essentially "devolving" into the very tried-and-true capitalist process?

The socialists may not still profess to adhere to a labor theory of value (although getting them to drop that theory may have been like pulling teeth), but their chief focus is on a category they call "the workers" (subordinate employees).  Do entrepreneurs do a lot of value-added intellectual work?  From what I've been able to discern, this seems to be an issue discussed very little in the socialist literature.  If we applied Marxoid phraseology (without reference to at-the-margin value or rarity), entrepreneurial labor could be categorized as multiplied or intensified unskilled or simple labor.  The less-clueless socialists will still want to distinguish between entrepreneurial or organizational talent on the one hand, and the finance-capital end of things on the other.  But what about financial-capital talent?  Is it discussed at length in socialist literature?  (If it is, it must be hidden well from view, with other themes and concerns pushed to the fore.  The main concern/theme driving all of it seems to be: inequality in the process of production.  Talents are, after all, "distributed" unequally.)

The capitalist ethos (espoused by Rand first and foremost) holds that private property rights are essential to human freedom, in terms of the products or consequences of individual value-added creativity.  In the case of the "tech titans" we might have the CEO owning a lot of the company's shares, in effect playing the roles of both entrepreneur/organizer as well as financial capitalist.  Along the lines of Locke and Hegel and Rand and others, property is an extension of self or personhood.  In some sense, the personality of a "tech titan" is heavily invested in the enterprise.  But does anyone really need a billion dollars (discovered via the loathsome leftist Leiter's blog) to properly express their personality?

It'd sure be nice to resurrect Rand in her prime to see how she would handle this kind of question.  She'd pick apart certain assumptions of the question, perhaps use the phrase "context dropping" or "blanking out the cause of the effect."  But I'm not her, I am merely me, and here's what I've got so far:

Say a tech titan reaches a billion dollars net worth.  (This is not like a billion dollars cash in the bank, it might be nearly tied up in stocks that couldn't all be liquidated at present market prices.  It's almost surely not a billion dollars that's going to be blown on hookers and coke, as good as that might be for the bottom line of hookers and coke merchants.)  So if Ocasio-Cortez and the other enlightened progressives have their way, this tech titan won't be able to amass a net worth more than $1 billion, at least not as long as there are human beings somewhere going without health insurance.  (What are we actually supposed to infer about the latter from the former, anyway?  Is one the cause of the other?  That means that our modern economy is accurately characterized as more like a zero-sum situation than a win-win one [tech titans offer comparative advantage, using talents not directly at the disposal of "the workers", . . . ].)

(Without delving into the preposterous, just how would a committee of average-100-IQ "workers" manage to develop a company like Apple?  Again, one only need read Rand for the essentialization of the principle involved here.  It's on the same order of preposterous as imagining a committee of average-100-IQ intellects coming up with the grand-scale integrations of a Karl Marx.  Ohhhhhhhh, so now the role of the mind in man's existence becomes more clear, all of a sudden, to the myopic leftist.  Keep in mind, though, that Marxism proper doesn't place primacy on the human intellect but on "the material productive forces" of which intellectual products - including Marx's theoretical edifice itself - are consequence or superstructure.  In the last resort, of course.  And this is the leading contender for best socialist theorist to date, no less.)

Anyway, let's say I have a billion dollar net worth and any extra amount of wealth over that is confiscated (to pay for children's health insurance or whatever most noble cause).  I could just sit on my ass after that and create no more value-added.  But what good would that do anyone?  No matter, my marginal tax rate is 100% because in the last resort that meets enlightened progressive understandings of fairness, and so I can either sit on my ass or continue to create value for free.  So why should the tax code create preference for leisure time over production?  In one case (sitting on my ass) my life is still exclusively at my disposal, but in the other, doing win-wing comparative-advantage consensual capitalistic acts, the state can dispose of 100% of my marginal proceeds, i.e., my time, energies, effort, talents, mind, person.  (Nozick makes a similar point about a tax-code incentive for leisure over production in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 170.  It's basically a common-sense refutation of the moral premise of punitively high redistributive taxation, just right there.)

What part of "Man is an end in himself, has a right to exist for his own sake, and he has a right to dispose of his own life as he chooses" do the leftists/socialists not fucking understand?

So, in a nutshell: Private property is an expression of man's mind.  Socialism foolishly flouts this moral principle; pure socialism flouts it purely (see: Mao, Great Leap Forward.).  Socialist moral theorizing implies the preposterous.

(If it can be established that "capitalism causes global warming," i.e., desire for economic prosperity causes global warming, and if it can be established that warming-mitigation technology could not outpace the warming itself, then and only then would you have capitalism characterized by a monumental negative externality or non-win-win scenario.  But the socialists were basically making preposterous assertions about capitalism before global-warming became a big issue, putting their credibility in tatters.)

[*] - I'd sexistly say "guy" . . . well, why not just say "guy," since we appear to be at the tail end of a bell curve of a certain kind of intelligence, dominated almost all by men . . . a fact that cannot be sexist.  (Speaking of which, if we're going to rank-order the greatest women philosophers in history on the basis of a full accounting of their strengths and shortcomings, we'd better be sure we've got the right criteria for measurement.  What did Prof. Hospers find so fascinating about Miss Rand in particular, again?  All-time starting five, at least?  And what about . . . All-Time Starting Five Philosophers, period?  What shall the criteria be?  I need to become more of a student of the history of philosophy to know for sure, but I already do know that there can be both a lot of great stuff in Rand and in the rest of the philosophy canon; need they stand over and against one another? ^_^ )

The "Ayn Rand is for children" meme

It is truer than any of her clueless leftist player-haters could barely begin to realize at this point; they are supremely foolish(ly ignorant) as to the why.

I mean, Kira Peikoff didn't turn out that bad, did she?

Peikoff's Philosophy of Education course (1985, according to the Russian Radical bibliography I have right here, and around the time daughter Kira is born).  Integrate with observable concrete outcome of such an approach, 27ish years later.  (Additional exercise: integrate Understanding Objectivism and The Romantic Manifesto with observable concrete outcome of the UO and TRM approach, namely: this here blog.  Integrate; assign A+ grade, a.k.a.: "Perfective." [Further exercise: Integrate the foregoing with The DIM Hypothesis.  Earn perfectivist medal badge.  Await further instruction, from self, of course.])  Compare/contrast to the Comprachico alternative, which pretty much exemplifies what the educational Left has to offer to the young - and, in turn, the caliber of minds emerging from our current, non-Jefferstotelian public school system.

Check, and mate.

