Rand, the Greeks, and the ideal (kalos) man

(Image from "Kalos Kagathos: A Fine Soul in a Fine Body.")

Pursuant to my previous posting, I'll keep this brief to draw mainly one (highly important but all too neglected) connection: between Rand's conception of the ideal man and the ancient Greek concept of kalos kagathos.

In her 1963 article, "The Goal of My Writing," Rand wrote:  "The motive and purpose of my writing is the projection of an ideal man. The portrayal of a moral ideal, as my ultimate literary goal, as an end in itself--to which any didactic, intellectual or philosophical values contained in a novel are only the means."

Compare with this portion of the wikipedia article on kalos kagathos linked above:

The word was a term used in Greek when discussing the concept of aristocracy.^[4] It became a fixed phrase by which the Athenian aristocracy referred to itself; in the ethical philosophers, the first of whom were Athenian gentlemen, the term came to mean the ideal or perfect man.

Compare also with this encyclopedia.com entry:

Kalon : the neuter of the Greek adjective kalos, beautiful, fine, also admirable, noble; accompanied by the definite article (to kalon ), for example, the beautiful (or beauty). In Greek culture, what is kalon is typically the object of erôs, passionate or romantic love, and in (male-dominated) literature (and art), the term is predominantly applied to males around the age of puberty. Plato appropriates the kalon (along with the good and the just) as a key object for human striving and understanding in general, discovering in it, along with the good, one of the properties of the universe and of existence; erôs itself, in Plato, is transformed from a species of love into love or desire tout court, for whatever is truly desirable—and good (for the human agent). See especially his Symposium, Phaedrus (Hippias Major, possibly not by Plato, represents an unsuccessful attempt to define the kalon ). The truly beautiful, or fine, is identical with the truly good, and also with the truly pleasant, as it is for Aristotle (Eudemian Ethics I.1, 1214a1–8). The Aristotelian good man acts "for the sake of the fine (to kalon )" (Nicomachean Ethics IV.2, 1122b6–7), an idea which is sometimes used as a basis for attributing to Aristotle a quasi-Kantian view of the ideal agent as acting morally, even—if occasion arises—altruistically, as opposed to acting out of a concern for his or her own good or pleasure. Against this, we need to take account of Aristotle's treatment of his good person as a self-lover, someone who seeks a disproportionate share of the fine for himself or herself (NE IX.8, 1169a35–b1), though he or she may willingly concede his or her share to a friend (NE IX.8, 1169a32–34). This is consistent with Aristotle's wanting to treat the fine (or the admirable) as itself part—the most important part—of the human good; and indeed, he ultimately seems to recognize only two objects of desire, the good and the pleasant (NE VIII.2, 1155b18–21; cf. e.g. EE VII.2, 1235b18–23). In this context the pleasant will include only those pleasures that are not fine and good. For this move we may compare Plato's Gorgias (474C–475D), where Socrates actually reduces fine to good, pleasant, or both. Later Greek philosophy trades on, while sometimes modifying, this complex of ideas, which also forms the basis for the analysis of beauty in literature or in the visual arts.

And what is Rand's ideal of moral beauty or perfection, as it were?  Here's a major clue:

Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue. Moral perfection is an unbreached rationality—not the degree of your intelligence, but the full and relentless use of your mind, not the extent of your knowledge, but the acceptance of reason as an absolute.

(Note that very early on in my book, I identify the ideal of an (Aristotelian) end of history with a cultural norm of unbreached rationality, i.e., something well above the viral/toxic/low-effort dreck of social media as we now know it.  Getting kids on philosophy as early as possible/apprioriate would help with that problem; getting them on philosophy most expressive of the ideal of kalos would speed up the process.)

Given a fundamental agreement here between Rand and Aristotle on the human exercise of the intellectual capacity as virtuous/excellent/kalos human activity, and given the seriousness with which Aristotle is widely taken as a philosopher, it stands to reason that Rand's conception of the human good merits wider attention from philosophers.  It also follows that the culmination of 'Randian' study in the art of thinking in a course by that very name (1992) by Peikoff merits close attention from scholars in this area.  Excuses (among Rand-commentators especially) for avoiding such materials have to be rather pathetically weak (very non-kalos) at this point.

