Maverick Philosopher (Bill Vallicella; hereafter MP)
goes after Peikoff on pretty much the same topic about which he's gone after
Rand/Objectivism/Peikoff before. (I've
discussed MP's take on Rand before, and there's even plenty of GOP-bashing in that link just in case anyone was wondering whether I reserve my political bashings for Demo rats.) The topic - and MP's area of specialization/expertise on which he has
published extensively - is theology (and metaphysics).
I'll try not to repeat what I've said in my earlier discussion linked above. I'll point out, if I haven't already, that it wasn't Rand/Peikoff's views on metaphysics that brought me to enthusiasm about Objectivism. In specific branches of philosophy my interest in Rand is stimulated most in aesthetics, ethics, and political philosophy, and in epistemology with special emphasis on matters of method. It's these matters of method that are covered most extensively in Peikoff's
courses, in particular
Understanding Objectivism (1983),
The Art of Thinking (1992), and
Objectivism Through Induction (1998). The topic of God is hardly discussed at all in these courses, so surely his
points of emphasis/focus are elsewhere. His
Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (or OPAR [1991], which is quoted by MP, and which faithfully represents what can be
found at the Ayn Rand Lexicon, all the material in which is vetted by Rand herself even if OPAR is not). By Rand's own attestation (e.g., pp. 666-7 of
Letters of Ayn Rand), Peikoff is eminently qualified to teach about her ideas, and it is these above-mentioned "advanced" courses in Objectivism that the actual, flesh-and-blood, longtime students of Objectivism have been immersed in for decades, and of which Rand-bashers are wholly ignorant. (Let's just say that these long-time students are not on the same page with the Rand-bashers about a whole lot of things Rand and Objectivism, including especially the fundamentality of cognitive and philosophical method to "living as an Objectivist.")
MP makes criticisms of the passage from OPAR about the that are entirely understandable given Peikoff's wording (and without further elaboration from Peikoff that might counter objections from theologians like MP). MP goes on to say:
It is trivially true that there is nothing natural beyond nature, and nothing existent beyond existence. But these trivialities do not supply anyone with a good reason to reject the supernatural. It is because of such shoddy reasoning as I have just exposed that most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously. Objectivists should take this in a constructive way: if you want your ideas to gain wider acceptance, come up with better arguments for them.
"Most philosophers have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously" is considerably toned down from previous MP postings on Rand/Peikoff. Some years ago, it was "Rand is a hack." Or, perhaps, "she argues like a hack." Or, perhaps, "She argues like a hack on a subject about which I am an expert." Or, perhaps, "philosophers don't take Rand seriously." Now, it's "
most philosophers
have a hard time taking Objectivism seriously."
I'm supposing that MP has toned down the belittling of Rand in no small part due to efforts by yours truly (through blog as well as non-blog means of communication) to show how and on what subjects she is being taken seriously by professional philosophers, including those without (well-known) pre-existing sympathies to Rand. There are now three
volumes from the Ayn Rand Society (not to be confused with the Ayn Rand Institute, as I've personally witnessed Rand-bashers ignorantly confuse the two) in which Objectivist professional philosophers debate non-Objectivists. The latest volume, for instance, has (now UC-Boulder philosophy professor) Michael
"Why I am Not an Objectivist" Huemer taking Rand seriously enough to devote some of his valuable time to covering (in spite of the proliferation of countless philosophy articles and books that no one human could read more than a fraction of, as he
pointed out elsewhere). There is an exchange between him and the supposedly "intolerant jerk" Harry Binswanger, on the anarchism-vs-government debate, a debate that orthodox Objectivists had supposedly treated as closed as of Rand's 1963
article, or supposedly ran away from upon encountering the subsequent arguments from Rothbard, David Friedman, the Tannehills,
et al. (One might note that none of the three aforementioned were professional philosophers. It might also be noted that for many hardcore "students of Objectivism" such as myself, spending their time mentally "chewing" the Peikoff courses, the anarchism-vs-government debate isn't high priority unless or until the preconditions for a liberty-respecting society are in place, and that deeper issues of method are much higher priority for both that and for personal happiness.)