(About the only thing that the Chicago Bozo and I agree on is the need for a philosophically-educated citizenry and - in generic terms - about the current cultural bankruptcy in America.  But I "get" Rand and he clearly doesn't, while I also know when to keep my own yap shut about Nietzsche.  The Reginster book (Affirming Life) was quite helpful, BTW, for understanding Nietzsche.  Why won't the Chicago Bozo even bother to read secondary Rand literature that has a clue about Rand?  It's Salon.com and Alternet.org hit pieces, when it could be Russian Radical, OPAR, Virtuous Egoist, and Gotthelf.  Vice of one-sidedness, I declare for all with wisdom-loving ears to hear!  My knowledge of Nietzsche could totally kick the ass of his "knowledge" of Rand (which amounts to: jack shit), and my study so far has been secondary literature only - Kaufmann and Reginster - in addition to that Fountainhead intro describing the author's sense-of-life similarities to Nietzsche, which ties in with a Kaufmann editorial footnote to a key aphorism, referencing Aristotle and the noble soul as a lover of self, which sheds crucial light on the egoist character of Rand's perfectivist eudaimonism.  All of a sudden, Rand looks like an Aristotelianized post-Nietzschean, which sounds way cooler than what Bozo-Boy evidently has to offer, which reeks of a politicized, Us-vs.-Them, pathologically elitist, mean-spirited, and - worst of all - malevolent-universe-ish mindset.  Consider: Is it some kind of effing accident that the American cultural dialectic is evidently converging on Ayn Rand, an avowed neo-Aristotelian?  No, it is not.  Ayn Rand is for children, and adults, all of whom have a vital need to integrate mentally.  I mean, duhhhh!  Also, my knowledge of the film canon vastly exceeds the Chicago Bozo's, and aesthetics is central to philosophy (just like Nietzsche would have said, Bozo-Boy).  So clearly I'm a vastly superior philosopher than he, at this time.  Also, Aristotle is the obvious perfectivist trump card in philosophical debate, and I'm definitely more Aristotelian than he!  And also much more capitalist in ethos, as anyone with a clue ought to be.  I blog about individualism (and in connection with eudaimonism, a moral theory with uniquely deep meaning-of-life resonance); he does not.  Strike three, the Bozo's out!)

"Checkmate, asshole."

Two more months of checkmating guaranteed!  And then what?  ;-)

-UP

:-p

A Real-Life Heroine, in Perfectivist Terms

A conflict of visions

Not exactly the same conflict of visions of which Thomas Sowell spoke, but it is closely related....

One opinion piece below appears at a section called The Stone at the New York Times website; the sidebar describes The Stone as follows: "The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless."  We can safely take the opinion pages of the Times as representative of "left-liberal" opinion in the United States.  The other opinion piece below would find a home in the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, which is fairly representative of right/conservative and libertarianish opinion in the USA.  The first is dated August 18 of 2012; the second, as if responding to the first retroactively, is dated August 13 2012.

(1) Deluded Individualism

(2) Obama's Assault on the Institutions of Civil Society

Regular readers of this blog could readily tell which article I think better represents (a) reality and (b) traditionally and distinctively 'American' attitudes concerning the relation between the individual, civil society, and the state.  As I have pointed out in two separate blog entries in the past couple years, the interest among academic moral and political philosophers as a group in the whole idea of individualism appears almost nonexistent.  (There are two academically-published books I know of from within the past forty years that deal to a great extent with the concept of individualism: David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism (Princeton, 1976), which can be found at many a good university library; and Leslie Paul Thiele's Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of the Soul: A Study of Heroic Individualism (Princeton, 1990), which can be found hardly anywhere, it would seem.  [EDIT: Upon further search, there are volumes by Tibor Machan that cover individualism in a positive light.  It also turns out that there are a few academic volumes scattered about here and there which tackle individualism, including a couple significant-looking ones by philosophy professors; they appear to aim at debunking individualist 'myths' such as the view - held by whom, I'm not sure - that the atomized individual is prior to or independent of society.  Perhaps this conception of individualism exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of authors like that of the first opinion piece above and not among actual proponents of individualism?])

(As the first opinion piece would have it, the content and direction of here blog is not due to autonomous or self-directing intellectually-virtuous/perfective activity; that would be a "delusion."  The credit for all this is due to society, or the welfare state, or other external factors.  That being the case, why isn't society all perfectivst already?  What contribution did I personally make to perfectivism?  Jack shit?)

I've said on this blog numerous times that, as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  To ward off a potential misunderstanding here among those who might go out of their way to misunderstand: The professional intellectual "class" is certainly filled to a great extent with people who are very bright, and very virtuous intellectually: they adhere to rigorous standards of truth-seeking inquiry.  If the People as a whole practiced such intellectual virtue in their own lives in their own ways and endeavors, we'd be in a vastly improved situation compared to what we have now.  This is the goal I would like to see accomplished.  So why isn't the nation going that way per my dictum?  Well, the chief problem is how the intellectuals make (or fail to make) their work relevant to the People.

It's not like the American people are inherently anti-intellectual.  Rather, what you see in this country is a widespread attitude, more on the Right than on the Left I should think, of hostility or indifference to what "higher learning" is or has become these days.  I'll enter as exhibit B (exhibit A being Scumbag Leiter & Co.) the first opinion piece above.  When this is the kind of thing that shows up on the opinion pages of "the liberal media's" flagship publication, accessible from page 3 of a google search on "individualism philosophy" no less, what else are the People - especially those right-of-center - to think about the "liberal" intelligentsia?  What use are such authors to the People?  Are they fulfilling their highest professional responsibility to serve as the guardians and integrators of human knowledge?

The feeling among many of the "higher ed" intelligentsia is mutual: a contempt for the unwashed masses.  There's a gulf separating what's going on up there in the ivory towers and what's going on out there in flyover country (where the folks cling bitterly to guns and bibles).  Whereas a genuine philosophical mindset and temperament would seek to facilitate a dialogue between the two groups, what we have here is a failure to integrate.  What's more, the intellectuals are in the position, as professional full-time thinkers, where they're supposed to understand the causes and solutions to this problem, and act accordingly.  (Or are they not really in control of this, per the first opinion piece above?)  So that's the short-short explanation for how the course of the country is dictated by the way the intellectuals conduct themselves.

What would Aristotle and/or Jefferson think about all this?

"Checkmate, asshole."