(The Aristotle-Nietzsche connection here also seems under-researched.  Also, any connection between the concepts of intellectual perfection and dialectical completeness should be duly-thoroughly researched.)

Notes on dialectic

Or: An exercise in advanced differentiation and integration* 75+ hours fasted (with electrolyte water), listening to some favorite music, and cannabinized with just a couple hits of very-residual kief.  (* - "Consciousness, as a state of awareness, is not a passive state, but an active process that consists of two essentials: differentiation and integration." --Rand, ITOE, first sentence)

Also: How a dialectic between leading philosophers in history and the likes of Ayn Rand might realistically play out, given a now large and ever growing roster of prominent philosophy professionals now taking a serious interest in her thought.

How might Nietzsche and Rand have 'dialectized' to reach a conclusion they could agree on?  Nietzsche spoke of an 'overman', but Rand spoke more matter-of-factly of 'man the rational animal,' a position she claims to have shared in a very deep sense with Aristotle and also Aquinas.  ("The three As" Rand would call them.  She thought very highly of her own philosophical ability, but didn't proclaim to have surpassed these other two.  But the only other philosopher she acknowledged a philosophical debt to, is Aristotle.)

Aristotle, the 'fountainhead of dialectic,' as Chris Matthew Sciabarra, author of Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (published 2000 by PSU Press, so exhaustively researched as to have a 48-page or approximately 1300-reference bibliography, which is at least 3 times what any other impressively researched academic book would have; the man is thorough) (Also, he wrote an also-thoroughly researched book on Rand, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995, PSU), containing the most complete bibliography of Leonard Peikoff materials, especially including Understanding Objectivism, an essential reference source for serious understanding of Rand's philosophy of Objectivism, Peikoff having spent oodles more time discussing philosophical issues with Rand than anyone else, etc. etc., although philosopher (and a serious well-reputed academic one at that) John Hospers also took Rand seriously enough to spend a lot of time discussing philosophical topics as well; but it's materials like Understanding Objectivism that one needs to master in order to be a seriously qualified scholarly commentator on Rand), dubbed him.

Hold on, let's say that it was Aquinas (say) dialecticalizing with Nietzsche (say), and while I haven't spent nearly the time studying these two that I had studied Rand's ideas (mainly for their claimed and real similarity to those of Aristotle, the fucking MAN...although much of my understanding of the fucking MAN comes from solidly reputed secondary sources, e.g., John M. Cooper's 1975 Reason and Human Good in Aristotle...), I can kinda imagine how a dialectic between (pre-Revelation-and-death) Aquinas and the (pre-going-mad) Nietzsche might have transpired, given the basic sensibility-vibe that I get from the various research sources (both primary and secondary) I've consulted on these two.  But what if we hypothesize that Nietzsche got to know Aquinas and Aristotle and Rand better than he apparently did, how might a dialectical synthesis between these four (say) figures transpire?  What sort of 'overlapping consensus' might they reach?

But wait, for Nietzsche to have become more familiar with these thinkers (most importantly Aristotle?), we have to hypothesize that, at minimum, he had a few more decades of intellectual productivity in him, and as we know from Aristotle and others and hopefully first-hand to a great extent, intellectual productivity is a very lofty thing for a human being to aspire to.  I don't know how long it would have taken for Nietzsche to get around to a serious and close study of Aristotle.

