With the money saved, my $6 billion plan could be expanded into the hundreds of billions of dollars, annually. That's gotta be enough to ensure the entire Rand & Peikoff corpus and Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism course for every household in America - from the first year's saved funds alone. We'd be in Singularity mode so fucking fast it'd make everyone's head spin.
And I mean it!
An added bonus: a spectacular drop in the number of proudly ignorant, cynical, nihilistic little turds infesting popular culture, politics, the media and the interwebs. A spectacular rise in achievement, efficacy, fulfillment, and benevolent sense of life.
Comprachico Middle School in a nutshell:
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Thought of the Day Re: the Dingbat
From a Facebook thread:
"Refudiate" ----> "refute the plan". So much for that 4-year Journalism degree from Comprachico U.
Very Brief Note About Perfectionism
An essential aspect of perfectionism is thinking and living integrally.
Ayn Rand's Staggering Mental Efficacy
If people basically have a clue - I'm leaving out many academics in the Humanities - they can, in principle, recognize the astounding level of unit-economy and clarity in Ayn Rand's writing style. Not only is it clear; it also condenses vast bodies of observations into fundamental principles. She did this without having to write ponderous tomes exploring impractical minutiae in order to impress some small specialized cluster of academics.
Take such examples of hard-hitting writing as "The Objectivist Ethics," "Man's Rights," and "The Nature of Government," all available at the ARI website. There is nothing inessential; the presentation is compact; they say all they need to say for their purposes, no more and no less.
Rand's unique ability to essentialize philosophical principles in compact, popularly-accessible, commonsensical, unit-economizing form is - get this! - the basis on which the academic snobs dismiss Rand as "simplistic," "shallow," "unsophisticated," "demagogic," etc. I don't know what more you need to know about the academic culture in the Humanities, when a genuine intellectual virtue is invoked as a basis for dismissal. The sources of such criticism are so clueless and so out of it that the damage they cause to clear thinking is untold. (Giving these specimens less of the benefit of the doubt, the criticisms are most likely politically-motivated. Truly pathetic, reprehensible, discreditable, etc.) I understand why some people have reservations about bringing children into a world such as it is today - especially if that involves sending tens of thousands of dollars a year for four years to centers of higher learning where these spiritual butchers perform intellectual lobotomies and churn out the sort of cynical, anti-capitalism, anti-America, nihilistic little shits - little copies of themselves - that you find on such places as reddit.com and DailyKos. (Just observe a typical discussion thread about Ayn Rand in such environments. These "liberally-educated" little shits are so pathetically ignorant, bigoted, and cognitively stunted that it serves as indisputable proof they've been conditioned to think like shit. Come the Revolution, most everyone will find this phenomenon as eye-opening and horrifying as I do. Fucking Comprachicos! Sonsabitches! You'll all be cheering these sentiments in time, mark my words.)
Did I mention that Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most important philosophical work of the 20th century? It sure beats the hell out of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. For proof, check out Rand's reduction of the concept "justice" in ITOE, then compare to the floating, hierarchy-disregarding mess that is Rawls's book.
And, hell, it was only an introduction. It could hardly compare to spending thousands of hours in conversation with Mrs. Logic herself - experiences which have blown away all those who came into close contact with her.* Even as academically-trained "mainstream" philosophers go, just check out the testimony from John Hospers about his extensive interaction with Rand. Blown. Away. He'll tell you all about Rand's unparalleled ability to reduce issues to their essentials - i.e., to apply the Rule of Fundamentality to any question.
Just RTFM and learn a thing or two, people. Start with the essays at ARI linked above and pay careful attention as you read, so as to get a clue as to what she is accomplishing in such a short space. The terms and concepts involved all have objectively-defined roots and interconnections within the cognitive hierarchy. Check out the online Ayn Rand Lexicon, or my list of essential writings. Repeat as necessary.
(* - The testimonies are much like those about Stanley Kubrick. Among famous 20th-century figures, Kubrick's thought processes resemble Rand's more closely than any others I know of. He was not only a libertarian [A Clockwork Orange] and a eudaemonist [2001], his basic method was holistic, reality-based integration of all relevant and essential elements; he was, in short, a perfectionist.)
Take such examples of hard-hitting writing as "The Objectivist Ethics," "Man's Rights," and "The Nature of Government," all available at the ARI website. There is nothing inessential; the presentation is compact; they say all they need to say for their purposes, no more and no less.
Rand's unique ability to essentialize philosophical principles in compact, popularly-accessible, commonsensical, unit-economizing form is - get this! - the basis on which the academic snobs dismiss Rand as "simplistic," "shallow," "unsophisticated," "demagogic," etc. I don't know what more you need to know about the academic culture in the Humanities, when a genuine intellectual virtue is invoked as a basis for dismissal. The sources of such criticism are so clueless and so out of it that the damage they cause to clear thinking is untold. (Giving these specimens less of the benefit of the doubt, the criticisms are most likely politically-motivated. Truly pathetic, reprehensible, discreditable, etc.) I understand why some people have reservations about bringing children into a world such as it is today - especially if that involves sending tens of thousands of dollars a year for four years to centers of higher learning where these spiritual butchers perform intellectual lobotomies and churn out the sort of cynical, anti-capitalism, anti-America, nihilistic little shits - little copies of themselves - that you find on such places as reddit.com and DailyKos. (Just observe a typical discussion thread about Ayn Rand in such environments. These "liberally-educated" little shits are so pathetically ignorant, bigoted, and cognitively stunted that it serves as indisputable proof they've been conditioned to think like shit. Come the Revolution, most everyone will find this phenomenon as eye-opening and horrifying as I do. Fucking Comprachicos! Sonsabitches! You'll all be cheering these sentiments in time, mark my words.)
Did I mention that Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology is the most important philosophical work of the 20th century? It sure beats the hell out of Rawls's A Theory of Justice. For proof, check out Rand's reduction of the concept "justice" in ITOE, then compare to the floating, hierarchy-disregarding mess that is Rawls's book.
And, hell, it was only an introduction. It could hardly compare to spending thousands of hours in conversation with Mrs. Logic herself - experiences which have blown away all those who came into close contact with her.* Even as academically-trained "mainstream" philosophers go, just check out the testimony from John Hospers about his extensive interaction with Rand. Blown. Away. He'll tell you all about Rand's unparalleled ability to reduce issues to their essentials - i.e., to apply the Rule of Fundamentality to any question.
Just RTFM and learn a thing or two, people. Start with the essays at ARI linked above and pay careful attention as you read, so as to get a clue as to what she is accomplishing in such a short space. The terms and concepts involved all have objectively-defined roots and interconnections within the cognitive hierarchy. Check out the online Ayn Rand Lexicon, or my list of essential writings. Repeat as necessary.
(* - The testimonies are much like those about Stanley Kubrick. Among famous 20th-century figures, Kubrick's thought processes resemble Rand's more closely than any others I know of. He was not only a libertarian [A Clockwork Orange] and a eudaemonist [2001], his basic method was holistic, reality-based integration of all relevant and essential elements; he was, in short, a perfectionist.)
Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism: Indispensable
Any quality education in Objectivism includes Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (1983) lecture course. For anyone who listens to the course with functioning ears, Objectivism emerges as the most formidable philosophical system yet conceived.*
One of the basic functions of Peikoff's later (post-1970s) lecture courses is to teach people methods of thinking (i.e., the how as distinguished from the what) about Objectivism as well as about any other subject. The essential core of Objectivist method - a responsible (context-appropriate) approach to checking premises - makes Objectivism itself essentially impervious to refutation. Like induction itself, you couldn't even attempt to refute it without implicitly accept and affirming it. Induction is the essence of rational, reality-oriented thought; Rand identified basic principles of inductive reasoning - the most notable achievement being her theory of concepts - and those basic principles are the very basic principles of Objectivism itself. Objectivism is the method of induction applied to the fundamental issues of man and his relationship to existence.
(I'll also note that Rand had the most perfectionistic thought processes for a philosopher since Aristotle. Same basic idea: check premises responsibly, spiral progression of knowledge, respecting the hierarchy of knowledge, etc. As perfectionism is essentially related to virtue in ethics, so it is in epistemology; Rand's definition of intellectual virtue is her way of establishing a Virtue Epistemology. [Hell, is there any other kind of sound epistemology?] The academic mainstream is, like, totally in the dark on this stuff - and why is that?)
The semi-prohibitive thing when it comes to Peikoff's courses is cost. Many of his courses are in excess of $200 or $300. Fortunately, there is a discount for an internet-only edition of Understanding Objectivism, bringing the cost to a mere $150. Essential preconditions for listener preparedness would be familiarity with the basic literature of Objectivism, including most emphatically Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Also, while Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, or OPAR (1991), came out after Understanding Objectivism, it also is of immense preparatory help, since it is based on the earlier 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand.
Cognitive clarity and efficiency are central aspects of successful functioning in life; in that regard, $150 is a drop in the bucket. Familiarity with this course also makes for a good head start as our culture moves in the Randian direction in the coming years. If you have the additional money, Peikoff's advanced seminars on OPAR are the next step.
In the Utopia I envision for humanity's not-too-distant future, familiarity with Peikoff's courses or something of comparable caliber would be an essential qualification for university professors - hell, all university professors, and not just those in the Humanities. There's really no excuse for educators and intellectuals not to be familiar with this stuff. No fucking excuse at all. Their minds might well be blown at just how insidiously, damagingly rationalistic (or emotionalistic, or otherwise dysfunctional) their thought processes were all along. Then they, too, will thank Rand for showing them the way.
The future enlightenment of humanity depends on it.
(* - Widespread exposure to Peikoff's audio courses would work quite nicely in conjunction with my $6 billion plan to fix America.)
One of the basic functions of Peikoff's later (post-1970s) lecture courses is to teach people methods of thinking (i.e., the how as distinguished from the what) about Objectivism as well as about any other subject. The essential core of Objectivist method - a responsible (context-appropriate) approach to checking premises - makes Objectivism itself essentially impervious to refutation. Like induction itself, you couldn't even attempt to refute it without implicitly accept and affirming it. Induction is the essence of rational, reality-oriented thought; Rand identified basic principles of inductive reasoning - the most notable achievement being her theory of concepts - and those basic principles are the very basic principles of Objectivism itself. Objectivism is the method of induction applied to the fundamental issues of man and his relationship to existence.
(I'll also note that Rand had the most perfectionistic thought processes for a philosopher since Aristotle. Same basic idea: check premises responsibly, spiral progression of knowledge, respecting the hierarchy of knowledge, etc. As perfectionism is essentially related to virtue in ethics, so it is in epistemology; Rand's definition of intellectual virtue is her way of establishing a Virtue Epistemology. [Hell, is there any other kind of sound epistemology?] The academic mainstream is, like, totally in the dark on this stuff - and why is that?)
The semi-prohibitive thing when it comes to Peikoff's courses is cost. Many of his courses are in excess of $200 or $300. Fortunately, there is a discount for an internet-only edition of Understanding Objectivism, bringing the cost to a mere $150. Essential preconditions for listener preparedness would be familiarity with the basic literature of Objectivism, including most emphatically Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Also, while Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, or OPAR (1991), came out after Understanding Objectivism, it also is of immense preparatory help, since it is based on the earlier 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course endorsed by Rand.
Cognitive clarity and efficiency are central aspects of successful functioning in life; in that regard, $150 is a drop in the bucket. Familiarity with this course also makes for a good head start as our culture moves in the Randian direction in the coming years. If you have the additional money, Peikoff's advanced seminars on OPAR are the next step.
In the Utopia I envision for humanity's not-too-distant future, familiarity with Peikoff's courses or something of comparable caliber would be an essential qualification for university professors - hell, all university professors, and not just those in the Humanities. There's really no excuse for educators and intellectuals not to be familiar with this stuff. No fucking excuse at all. Their minds might well be blown at just how insidiously, damagingly rationalistic (or emotionalistic, or otherwise dysfunctional) their thought processes were all along. Then they, too, will thank Rand for showing them the way.
The future enlightenment of humanity depends on it.