Another example that illustrates my point rather boldly is the way philosopher John Hospers approached Rand's ideas. The place of Hospers in the "Rand and philosophy" timeline is discussed
here. I note there that: (1) Hospers was a well-respected member of his profession, including having served a term as president of the American Society of Aesthetics; (2) Rand's ethical ideas made a deep and lasting impression on him; (3) Rand basically converted him to
libertarianism; (4) Hospers wrote a glowing tribute to
Atlas Shrugged in 1977; (5) Hospers thought Rand's ideas serious enough that he encouraged her to publish her ideas in professional journals; (6) Hospers wrote a comprehensive
guide to classical music listening (which I would have found more useful than I did had I not encountered classical music some years before discovering his guide), which by itself shows he's
not exactly a lightweight on aesthetics; and last but not least, (7) in his aesthetics text,
Understanding the Arts (1982), he quotes from Rand once, but the quotation pertains to the most central and fundamental of concepts in Rand's theory of art,
sense of life.
Now, I can only (safely?) assume that had Hospers encountered some writer on art theory
other than Rand who discussed sense of life, he would have mentioned or quoted them. But sense-of-life appears to be a distinctively Randian contribution to understanding the nature of art. So, is it Rand's or Hospers' fault that "most philosophers find it hard to take Rand's aesthetics seriously"? AYFKM? The best explanation I can think of here is that Rand's
Romantic Manifesto is a grand work in
aesthetics, the product of a lifetime of thought by a philosopher-artist, and that "most philosophers" have (for whatever reason) failed to recognize its merits. (The first two chapters of
The Romantic Manifesto are titled "Philosophy and Sense of Life" and "Art and Sense of Life," BTW. The most advanced essay in that collection of essays is "Art and Cognition" from 1971....)
There are other examples which can be gleaned from my linked Rand-and-philosophy timeline. In
The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984), did editors and contributors "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen somehow do an inadequate job of showing how and where Rand should be taken seriously? Their chapter on Rand's metaphysics, "Ayn Rand's Realism," shows what they take to be Rand's carrying on the Aristotelian torch. Heck, Rasmussen is a Catholic philosopher and theologian, so if MP is looking for a conversation with a philosophically-trained Christian Rand-enthusiast on theological matters, he can contact Rasmussen and (probably) learn more about how or why, e.g., a Christian philosophy professor could also be a Rand-enthusiast.
Suppose, however, that Rand/Peikoff produce arguments about God that theologians or metaphysics experts find unimpressive, and one were to draw the conclusion that if such unimpressive arguments are the fruit of Objectivist method (in those courses the non-Objectivists much less the committed Rand-bashers know next to nothing about), then the method must not be all that impressive. (See, I've anticipated a counter-point that MP might bring up.) I've pointed out above about how these issues of method are key to Objectivist
epistemology (and I take chapters 4 and 5 especially of OPAR to be distillations of the methodological subjects Peikoff covered in so many of his courses). The concepts of
context and
hierarchy, especially, are central to Objectivist method. And
there's no guarantee that one will apply these methodological principles correctly in all areas, a point I made in my
post about how to criticize Rand effectively. Heck, one of my own takeaways from the constant admonitions from Peikoff about keeping context is that to engage in polemics or debate generally, one needs to establish a grasp of the opponent's context, which is to make every effort to characterize their positions as they would characterize the positions themselves. (The
Rapoport/Dennett Rules, in other words - rules flouted 100% of the time by Rand-
bashers, BTW.) And that's one big issue I take with Rand's philosophical polemics, as I've made well-known. (I think her political polemics are spot-on; for instance, compare her treatment of the
Comprachico "educators" with their most loyal [ideologically-
inbred] spawn two generations onward in every left-dominated institution you look at.)