One thing I do know, is that in Walter Kaufmann's (leading Nietzsche scholar and fairly prominent philosopher in his own right) translation of Beyond Good and Evil, namely aphorism 287 (or is it 257) about the noble soul having reverence for itself, Kaufmann makes a footnoted reference to Aristotle on the great-souled man.  But it's that same aphorism that Rand had originally considered placing at the beginning of The Fountainhead, my pick for her best novel even though Atlas Shrugged has a great many virtues, as aesthetics-expert Hospers highlighted.  This is during the phase of her career when Nietzsche was her primary intellectual influence (aside from herself, obviously) (and there was also Isabel Paterson), but it was within a few years that Aristotle (and secondarily Aquinas) became the chief intellectual influence to the point she acknowledged a philosophical debt only to him.  Anyway, all three of the thinkers - Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand - seem to be in fundamental agreement about a great-souled man or noble soul having reverence for itself, a fundamental component of Rand's distinctive variety of egoism for sure.  So why isn't she taken that much more seriously by academic philosophers already?  Good question.  One thing is, few if any of them were in the epistemic position that, say, Hospers was in, now were they.

Anyway, if we could get these three rather meticulous thinkers to agree on that premise - I say if, but I think it's a given? - about the great-souled and (therefore?) Randian-egoistic man, then shouldn't that inform a dominant new paradigm in ethical thinking?

What is dialectic, anyway?  Sciabarra refers to it as "the art of context-keeping" (a fundamental focus of Understanding Objectivism, the chief methodological 'treatise' of Objectivism, duh.), and I take his Total Freedom to be a pretty complete - indeed 'dialectically complete or perfectionistic' - exercise in the art of context-keeping, starting with that fucking massive bibliography.  (There are two books that I know of with larger bibliographies: Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (Rand's phrase "in the name of the best within us" comes to mind in this context) and T.H. Irwin's monumental 3-volume, 5000-ish-page-equivalent The Development of Ethics (OUP, 2008).  Irwin is I think definitely most impressed with the Aristotelian-Thomistic ethical tradition, no surprise given how he compares them exhaustively with prominent alternatives including even Kant.  All three of these books strike me as seriously impressive; what if they were in some way dialectically synthesized together along with the putative Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian synthesis about ethical egoism or individualism or eudaimonist-individualism or individualist-perfectionism, etc.

And funny I should bring up individualist-perfectionism, since that's a key theme of neo-Aristotelians Douglas Rasmussen (a Catholic who could be the leading authority on how Randian and Thomistic thought might be synthesized) and Douglas Den Uyl.  Funny I should bring them up, since they did a response to Nozick on the Randian argument and I hadn't even brought Nozick up.  Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia was praised on the back cover by some prominent philosopher type as exhibiting an unsurpassed 'dialectical sensibility,' which it arguably does.  Does this mean that he out-dialecticizes Rawls?  Does anyone out-dialecticize Alan Gewirth, who wrote the book Self-Fulfillment (1998, PUP, at age 86, mind you) and Reason and Morality (1978, Chicago UP), the key themes of which are defended in Deryck Byleveld's daunting-looking 1991 book, The Dialectical Necessity of Morality: An Analysis and Defense of Alan Gewirth's Argument to the Principle of Generic Consistency (PGC)?  That book looks thoroughly researched as well.  Does dialectical completeness require some sort of positive rights after all?  But if everyone adopts an Aristotelian-Nietzsche-Randian ethos about eudaimonistic individualistic perfectionist dialectical-completist, etc., would positive rights ever be a factor at that point, with everyone flourishing so?  But is that realistic?  Well, let's say we stage for a national audience a debate (well, dialectic) between long-dead but now-taken-very-seriously figures such as Plato, Aristotle, Kant, et al, and see what kind of overlapping consensus they reach.

I'm not talking about intellectually lazy trolls on social media, now, I'm talking serious dialectical synthesis here.

Assume that all these thinkers in this staged debate/dialectic are adequately informed of at least a lot of the scholarship and philosophical writing that has occurred since their actual lifetimes.  Would they all at least agree that you can only hope to match but not exceed Aristotle?  Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl (RDU) appear to do so, and they're pretty dialectically complete, too, and they also happen to be in fundamental agreement (from all available indications) with Sciabarra about that (Aristotle the fountainhead of dialectic being among them, eudaimonism in ethics being another, and so on).  Indeed, one must think of post-2000 RDU writings as having dialectically presupposed Total Freedom (a unit that condenses another 1300-ish units, we might say, or the way an internet link can condense a reference to a wider context within one word...), which makes it that much more dialectically complete.  (What if Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism and (RDU's) Norms of Liberty: A Perfectionist Basis for Non-Perfectionist Politics (2006, PSU) translate into essentially the same idea?)  But have they dialecticized with Gewirth?  Not that I know of, beyond Den Uyl's 1970s article on what he then referred to as Gewirth's Principle of Categorial Consistency or PCC at the time, but I do remember reading Rasmussen vs. Sterba in a 1987-ish book, The Catholic Bishops and the Economy: A Debate, and I'm not sure the debate there was resolved to my complete satisfaction.