(* - Widespread exposure to Peikoff's audio courses would work quite nicely in conjunction with my $6 billion plan to fix America.)
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Platonic Realism vs. Science, Evolution, Etc.
Question: How badly does Platonic Realism interfere with science, secularism, evolutionary biology, etc.?
The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.
It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.
The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.
And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.
Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.
I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.
The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.
Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.
Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.
This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)
The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.
(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)
The scientistic response to Platonic Realism (PR) is that it violates scientific principles - empirical observability and verifiability (I'll leave "falsifiability" aside for now), testability, explanatory power, and other related concepts.
It's safe to say that PR is anti-scientific because it violates a central principle of cognition as such: induction. A fully philosophically-worked-out theory of induction wasn't made possible until the 20th century; that theory itself, of course, would have to be inductively-based. Induction is axiomatic-level; to try to deny it is to reaffirm it. Plato's Realism by its very nature is not inductively-based, but pure floating abstraction in the most applicable and fitting sense. By consequence it has no explanatory power (philosophically, this irresolvable problem is stated in such terms as "problem of partaking," a nice precursor to Cartesian "mind-body problem" given the basic principle involved: the commonsense-impossible "interaction" between the supernatural and the natural). By being an intrinsically floating theory, it cannot be reduced to the perceptual, hence the reason there is no testability, observability, or verifiability.
The question that initially occurred to me in the context of this thread was whether PR is empirically false given the established theory of evolution. The question came to mind because in evolution there are no Eternal Forms, but always transitional forms, and that the form of Man (in scientific terms: human DNA) was not actualized until some point in time, which means the form of Man is contingent, finite, etc. I'm guessing - without having given the matter much thought at all yet - that there is a proposed workaround of some sort to shelter PR from this particular refutation. After all, we might simply say that it is arbitrary, referencing beings entirely beyond the realm of the empirical, making it empirically unverifiable as well as unfalsifiable.
And adept advocate of PR might say that its not being "empirical" is not a philosophical problem, and that philosophy needn't be beholden to science (rather than vice versa). But the more adept philosopher than that, will say that PR is nonetheless arbtirary and fails to be inductive.
Aristotle is in a weird limbo-area on all this. His philosophical method was admirably inductive, but he was still limited by his own variant of Plato's Realism, also known as Moderate Realism. The first, first question I asked myself in the context of this thread was, "What was holding Aristotle back from positing what Darwin did over 2,000 years later? Was he lacking in the relevant empirical observations?" (I'll note here that Ayn Rand did not given an opinion on the theory of evolution when the subject came up. My best guess is that she did not regard herself as someone in a position - such as that of a biologist - to render a verdict on the matter. However, biology was one of Aristotle's chief areas of focus.) The supposed positing of the seed of evolutionary theory would be based on a straightforward observation of similarity between man and very similar animals - it might well have to involve higher primates. But if Form is thought to be eternal and unchanging, then the very notion of humans and other primates having a common ancestor might not even occur.
I'll just note in passing that PR as well as Moderate (Aristotelian-Thomistic) Realism is all-too-convenient cover for creationist views about our origins. Indeed, the notion of there being such a thing as Eternal Form, absent a Creator, is weird, to say the least, and probably incoherent. Aquinas performed a most understandable integration in his context. Let not this inference stand in place of the other (cosmological and ontological) arguments for God's existence, however.
The very problems stated here are the main reason scientists have basically cast off philosophy as useless to their field. Post-Aquinas and the Scholastics - with Bacon and others - modern science, called "natural philosophy" at the time, took on its own form independent of philosophy. At the same time, it has also had remarkable practical success - way more success than the humanities have had, in the meantime. (The Humanities are so screwed up that there may well have been regression since that time.) Some (understandably ignorant) scientists have used this track record of comparative progress as a victory cry for science and a reason to dismiss philosophy.
Here's what happened with the development of science: Well, first, there was Aquinas bringing Aristotle back into the fold, bringing with him a revival of this-worldly concerns. This led to the Renaissance and to the scientific revolution. Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas, however, would have been of limited use, at best, in formulating the basic methods of the natural sciences. Now, simply as a matter of practical necessity, rational principles of natural philosophy had to be discovered and formulated - and they were. The basic methodological principle? Induction.
Induction is the basic method of learning and cognition. It involves a painstaking process of organizing sensory observations into a coherent generalizable whole, in which later observations and theories build upon the earlier ones. Einstein, for instance, had the same knowledge-base Newton had to work with, and then some. So in some important, crucial and relevant sense, Einstein's theories did not contradict Newton's. Newton wasn't all of a sudden overturned and repudiated; Newton was working from a more limited base of knowledge, is all.
This point might not matter much to the practical scientist - their working methods get results, and that's mainly what matters to them - but it does indicate a proper epistemological approach. Theories can turn out to be wrong; observations cannot; the role of epistemology is to determine what conclusions and theories are warranted given the knowledge-base, such that later conclusions do not contradict earlier ones. (Philosophy's role is to explain in underlying terms how it is that induction is practical; it has something to do with these things called identity and causation, concepts pretty darn well undermined by Pragmatism and plenty other bastardizations of inductivist method to come out of analytic philosophy in the last century-plus. Thanks a lot, Kant.)
The reason that science made leaps and bounds over philosophy in the last few hundred years is that science was based on induction, while philosophy was not. Philosophy, at the hands of Descartes and the rest, floundered; these thinkers failed to identify at root the principles of induction as applied to all areas, including philosophy itself. Their basic anti-inductive psycho-epistemological paradigm, emulated en masse by philosophers to this very day? Rationalism. (And a heaping dose of social metaphysics thrown in for good measure.) That paradigm, however, is about to change, thank Rand.
(Note: I write this without yet having read Harriman's The Logical Leap.)
Obama: Weak
The tax cut extension was a good idea, but Obama's rationale and rhetoric are quite telling. No one forced his hand on this, but he caved on his campaign pledges and (ridiculously) likened the GOP leadership to hostage-takers with whom he wouldn't negotiate . . . unless . . . always an "unless" with this guy . . . unless refusing to negotiate would bring harm to the hostage.
Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?
[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]
Great. Wonderful way to telegraph weakness to the Terrorists, innit?
[ADDENDUM: I guess strength in the Obama paradigm, when it comes to the Terrorists, is to continue the Cheney-era lawbreaking. If he wants to equate strength with cheating - this is what our political system today has come to, isn't it - he should just say so.]
[ADDENDUM #2: Ever the Machiavellian mentality, Obama played politics on these tax cut extensions. He waited for the November election returns before deciding on the issue. In the 2008 primaries, he told his left-wing DailyKos/reddit/ThinkProgress/Soros base what it wanted to hear, and now he screws them over. All the while, Obama's Machiavellianism seems to go over really well on the increasingly boring, short-term-oriented, small-fry-focused Daily Dish - an insidious effect of adopting a Hayekian over a Randian paradigm. WEAK!]
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Sunday worship, 12/5/2010
"It is a philistinic culture that does not appreciate the genius of Kayo Dot."
- The Ultimate Philosopher
- The Ultimate Philosopher
Friday, December 3, 2010
The Singularity Already Happened?
Once in a while, the Daily Dish has an especially interesting link. This one makes a case that the Singularity has already happened.
Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.
Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.
Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.
Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.
So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.
We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.
We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.
Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.
I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?
The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.
Oddly/interestingly enough, the 19th century on through right around WWI is that Golden Age in human history Miss Rand waxed so poetically about. Hell, come the early 1900s, the USA may well have been on the verge of utopia. Then, the assholes took over. I'm speaking, of course, of "progressive" pragmatists who had no answer to, or embraced, the fucking socialists (who'd already been chewed up and spit out by Mises, but his book was in German and so the readership was limited for a time). Having no answer to socialism, and facing economic crises, pragmatic experimentation with the American people's liberties set in. The results have been - seeing as the consequence has been a mixed economy (the legacy of pragmatism) - shall we say, mixed.
Just imagine extrapolating the 19th century onward. Where would we be now? Economic analysis - the competent capitalist stuff, not the incompetent or dishonest socialist stuff, or the pathologically-agnostic pragmatist stuff - says that we'd be way richer by now. One academic-style myth we should do away with, is this idea that human history is evolving toward something not all that capitalistic but rather some hybrid of capitalism and government controls. That myth is a legacy of pragmatism, which has this pathological tendency towards mixing, compromising, and reconciling. (When pragmatism dispenses with an accessible, stable, underlying causal reality and settles for "overlapping consensus" and other such buzzwords, the only result is a mixing of what's true and what's not true.) But let's just envision a world in which 40 percent of the country's resources aren't directed by fucking politicians, bureaucrats, public employees unions, and the rest of the pro-forced-stagnation crowd.
Now, it's a completely dishonest Marxist myth that prior to Big Government, America was having it pretty bad. One need only look at the progression between the Declaration of Independence to Henry Ford's assembly line to see the improvements for all classes of economic actors. What this says is that we shouldn't let the fucking Marxists dictate history to the rest of us - which is exactly what happened when those fucking Marxists took over the History (and other) departments. That has cost us decades of progress. So much for the "progressive," i.e., pragmatist-liberal, strategy of embracing A (freedom) and not-A (socialism) at the same time.
Now, my thesis is that the Singularity has begun, and that it began here. I have advertised this very blog as your headquarters for the Singularity. So what's all this stuff about a past Singularity? First off, Ray Kurzweil's concept of the Singularity centers around technology - and it's rather evident that we are headed into a true space-age of technology in the coming decades. I don't think it's relevant that this coming space-age is only a continuation of trends we've already had; the fact is that the past trends produced major technological advancement that had not reached the space-age tipping point that Kurzweil is talking about. What Kurzweil is talking about is such an advance over what we've seen already - given a geometric progression - that we can hardly imagine what humanity would look like a few generations from now.
So what's this business about the Singularity beginning here? Well, tying back into the 19th-century growth period, we have a record of the awesome success of the capitalistic system. The "new" Singularity is a return to that model. But going back to that model would merely be a consequence of a more fundamental underlying cause: a philosophical revolution. Kurzweil's prediction concerns technology; my conception of the Singularity is more all-encompassing and fundamentals-oriented than that. What we are looking at is an intellectual revolution.
We've had intellectual revolutions before, but not of the kind I'm talking about. Kant, for instance, initiated an intellectual revolution. Christianity represented an intellectual revolution. Marxism represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas (i.e., Aristotle) represented an intellectual revolution. Aquinas aside, these revolutions were a false start, a fuck-up, a diversion, a regression, what have you. (Absolutely I consider the Christian era until Aquinas a regression compared to the ancient Greek era. I'd go so far as to say that because of the horrendous psycho-epistemology involved - the astonishing levels of denigration of the intellect - the West suffered roughly 1,500 lost years. Of course, with the denigration of this-worldly concerns involved, these Lost Years don't and shouldn't really matter to the medievalist mystics. Nice going, anti-reason assholes!) Now, with the help of Ayn Rand's philosophy - namely her theory of concepts and general methodology - we finally have a chance to get it right.
We are now at a tipping point, intellectually. We are now finally on the verge of getting our epistemological house in order. We are finally at a point, given our historical progression of fits and starts, of reaching intellectual maturity. Kurzweil's conception of the Singularity is one of technological maturity. Technology, however, is deadly in the hands of those empowered by a deadly worldview. With the intellectual maturity, we also get a moral maturity.
Given the history of human evolution, consider humanity's intellectual and moral maturation a matter of moving beyond a lesser stage of development or maturation. Religion is like the product of a child-level epistemology, one of dependence on authority, before a more critical or questioning stage comes about. That critical or questioning stage - analogous to adolescence in an individual - began some 2,500 years ago with the advent of Philosophy. The child-epistemology religion-attachment stays around during this period until the conflict is worked out; that working out is the onset or maturation or adulthood. (David L. Norton refers to the stage of maturation in an individual as eudaimonia.) The course of history, all the way from the primordial ooze up through the present day, is ample demonstration of this development.
I mean, isn't it obvious once you think about it?