Establishment Philosophy vs. individualism

An exercise in the spiral:

If one googles 'individualism philosophy' one finds the same state of things, essentially, as what I pointed out nearly two years ago - a near-complete lack of interest among academic moral and political philosophers in individualism (and especially among the most "elite" of them - e.g., Oxford/NYU/Harvard's Derek Parfit, who also - mind-bogglingly - neglects Aristotle, eudaimonia, and virtue-ethics in his "state of the art," Oxford-published "magnus opus" on ethics).  This is a widespread corruption in the Intellectual Establishment, constituting an intellectual and moral betrayal of the American people and of the nation's founding ideals.  My observations remain as spot-on accurate now as they did then; spiral progression in the two years since has only further enhanced and solidified these findings.

I think the American people would like to know why this near-complete neglect of individualism is taking place in the Academic Establishment, wouldn't they?

There is an ominous parallel here to a culture- and polity-wide corruption in the Establishment - not in the universities (in this particular case) but in media and in government - when it comes to Noam Chomsky's near-complete absence from political discourse and exposure in (American) mass-media venues (outside of the internet, that is).

What I observe here are cultures of evasion, in which truth and justice are unpopular and inconvenient with regard to the status quo.

I don't think the Framers would stand for this status quo for one fucking second.

Do you?

As Walter Sobchak might very well have said, there's no reason - there's no FUCKing reason - for the national situation to be this way, or to stay this way.  One need only look at the complete failure of intellectual, moral, and political leadership in our nation's Legislative and Executive branches at doing the obviously-right fucking thing on cannabis legalization, to know our polity is a broken one.  I know it, you know it, and the American People (should damn well) know it.  Here we have overwhelming evidence and reasons for why cannabis should be legalized yesterday; we have a majority of the People showing support for its legalization according to polls; all logic, right, truth, and justice point in that direction; the de facto racist nature of the War on Drugs should sting at the conscience of everyone; the prison-industrial complex built up around this vicious War should likewise sting at everyone's consciousness; and, yet, no action from our national leaders.  The Democrat Establishment is no less corrupt in its ongoing support of this President despite the obviously-racist effects of the Drug Policies which he enforces (or does he?) and - worse - remains dubiously silent about in the face of all the evidence.

All this, no thanks to the Intellectual Class, and its culture of evasion and stagnation.  As the Intellectuals go, so goes the country - just as Rand said.

Do these Intellectuals even begin to wonder why even the leading one of their own, MIT's Prof. Chomsky, is nearly absent from America's public discourse?

It's their own fault, after all, having made philosophy almost totally irrelevant to ordinary citizens.

It so happens that Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom would be of more interest in meaning-of-life terms to the ordinary people, than would Quine's "Two Dogmas" article.  That's just a fact.  While that should (of course) not be construed to denigrate what Quine et al have been doing, it is a severe problem when meaning-of-life issues are neglected by the Philosophical Establishment in the process.  (The Existentialists and Rand were addressing fundamental meaning-of-life questions well over half a century ago, at a time that Academic Philosophy was going out of its way to be as irrelevant as ever to the People and is only now catching up in the meaning-of-life area - a task which can't even be addressed all that well as long as Rand and individualism remain largely neglected.  That's just a fact.)

Perhaps it's high (ahem) time that someone, somewhere, founded an alternate Academy, as individual philosophers did way back in the day - only perhaps the term "academy" should be dropped altogether given the disrepute that has been brought upon that term by institutional insiders, and replaced with something along the lines of "lyceum".  Just a hunch.

Am I wrong?

(Why does taking on an entire Philosophical Establishment feel like shooting fish in a barrel?  Is it supposed to feel that way?  Is that how Rand - who was decades ahead of her time in the virtue-ethics department - felt, too?  Is that why so many in the Establishment hate Rand?  A frightfully high number of these entities don't seem to give a shit what Gotthelf and the Ayn Rand Society have to say about her, either.  These aren't worthy fucking adversaries.  [A notable exception is one John M. Cooper of Princeton, a preeminent scholar of ancient philosophy and chair of a recent Ayn Rand Society program, "Ayn Rand as Aristotelian" (2005).  Perhaps the ancients had more noble ideas about how to carry out philosophical discourse and make it relevant to people's lives?])

P.S. Aw, fuck it; spiraling back to this subject, I'll go ahead and perfectively fortify my observations as follows: Prof. Leiter is a vicious piece of shit.  That motherfucker had better retract and apologize for his appalling treatement of Rand and Rand-scholars, or else.  (See item #9 here.)  One might think a simple concern about one's long-term intellectual and moral credibility would lead to such a retraction and apology, irrespective of my threat to go on strike beginning 4/20, because his (and his vile little cronies') credibility will be ruined long-term - whatever happens - if they don't.  Whatever his academic accomplishment, the man is a disgrace.  Maybe some of his colleagues could light a fire under his rotund posterior and improve their own reputations in the process.  The American People are not going to take kindly to this unbelievable shit once they find out what their most vocal intellectuals have been saying and doing these past years and decades to stonewall progress.  Once again: as the intellectuals go, so goes the nation.  (A recent Leiter entry has him whining about capitalism, yet again, whereas the solution to our nation's economic and existential problems lies in an Aristotelian eudaimonist intellectual perfection.  Why the fuck doesn't he at least advocate that?  [Of course, that would mean getting cornered like a rat for his treatment of Rand, all the same.  Maybe that's why?]  He complains all the goddamn time about America's intellectual and cultural dysfunction, but then shits all over Rand and capitalism without providing any real alternative answers.  Fuck 'em!)

P.P.S. reddit's /r/philosophy and I have a date Wednesday (tomorrow), baby!  Woo!!!

Wolff, Romney, Marx, and Rand

First, a little bit of background: About a year and a half ago, in the month or so leading up to the release of the first installment of the Atlas Shrugged movie, I made the not-all-that-wise move of posting a link to a blog entry of mine in the comments section of Robert Paul Wolff's blog, which had the effect of "stealing" a bit of his audience for a bit of time before my posted comment was removed.  For that I apologize.  As I came to realize, blog etiquette tends to involve building up an audience in a more fair-and-square fashion, the exact contours of which are often discovered through a process of trial-and-error, that incident being an error on my part.  (I can only imagine what many bloggers and site admins have to put up with in comments sections; what little experience I had with it led me to turn off comments to this blog and invite feedback by email-only.  But I'm so wonderfully self-correcting, what feedback do I really need? :-)

Okay, that said, let's proceed.  Recently as I was rummaging around for content online (an ever-ongoing process, BTW, not just a recent thing - see this blog's "masthead"), I encountered this blog entry by Prof. Wolff, and I find it (in essence) chillingly spot-on:

There has been a good deal of speculation about the hour-long video that has surfaced of the now truly infamous supposedly private Mitt Romney speech to $50,000 a plate donors.  [I use the adjective "infamous" in its proper meaning, "detestable or shamefully malign," not in its current misusage as simply "widely known."]  Present in  the room were Romney, the fat cats, and servants scurrying about bringing the food and clearing the dirty plates.  The angle of the video makes it clear that it was not recorded by one of the guests, so we can only conclude that one of the wait staff managed to set up a camera and film the proceedings. 