(okay, that was composed during a listen of the 50-minute album Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, currently #6 on my list of favorites.  to be continued, or have I made my point? ^_^ )

also, context-keeping and integration (a key focus of Rand's, and Peikoff's lecture courses and books) are essentially the same process.  I.e., integration and dialectical synthesis are the same process.  Where does Marx fit into all this, I haven't even mentioned him yet.  But then I have to bring up Mises and Kolakowski, i.e., see how they fit into, i.e., integrate with these other concrete instances (of thinkers), and so on and so on.  But how can I understand all these other thinkers to the same extent, with the same resource-constraints, that I studied and understood Rand so extensively?  (My one "peer reviewed professional literature publication" is on Rand.  My book was reviewed by a few esteemed peers (including an academic neo-Aristotelian philosopher) and passed with flying colors, I also think it's pretty good shit...but almost sure to be overshadowed by BLTP....)

also, dialectical completeness has something fundamental/essential to do with perfectionism in the philosophical tradition (of whom Aristotle was an exemplar, given his dialectical completeness, i.e., perfectionism and - therefore ultimately - intellectual perfectionism).  Also, Rand is some sort of intellectual perfectionist (although she didn't seem to think that theoretical contemplation was the highest or most noble of the intellectual activities, but seemed to include all activities resulting from intensive focus, a fundamental that would lie at any account of 'Randian perfectionism' and perhaps arguably any similar perfectionist account such as the Dougs').

Also, Norton's eudaimonist perfectionist individualist self-actualization-ethics fits into all this quite beautifully, synthesizing ancient Greek themes with themes from modern psychologists like Jung (a big 'individuation' guy) and Maslow (hierarchy of needs or objective goods).

Ok so that's about an hour and 8 minutes worth of output, not bad I guess.  Some promising, uh, leads anyway.

also this should tie in (integrate) closely with any philosophy curricula for children, duh.

1.5hrs spent after edits/additions, and the cannabuzz is gone.  later?... (Next up?: How would Aristotle blog, cannabanized and fasted?  Or: Aspiring to great-souled dialectical perfection/integration/kalon, etc.)  (Is this one chock full of enough thorough-research-derived contextualizing links/leads yet?  Hell, I hadn't even brought up Hegel yet, but Sciabarra incorporates his insights as well.  And what did Hegel think of Aristotle?  Surely Ferrarin (2001, CUP, post-dating Total Freedom by one year...) has insights there.)

The earth going forward

In a nutshell, the earth going forward will be affected by what human beings do.  This is why the era we are entering is now dubbed the Anthropocene.  There are two major trends going on right now: (1) technological maturation and (2) Stress on the ecological system.  (When I think of ecological stresses it's not just climate change that comes to mind; I also think of the acidification of the oceans, declining insect populations and biodiversity, destruction of the coral reefs, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, antibiotic-resistant diseases, and other readily googlable troubling phenomena.)

(Also, any educated person these days should be considerably familiar with ourworldindata.org.)

In the light of exponential growth in technology which is now seeing AI or machine learning going mainstream, advances in robotics, nanotechnology on the near horizon, lab-grown meat becoming affordable around this year (which can only put some size dent in the consumption of meat grown even in organic and therefore more resource-intensive and therefore more expensive processes, along with the methane produced from such processes), production automation making goods and services ever more affordable (counteracting to a great extent supposed disemployment effects), and any number of other advances, it becomes very difficult to envision the future of humanity with much detail beyond a few years from now.  The most significant of the advances would probably be in the area of AI, for the same reason that intelligence-capable human beings mark a rather radical departure from nature's and life's original courses.  And you have to imagine AI helping humans solve problems in conjunction with their use of all the other new emerging technologies.