As to the bearing of Rand/Peikoff/Objectivist method on the subject of God and the supernatural, the connection isn't all that hard to draw, although I don't draw it in the realms of metaphysics/existence or theology, but in the realm of epistemology/knowledge. They are hardcore anti-Platonist Aristotelians who base all knowledge, all context and all hierarchy on what first comes through the senses. The notions of God and the supernatural - notions set over and against nature, to use Hegelian terminology - don't have a place in knowledge according to Rand/Peikoff. There isn't an
induction from the range of perceptual concretes that will get us to God (and Rand/Peikoff emphatically don't agree that the timber of humanity is irredeemably crooked...). But I'll mention, again, that a neo-Aristotelian like Rasmussen surely has some different thoughts about that. In the interests of engaging fully in the art of context-keeping, there should be rigorous back-and-forth between Objectivists and theologians (any neo-Aristotelian ones, especially) as and when personal contexts (interests, priorities) dictate. Perhaps the Ayn Rand Society will get around to that. In the meantime, their focus has been on ethics (Vol. 1 of the Society's Philosophical Studies series), epistemology (Vol. 2), and politics (Vol. 3). The upcoming fourth volume is on the theme of "Ayn Rand and Aristotle," and that's the one I'm really anticipating very eagerly because, well, Aristotle isn't exactly a lightweight - along with Plato and Kant he has more
SEP entries by far than the rest - and you have
experts on both Rand and Aristotle, academic scholars no less, who think there is a high degree of similarity between these two thinkers. A considerable number of these experts are pictured right there on the Ayn Rand Society
website. (The late Allan Gotthelf had the distinction of being both a leading scholar of Aristotle('s biology) and a long-time associate of Rand's.) Past steering committee members not pictured/listed there include Douglas Rasmussen and Tara Smith. And you can bet that Prof. Smith knows all about Rand's unique place in the (Aristotelian) virtue-ethical tradition which has seen a recent revival in academia. (When Rand wrote "The Objectivist Ethics" in 1961 - presented at an academic symposium, BTW, probably with Hospers' encouragement - virtue ethics was hardly even a thing at the time, as ethics was dominated by Kantian and utilitarian schools of thought, along with non-biologically-based accounts of value or goodness. Rand's theory is (and was presented as) a bold alternative to those schools of thought. Nozick took up the Randian argument as late as 1971, only for the "Dougs" to show in 1978 how Nozick missed the Aristotelian character of Rand's argument. See again the linked Rand and philosophy timeline for the links. Is it that Rand's argument was spotty or shoddy and that trained academics like the Dougs had to step in to buttress the case? Or does it go to show that some philosophers have identified things in Rand that other philosophers missed, and that those who have identified those things also happen to be strongly Aristotelian? Gee, ya think? How else does Smith's
Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (2006) get written?)
As much of the preceding makes evident, my issue here isn't so much about the quality of this or that argument or conclusion but rather about how philosophical inquiry by trained practitioners should be conducted. There are leads available to be pursued, and they're not exactly obscure or lightweight. I haven't even mentioned the lead that is
Sciabarra's exhaustively-researched work (including the university-press published
Journal of Ayn Rand Studies of which he is lead editor).
Now what
I would like to know is how, despite all the available non-obscure leads, there is still so much ignorance and hostility toward Rand/Objectivism out there. The underlying problem
there goes well beyond anything specifically Rand. The problem hits home for someone like MP/Vallicella who finds there to be so much ignorant hostility toward theism in light of available philosophical theology (and he perceives Rand/Peikoff to be one source or instance of such). It's a serious, huge, perhaps monumental problem to be overcome. It is a problem which humanity on the whole has not yet developed a shape of consciousness (to wax Hegelian again) sufficient to overcome. Perhaps humanity as a whole has missed the point of Plato's
Republic all this time, in spite of the not-so-obscure lead in the form of philosopher-ruler Marcus Aurelius (to which no politician I know of today remotely compares). But it is a problem I have been documenting exhaustively in this blog for diagnostic purposes. The problem would be solved if a critical mass of humanity were to bring the art of dialectic to a high level. And guess what: given the
leads I've noticed, homed in on, and pursued, Rand's philosophy - and the Aristotelian tradition in general - has a particularly valuable role in providing the tools to practice dialectic at the highest level. (
Hegel and Aristotle, anyone? Come
on, already, ffs. [I found out about this book in particular by searching multiple university library catalogs for books on Hegel, BTW. It's available in e-format, even. Insatiable curiosity carried to the highest level, anyone?])