Upper classes always ignore the presence of their servants, a fact that gave rise to an entire genre of eighteenth century French comedy.  [Think "The Marriage of Figaro" without the immortal music.]  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the working class is populated by actual human beings with eyes and ears and fully functional intelligence.  This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature.  Were the rich and powerful of the world to acknowledge the full humanity of those they exploit, they would find it difficult to sustain the easy air of superiority that they consider their birthright.
...
At Romney's rich donor dinner, it is a virtual certainty that the wait staff consisted of men [and perhaps women -- one cannot tell from the video] who make too little money to pay federal income taxes, and hence are among the 47% whom Romney says are dependent moochers who cannot take personal responsibility for their lives.  These people were obviously in full view of Romney as he stood at the podium and spoke for more than an hour.  The fact that it obviously never occurred to him that he was talking about people present in the room says more about Romney than any formal biography or hatchet job expose possibly can.

First off, I'll take issue mainly with some things in the middle paragraph here.  "This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature."  I'm not quite sure how to take this statement.  Is it that a capitalistic ideology (which Romney & Co. do buy into in some form or other) causes people like Romney to be oblivious to the humanity of waitstaff at his gatherings, or is it a moral failing, or is it something like a cognitive bias, a problem that besets just about everyone (and which philosophers see as their duty responsibility to correct as best they can, as part of the knowledge-guarding-and-integrating process)?  Is it part of the Romney ideology that the "servants" don't possess full humanity?  Is it part of capitalistic ideology?  Is it some process by which Romney's or anyone else's having adopted a capitalistic ideology leads to ignoring the full humanity of the "servants"?  I think it is more of a personal failing, in the cognitive-bias sense rather than in a moral sense (though I won't rule out the moral sense).  Anyway, that's nitpicking one sentence.  The other sentence is the very ideologically-contentious one that there's "exploiting" going on.

But first, let's say that my idea of a much better (utopian?) society is one that is capitalistic (as Wolff's other blog posts make clear, he'd endorse markets but not capitalism) while at the same time intellectually-enlightened, philosophically-imbued.  (Would Plato, Aristotle, and Kant be capitalists [ideologically speaking, not "moneybags"] today, assuming they got together with all data available to intellectually-diligent middle-aged folks today and hashed things out among them, perhaps with Jefferson and Franklin and a bud-sharing Carl Sagan thrown in the mix?  I'll get to this more in a bit.)  So, assuming some uncorrect biases don't creep in too much, you wouldn't have Romney-types being so oblivious to the waitstaff-types.  (This is where Wolff gets it spot-on, although for all we know some of the waitstaff may be putting themselves through business school so that they can jump class-ranks. ;-)  So what we do know is that Romney is great with money (making it, minimizing tax liabilities, etc.), kind of a boring douchebag, and big on Mormonism, while his supposedly heavily-Rand-influenced running mate is also a douchebag (if only for his views on medical - medical! - marijuana and, now, same-sex marriage).

I want to also say that Prof. Wolff and I are coming from quite-different contexts.  In his "about me" section, he writes: "As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist."  I'm not any of these things; in fact I once made the observation when reading this that anarchism is the opposite of politics and atheism the opposite of religion, so what does that make Marxism with respect to economics?  Of course things are more complicated than that; he clarifies that he's an anarchist in the sense that we aren't obligated to obey the law just because it is the law (quite sensible, though what if it isn't "just a law," but a law integrally decided-upon within a separation-of-powers system? complications...).  Many people mean many different things by "atheism"; I don't identify as such but I might be one according to some folks or definitions.  (How would we know if there's a God or gods?  Haven't found a satisfactory answer yet.)  But most significantly, as far as ideological things go, is our very different context when it comes to Marxism and capitalism.  I've been ideologically a capitalist since just about the time I ever got interested in politics, which is before adulthood, and have yet to seriously entertain Marxism or socialism.  (I've had to seriously entertain anarchism in its David Friedmanite manifestation.  But still far removed from socialism.)

My intellectual context?  At this point it's been influenced by Ayn Rand well more than anyone.  It's not so much that I think Rand is so much more the be-all and end-all than everyone else out there; it's just a matter of biographical fact that I've been exposed to her ideas quite a bit more than those of any other philosopher out there.  Some folks - like a certain leading philosopher blogger I'd rather not name, but who's a complete douchebag and imbecile whenever the subject of Rand comes up - might say that this is so much philosophical time wasted.  My response to that is: you have to know my context.  There's a lot in Rand to be inspired by, though my immersion in Objectivist thought was quite extensive and thorough: I listened to well over 100 hours of Peikoff lecture courses, including the crucial, now-published-in-paperback Understanding Objectivism.  I had much exposure to Objectivist internet forums, including Jimmy Wales's Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP) back in the day.  I've interacted with real, live Advanced Students of Objectivism who are perfectly normal and fun people.  (I've had online interactions with ASO's who weren't so great, cognitively biased partisans and dogmatists a lot of them.)  I've read abundant amounts of the secondary literature - the intensively researched Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical by Sciabarra, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand edited by "Dougs" Ramussen and Den Uyl, to name a couple - and have spent thousands of hours thinking about these ideas.  I would say that the most pivotal secondary literature is Understanding Objectivism; without that absorbed into the fiber of your being, you don't really have Objectivism as Rand meant it to be understood - not just as a doctrine, but as a way - a method - of thinking (which in turn affects one's way of living).  And I've come to the conclusion that this way of thinking is neo-Aristotelian, perfectivist (hence what's in my own "about me" section).  And you just can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Now, my understanding of Rand probably parallels Wolff's understanding of Marx.  By much the same token, my understanding of Marx is probably comparable to his understanding of Rand, i.e., I wouldn't go to him as a source on what Rand said and meant.  Also by the same token, it's evident that he has built up an impressive edifice of thought surrounding Marx's economic doctrines.  I'd have to spend thousands of hours of integration to know what he knows; this is simply the nature of specialized expertise, just like Romney has his own specialized expertise requiring thousands of hours of integration of knowledge.  As Rand said, integration is the cardinal function of human consciousness.  It's right there in the Lexicon. :-)  I have no idea if Marx said something similar.  But this gets to another point I want to make: the nature of dialectic.  Could there be a productive dialectic between a Rand and a Marx, despite their clashing contexts?  ("Clashing contexts" is a phrase that may be recognizable to ASO's.  But it would be applicable in the context of Sciabarra's treatment as well, dialectics being "the art of context-keeping" in his phrasing).  If Rand and Marx could adequately grasp each other's context - which is an aim of dialectic if not a simple matter of empathy - if they could be set walking in the same direction rather than arguing at cross-purposes, what kind of "synthesis" might emerge?  I ask this as a perfectivist.  We all have the same set of empirical facts in front of us; how do we go about integrating them in a commonly-accepted way?