The only issue now is how much ultimately-futile opposition, denial, sneering, fear-mongering, etc. is going to get in the way of this progress toward full maturation.
Conservatism vs. Liberty
I was provided these links in an email:
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/018060.html
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/017938.html
The sender said, "You rarely comment on the Conservative critiques of Rand. You focus more on the Leftist ones which is understandable. I was curious what you think of these arguments."
I'm the sort of "intellectual elitist" that is so disgusted with the Right as an (anti-)intellectual phenomenon, that I rarely expect to see much of any merit from those quarters. I figure that if the "conservatives" would crawl out of their intellectual cave, they'd stop being conservatives and be Jeffersonian or classical liberals instead. (I don't mind the term "libertarian" personally, but there's an awesome amount of baggage with that term when used in or around Objectivist circles. Rand's policy was to put the term in "scare quotes," indicating that she regarded it as an anti-concept - not at all surprising with terms applied in a political context. Me, I just take the term in its ordinary connotation and conclude that it's a matter of plain common sense to be a libertarian.) As it is, the history of the "conservative" movement starting with William F. Buckley is a disgrace to rational values. Buckley's monstrously incompetent treatment of Rand sets the tone. There's also that pesky matter of how religion of the sort embraced by Rightists is downright fucking toxic to rational values.
Once in a while, though, we get something resembling a carefully-reasoned critique of Jeffersonian-liberal values. Perhaps the most advanced critique goes under the heading of "The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism." The above-provided links are a variant on the basic theme.
First, I'd like to point out the Ayn Rand Lexicon entry on the subject of physical force, this excerpt in particular:
An attempt to achieve the good by physical force is a monstrous contradiction which negates morality at its root by destroying man’s capacity to recognize the good, i.e., his capacity to value. Force invalidates and paralyzes a man’s judgment, demanding that he act against it, thus rendering him morally impotent. A value which one is forced to accept at the price of surrendering one’s mind, is not a value to anyone; the forcibly mindless can neither judge nor choose nor value. An attempt to achieve the good by force is like an attempt to provide a man with a picture gallery at the price of cutting out his eyes. Values cannot exist (cannot be valued) outside the full context of a man’s life, needs, goals, and knowledge.
Now, to quote the last two paragraphs of the first link:
The bottom line: the dictum, "Do whatever you like, so long as you don't hurt anyone else," does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order an individual life. There is a complex nexus of feedback relations between individual lives and the social order, of which the legal order is an aspect. Individual lives depend upon society, and constitute it. As they go, so it goes; and as it goes, so do they. To say this is no more than to say that if we are to live, we must do so together, and so must order our lives in respect to each other, and to our joint prosperity--not just across space, but across time.
Ordering lives across time, across generations, is the function of tradition. Libertarianism presupposes a vibrant moral tradition, that has informed a people from the bottom up, so that the net result of their unsupervised activities is social harmony, justice, prosperity. Where such a tradition perdures, the libertarian project can perhaps succeed. Where not, not. If you have no tradition, you have no nexus of support for your individual agency, and thus no true freedom to organize your activities toward your own ends. Rather, you have only raw lurching from one dire exigency to the next, with no notion of a fundamental moral order to inform your deliberations. Randian atheism demolishes the ontological basis for morality, and so cannot but destroy moral tradition, thus preventing the option of libertarianism. "If there is no God, then all is permitted"--including force, and fraud.
First, this part about everything being permitted if there is no God is intellectually disreputable and automatically creates suspicion about the author's intellectual caliber. The Euthyphro Dilemma suffices to show what's wrong with a divine-command basis for ethics. So already we have a fundamentally mistaken context informing this rationale for force - a faulty metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics. One can only guess how corrosive the effects of such a context will be in any particular case, but once you do go into flights of epistemological fancy on matters such as the basis of morality, who knows where the epistemological flights of fancy might pop up next.
(This is just one example of why conservatives have such a low reputation amongst philosophers.)
Anyway, putting aside the fucked-up underlying context, we have a seemingly serious criticism of the liberal ethos; it's nothing new, however. It's a reiteration of a standard Communitarian critique of liberalism that's been going through academia since the '70s, in response first and foremost to John Rawls's theory of justice. Now, readers of my blog might remember the time I slammed Rawls for his lack of respect for philosophical hierarchy - namely, how there's no deeper structure to his political philosophy. Rawls more than readily plays right into that criticism in such later essays as "Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical." (Rand would just flip out if she heard of that title, wouldn't she?) The Communitarian criticism coincides with a rise in Virtue Ethics in the past few decades. An ethics of virtue would constitute part of the deeper structure but Rawls doesn't view virtue as being the concern of politics. (This is only slightly weird given that justice itself is a virtue. But Rawls's first statement about justice is that it's the first virtue of social institutions - consistent with his regarding justice as a political-level concern.)
Now, is virtue a concern of politics? Does it have any role at all in determining the basic social structure of socio-political liberalism? The relation between morality proper and politics is not an easy one to explain in a very brief space; for a lengthier treatment there is my article "Egoism and Rights". The gist of the relation is that man requires the use of reason to live qua man. Reason is a volitional capacity and does not operate under coercion. Under coercion you aren't the author of your actions; you've been effectively deprived of moral agency. To subject a reason-having being to force is, to that extent, to treat them not as a reason-having being, and to attempt to force the person into "good" is a contradiction for the reasons Rand explained. For a human being, the good must be chosen. (Think about the moral conscience of A Clockwork Orange.)
Now, one place where the conservative proposal to force human beings into virtue fails, is the failure to identify the place of force within the philosophical hierarchy. Why should force ever enter into any moral picture? What, if anything, is the proper use of force? Rand or a Jeffersonian liberal says that it enters the picture at the level of self-defense. Now, just observe the weasel-version of the concept of "self-defense" as used in the conservative pro-force proposal. "Society" would have a vital interest in forcing individuals as a matter of "self-defense." Apparently this is so whether or not we see society as deriving its moral value from the value provided to individuals.
(I take it for granted here that society is not prior to individuals in any morally-relevant sense and that moral directives of any sort derive from the living-requirements of individuals. If we don't even have that context, then the gap between the pro-force view and the individual-liberty view is simply too radical. We're assuming here that the individual-liberty view is being called into question on the grounds that it ultimately undercuts the best interest of individuals.)
The philosophical hierarchy being flouted in this instance concerns the distinction between "social" and "political." Social relationships are not the same as political ones. In the hierarchy of moral justification, sociality precedes political relations. The political relations are those relations formed for the purpose of regulating the use of force. Social relationships as such are not.
So, let's say that someone does non-virtuous things that or to his or her own detriment. Sure enough, this non-virtuous behavior does abuse the goodwill of the people - family, friends, community - who have a rational stake in the person's well-being. But having a rational stake in something doesn't warrant initiating force against someone to obtain or promote the value in question. There are plenty of non-coercive means that family, friends and community can use to deal with the person's self-detrimental behavior. The idea of resorting to force is pathological - perhaps a holdover from olden-times when force was a "natural" part of human life and its evil not recognized or understood.
As for "effects on society" of individual behavior, that's nebulous and could lead to who-knows-what. If we're going to appeal to a commonsensical guide like the common law, on the other hand, we need to establish demonstrable causal relationships between an individual's behavior and injury or damages to an identifiable victim. There had better be a really fucking good reason for restricting someone's freedom of action - and, sorry, "effects on society" doesn't cut it.
I mentioned above the justificatory hierarchy with respect to individuals, society, and polity. In that hierarchy, individuals precede the rest, as it is individual lives that are being acted out by moral agents. As Norton in Personal Destinies shows, ethical priority lies in self-actualization. This means that, even if we come into the world embedded in social relationships and are partly nurtured by those relationships, individuals are ethically prior to society. The common law reflects this individualism in regard to social causes and effects.
For socio-political purposes it is axiomatic that people have the right to live their own lives as they choose. They own their own lives. By what right does a society - a group of people - force a person other than in self-defense?
The second link above provides little over and above the first one, but I want to add that Rand does offer a comprehensive vision of life that the run-of-the-mill libertarians do not. That comprehensive vision - in addition to a socio-political prohibition on the use of initiatory force - endorses an entire ethical system that defines virtuous behavior for individuals, and rests its ethical conclusions on a base of reason, the principles of which are defined by epistemology. If we envision a society based on Randian values, it is a peaceful, prosperous, rational, cooperative, benevolent, humane society - and, by necessary consequence, it is a society that eschews force as a solution to problems. If you respect reason at its root - and that means preserving hierarchy and rejecting false justifications for morality (e.g., God) - and are consistent in that respect for reason, it follows quite naturally and common-sensibly that you would reject the use of force against reason-having beings. This stuff really is a no-brainer.
The criticism that a libertarian social order is devoid of a deeper structure which helps to preserve the societal structure and unite people under common values, simply doesn't apply to thinkers like Rand. She would - and did - make the argument that you can't have a societal structure of lasting liberty without a deeper structure of reason.
To sum up:
The only rightful purpose of government is the defense and preservation of freedom.
How Aristotle beats Plato and Kant
On the tail of my last posting, I'd like to take up - briefly, not in detail - the fundamental difference between Aristotle on the one hand and Plato and Kant on the other. In my last posting I made reference to Aristotle's defense of what I termed classical realism.
Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.
Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.
In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.
If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.
No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!
I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.
(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)
Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.
Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.
Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.
Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.
In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.
If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.
No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!
I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.
(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)
Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.
Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
How this Philosopher is Looking out for You
There is a deep "fit" between someone's adopting the Ultimate Philosopher moniker and writing a book titled Toward Utopia, and that someone being a huge and well-informed devotee of Ayn Rand. It's really no surprise in the slightest to someone in my epistemic position - someone with tremendous amounts of intellectual curiosity combined with a deep familiarity with philosophically-sound cognitive guidelines (explicated at length by Rand and Peikoff, as it turns out). But even taking Ayn Rand out of the picture, there's Aristotle, and he was looking out for the everyday human being as skillfully as anyone.
Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.
The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)
So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?
Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.
It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?
Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?
Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?
Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?
Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?
Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?
Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?
John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?
I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.
It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.
The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.
This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.
I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.
Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?
Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.
The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)
So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?
Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.
It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?
Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?
Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?
Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?
Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?
Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?
Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?
John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?
I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.
It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.
The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.
This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.
I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.
Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?
Why Ayn Rand = The Future
The spread of Randianism/Objectivism will definitely provide some parallels to the spread of Christianity in the centuries following Jesus's death. There's something these two quite-different worldviews have in common: the ability to inspire. There's that obscure part of The Fountainhead where Roark agrees that he is a "profoundly religious man, in [his] own way." There's this theme in there about the projection of a human ideal. Rand described the consequent emotion and practice as man-worship." The vision and sense-of-life associated with this is a heroic one. "My philosophy, in essence, is man as a heroic being..." Here's the last paragraph in the first AR Lexicon entry under "man-worship":
This represents a radical transformation from the other-worldly religion of Christianity, placing the object of reverence and worship back in the realm of observable reality grasped through reason alone: man as he might be and ought to be.
Unlike the many philosophers in history - the likes of Plato excepted in part - Rand presents a comprehensive vision of life that hits home on not just the intellectual level, but the spiritual level as well. From the standpoint of ability to inspire and appeal to people's spiritual sense, Rand's philosophy offers what Christianity does, without all the vicious (anti-)intellectual baggage.
Rand's philosophy is a philosophy for America - America as it might be and ought to be. It offers a vision of freedom from all forms of tyranny over the mind of man. It offers a vision of greatness and genius actualized once all the shackles of unreason and oppression are lifted. Salvation lies within. Moral perfection is possible to human beings. All this is grounded in one's own observation of reality and not in some book of myths or epistemologically-unsound wishful-thinking.
Rand offers a vision of man not as a corrupt and ugly being wallowing in the muck; rather, when she looks at man she sees the possibility of a Howard Roark or a John Galt. She sees a being capable of being shiny, happy, radiant, clean, and benevolent. It's the total opposite of the cynicism ruling the mainstream-swamp. "What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential."