Climate change and other actual or potential ecological crises would definitely be a major problem going forward, if present human trends using present technology continue.  But the latter is not going to happen.  Do we really have any way of telling what the earth is going to be like in half a century?  By then will biodiversity be engineered by humans, the coral reefs restored, agriculture moved to laboratories, etc.?  How about any advances in human culture, e.g., philosophy (and therefore superior rationality, and ultimately Aristotelian-caliber rationality or intellectual perfectionism) for children becoming mainstream?  Will AI help humanity transcend its addictions to rationality-undermining facets of social media, which people are already well becoming sick of and looking for solutions to?

This seems to be a good time for bets to be placed as to whether this or that ecological challenge will be met by technological advances, and when.  If people have too little information to go on to make such bets, then that just reinforces my point here: we really don't know how the earth is going to look going all that much forward.  And maybe that's the source of present-day anxieties.  (We may be living dangerously, with all the psychological consequences of that.)

We might try to go 50 years into the past for some guide to what we might expect to transpire over the next 50 years.  51 years ago, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released.  (It was also one year before man first landed on the moon.)  There was inevitably some amount of speculation on Kubrick's (and author of the book version, Arthur C. Clark's) part, such as the form that advanced AI might take, with the eventually villainous HAL 9000 ("I'm sorry, Dave...").  But there was only so much that could be done even at the level of speculation, which the film's "mysterious" ending is meant to convey.  As Kubrick explained in interviews at the time, the Star Gate sequence and the resulting Star Child are meant as symbolic and/or allegorical depictions of humanity taking a "leap" to a higher level of being.  (The musical cue from "Also Sprach Zarathustra," Richard Strauss's musical tribute to Nietzsche's novel, appears in the film where the ape advances into man, and then when the man advances into the Star Child, which Kubrick directly refers to in interviews as a kind of superman.)  But the symbolic or allegorical treatment is replacement for literal depictions of futuristic humanity or contact with alien species (represented indirectly by the black monolith), because at that point we just wouldn't know.

This reveals a problem with a lot of non-Kubrick science fiction.  Take even such lauded sci-fi as Blade Runner, which occurs in Los Angeles of 2019.  At that time, there would be humanoid replicants who almost thoroughly successfully mimic human beings.  Somehow, humanity would have gotten to the point of creating such replicants without first thinking through the implications.  But it's precisely such cultural resources as Blade Runner that gets humanity to first think such things through.  It's why the year 1984 came to pass without the world becoming like Orwell's novel.  As China begins implementing its "social credits" system here very soon, it invites warnings and comparisons to Big Brother.  (It's hard to tell whether the concerns here are overblown.)

Another common element in a lot of sci-fi, save perhaps for Star Trek: the futures depicted are often dystopian -- i.e., that humanity misused its technology with the result often being that a tyrannical government or corporate entity used that technology to control or dehumanize people, use them for gory entertainment purposes, consume them, limit their lifespans, manipulate their minds, and so on.  Even with Star Trek and Star Wars, we see wars occurring, but what would motivate beings who are that technologically advanced (and, presumably, intellectually advanced as they use their technology to learn how to become more morally and aesthetically perfect?) to go to war?  The movie Independence Day (1996) depicts a hostile alien race - which has mastered interstellar travel - coming to earth to use its resources.  Perhaps going forward, humans will increasingly demand that movies with such dubious and intelligence-insulting premises not be made?  That alone would be a cultural improvement, and less wasteful of storytelling resources.  And becoming smarter and more efficient with resources is just part of humanity's technological improvement.

The same year as 2001's release, Paul R. Ehrlich foresaw doom with his book, The Population Bomb.  In 1980 he made a wager with economist Julian Simon, "betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. ... Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period."  This strikes me as an instructive example of doom and gloom coming up against what Simon referred to as the ultimate resource: “skilled, spirited and hopeful people who will exert their will and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all.”  In short, the human mind.