Above I asked what the result of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant dialecticizing might be.  Would they support capitalism?  Socialism?  Something else?  Before we even get to that question, though, what are things they would agree about?  Being philosophers, they would (I'm pretty sure) agree that using our powers of reasoning to the utmost would be most desirable as a policy of living.  Guess what - Rand agrees with that.  Would they agree about ethics being eudaimonistic in a more or less strictly Aristotelian sense?  A perfectivist sense, which I think Aristotle was?  (Perfectivism says: If Aristotelian eudaimonism is found faulty, let's find something better; indeed, let's find the best thing we can possibly find within the limits of our cognitive abilities.  But isn't that perfectivist attitude that of Aristotelian eudaimonism?  Can it be refuted?  Put another way, aren't philosophers qua philosophers cognitive perfectivists?  Is perfectivism different from a most rigorous application of dialectical ability, or is it synonymous with it?  If the latter, how do you refute that?)  Anyway, I'm big on eudaimonism, which I take to be a practical (from praxis) corollary of cognitive perfectivism.  I think Rand would agree on that as well.

Let's take a couple key statements by Rand, indicating her approach to philosophical hierarchy ("hierarchy" being another term well-known to ASO's seeing as it's a central focus of Understanding Objectivism, after all, and further indicative of cognitive perfectivism).  First, there is her statement about the theme of Atlas Shrugged.  (Hold on, I've got to review/refresh, spiral-like - oh there's another UO term - my understanding of Rand's ideas about literary theme.  You're invited to join me here; that link should help you.  I might have to click on some of the cross-referenced links for integration purposes, so this could take a bit of time.  You do realize that Rand put forth formulations of her philosophy in more than novels, right, newbies?  What, did you already know what the theme of Atlas Shrugged was?  That it isn't "The superman gets to prosper, while the weak can rot"?)


"Its theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest."  --For the New Intellectual, 88


Now, the morality of rational self-interest as a corollary.  See above about eudaimonism as a corollary of cognitive perfectivism.

So, we have "the role of mind in man's existence."  Now, another quote: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."  (Heroism or nobility - didn't Rand approvingly quote something from Nietzsche about nobility - see the 1968 introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead - and didn't Kaufmann in a footnote to that and another aphorism direct our attention to . . . Aristotle?  Damn.  [Integration, see.])  And then there's this: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.  This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism."  And what - in full - does Rand mean by "reason"?  It's spelled out in detail - well, in outline form - in the chapters on epistemology in Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand ("OPAR"), and in fuller detail (i.e., with respect to cognitive integration, hierarchy, and context) in Understanding Objectivism.  (Noticing a pattern here?)  Then we get Rand's statement on the basic virtue of her ethical system, the virtue of rationality.  (What, she didn't say that man's basic virtue is selfishness?  But but, but but but, what about the title to her book?  Consider the context of her titling her book that way, such as the time period she did so, and then consider what she actually says in the introduction and the lead essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," where the first selection in the Lexicon entry on rationality comes from.)

Now comes something ostensibly more controversial in substance: Individualism.  If one bothers to pay attention to Galt's radio address, one encounters this: "By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man - every man - is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose."  In full context, is there something - anything - objectionable here?  Do we go out of our way, as intellectually mediocre Rand critics often do, to misunderstand "for his own sake"?  (Personally I construe it to be the same in meaning as the title of chapter 1 (along with the substance of the book's essential theme) of paradigmatic eudaimonist David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism: "The ethical priority of self-actualization."  But maybe that's just me, reading too charitably into Rand's "new concept of egoism."  Hah!)  In any case, we have in Rand's philosophical hierarchy an individualistic ethics, prior to her advocacy of capitalism in politics and economics.

Is capitalism the logical extension of individualism to politics?  Is political libertarianism (in the usual sense - e.g., the political philosophy of Nozick or Eric Mack or, indeed, of Rand herself) genuinely expressive of individualism, or of respecting the humanity of persons, or treating persons as ends in themselves?  Would Marxism as an alternative value individualism?  I would have to ask someone, like Prof. Wolff, who has studied Marx very indepth.  On a charitable reading, I would guess that Marx thought that capitalism produced an "alienated individuality," an atomistic individuality, one that undermined sociability and community, one that is ahistorical, perhaps (supposedly) a "Stirnerite" version Marx is famous for critiquing.  But isn't it most fortunate that Rand did not endorse such an "individualism"!  Need I post the Lexicon entry for "altruism" as Rand actually meant it?  (I'm kind of tired out with posting links at this point.)  Need I quote and re-quote Rand's statement about man being a social being but not in the sense that the moral cannibals (see We the Living) mean?  Need I refer to Sciabarra for the appropriate context-keeping treatment of the subject?  And of course, if we have a perfectivistic eudaimonism, we have to take into account Aristotle on sociability.

Anyway, I don't know if Prof. Wolff would object to a proper individualism; but let's say that he does.  We then come to the question of whether capitalism is expressive of, or instead undermines, individualism.  This is a very serious and important question.  On the question of the proper socio-political system for human beings, many (individual, invaluable, potentially-flourishing) lives hang in the balance.  If capitalism is inherently exploitative, it means some humans treating others merely as means, not respecting their humanity fully (whether they intend it or not), it means individuals to that extent alienated from one another, it means a suppression of human flourishing.  For all the appearance of capitalist acts between adults being consented-to, do the relations involve presuppose an unjust power-dynamic?  This requires a serious answer without begging important questions or dismissing "Marxists" in the unforgiving (and arguably quite context-insensitive) fashion that some Objectivists have recommended.  There is a dialectical tension here crying out for resolution.  And let's make it clear: Rand advocated reason and individualism as primaries.  If capitalism is somehow shown to undermine these, then it's capitalism that has to go.  I take Rand at her word; individualism is primary to her normative philosophy, and not some post-hoc rationalization for capitalist politics (as many of her intellectually-mediocre and suspiciously projective-sounding opponents charge).