If we as a country and as a world are to move ahead - full speed, not in the usual stale, worn-out way - then it is Ayn Rand's philosophy we need to understand and embrace. (On the intellectual side there's also Aristotle; the big A did not, however, inspire spiritually - at least not in the extant writings/lecture notes.) The 2,000 years following Randian reason will absolutely blow away the 2,000 years following Christian mysticism. The essential precondition - freedom of thought - was secured by the American Revolution. Now is the time to fulfill that Revolution's promise.
The man-worshipers, in my sense of the term, are those who see man’s highest potential and strive to actualize it. . . . [Man-worshipers are] those dedicated to the exaltation of man’s self-esteem and the sacredness of his happiness on earth.
This represents a radical transformation from the other-worldly religion of Christianity, placing the object of reverence and worship back in the realm of observable reality grasped through reason alone: man as he might be and ought to be.
Unlike the many philosophers in history - the likes of Plato excepted in part - Rand presents a comprehensive vision of life that hits home on not just the intellectual level, but the spiritual level as well. From the standpoint of ability to inspire and appeal to people's spiritual sense, Rand's philosophy offers what Christianity does, without all the vicious (anti-)intellectual baggage.
Rand's philosophy is a philosophy for America - America as it might be and ought to be. It offers a vision of freedom from all forms of tyranny over the mind of man. It offers a vision of greatness and genius actualized once all the shackles of unreason and oppression are lifted. Salvation lies within. Moral perfection is possible to human beings. All this is grounded in one's own observation of reality and not in some book of myths or epistemologically-unsound wishful-thinking.
Rand offers a vision of man not as a corrupt and ugly being wallowing in the muck; rather, when she looks at man she sees the possibility of a Howard Roark or a John Galt. She sees a being capable of being shiny, happy, radiant, clean, and benevolent. It's the total opposite of the cynicism ruling the mainstream-swamp. "What fuel can support one’s fire? Love for man at his highest potential."
If we as a country and as a world are to move ahead - full speed, not in the usual stale, worn-out way - then it is Ayn Rand's philosophy we need to understand and embrace. (On the intellectual side there's also Aristotle; the big A did not, however, inspire spiritually - at least not in the extant writings/lecture notes.) The 2,000 years following Randian reason will absolutely blow away the 2,000 years following Christian mysticism. The essential precondition - freedom of thought - was secured by the American Revolution. Now is the time to fulfill that Revolution's promise.
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split, Cont'd
Following up yesterday's posting, I want to take up the issue of David Kelley's strategy of "working with" libertarians to achieve libertarian and/or Objectivist goals. This strategy reveals a fundamental failure to grasp the Objectivist view on philosophical hierarchy, and in ways Peter Schwartz's incompetent attack on the "libertarian movement" failed to capture.
I made reference in yesterday's posting to one-time Atlas Society Executive Director Ed Hudgins' totally lame op-eds. Hudgins came over to the Atlas Society from the CATO Institute, and those two organizations have intertwined over the years. Now, here's the issue: what does Objectivism-advocacy have to gain from Objectivists hobnobbing with libertarian groups? What, exactly, has Kelley's alliance with CATO produced to help advance the spread of Objectivism? More fundamentally, what could he gain on the Objectivism-advocacy front with this strategy? What crucially important ideas do organizations like CATO offer for Objectivists? What's the goal, and what has been accomplished?
An alliance between a primarily Objectivist organization and a primarily libertarian organization offers nothing of use to the Objectivist one. I mean, isn't it obviously so? The American discourse is up to its neck in pragmatic policy analysis, which is what CATO in all its glory specializes in. This isn't to downplay the useful aspects of such policy analysis in the discourse. But we've been awash in policy analysis with libertarian or capitalist implications for decades on end. What good has it all done? The mainstream is still way suspicious of capitalism and laissez-faire and individualism. Doesn't this suggest that this isn't a question of there being enough economics education, but rather not enough philosophical education?
This begs the question: just what were Kelley & Co. doing, devoting their precious intellectual resources to aligning with libertarian organizations in their advocacy-strategy? Not only has that strategy not accomplished much of anything given the empirical record, it couldn't accomplish anything. You don't even need Kelleyite pragmatic experimentation along such lines to test this true hypothesis. Why? Because of the philosophical hierarchy. (Duh.)
I'll quote Objectivism's founder on this point:
(For further amplification of reason in its full meaning, see Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism and other courses.)
Now, it's self-evidently obvious that had Kelley understood this point, he wouldn't be substituting a fight for reason with a fight for the same thing libertarian groups are already fighting for. Rand recognized the primacy of ethics over politics and of epistemology over ethics. In terms of epistemology - i.e., cognitive methodology - Peikoff has done a shit-ton more of value in the time since Rand's death than Kelley has. Peikoff did work of greater philosophical fundamentality with his work on induction alone. Perhaps it's no coincidence that as Kelley spent more and more time courting libertarians, on a level of lesser philosophical fundamentality, his grasp of the principles of greater fundamentality atrophied, culminating in his evasion on the Branden matter?
Well-versed students of Objectivism are well aware of how abstract principles of greater fundamentality are broader reaching in their practical effects. When Rand looked at the American political scene, she recognized that a moral revolution was needed to restore America to its founding roots, as policy analysis provides only facts, not values. And she asked, further, what preconditions were necessary to bring about the moral revolution. To do that, she looked at things the way a true philosopher is supposed to: at the greatest level of fundamentality applicable. The fundamental is reason, which is adherence to reality by means of logical integration; the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to exercise one's mind are derivative of that fundamental.
Rand gave up on aligning with the many conservatives and libertarians of her day, given the fundamental differences between what they were fighting for and what she fought for. The absolutism, primacy and supremacy of reason was her chief concern. What is Kelley's?
[Hint: at the core of a sound understanding of Objectivism is knowing how to apply the Rule of Fundamentality on any given issue. Rand was a fucking master at it (leaving aside her polemics). A much more fundamental goal than educating people about libertarian policy analysis is educating people on how to master the Rule of Fundamentality as well as Rand did. Since this is an issue concerning the essence (i.e, the fundamentals) of sound cognition as such - an illustration of the very Rule in question - the implications in practice are going to be the most far- and wide-reaching. The basic reason there isn't laissez-faire in this country isn't primarily because people fail to grasp what's so great about freedom; that is merely a consequence. The underlying cause is people's inability to think properly. As we've seen, this malady of improper thinking strikes even (or is it especially?) intellectuals, with the greatest tragic effects in practice (again, given the Rule).]
I made reference in yesterday's posting to one-time Atlas Society Executive Director Ed Hudgins' totally lame op-eds. Hudgins came over to the Atlas Society from the CATO Institute, and those two organizations have intertwined over the years. Now, here's the issue: what does Objectivism-advocacy have to gain from Objectivists hobnobbing with libertarian groups? What, exactly, has Kelley's alliance with CATO produced to help advance the spread of Objectivism? More fundamentally, what could he gain on the Objectivism-advocacy front with this strategy? What crucially important ideas do organizations like CATO offer for Objectivists? What's the goal, and what has been accomplished?
An alliance between a primarily Objectivist organization and a primarily libertarian organization offers nothing of use to the Objectivist one. I mean, isn't it obviously so? The American discourse is up to its neck in pragmatic policy analysis, which is what CATO in all its glory specializes in. This isn't to downplay the useful aspects of such policy analysis in the discourse. But we've been awash in policy analysis with libertarian or capitalist implications for decades on end. What good has it all done? The mainstream is still way suspicious of capitalism and laissez-faire and individualism. Doesn't this suggest that this isn't a question of there being enough economics education, but rather not enough philosophical education?
This begs the question: just what were Kelley & Co. doing, devoting their precious intellectual resources to aligning with libertarian organizations in their advocacy-strategy? Not only has that strategy not accomplished much of anything given the empirical record, it couldn't accomplish anything. You don't even need Kelleyite pragmatic experimentation along such lines to test this true hypothesis. Why? Because of the philosophical hierarchy. (Duh.)
I'll quote Objectivism's founder on this point:
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. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.
(For further amplification of reason in its full meaning, see Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism and other courses.)
Now, it's self-evidently obvious that had Kelley understood this point, he wouldn't be substituting a fight for reason with a fight for the same thing libertarian groups are already fighting for. Rand recognized the primacy of ethics over politics and of epistemology over ethics. In terms of epistemology - i.e., cognitive methodology - Peikoff has done a shit-ton more of value in the time since Rand's death than Kelley has. Peikoff did work of greater philosophical fundamentality with his work on induction alone. Perhaps it's no coincidence that as Kelley spent more and more time courting libertarians, on a level of lesser philosophical fundamentality, his grasp of the principles of greater fundamentality atrophied, culminating in his evasion on the Branden matter?
Well-versed students of Objectivism are well aware of how abstract principles of greater fundamentality are broader reaching in their practical effects. When Rand looked at the American political scene, she recognized that a moral revolution was needed to restore America to its founding roots, as policy analysis provides only facts, not values. And she asked, further, what preconditions were necessary to bring about the moral revolution. To do that, she looked at things the way a true philosopher is supposed to: at the greatest level of fundamentality applicable. The fundamental is reason, which is adherence to reality by means of logical integration; the pursuit of happiness and the freedom to exercise one's mind are derivative of that fundamental.
Rand gave up on aligning with the many conservatives and libertarians of her day, given the fundamental differences between what they were fighting for and what she fought for. The absolutism, primacy and supremacy of reason was her chief concern. What is Kelley's?
[Hint: at the core of a sound understanding of Objectivism is knowing how to apply the Rule of Fundamentality on any given issue. Rand was a fucking master at it (leaving aside her polemics). A much more fundamental goal than educating people about libertarian policy analysis is educating people on how to master the Rule of Fundamentality as well as Rand did. Since this is an issue concerning the essence (i.e, the fundamentals) of sound cognition as such - an illustration of the very Rule in question - the implications in practice are going to be the most far- and wide-reaching. The basic reason there isn't laissez-faire in this country isn't primarily because people fail to grasp what's so great about freedom; that is merely a consequence. The underlying cause is people's inability to think properly. As we've seen, this malady of improper thinking strikes even (or is it especially?) intellectuals, with the greatest tragic effects in practice (again, given the Rule).]
The Lesson of the Peikoff-Kelley Split Today
If the last 20 years of the Objectivist movement tell us anything, it's the triumph of the Peikoff model over the Kelley model. This is not to say that the Peikoff model is correct in every way, but its superiority over the Kelley model is now no longer in any serious question - much like how even advocates of socialism like Robert Heilbroner eventually and graciously conceded to Ludwig von Mises.
Let's start with the endorsement Ayn Rand herself lent to Leonard Peikoff. His 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course is - superseding any and all presentations by the discredited Nathaniel Branden in particular - the only course on Rand's philosophy she herself authorized. In a general recommendation included in Letters of Ayn Rand, she described Dr. Peikoff as having a "superlative" understanding of her philosophy and ability to communicate it. This observation is borne out for normal listeners of such Peikoff audio courses as Understanding Objectivism and the advanced seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Let me cut to the chase of the thought that led me to post this rumination: David Kelley's version represents a mushy, pragmatist approach to Objectivism. It all seemed quite innocuous back then, in 1990, when he penned Truth and Toleration and spoke to some commonsense issues such as how not to judge people illicitly based only on ideas they espouse. The concern and issue that I think Peikoff and Kelley each in their own way addressed was the role of context in moral judgment. But Kelley would make these awkward formulations of Objectivist principles that you'd never in a million years see Ayn Rand making. The formulations sounded a little mushier, a little more accommodating to Objectivism's critics and opponents. We got these Rawls-sounding digressions about dialoguing and reconciling, a "forge an overlapping consensus" type of approach (hence the "libertarian outreach"), doing more of the give-and-take of discourse, and strange pragmatist language about "balancing acts."
If Ayn Rand taught us anything about philosophical integration, it's that small and subtle disintegrations are insidious to the integrity of the whole. This is the basic problem with pragmatism: once you start going into "compromise" mode, there's no end to it. This is the basic issue behind the "quality control" that Rand and Peikoff were always concerned about maintaining. It wasn't about enforcing agreement, but about keeping out mushiness. And that's what David Kelley symbolizes: mushiness.