Which is to say, that one's level of anxiety over the future of planet earth is probably inversely proportional to one's confidence in the ability of humans to use their mental capacities to solve problems.

I can't say that I'm all that anxious about the condition of the earth going forward.

(My anxiety, if that's what it is, is more about how even intellectually- and culturally-advanced humans would manage to discover lasting meaning if/when they have all that extra time on their hands in a 'post-scarcity' era; I just hope beauty would always remain fulfilling, seeing as how 'living to kalon' - for the sake of the beautiful or noble or fine, where our values or needs are in harmonious proportion in a hierarchy (and wherein we discover our unique form of self-actualization or eudaimonia) - is ultimately the best theoretical accounting for our widely-shared commonsense standard of value that I can think of.  Perhaps that means humans eventually becoming essentially aesthetic-creative beings.  Is that what Nietzsche had in mind with the 'overman' idea?...)

Toxic social media vs. philosophy, Exhibit A

In addition to following a couple philosophy blogs regularly, I also follow the /r/badphilosophy subreddit (reddit lingo for forum), mainly for the humor value.  I'll get to the badphilosophy subreddit in a moment, but in the last few days there was a link there discussing a link on the /r/philosophy subreddit which discusses and in turn links to a blog post on the meaning of the term "selfishness," mainly in connection with Ayn Rand's usage of the term.

On reddit, the default settings sort comments by "top," as in most net upvotes, and do not display comments that receive 5 or more net downvotes.  The process of upvoting or downvoting is anonymous (and therefore unaccountable) and effortless.  (Surely you can see where I'm going with this?)  So in theory, someone can put in a lot of thought and effort into writing up a comment only to have it "buried" by downvotes, or conversely, someone can make a lazy comment that is popular with the anonymous upvoters and thereby see it elevated to the top of the displayed comments section.

In the instance covered here, the user linking his own blog post, Sword_of_Apollo (an Objectivist), received for his efforts many downvoted comments.

(Digression: It's not exactly germane to the topic of this posting to get into Rand's unconventional but not necessarily incorrect usage of the terms "selfishness" and "altruism" here; the main point is to contrast social media formats with actual philosophical ones uncorrupted by social media toxicity.  But here's my take: Rand's book The Virtue of Selfishness is subtitled A New Concept of Egoism, so what she's proposing is a reconceptualizing of how egoism or self-interest is treated in ethical philosophy.  Usually theorists dismiss egoism on the grounds that it supposedly fails to offer commonsense ethical advice or gives the wrong reasons for doing what morality demands.  Rand, meanwhile, holds that the purpose of morality or ethics is the achievement of happiness; further, happiness is the reward of virtue, the primary virtue being rationality, rationality being the specific mode by which human beings function and flourish.  (I spell this theme out in this blog post.)  To try to make a long story short for purposes of this post, Rand is advancing the case that the agent or author of moral action is properly the beneficiary of that action, specifically in terms of that agent's hierarchy of values.  Rand defines "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep"; values or those things that are important, what one cares about.  At the same time Rand holds that there is a rational standard of value that guides one toward successful or better or happier living, and that for man, that standard is defined in terms of the specific human capacity for reason, which means that the good life for man is rational or thoughtful or intelligent living.  This means exercising one's best judgment about one's hierarchy of values, including one's relations with others.  But to exercise one's best judgment requires one act on one's own independent judgment, which - metaethically speaking - is to recognize the objective nature of values, that is, as requiring a specific mental process, as opposed to the intrinsic and subjective conceptions of value which each in their own way subvert objectivity.  The intrinsic conception takes values as a given directly from reality without the need for such a mental process, while the subjective conception takes value as irreducibly the product of the agent's will without a connection to a rationally establish-able standard of value.  And what altruism does, in Rand's view, is to subvert the connection between the agent's own mental processes and therefore hierarchy of value and the ends or values the agent is to serve.  More pointedly, the agent must be prepared to sacrifice what his own independent judgment would dictate -- or alternatively, since the agent's independent judgment is effectively rendered irrelevant to the standard of value guiding his actions, the agent can properly be sacrificed by others, by force.  This is how various forms of statism get their moral impetus: the agent is to (be made to) serve a standard and hierarchy of values not his own, on the grounds of a "greater good" to be achieved thereby.  Observe how various arguments from the left appeal to values like compassion in political terms - how the individual's life is implicitly the state's to dispose of - and how possession of a superior moral compass leads to state-directed (enforced) charity.  As for how an objective principle of fellow-human-aiding might be formulated, here's the principle Rand states in "This is John Galt Speaking": "Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his right to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. But to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values.")