At this point in time I do not have a knock-down argument (by which I mean one that could convince someone like Prof. Wolff) showing that capitalism is the only right social-political system on individualist grounds - or, as Rand would put it, the only system proper to humans given their requirements for living as rational beings, given "the role of the mind in man's existence."  I do think that an intellectually-enlightened "Aristotelian utopia" would have the resources to deal voluntarily and charitably with people's safety-net needs should (capitalistic) institutions based on private ownership of the means of production fail to meet those people's flourishing-based needs.  (When I hear socialists describe their own views, I tend to hear "worker ownership of the means of production," but really haven't given that idea much thought given my context of reading Mises and Nozick: "What if a worker saves enough money and decides to open and direct his own business, using entrepreneurial skill?"  Where does it go from there?  Is that okay, but corporate-forms of ownership not?  Do we need to distinguish private property or capitalism from corporatism?  In an intellectually-advanced society, do people become their own independent bosses anyway, making the corporate form obsolete?  Can the corporate-form realistically be reformed for the better?  Etc....)  But, thinking in more comprehensive terms than that, such a "utopia" would also have the intellectual resources by which to resolve disputes concerning whether capitalism is indeed the best system for human beings.*  I really don't know how Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin, and Sagan (and Marx and Nozick and Rawls and Rand and Chomsky and Mises and...), after giving all sides a full and fair hearing would resolve these existing disputes to everyone's high standards of satisfaction.

I'd like to think that eudaimonistic individualism, however, is not so much open to dispute.  (And understood in perfectivist terms, how would it be?)  One thing that needs to happen in any event for a productive debate on politics to happen is for people to adequately understand their opponents' viewpoints to the opponents' satisfaction.  I've seen misunderstandings from opponents of other people's ideas (not just of Rand's ideas, though perhaps especially of her ideas) happen way too much and to too ridiculous an extent for there to be much of a productive debate as things stand now.  That's why hierarchy matters: what we need, first, is a (perfective) betterment of people's cognitive faculties so that such misunderstanding becomes one less (major) obstacle we have to deal with in the pursuit of what is true and right.

* - The intellectual resources in such a scenario would be put to use addressing a lot of challenges - perhaps most importantly scientific ones, perhaps most importantly spiritual ones - and not just this one.

EDIT: This article just crossed my field of vision.  "Gee, what's this whole Ayn Rand thing all about in American political discussion?"  From the perspective of someone who thinks in terms of "spiral progression of knowledge," "sense of life," "psycho-epistemology," "measurement-omission," "rule of fundamentality," "rationality as the primary virtue," and other such Objectivism-isms, I find a major clashing of contexts going on here.  Right now we've got a bunch of ordinary citizens and Randophobes (the author's term, I like it!), many of them on the MSNBC-watching Left, running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to come to grips with "the Rand thing."  ("She espouses such monstrously hateful things, how can anyone take her seriously?  Premises have to be checked here!"  Indeed.)  So how does one "present Ayn Rand" (interpretively, that is) to folks who are only superficially intellectual - perhaps having read only the novels - who get a lot of their ideas from op-eds and cable news and soundbites and whatnot?  You can't exactly point them to Sciabarra, Peikoff, Tara Smith, or Gotthelf books and say, "Read them, will you, please?  Then we'll talk."  But then what do you do exactly?  Give televised lectures on C-SPAN (who watches that?) which don't - can't - go into philosophical depth?  Go on cable news and have the usual talking-head shouting matches?  What do you do?  I suppose you can throw 30,000 darts at a wall (the Fountainhead high-school essay contests) and get one or two Objectivists into a possible tenure-track position at a well-ranked university every few years, but that's been done and these people still ignore the output.  (Ever hear one mention - one fucking mention - of Tara Smith's, or Peikoff's, or Sciabarra's work in the lamestream media?  On the usual "liberal" news sites like the Huffington Post?  Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish?  The political blogosphere?  Hell, the "leading" "philosophical" blogs?  I think the total count here is approximately zippo, nada, rien, nicht.  I think once, maybe twice, there was a mention of the Ayn Rand Society somewhere.  Barring a fucking miracle, would we expect something different to happen after Wiley publishes the forthcoming Gotthelf-edited book?  In short, it's really, really pathetic what's going on here, folks.)  This actually points to a wider problem: how do you present philosophically-imbued ideas, period, in an intellectually-dysfunctional culture?  How do you make it an intelligent discussion about things like integration and virtue and not just about politics and economics?  I mean, shit, philosophers - any of them that you could name; Rand is hardly an exception - are bound to be misunderstood by a large segment of the public.  How does one raise the standard, other than a (commonsensical?) approach to educational reform with emphasis on critical thinking skills?  How fucking hard could it be, really?  Can't we at least begin at the margins and work from there?  Wh- wh- what, has the whole world gone crazy? ;-)

Spiritual Uplift for the Day

From the "Roarkian Soul" department:



(h/t: Frank O'Connor) (Also: TUW)

(ADDENDUM: More spiritual uplift.)

(ADDENDUM #2: Is this far and away the best philosophy blog on the internet, or what? :-D )

(ADDENDUM #3: Nicely done, self. Keep it up! :-) )

A Big, Fat Anti-Euphemism

Ayn Rand was an expert at identifying and diagnosing the myriad techniques of intellectual sloppiness and evasion used by enemies of the American way of life, i.e., of reason, individualism and capitalism.

These techniques include (but are by no means limited to): package-dealing, smuggling in premises, stealing concepts, purveying anti-concepts, hurling ill-defined approximations, dropping context, equivocating, and weasel-wording.

One such occasion of expert Randian diagnosis occurs in a little-cited article, "How to Read (and Not to Write)" in a 1972 issue of The Ayn Rand Letter (reprinted in The Voice of Reason [1989]). There, Rand addresses a charge made against individualist ideas like hers time and time again, viz., that they promote "atomism." Rand breaks down a New York Times editorial, which stated that "this country cannot go back to the highly atomistic, competitive model of the early nineteenth century," as follows:

If a euphemism is an inoffensive way of identifying an offensive fact, then "highly atomistic, competitive model" is an anti-euphemism, i.e., an offensive way of identifying an inoffensive (or great and noble) fact -- in this case, capitalism. "Competitive" is a definition by non-essentials; "atomistic" is worse. Capitalism involves competition as one of its proper consequences, not as its essential or defining attribute. "Atomistic" is usually meant to imply "scattered, broken up, distintegrated." Capitalism is the system that made productive cooperation possible among men, on a large scale - a voluntary cooperation that raised everyone's standard of living - as the nineteenth century has demonstrated. So "atomism" is an anti-euphemism, standing for "free, independent, individualistic." If the editorial's sentence were intended to be fully understood, it would read: "this country cannot go back to the free, individualistic, private property system of capitalism." (Voice of Reason, p. 131)

(The chickens' homecoming, as far as any last shred of intellectual credibility in NYT editorials are concerned, has been dissected by Greenwald. The NYT euphemized torture so that the Bush Administration didn't have to, torture - usually a last-ditch, pathologically-agnostic, no-absolutes, panic-ridden attempt to force a mind - being the naked-essential end-of-the-line for a pragmatist ethos.)