As personages go, the Brandens are central to the difference in the respective courses charted by Peikoff and Kelley. It starts with the Brandens' bios/memoirs, Nathaniel's being the especially vicious, pathological, and dishonest one. The issue of Barbara Branden is a minor distraction relative to the issue of Nathaniel Branden. If you don't get it about Nathaniel Branden by now, there's something gone wrong. If there's anything that all the now-available evidence about his grossly immoral treatment of Ayn Rand (among others) shows, it's that he can't be trusted any further than he can be thrown. Anyone paying at least half attention could discern that the Rand-Branden schism wasn't about "a jealous woman scorned" but about gross immorality by someone posing as a spokesman for Objectivism. That's all it was about. Allen Blumenthal had figured that out, which is why he stuck by his 1968 pledge and left Kelley's Institute for Objectivist Studies when Branden was brought on there.
But let's just say - and there are reasonable bases for saying this - that the full scope and extent of Branden's immorality was not made publicly manifest until excerpts from Rand's journal were published in Jim Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in 2005. The gist was Nathaniel Branden's dishonesty and betrayal of Objectivist principles, and Barbara Branden's complicity in that. Anyway, they lied convincingly to Rand for years, taking advantage of her goodwill, and then Branden continued to conceal the full scope and extent of his "psychology/sex problem sessions" with Rand in his Judgment Day/My Years With Ayn Rand, while laying out an open challenge for Rand's journals regarding the whole train wreck to be released. Well, they were released - and Branden was proven to be a way bigger liar than he had let on. (And not merely a liar. Brad Aisa once summed it up aptly: "Branden's a creep." He was revealed not to be a semi-helpless guy caught between a rock and a hard place, but a manipulative, narcissistic creep. In addition to being a liar.) The only rationally justifiable thing to do at that point was to be entirely disgusted at Nathaniel Branden and his monstrously unjust treatment of Rand.
Kelley's response to The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics was - let's cut the shit - an evasion. A downright cowardly refusal to face facts and accordingly. It was the "cashing in" of the initial mushiness taking hold and building. So, even after Branden was exposed as a total fraud and creep, up through his memoirs and beyond, he was still invited to present at the Objectivist Center's (the new name for the Institute for Objectivist Studies)
events. That's when the falling-out began. Lindsay Perigo couldn't stand the ever-insidious-and-expanding mushiness (a lack of what he called KASS, or a Kick-ASS sense of life), much less the outright cowardice on the Branden issue. Once Perigo left in disgust, the dominoes fell. Along the way, the Objectivist Center changed its name again, to the Atlas Society (Perigo affectionately dubbed it the "KASSless Society"), and quickly became irrelevant.
Today, the only Objectivism-advocacy organization doing serious work training the next generation of intellectuals is the Ayn Rand Institute. Kelley's brand of doing things is all but defunct.
There was a time that I found Kelley's sensibility more attractive. It hit home more for me as an aspiring academic philosopher. Kelley's idea of advancing Objectivism was to make advocacy more like the academic model of doing philosophy - with the inevitable consequence of repudiating Rand's "intolerant," non-scholarly approach to thinkers like Kant. (Pathological fixation on "scholarship" may well explain various problems within "the academic model." Rand's not being "a scholar" or "consensus-forger" in her mode of popular exposition is a question-begging excuse for the insular snobs to downplay or ignore her.) Indeed, for a period of time there in the 1990s, many of the best minds within the Objectivist movement were attracted to Kelley's organization. The case for ARI around this time was hurt severely by the presence and position of Peter Schwartz there. In addition to writing a disreputable and silly hatchet job on some non-existent he called "Libertarianism," he also cited Rand's authorship of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as good-enough proof of her character vis-a-vis the Brandens. (According to Atlas Shrugged, a morally-ideal person, Dagny, apparently-needlessly shoots a guard toward the end of the story. Is this to say Ayn Rand herself would do such a thing, or is this to say that Atlas Shrugged is subtly and insidiously flawed in mis-integrated kinds of ways?) Never mind that this settles no issue, epistemologically, when the disputants are Atlas Shrugged's author and dedicatee, respectively, a decade after the novel was written. One of them went corrupt, but which one? Long story short, the credibility of Peikoff and ARI suffer around this time due to the Schwartz MO.
I happen to be a rather unique case in that, even while drawn to the "academic model" around the mid- to late-1990s, I also listened to a good number of Peikoff audio courses. These courses provided little in the way of help for my graduate-school years in Philosophy - the paradigms are so at odds - but have proven to be saving graces and game-changers long-term. The essence of courses like Understanding Objectivism is that Objectivism doesn't need "updating" and "improving" or bridge-building with academia; rather, understood and used properly, it is its own best defender. Kelley seemed to pay lip service to Objectivism's special imperviousness to refutation, but what he says and the way he says it is unconvincing; the way he talks about Objectivism, it ends up sounding like merely a reasonable-sounding entry into the discourse with no special sales points. I think if he were truly aware of its special sales points, he'd not have drifted the way he did.
This gets back to his drift in regard to Nathaniel Branden. Branden is so discredited by now that his influence can only be poisonous. But there's something of a "sense of life" nature here, and that has to do with Ayn Rand's sense of life as opposed to David Kelley's. Rand was an uncompromising idealist and this comes out in her art. Kelley's basic operative MO is pragmatism. Much like in Rand's art, the cashing-in of Kelley's pragmatism is the irrelevancy of his organization and MO after 20 years. (You ever have the patience to sit through an Ed Hudgins op-ed when he was Ex-Dir of the Objectivist Center and/or Atlas Society? Total undistinguished mush, every time.)
Another insidious effect of pragmatism is how easily it devolves into cynicism. And it is ugly, naked cynicism that explains so many folks' seemingly instinctive attraction to the Branden message: that Rand was a "great, but ultimately flawed" human being. A cynical sense of life is shut off to ideations of greatness and grandeur and moral innocence and purity. "These ideals only pop up in juvenile novels and appeal to naive youth." That's the kind of amateurish bullshit that the Kelleys and Brandens feed right into. "Great, but ultimately flawed" is typical cynical double-speak and the effects of this portrayal of "flawed greatness" was - of course - entirely insidious; naturally, it devolved into "Rand was an unhappy/tyrannical/delusional/etc. human being," with the acknowledgment of her greatness - if it even remains after all the evisceration - reduced to a mere concession.
I still take issue with certain aspects of the Rand/Peikoff MO, and it concerns mainly their (non-essential) polemical criticisms of other thinkers or ideas. Nonetheless, if you disregard their polemics entirely - hell, I'm fine with that; Rand and Peikoff never advised anyone to take their word for it, after all - the substantive core, particularly the methodology (which is the fundamental ground of the rest, including the theory of concepts), stands pure and strong. Rand and Peikoff mastered that methodology at a much higher level than Kelley did. Branden was as clear a litmus test as any.
To illustrate Peikoff's continuing contribution to the discourse about Objectivism in ways Kelley doesn't measure up to, I'd like to mention Peikoff's own DIM Hypothesis and apply it to the difference between Peikoff and Kelley. Kelley, through his basic pragmatist orientation, falls into the "D" or "disintegration" category. Rand goes into the "I" or "integration" category. (I'll leave aside here the issue of subtle/insidious mis-integration or "M" as it's popped up in Objectivist circles.) Peikoff has a deeper grasp of Rand's "I" method. Part of Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis is that integrated worldviews have a kind of influence and appeal that disintegrated worldviews do not. This was illustrated in the 2004 presidential election campaign: Kelley, er, uh, John Kerry was the mushy disintegrated guy who didn't stand for anything and came off as weak. Counter to that, there was a widespread attraction to Bush's being bold and standing for something even if it was wrong; at least with fundamentalist cowboys like Bush there's no question about his sticking to a course or position whatever the practicality or political winds.
To sum up: Kelley = mushy pragmatic "D"; Rand and Peikoff = uncompromising and intransigent "I". It's like Keating vs. Roark all over again. At stake this time: the future of philosophy. Rand FTW!
Let's start with the endorsement Ayn Rand herself lent to Leonard Peikoff. His 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course is - superseding any and all presentations by the discredited Nathaniel Branden in particular - the only course on Rand's philosophy she herself authorized. In a general recommendation included in Letters of Ayn Rand, she described Dr. Peikoff as having a "superlative" understanding of her philosophy and ability to communicate it. This observation is borne out for normal listeners of such Peikoff audio courses as Understanding Objectivism and the advanced seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand.
Let me cut to the chase of the thought that led me to post this rumination: David Kelley's version represents a mushy, pragmatist approach to Objectivism. It all seemed quite innocuous back then, in 1990, when he penned Truth and Toleration and spoke to some commonsense issues such as how not to judge people illicitly based only on ideas they espouse. The concern and issue that I think Peikoff and Kelley each in their own way addressed was the role of context in moral judgment. But Kelley would make these awkward formulations of Objectivist principles that you'd never in a million years see Ayn Rand making. The formulations sounded a little mushier, a little more accommodating to Objectivism's critics and opponents. We got these Rawls-sounding digressions about dialoguing and reconciling, a "forge an overlapping consensus" type of approach (hence the "libertarian outreach"), doing more of the give-and-take of discourse, and strange pragmatist language about "balancing acts."
If Ayn Rand taught us anything about philosophical integration, it's that small and subtle disintegrations are insidious to the integrity of the whole. This is the basic problem with pragmatism: once you start going into "compromise" mode, there's no end to it. This is the basic issue behind the "quality control" that Rand and Peikoff were always concerned about maintaining. It wasn't about enforcing agreement, but about keeping out mushiness. And that's what David Kelley symbolizes: mushiness.
As personages go, the Brandens are central to the difference in the respective courses charted by Peikoff and Kelley. It starts with the Brandens' bios/memoirs, Nathaniel's being the especially vicious, pathological, and dishonest one. The issue of Barbara Branden is a minor distraction relative to the issue of Nathaniel Branden. If you don't get it about Nathaniel Branden by now, there's something gone wrong. If there's anything that all the now-available evidence about his grossly immoral treatment of Ayn Rand (among others) shows, it's that he can't be trusted any further than he can be thrown. Anyone paying at least half attention could discern that the Rand-Branden schism wasn't about "a jealous woman scorned" but about gross immorality by someone posing as a spokesman for Objectivism. That's all it was about. Allen Blumenthal had figured that out, which is why he stuck by his 1968 pledge and left Kelley's Institute for Objectivist Studies when Branden was brought on there.
But let's just say - and there are reasonable bases for saying this - that the full scope and extent of Branden's immorality was not made publicly manifest until excerpts from Rand's journal were published in Jim Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics in 2005. The gist was Nathaniel Branden's dishonesty and betrayal of Objectivist principles, and Barbara Branden's complicity in that. Anyway, they lied convincingly to Rand for years, taking advantage of her goodwill, and then Branden continued to conceal the full scope and extent of his "psychology/sex problem sessions" with Rand in his Judgment Day/My Years With Ayn Rand, while laying out an open challenge for Rand's journals regarding the whole train wreck to be released. Well, they were released - and Branden was proven to be a way bigger liar than he had let on. (And not merely a liar. Brad Aisa once summed it up aptly: "Branden's a creep." He was revealed not to be a semi-helpless guy caught between a rock and a hard place, but a manipulative, narcissistic creep. In addition to being a liar.) The only rationally justifiable thing to do at that point was to be entirely disgusted at Nathaniel Branden and his monstrously unjust treatment of Rand.
Kelley's response to The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics was - let's cut the shit - an evasion. A downright cowardly refusal to face facts and accordingly. It was the "cashing in" of the initial mushiness taking hold and building. So, even after Branden was exposed as a total fraud and creep, up through his memoirs and beyond, he was still invited to present at the Objectivist Center's (the new name for the Institute for Objectivist Studies)
events. That's when the falling-out began. Lindsay Perigo couldn't stand the ever-insidious-and-expanding mushiness (a lack of what he called KASS, or a Kick-ASS sense of life), much less the outright cowardice on the Branden issue. Once Perigo left in disgust, the dominoes fell. Along the way, the Objectivist Center changed its name again, to the Atlas Society (Perigo affectionately dubbed it the "KASSless Society"), and quickly became irrelevant.
Today, the only Objectivism-advocacy organization doing serious work training the next generation of intellectuals is the Ayn Rand Institute. Kelley's brand of doing things is all but defunct.
There was a time that I found Kelley's sensibility more attractive. It hit home more for me as an aspiring academic philosopher. Kelley's idea of advancing Objectivism was to make advocacy more like the academic model of doing philosophy - with the inevitable consequence of repudiating Rand's "intolerant," non-scholarly approach to thinkers like Kant. (Pathological fixation on "scholarship" may well explain various problems within "the academic model." Rand's not being "a scholar" or "consensus-forger" in her mode of popular exposition is a question-begging excuse for the insular snobs to downplay or ignore her.) Indeed, for a period of time there in the 1990s, many of the best minds within the Objectivist movement were attracted to Kelley's organization. The case for ARI around this time was hurt severely by the presence and position of Peter Schwartz there. In addition to writing a disreputable and silly hatchet job on some non-existent he called "Libertarianism," he also cited Rand's authorship of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as good-enough proof of her character vis-a-vis the Brandens. (According to Atlas Shrugged, a morally-ideal person, Dagny, apparently-needlessly shoots a guard toward the end of the story. Is this to say Ayn Rand herself would do such a thing, or is this to say that Atlas Shrugged is subtly and insidiously flawed in mis-integrated kinds of ways?) Never mind that this settles no issue, epistemologically, when the disputants are Atlas Shrugged's author and dedicatee, respectively, a decade after the novel was written. One of them went corrupt, but which one? Long story short, the credibility of Peikoff and ARI suffer around this time due to the Schwartz MO.
I happen to be a rather unique case in that, even while drawn to the "academic model" around the mid- to late-1990s, I also listened to a good number of Peikoff audio courses. These courses provided little in the way of help for my graduate-school years in Philosophy - the paradigms are so at odds - but have proven to be saving graces and game-changers long-term. The essence of courses like Understanding Objectivism is that Objectivism doesn't need "updating" and "improving" or bridge-building with academia; rather, understood and used properly, it is its own best defender. Kelley seemed to pay lip service to Objectivism's special imperviousness to refutation, but what he says and the way he says it is unconvincing; the way he talks about Objectivism, it ends up sounding like merely a reasonable-sounding entry into the discourse with no special sales points. I think if he were truly aware of its special sales points, he'd not have drifted the way he did.
This gets back to his drift in regard to Nathaniel Branden. Branden is so discredited by now that his influence can only be poisonous. But there's something of a "sense of life" nature here, and that has to do with Ayn Rand's sense of life as opposed to David Kelley's. Rand was an uncompromising idealist and this comes out in her art. Kelley's basic operative MO is pragmatism. Much like in Rand's art, the cashing-in of Kelley's pragmatism is the irrelevancy of his organization and MO after 20 years. (You ever have the patience to sit through an Ed Hudgins op-ed when he was Ex-Dir of the Objectivist Center and/or Atlas Society? Total undistinguished mush, every time.)
Another insidious effect of pragmatism is how easily it devolves into cynicism. And it is ugly, naked cynicism that explains so many folks' seemingly instinctive attraction to the Branden message: that Rand was a "great, but ultimately flawed" human being. A cynical sense of life is shut off to ideations of greatness and grandeur and moral innocence and purity. "These ideals only pop up in juvenile novels and appeal to naive youth." That's the kind of amateurish bullshit that the Kelleys and Brandens feed right into. "Great, but ultimately flawed" is typical cynical double-speak and the effects of this portrayal of "flawed greatness" was - of course - entirely insidious; naturally, it devolved into "Rand was an unhappy/tyrannical/delusional/etc. human being," with the acknowledgment of her greatness - if it even remains after all the evisceration - reduced to a mere concession.
I still take issue with certain aspects of the Rand/Peikoff MO, and it concerns mainly their (non-essential) polemical criticisms of other thinkers or ideas. Nonetheless, if you disregard their polemics entirely - hell, I'm fine with that; Rand and Peikoff never advised anyone to take their word for it, after all - the substantive core, particularly the methodology (which is the fundamental ground of the rest, including the theory of concepts), stands pure and strong. Rand and Peikoff mastered that methodology at a much higher level than Kelley did. Branden was as clear a litmus test as any.
To illustrate Peikoff's continuing contribution to the discourse about Objectivism in ways Kelley doesn't measure up to, I'd like to mention Peikoff's own DIM Hypothesis and apply it to the difference between Peikoff and Kelley. Kelley, through his basic pragmatist orientation, falls into the "D" or "disintegration" category. Rand goes into the "I" or "integration" category. (I'll leave aside here the issue of subtle/insidious mis-integration or "M" as it's popped up in Objectivist circles.) Peikoff has a deeper grasp of Rand's "I" method. Part of Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis is that integrated worldviews have a kind of influence and appeal that disintegrated worldviews do not. This was illustrated in the 2004 presidential election campaign: Kelley, er, uh, John Kerry was the mushy disintegrated guy who didn't stand for anything and came off as weak. Counter to that, there was a widespread attraction to Bush's being bold and standing for something even if it was wrong; at least with fundamentalist cowboys like Bush there's no question about his sticking to a course or position whatever the practicality or political winds.
To sum up: Kelley = mushy pragmatic "D"; Rand and Peikoff = uncompromising and intransigent "I". It's like Keating vs. Roark all over again. At stake this time: the future of philosophy. Rand FTW!
Monday, November 29, 2010
A $6 Billion Fix-America Plan
You read that right, $6 Billion, with a B. In this day and age, that's a drop in the bucket. Hell, with this plan, it virtually pays for itself overnight. On the heels of the addendum to my last entry, here's the plan:
Buy and distribute $20 worth of Ayn Rand books for every man, woman, and child in America. It means buying up about 30 million copies each of the following mass-market paperbacks:
We the Living
Anthem
The Fountainhead
Atlas Shrugged
For the New Intellectual
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
The Romantic Manifesto
Philosophy: Who Needs It (we might need double or triple orders of this one)
plus about 15 to 20 million copies each of the following trade paperbacks:
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology
Return of the Primitive
The Ayn Rand Lexicon
Letters of Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand Answers
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (by Leonard Peikoff)
Just buy 'em up and distribute 'em however they'll make the most impact. Put 'em in libraries, put 'em in schools, just put big stacks of whole boxes of books in spaces where large numbers of people usually gather, wherever. Just get 'em out there. For a mere $6 billion, the results would be fucking mind-blowing.
How could you possibly not get your money's worth with this plan?
(The story behind the "Read Ayn Rand" image here.)
Plan updated here.
Sunday, November 28, 2010
More From the Anti-Capitalist Mindset
The Distinguished Professor, Brian Leiter, is such an ass. In his own way, he's analogous to or a counterpart to Sarah Palin, who is Too Fucking Stupid to Take Seriously (TFSTTS, or TFS for short). He's close to the archetype of the out-of-touch, arrogant, elitist academic professor of the Humanities. (He's actually a professor of Law first and foremost; as a philosopher it's clear he's an incompetent piece of shit in virtue of his blind and ignorant hatred of any and all things capitalistic. That's right, a piece of shit. A big, fat, ugly, walrus-looking, fucking piece of shit. I'm thinking maybe a hybrid of Balph Eubank and Wesley Mouch. Come the Revolution, he's completely discredited and out of a job qua philosopher-pretender. Thus spake the Ultimate Philosopher.) His latest piece of hatred of the good for being the good mostly quotes from another article. The question: Does Wall Street Produce Anything of Value? (Like I said, a piece of shit who hates the good for being the good.) The Distinguished Professor says, "yes, but not much," according to an assessment he regards as "sensible."
It really makes no difference to this that he's quoting from an "economics reporter" (anyone with common sense should know that this is codeword for "pundit with an econ degree," and pundits are almost uniformly idiots - near-sighted idiots - fucking idiots). Economics reporters get things wrong all the time - which is why there are people out there, smarter than they are, who beat the market and the CW/punditry. Who are those smarter people, exactly? Youuuuu guessed it - the ones hated most by the Leiters of the world. The ones who "owe" the rest of society for their superior mind and vision. And Leiter is fundamentally a dishonest evader at root, picking and choosing which "economics reporter" he decides to find "sensible commentary" from. I mean, isn't it obvious how dishonest and cowardly his whole M.O. is?
Now, what does the pro-capitalist mentality say, in reaction to the higher-than-before salaries commanded by "not very productive" Wall Street people? One thing the capitalism-hating mentality can't seem to get its head anywhere near around, is globalization and its effects. Globalization is like the exact opposite of what the Academy is all about. With globalization, there's no tenure. There's no taxpayer-subsidized intellectual fraud. There's no incentive and reward for stagnation and conformity and ass-kissing. There's only the thing the leftists pathologically fear and hate: the capitalistic process of supply and demand. It is supply and demand that determines prices, including salaries. In an anti-capitalist, globalization-ignorant, economics-ignorant, market-ignorant mindset, it's incomprehensible how the greater Wall Street salaries can be tied to greater economic value.
(Remember that Piece-of-Shit Leiter's intellectual hero is another piece of shit, Karl Marx, who dishonestly promoted the idea that workers are the source of all value and that capitalists are exploiters. One thing about Marx is that he was a loser who mooched off of Engels, and played the victim of capitalists his whole life. Marx also fantasized that capitalism and individualism would be transcended and superseded by communism. What an idiot! One could discern that he was an idiot, well before historical experience discredited him entirely. In the facepalm department, this dishonest idiot still makes the top ten amongst philosophers most cited in the mainstream academic journals.)
If we are forward-looking and visionary - much like capitalists but much unlike tenured academic leftists - we can use the Wall Street People's superior earning-power as an example to emulate rather than one to denounce, denigrate, undercut and hate. We could use their example to learn important lessons. We might do things like discover what underlies this shift in market values from the way they were before, prior to advancing globalization. What this shift tells us is that America and Americans could - given the right leadership and direction - very well play a certain kind of role as globalization inevitably advances further and the developing world becomes industrialized. The role I have in mind is one of extreme profitability: Americans increasingly become like the Wall Street People (though hopefully with a more philosophical and less philistinic mindset than the current crop). In other words, Americans increasingly would fill the job of deciding how investment resources get directed worldwide. America would become more and more like Wall Street itself.
In other words, the average American would become a big-time capitalist, and profit immensely.
Now, whose philosophy do you think would best equip and encourage Americans to take on this role as financiers to the world? Karl Marx's? John Rawls's? Immanuel Kant's? G.W.F. Hegel's? Plato's? (Plato, the proto-communist, the intellectual and spiritual father of all the terrible shit that happens under the banner of philosophy, starting with the wholly arbitrary Forms?) Martin Heidegger's? (Heidegger, the guy who signed onto National Socialism?) Jesus's? Some other major thinker with insidiously anti-individualist, anti-capitalist ideas? Some other mainstream/left academic? Some other intellectual figure out to stifle people by making them feel guilty for making money while others are in need?
Are you fucking kidding me?
This stuff is so slam-dunk, innit?
[ADDENDUM: On tonight's new episode of The Simpsons, Moe remarks that the people of Detroit are "living in Mad Max times." I'd like to propose an experiment: carpet-bomb Detroit . . . with books like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I think it could be absolutely mind-blowing just how much difference a good idea can make, even amongst the nation's supposed throwaway-people. Besides, they've been carpet-bombed enough, so to speak, by The Communist Manifesto and A Theory of Justice; why not give the truth a chance for a change? Prediction: Detroit would be a mecca of greatness within a generation. No shittin'! Just gotta think big . . . like a capitalist.]