I'd like to identify a massive anti-euphemism that has been perpetrated on this country, much to its long-term detriment. And that is the identification of the American ethos of "commonsense practicality" with pragmatism (either little-p or big-P).

This didn't happen overnight and the corruptions involved have hardly been made explicit much less manifest to the American people. America's implicit founding philosophy - groped toward by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine - was Aristotelian through and through. Rand is the only 20th-century American thinker to have made this fully explicit.

The fundamental difference one needs to know between Aristotelianism and Pragmatism has to do with their respective stands on the Law of Identity and the Primacy of Existence. Aristotelianism affirms Rand's statement that "Existence is identity; consciousness is identification." Pragmatism systematically undercuts this axiomatic principle.

Since Pragmatism understands truth in terms of "what works" rather than in terms of correspondence to an independent, term-setting, causal reality with its own definite identity, it fails right on its face to represent "common sense," whereas Aristotelianism clearly does not so fail. What's more, an Aristotelian primacy-of-existence approach recognizes the ontological primacy involved: something works in virtue of being properly in accord with reality. Pragmatism dispenses with any such talk as being "metaphysics" with no "cash value." But getting this right is fundamental to getting it right about the nature of existence and humans' relationship to existence, which includes having a philosophy that fully and adequately addresses the independent-fact-integrative requirements of our conceptual nature.

Before Aristotle's complete works were translated into English in the early 20th century and before Ayn Rand's arrival on the scene - before America had had the opportunity to become a philosophical behemoth as a complement to its becoming a political and economic behemoth - its budding intellectual class, consisting first and foremost of the Pragmatists, had to cobble together the "best" of the philosophical ideas out there (again, in the absence of Aristotle). It must be kept in mind that inasmuch as people had heard of Aristotle, it was in terms of non-essentials - for instance, that his biology had been overturned by Darwin, or that his universal teleology was outmoded, or that the Church had canonized him into a dogma, or (among those less intellectually out-of-it) that he was being invoked by Hegel and Marx as a forerunner to modern "dialectics."

(Throw into this whole mix the rise of modern psychology: by the mid-20th century, many of the most adept minds were preoccupied by matters of psychology rather than philosophy - see Nathaniel Branden, Stanley Kubrick, David L. Norton. It's probably not at all accidental that people who developed like these three did were also all born right around 1930. An intellectually-minded person reaching college age ca. 1950s is more likely to be reading a lot of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Maslow, and Fromm, than to be reading Aristotle or Rand. Only a highly-unusual instance - namely, Branden - would have feet in both these worlds. What's more, young idealists aren't going to be interested much in reading middling, cynicism-breeding Pragmatist philosophy, and anyone who bothers to delve into philosophy around this time is going to be assaulted by positivism and existentialism. Given this default by the philosophers, one can hardly blame a perfective artist like Kubrick for being much more psychology-focused than philosophy-focused. This of course only reinforces Miss Rand's point about the inescapable power of philosophy to affect a culture for good or bad, be it through influence or default. Oh, and ain't integration fun?)

No, Aristotle was pretty much a non-factor on the intellectual scene at the height of the Pragmatist movement. Instead, the chief influences were Hume and Kant, and if you want the non-identity, non-primacy-of-existence version of doing philosophy (complete with - get this - an atomistic, homo-economicus conception of the empirical-natural person!), you get it in full force with these two. In this fundamental respect, Hume and Kant share essential premises that only an Aristotelian approach can answer. In more specific terms, Hume and Kant both agreed that you could not get the concept of causal necessity from experience. From there, it's a matter of preference whether you go the Humean route of giving up on finding such an account, or the Kantian route of assigning to necessity a subject-dependent ("a priori") status.

On this point, I think Peikoff and Rand may have misidentified just how strongly "Kantian" the Pragmatists were, because I see them much more as Humean. What is the "cash value," after all, of Kant's whole categorical scheme? As a primacy-of-consciousness view - hence the purported subjectivity of the category of necessity - Kant's view is still a metaphysical one of sorts. (If you want another anti-euphemism in connection with this, how about the identification of Kant's critique of Rationalist metaphysics with a critique of metaphysics as such. Just imagine the thousandfold-multiplied disasters that might proceed from that kind of imperfect lumping-together. For evidence of the cashing-in there, see post-modernism.) Hume, to his commonsensical credit, makes no pretense to overturning empty metaphysics and replacing it with a primacy-of-consciousness one. In this, the Pragmatists are much more akin to Hume. It's Hume's philosophy, his whole approach, which sets the terms for everything to follow. The Pragmatists were too "common sense" to go with Kant's (metaphysical) subjectivism over Hume's (epistemological) subjectivism, which - unfortunately for the Pragmatists - still devolves into skepticism. (Again, see post-modernism for the final dead-end of a Humean influence.)

In the mind of the pragmatism-bred mainstream American now, philosophy is associated with skepticism - with questions without answers. That, of course, isn't practically workable, so the average American "rationally" rejects the study of philosophy as a waste of time. ("Rationally," that is, in the morally-vacuous sense used by social scientists who just don't know better, while their cognitively-Humean counterparts in the philosophy departments never told them otherwise. Certainly it's not "rationally" in the sense used by Rand or Henry Veatch. [From Hume: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions," and "'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger." This, today's philosophical Establishment considers a formidable thing to have to respond to - and is ill-equipped to do so as things currently stand.])

The important thing which only a few astute intellectuals grasp at this time, is that Aristotle and Rand have Hume and the Pragmatists checkmated/trumped on Law-of-Identity and Primacy-of-Existence grounds, just like Aristotle had all the ancient skeptics and proto-pragmatists checkmated (in addition to having been more dialectically comprehensive-completist-perfectivist than was his otherwise beloved teacher, Plato - and having become the father of inductive Western science in the process). Rand's primary-of-existence terminology is her way of more effectively phrasing the fundamental essence of classical commonsense realism. American-style commonsense would dictate adopting the comprehensive/perfectivist style of an Aristotle or Rand over the disintegrative style of Hume and the Pragmatists. What's more, there's a lot more cash-value in adopting the former over the latter.

Relative to the implicit neo-Aristotelian philosophy of America's founding, Pragmatism represents a regression, and the chief force undermining what made this country great. By having Hume as the "best" to fall back on in the tradition, America has never really declared an intellectual independence from Britain (or British notions of common sense). The Intellectual Establishment here is so very Humean (that is, non-Aristotelian) in basic cognitive style and many of its leading practitioners don't even seem to be aware of it. (That's why I'm here to point this out.) It's quite undeniable, actually: had they been more Aristotelian in basic cognitive style, the Establishment leaders would have acknowledged the deep similarity of cognitive style between the venerated Aristotle and the snidely dismissed Rand. Absent Aristotelianism and Randism, these children of Hume are reduced to increasingly-complex acts of squaring circles: see, for instance, the various ingenious but non-Aristotelian attempts to get around Hume's "is-ought" distinction, attempts which serve no useful purpose to the community at large but which can make for exhaustive publication or dissertation material. And that's not the only thing the Intellectual Establishment is way out-of-touch about.

Pragmatism breeds staleness, conformity, mediocrity, stagnation, weakness, and cowardice. (And so much anti-euphemism-spouting, soul-killing cynicism!) For abundant real-world evidence of this, see the state of America today. For Rand's expert, naked-essentials, theoretical analysis of all that's wrong with Pragmatism as against Aristotelianism, see Peter Keating as contrasted (spiritually) with Howard Roark, or Mr. Thompson as contrasted (intellectually, morally and metaphysically) with John Galt.

American Exceptionalism

Greenwald.

Rand.

Not really a tough call for me to say that Rand trumps Greenwald. (Greenwald is right, though, that Obama has become an empty suit after presenting such a promising and principled-sounding persona during the '08 campaign. Fool me once....) America as it is right now - in all its intellectually-stunted glory - is not obviously exceptional, even if it is still exceptional compared (in full context) to the alternatives. But America as it might be and ought to be? Of course it's exceptional. It's all about individualism and a benevolent sense of life. (America is also uniquely situated to boldly lead the world toward the Singularity. Ain't integration fun?)

To see that as clearly as Rand did or yours truly does, requires a massive amount of well-focused integration - e.g., a well-integrated understanding of Galt's radio address. Attaining such an integrated understanding is not at all quick or easy (if it were, everyone would be doing it), and the leads (e.g., this) are not at all obvious or accessible. Without the requisite context of understanding, Rand's words - about America, or just about anything else - fall on uncomprehending and/or cynical ears.

Hence the assignment at the end of my previous posting.

"Let your mind and your love of existence decide."

Individualism and Modern Philosophy

In a very recent post, I cited Nozick's offered explanation for the opposition amongst the Intellectuals to capitalism. Nozick suggests basically a psychological explanation. But of course I had to press the issue to the question not just of capitalism, but of individualism. (In turning my mind to the subject of moral individualism in relation to the state of modern philosophy, I find that my thoughts keep expanding; an adequate treatment of the subject might have to be chapter-length, so I couldn't post in depth on the subject here and now.)

One might think that while opposition to capitalism among many philosophers is readily understandable psychologically, the decided lack of interest among philosophers on the subject of individualism is bizarre. If individualism extols as a primary virtue "thinking for oneself," you'd think the philosophers would be most interested in the subject. But what academic literature is there out there on the subject? Aside from Norton, and a few Rand-influenced ethical philosophers (Machan, Mack, Rasmussen and Den Uyl), and parts of Lomasky and Nozick, what literature have professional philosophers generated on the subject in recent memory? Why does so deeply American a subject as individualism interest America's intellectual class so little?

I came to these thoughts when working through possible non-psychological explanations for the widespread antipathy to capitalism among intellectuals. At some point during one of Peikoff's lectures, a short and simple philosophical explanation was given: the widespread acceptance of "altruistic" morality in its various forms (e.g., Christianity, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls). But I'm not really satisfied with that explanation. Among the intellectuals, the antipode of altruism is not capitalism or individualism, but egoism, and the intellectuals have been hard at work devising moral theories that work somewhere in between the antipodes of egoism (e.g. Rand) and altruism (e.g. Comte). They find such extremes unacceptable because (aside from any pathologically pragmatistic opposition to extremes) altruism runs up against problems of rational motivation (which Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism makes a thorough effort to confront), while egoism supposedly - supposedly - runs up against the problem of respecting all moral agents over and above their serviceability to the agent's own interests.

But what about individualism? The most widely accessible and widely-read "text" on individualist ethics is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. The theme is "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul." The political themes are there, but mainly by implication. The full implication would have to wait another 14 years. But aside from the supposedly "weird" characterizations and narrative that drive many a reader to miss the point, what about the Roarkian individualist ethos makes professional philosophers so uninterested? True, there are professional philosophers aplenty who openly oppose egoism, but I don't know of any that would dare openly oppose individualism, certainly not in America. Instead, on the subject of individualism, there's one conspicuous fact here: silence.

This might reduce back to some psychological explanations. The Fountainhead is, after all, about individualism and collectivism in the human soul, and provides certain archetypes of motivation. Roark finds himself in fundamental opposition to what, for a long time, he can only term "The Principle Behind the Dean." Keating embraces that principle; it's about the only principle a pragmatist, for all the pragmatists' opposition to principles, can willingly accept. One thing about Rand's style of writing is that she would directly confront, in the most extreme and oppositional terms, the psychology of her readers. The Roark-Keating opposition is pretty deep, and being more fundamentally a psychological rather than intellectual one, it carries more fundamental explanatory power about how people behave. (It would explain, for instance, why someone would turn toward a less intellectual life as such, as distinct from turning to an intellectual life that is, say, socialism-friendly. It also explains Ayn Rand's - the real Ayn Rand's, not the caricatured, distorted, misrepresented and smeared Ayn Rand's - behavior in regard to those who disagreed with her. She valued intellectuality above agreement as such. (There are rare exceptions, like with her treatment of Kant, but she simply did not get Kant or his context.))

This gets to something very fundamental, perhaps not as fundamental in Rand's philosophy as it was in her very soul and being: sense of life. One's views about a thing such as individualism are fundamentally conditioned by one's sense-of-life. Now, either you share Rand's basic sense of life, or you don't. (I like to think that I share her sense of life, and then some.) With Rand, on the subject of individualism, there is heroic and passionate affirmation and praise and benevolence. With someone who doesn't share Rand's sense of life, the response is one of so much indifference.

The logical conclusion to draw here is that the mainstream of the Intellectual Class does not share Ayn Rand's basic sense of life. The American People, on the other hand - the best within the American people, of course - well, they do share her basic sense of life.

And that's how modern "canon" philosophy has defaulted on its task and failed the people. Can I not help but think that modern "canon" philosophy's days are sooooo numbered?

:-)

[ADDENDUM: See any entry under "Individualism" here? For that, you have to go here. CASE CLOSED.]

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.