It really makes no difference to this that he's quoting from an "economics reporter" (anyone with common sense should know that this is codeword for "pundit with an econ degree," and pundits are almost uniformly idiots - near-sighted idiots - fucking idiots). Economics reporters get things wrong all the time - which is why there are people out there, smarter than they are, who beat the market and the CW/punditry. Who are those smarter people, exactly? Youuuuu guessed it - the ones hated most by the Leiters of the world. The ones who "owe" the rest of society for their superior mind and vision. And Leiter is fundamentally a dishonest evader at root, picking and choosing which "economics reporter" he decides to find "sensible commentary" from. I mean, isn't it obvious how dishonest and cowardly his whole M.O. is?
Now, what does the pro-capitalist mentality say, in reaction to the higher-than-before salaries commanded by "not very productive" Wall Street people? One thing the capitalism-hating mentality can't seem to get its head anywhere near around, is globalization and its effects. Globalization is like the exact opposite of what the Academy is all about. With globalization, there's no tenure. There's no taxpayer-subsidized intellectual fraud. There's no incentive and reward for stagnation and conformity and ass-kissing. There's only the thing the leftists pathologically fear and hate: the capitalistic process of supply and demand. It is supply and demand that determines prices, including salaries. In an anti-capitalist, globalization-ignorant, economics-ignorant, market-ignorant mindset, it's incomprehensible how the greater Wall Street salaries can be tied to greater economic value.
(Remember that Piece-of-Shit Leiter's intellectual hero is another piece of shit, Karl Marx, who dishonestly promoted the idea that workers are the source of all value and that capitalists are exploiters. One thing about Marx is that he was a loser who mooched off of Engels, and played the victim of capitalists his whole life. Marx also fantasized that capitalism and individualism would be transcended and superseded by communism. What an idiot! One could discern that he was an idiot, well before historical experience discredited him entirely. In the facepalm department, this dishonest idiot still makes the top ten amongst philosophers most cited in the mainstream academic journals.)
If we are forward-looking and visionary - much like capitalists but much unlike tenured academic leftists - we can use the Wall Street People's superior earning-power as an example to emulate rather than one to denounce, denigrate, undercut and hate. We could use their example to learn important lessons. We might do things like discover what underlies this shift in market values from the way they were before, prior to advancing globalization. What this shift tells us is that America and Americans could - given the right leadership and direction - very well play a certain kind of role as globalization inevitably advances further and the developing world becomes industrialized. The role I have in mind is one of extreme profitability: Americans increasingly become like the Wall Street People (though hopefully with a more philosophical and less philistinic mindset than the current crop). In other words, Americans increasingly would fill the job of deciding how investment resources get directed worldwide. America would become more and more like Wall Street itself.
In other words, the average American would become a big-time capitalist, and profit immensely.
Now, whose philosophy do you think would best equip and encourage Americans to take on this role as financiers to the world? Karl Marx's? John Rawls's? Immanuel Kant's? G.W.F. Hegel's? Plato's? (Plato, the proto-communist, the intellectual and spiritual father of all the terrible shit that happens under the banner of philosophy, starting with the wholly arbitrary Forms?) Martin Heidegger's? (Heidegger, the guy who signed onto National Socialism?) Jesus's? Some other major thinker with insidiously anti-individualist, anti-capitalist ideas? Some other mainstream/left academic? Some other intellectual figure out to stifle people by making them feel guilty for making money while others are in need?
Are you fucking kidding me?
This stuff is so slam-dunk, innit?
[ADDENDUM: On tonight's new episode of The Simpsons, Moe remarks that the people of Detroit are "living in Mad Max times." I'd like to propose an experiment: carpet-bomb Detroit . . . with books like Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. I think it could be absolutely mind-blowing just how much difference a good idea can make, even amongst the nation's supposed throwaway-people. Besides, they've been carpet-bombed enough, so to speak, by The Communist Manifesto and A Theory of Justice; why not give the truth a chance for a change? Prediction: Detroit would be a mecca of greatness within a generation. No shittin'! Just gotta think big . . . like a capitalist.]
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Kudos Again to Greenwald
Greenwald picks apart a Nation article which cast doubts on the authenticity of the "don't touch my junk" guy.
It's almost like reading Ayn Rand dissecting all the conceptual evasions in a run-of-the-mill article of her day (most likely one attacking, undercutting, or impugning good things like capitalism). Outlets like The Nation are left-partisan to begin with, so already there's reason for suspicion, prima facie. Then come all the conceptually sloppy associations, "wonderment" passing as legitimate fact-based observation, etc. Hell, the Nation's smear-piece reads much like your typical hit-piece on Ayn Rand herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the history of the Nation is peppered with all kinds of sloppy, shoddy, awesomely-committed-to-misconception (h/t Michael Herr) references to Rand.
In fact, googling up "the nation ayn rand" brings up this incompetent pile of shit as the first result. See?
It's almost like reading Ayn Rand dissecting all the conceptual evasions in a run-of-the-mill article of her day (most likely one attacking, undercutting, or impugning good things like capitalism). Outlets like The Nation are left-partisan to begin with, so already there's reason for suspicion, prima facie. Then come all the conceptually sloppy associations, "wonderment" passing as legitimate fact-based observation, etc. Hell, the Nation's smear-piece reads much like your typical hit-piece on Ayn Rand herself. I wouldn't be surprised if the history of the Nation is peppered with all kinds of sloppy, shoddy, awesomely-committed-to-misconception (h/t Michael Herr) references to Rand.
In fact, googling up "the nation ayn rand" brings up this incompetent pile of shit as the first result. See?
Big, Long Sigh
First, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ayn Rand. The authors of that entry are Neera Badhwar and Roderick Long, who are sympathetic to Ayn Rand, are partly involved with "non-orthodox" segments of the Objectivist movement, and are philosophy professors. This last part should have a Rand fan concerned already. Combined with the middle part, there is even more cause for concern. Why? Because the probability that an academic philosopher - much less one not intimately familiar with Peikoff's lecture courses - would understand Objectivism properly, is exceedingly small. The only ones (who come to mind right off) who do a really good job of coming quite close, are the "Dougs," Rasmussen and Den Uyl. But to do things like write Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand or to understand and integrate the inductive methodology behind that book and courses like Understanding Objectivism, requires many years of immersion and habituation in the philosophy. Outside of this process, it's a crap shoot whether you end up "getting" Objectivism or not.
One thing that the academy of present day simply does not and cannot do is habituate philosophers to think in such a way as to "get" Ayn Rand and the way she thinks. There is simply a fundamental disconnect between the two models. It's like apples and oranges how the two modes of "doing philosophy" happens. If we are intellectual cowards and go by strength in numbers, we'd conclude the academy is where it's at and that Objectivism is some kind of cult-like and sheltered fringe. The academy, meanwhile, emphasizes "rigor" (this carries an inherent danger of "paralysis by analysis" if you don't come at it from a proper methodological context) and peer review, and those are ostensibly good things, but - and I'd have to spend much more time on a longer posting or book chapter to explain all this - these things are applied in such a way as to stifle the development of good things like Rand's ideas. The closest the academy has to exposure to Rand at this point - aside from one prominent book published four years ago (Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics published by Cambridge Press) - is the work of Aristotle. (Speaking of Aristotle, I'm reading Henry B. Veatch's Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation. At the time he wrote it - 1974 - the most dominant figures in professional philosophy were Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while Aristotle was just beginning to be looked at by the English-speaking world. Fucking ridiculous!) The current generation of ARI-trained folks going into academia simply could not come out of the academy with their methodological faculties intact, which is why they require the dual-training.
So, getting back to the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry. I encountered this collection of links to a discussion between Profs. Long, Badhwar, Rasmussen and Michael Huemer, a libertarian intuitionist. (Incidentally, intuitionism is a total dead-end. But never mind that, it's a prominent position and it comes from the academy! Yay!) Now, I hardly know Prof. Badhwar; about the most I know is that she contributed articles to the libertarian-friendly Social Philosophy & Policy journal, a leading journal in that area of specialty. (Don't get me started on "area of specialty" or AOS; hell, that alone could explain why the academy as a way of "doing philosophy" is so damaging, by encouraging compartmentalization and paralysis through analysis. For evidence, see the contrast between Rand and Rawls.) I trust she has only the best of intentions and is going on the best of her understanding. But this is simply unacceptable:
(This is where you're supposed to let out that big, long sigh like I did.)
I just don't know how this shit gets into the mindset of those "analyzing" Rand. I'm sorry, but if - whatever the reasons, whatever the causes - you end up saying things like "Ayn Rand is not a systematic philosopher," you really haven't a clue what you're talking about. You simply are not coming from a proper context of understanding.
One thing about thinking systematically is - seemingly obsessively, but more just a matter of habit and mental organization (see Kubrick for another example) - keeping mental notes about all kinds of concretes and relating them in logical fashion to other instances based on relevant similarities. In this case, I note that we have a "Rand-sympathetic" professional philosopher who doesn't really "get" Rand, who also happens to be the same person to co-author the entry on Ayn Rand at the internet's leading philosophy encyclopedia. To a systematic-integrated mind, this otherwise-unnoticed connection raises red flags. One thing it says is that there is no real effort within the academy as it's currently set up to approach Ayn Rand's writings and ideas on the demanding terms Miss Rand set for her readers. Only a truly corrupt mentality would equate her plainspoken style of writing with such vices as being "simplistic" (I believe Rand identified this as an anti-concept, BTW, but what does she know - she's "simplistic") or unsophisticated. I guess the idea of condensation and essentialization (more Randian buzzwords used in connection with concept-formation, integration, and unit-economy), a process which captures all the original content and applies it to an appropriate (popular) format, means a thinker who isn't "serious" or "rigorous."
(Never mind the eye-opening, free-flowing rigor on display in the ITOE workshops. Never mind that her ideas emerge virtually intact under the rigorous Rasmussen-and-Den-Uyl treatment. One thing you mustn't forget about the ethos of academia: Rasmussen and Den Uyl aren't "prominent" enough for the message to reach the mainstream there. So, in addition to rigor and peer review, you also need prominence and specialization. But those latter can't be all that insidious and corrupting, can they? And if Leiter's views about former UT colleague Tara Smith and her book are any indication, not even prominence helps. Hell, Nozick was prominent. Nozick even gave a biting explanation for why so many academics embrace socialism and oppose capitalism. And even that gets ignored. Rocks the boat too much or something. Boat-rocking is frowned upon as well, and "rightward" political leanings can cost you career-wise. Now there's nothing insidious and corrupting about that, could there be?)
I guess that what I'm trying to say here, is that if Ayn Rand's ideas go under the "rigorous, analytical" microscope according to the present-day academic ethos, prepare for a train wreck. You can start with encyclopedia entries on her by those who seem to understand her by demonstrating a superficial understanding that a legitimate insider can only find inadequate.
Rand and the Academy (as we know it) are fundamentally at odds, and something has to give. I'd even go so far as to question the "infiltrate academia" strategy the ARI has been going with. How do you un-corrupt a corrupt institution? I'm thinking it could only be done from "the outside" - busting the whole system at its root. You can start with how academia these days is funded in large part by taxpayers rather than by a straightforward market process. Alternatively, you could start by noting that "best minds" doesn't mean "best minds in academia," and that a lot of our best minds become rich capitalists whose ethos is way at odds with the academic one (for the reasons Nozick explained). There's no mystery how many of the best minds look at the present state of the academy - the humanities in particular - and throw their hands up in disgust or incomprehension, and move on. This doesn't seem to be a reality that many within that institution have woken up to - hence the intellectual elitism, the insularity, and such. Facepalm.
Anyway, the success of Rand's system of ethics - her individualistic eudaemonism with rationality as the central virtue - in contrast to the trainwreck-theories mulled over for decades on end by the "trained academics," is enough prime facie evidence right there that she's got her act together more than the academy has. That's before you even get to her theory of concepts and - most fundamentally - her (system-oriented) methodology, which will prove the most revolutionary in the end.
One thing that the academy of present day simply does not and cannot do is habituate philosophers to think in such a way as to "get" Ayn Rand and the way she thinks. There is simply a fundamental disconnect between the two models. It's like apples and oranges how the two modes of "doing philosophy" happens. If we are intellectual cowards and go by strength in numbers, we'd conclude the academy is where it's at and that Objectivism is some kind of cult-like and sheltered fringe. The academy, meanwhile, emphasizes "rigor" (this carries an inherent danger of "paralysis by analysis" if you don't come at it from a proper methodological context) and peer review, and those are ostensibly good things, but - and I'd have to spend much more time on a longer posting or book chapter to explain all this - these things are applied in such a way as to stifle the development of good things like Rand's ideas. The closest the academy has to exposure to Rand at this point - aside from one prominent book published four years ago (Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics published by Cambridge Press) - is the work of Aristotle. (Speaking of Aristotle, I'm reading Henry B. Veatch's Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation. At the time he wrote it - 1974 - the most dominant figures in professional philosophy were Heidegger and Wittgenstein, while Aristotle was just beginning to be looked at by the English-speaking world. Fucking ridiculous!) The current generation of ARI-trained folks going into academia simply could not come out of the academy with their methodological faculties intact, which is why they require the dual-training.
So, getting back to the authors of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry. I encountered this collection of links to a discussion between Profs. Long, Badhwar, Rasmussen and Michael Huemer, a libertarian intuitionist. (Incidentally, intuitionism is a total dead-end. But never mind that, it's a prominent position and it comes from the academy! Yay!) Now, I hardly know Prof. Badhwar; about the most I know is that she contributed articles to the libertarian-friendly Social Philosophy & Policy journal, a leading journal in that area of specialty. (Don't get me started on "area of specialty" or AOS; hell, that alone could explain why the academy as a way of "doing philosophy" is so damaging, by encouraging compartmentalization and paralysis through analysis. For evidence, see the contrast between Rand and Rawls.) I trust she has only the best of intentions and is going on the best of her understanding. But this is simply unacceptable:
Doug is right that the omission of the virtue of practical wisdom from Rand’s discussion is an important one. But I don’t find it surprising: she was not a systematic philosopher, and she omitted to discuss a whole lot of important things, such as generosity, kindness, forgiveness, and charity.
(This is where you're supposed to let out that big, long sigh like I did.)
I just don't know how this shit gets into the mindset of those "analyzing" Rand. I'm sorry, but if - whatever the reasons, whatever the causes - you end up saying things like "Ayn Rand is not a systematic philosopher," you really haven't a clue what you're talking about. You simply are not coming from a proper context of understanding.
One thing about thinking systematically is - seemingly obsessively, but more just a matter of habit and mental organization (see Kubrick for another example) - keeping mental notes about all kinds of concretes and relating them in logical fashion to other instances based on relevant similarities. In this case, I note that we have a "Rand-sympathetic" professional philosopher who doesn't really "get" Rand, who also happens to be the same person to co-author the entry on Ayn Rand at the internet's leading philosophy encyclopedia. To a systematic-integrated mind, this otherwise-unnoticed connection raises red flags. One thing it says is that there is no real effort within the academy as it's currently set up to approach Ayn Rand's writings and ideas on the demanding terms Miss Rand set for her readers. Only a truly corrupt mentality would equate her plainspoken style of writing with such vices as being "simplistic" (I believe Rand identified this as an anti-concept, BTW, but what does she know - she's "simplistic") or unsophisticated. I guess the idea of condensation and essentialization (more Randian buzzwords used in connection with concept-formation, integration, and unit-economy), a process which captures all the original content and applies it to an appropriate (popular) format, means a thinker who isn't "serious" or "rigorous."
(Never mind the eye-opening, free-flowing rigor on display in the ITOE workshops. Never mind that her ideas emerge virtually intact under the rigorous Rasmussen-and-Den-Uyl treatment. One thing you mustn't forget about the ethos of academia: Rasmussen and Den Uyl aren't "prominent" enough for the message to reach the mainstream there. So, in addition to rigor and peer review, you also need prominence and specialization. But those latter can't be all that insidious and corrupting, can they? And if Leiter's views about former UT colleague Tara Smith and her book are any indication, not even prominence helps. Hell, Nozick was prominent. Nozick even gave a biting explanation for why so many academics embrace socialism and oppose capitalism. And even that gets ignored. Rocks the boat too much or something. Boat-rocking is frowned upon as well, and "rightward" political leanings can cost you career-wise. Now there's nothing insidious and corrupting about that, could there be?)
I guess that what I'm trying to say here, is that if Ayn Rand's ideas go under the "rigorous, analytical" microscope according to the present-day academic ethos, prepare for a train wreck. You can start with encyclopedia entries on her by those who seem to understand her by demonstrating a superficial understanding that a legitimate insider can only find inadequate.
Rand and the Academy (as we know it) are fundamentally at odds, and something has to give. I'd even go so far as to question the "infiltrate academia" strategy the ARI has been going with. How do you un-corrupt a corrupt institution? I'm thinking it could only be done from "the outside" - busting the whole system at its root. You can start with how academia these days is funded in large part by taxpayers rather than by a straightforward market process. Alternatively, you could start by noting that "best minds" doesn't mean "best minds in academia," and that a lot of our best minds become rich capitalists whose ethos is way at odds with the academic one (for the reasons Nozick explained). There's no mystery how many of the best minds look at the present state of the academy - the humanities in particular - and throw their hands up in disgust or incomprehension, and move on. This doesn't seem to be a reality that many within that institution have woken up to - hence the intellectual elitism, the insularity, and such. Facepalm.
Anyway, the success of Rand's system of ethics - her individualistic eudaemonism with rationality as the central virtue - in contrast to the trainwreck-theories mulled over for decades on end by the "trained academics," is enough prime facie evidence right there that she's got her act together more than the academy has. That's before you even get to her theory of concepts and - most fundamentally - her (system-oriented) methodology, which will prove the most revolutionary in the end.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Essential Writings of Ayn Rand
As I am (constantly in a process of) organizing mental content, the idea occurred to me that, some day, there will be a "Basic Works" compilation for Ayn Rand like we see with Plato, Aristotle, Kant and other big hitters. So what might a Basic Works of Ayn Rand look like? What constitutes the essentials? The essays Rand wrote that might be considered foundational. Such essays as "The Objectivist Ethics" are prime examples of this. What else might be considered foundational in some important way? I think an essay such as "'Extremism,' or the Art of Smearing" covers certain epistemological essentials even while covering a political topic, so I think it qualifies. But we don't want to start doing the borderline-case, slippery-slope kind of thing, so we need a process of elimination. After such a process, I come down to the following writings:
Part 1: Speeches from the Novels (those excerpted in For the New Intellectual)
Part 2: General Essays on Philosophy
"Philosophy: Who Needs It" (1973) (PWNI)
"Philosophical Detection" (1974) (PWNI)
"For the New Intellectual" (1961) (FTNI)
"Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World" (1960) (PWNI)
Part 3: Metaphysics and Epistemology
"The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" (1973) (PWNI)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966-67)
Part 4: Ethics
"The Objectivist Ethics" (1961) (TVOS)
"The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests" (1962) (TVOS)
"Doesn't Life Require Compromise?" (1962) (TVOS)
"Causality Versus Duty" (1970) (PWNI)
Part 5: Politics
"Man's Rights" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Nature of Government" (1963) (TVOS)
"What is Capitalism?" (1965) (CTUI)
"Patents and Copyrights" (1964) (CTUI)
"Conservatism: An Obituary" (1960) (CTUI)
"'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing" (1964) (CTUI)
"Racism" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Roots of War" (1966) (CTUI)
"The 'Inexplicable Personal Alchemy'" (1969) (TNL/ROTP)
"Censorship: Local and Express (1973) (PWNI)
Part 6: Aesthetics
First six articles in The Romantic Manifesto plus "The Goal of My Writing" (TRM)
Introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead
Part 7: Essays on American Culture
"Apollo 11" (1969) (TVOR)
"Apollo and Dionysus" (1969-1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Comprachicos" (1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Age of Envy" (1971) (TNL/ROTP)
"Don't Let It Go" (1971) (PWNI)
I figure such a book would run to about 800 pages total with an index. (Part 1 would be about 140 pages, Part 2 about 90 pages, part 3 about 90 pages, part 4 about 60 pages, part 5 about 130 pages, part 6 about 130 pages, part 7 about 130 pages. That total comes to 770 pages.)
Abbreviation code: CTUI = Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; FTNI = For the New Intellectual; PWNI = Philosophy: Who Needs It; TNL/ROTP = The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution / Return of the Primitive (rev/updated ed. of The New Left); TRM = The Romantic Manifesto; TVOR = The Voice of Reason; TVOS = The Virtue of Selfishness.
Part 1: Speeches from the Novels (those excerpted in For the New Intellectual)
Part 2: General Essays on Philosophy
"Philosophy: Who Needs It" (1973) (PWNI)
"Philosophical Detection" (1974) (PWNI)
"For the New Intellectual" (1961) (FTNI)
"Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World" (1960) (PWNI)
Part 3: Metaphysics and Epistemology
"The Metaphysical Versus the Man-Made" (1973) (PWNI)
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology (1966-67)
Part 4: Ethics
"The Objectivist Ethics" (1961) (TVOS)
"The 'Conflicts' of Men's Interests" (1962) (TVOS)
"Doesn't Life Require Compromise?" (1962) (TVOS)
"Causality Versus Duty" (1970) (PWNI)
Part 5: Politics
"Man's Rights" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Nature of Government" (1963) (TVOS)
"What is Capitalism?" (1965) (CTUI)
"Patents and Copyrights" (1964) (CTUI)
"Conservatism: An Obituary" (1960) (CTUI)
"'Extremism,' or The Art of Smearing" (1964) (CTUI)
"Racism" (1963) (TVOS)
"The Roots of War" (1966) (CTUI)
"The 'Inexplicable Personal Alchemy'" (1969) (TNL/ROTP)
"Censorship: Local and Express (1973) (PWNI)
Part 6: Aesthetics
First six articles in The Romantic Manifesto plus "The Goal of My Writing" (TRM)
Introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead
Part 7: Essays on American Culture
"Apollo 11" (1969) (TVOR)
"Apollo and Dionysus" (1969-1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Comprachicos" (1970) (TNL/ROTP)
"The Age of Envy" (1971) (TNL/ROTP)
"Don't Let It Go" (1971) (PWNI)
I figure such a book would run to about 800 pages total with an index. (Part 1 would be about 140 pages, Part 2 about 90 pages, part 3 about 90 pages, part 4 about 60 pages, part 5 about 130 pages, part 6 about 130 pages, part 7 about 130 pages. That total comes to 770 pages.)
Abbreviation code: CTUI = Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal; FTNI = For the New Intellectual; PWNI = Philosophy: Who Needs It; TNL/ROTP = The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution / Return of the Primitive (rev/updated ed. of The New Left); TRM = The Romantic Manifesto; TVOR = The Voice of Reason; TVOS = The Virtue of Selfishness.
Monday, November 15, 2010
The Genius of Glenn Beck
I want to start out by saying that to really "get" Glenn Beck, you have have have to watch his show for yourself over a period of at least a few weeks. (Perhaps this is a rule for immersing yourself in just about anything or anybody.) It simply will not do to rely on the hit-piece style of "quoting" from his show by (probably Soros-supported?) sources. Otherwise, what I say in praise of Beck's show would seem incomprehensible and/or crazy. But his show is some of the most riveting stuff in television; an hour of Beck just flies right on by. You just have to go into it with no preconceptions and get drawn in over time by the core message.
Anyway, to capture this man's genius in a nutshell: on today's show he quotes from a document called the United States Declaration of Independence, thusly:
Then he proceeds to ask: How do you "progress" beyond this principle? "There is no higher principle than this!"
Take that, "progressives" (a.k.a. cowards afraid to identify themselves openly with socialism and/or substance).
Anyway, to capture this man's genius in a nutshell: on today's show he quotes from a document called the United States Declaration of Independence, thusly:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Then he proceeds to ask: How do you "progress" beyond this principle? "There is no higher principle than this!"
Take that, "progressives" (a.k.a. cowards afraid to identify themselves openly with socialism and/or substance).
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