Now, here's a comment that has gotten over 100 upvotes:

Cowistani 111 points 2 days ago
I read Rand’s “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
A pile of pseudo-intellectual masturbatory piffle.
You want to redefine words in common usage. Fine. But be prepared for immediate and aggressive pushback.
Language doesn’t work the way you want it to. Language works how the people who use it want it to. So the common usage of “selfish” is what 99% of the population will think when you use that word.
And to be honest, they’re not going to give two dukes about your definition because it isn’t their definition. This is a huge issue with philosophy like this: to make the points you want to make, you want to use common usage words to take advantage of the baggage associated with those words while redefining them to be something positive and helpful for your ideology.
It’s dishonest. There’s words or concepts you can use for the idea you want to get across. Use them. Don’t call the users of language wrong because they use a word differently than you do.

What's being asserted here is that Rand's "pseudo-intellectual masturbatory piffle" rests on a redefinition of terms, and that one can glean this from reading The Virtue of Selfishness (TVOS).

Now, the main theoretical essay in TVOS is "The Objectivist Ethics," a paper delivered at an academic symposium (perhaps in part at the urging of her friend and correspondent at the time, Prof. John Hospers), which (to but it bluntly) doesn't rely in the least on any definition of "selfish." It does rely on definitions of terms like "value," "goal," "goal-directed action," "standard of value," "virtue," and "happiness," and any other related terms.

It sounds (well, is) grossly irresponsible to read TVOS and especially the main essay and come away with the conclusion that it is "pseudo-intellectual masturbatory piffle."

If Rand's writings really did reach such a low level, it is hard to explain Rand's relation to and extensive correspondence with Prof. Hospers, a well-respected philosopher and author of several textbooks (including especially in aesthetics, a branch of philosophy which receives too little coverage, and where Hospers - the president of the American Society For Aesthetics in the early '80s - had an affinity for Rand). (Hospers also became the first Libertarian Party candidate for president, and his essay summarizing his political philosophy, "What Libertarianism Is," clearly echoes Rand and especially her article, "Man's Rights," in several places.) (Hospers describes his history with Rand in a two-part article which merits some comment when time permits...)

If Rand's writings really were "pseudo-intellectual masturbatory piffle," it's hard to explain the series of articles discussing Rand that appeared in the philosophy journal The Personalist (edited at the time by Hospers), notably Robert Nozick's (not exactly a lightweight) "On the Randian Argument" and Den Uyl and Rasmussen's response, "Nozick on the Randian Argument." (Typical of usually-scummy Rand-bashers is to tout the Nozick essay as an example of a "real philosopher debunking Rand," while pretending that the Den Uyl-Rasmussen response, which in essence faults Nozick's critique for failing to appreciate the neo-Aristotelian character of Rand's argument, doesn't exist.)

The articles in The Personalist did have to go through a peer-review process, which is more than can be said for social-media comments, the only "peer review" being the upvote/downvote format.

But it's not like academic-level discussions of Rand ended back in the '70s with articles in The Personalist.  How about stuff from this past decade?  Surely that wouldn't escape the notice of social media?  Based on discussions of Rand in venues like reddit, you'd never know whether such discussions occurred at all.

For starters, the authoritative Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy published an entry (2010, rev. 2016) on Rand.  It includes about as many references/leads as needed for a curious scholar to follow, including the 2006 book published by Cambridge University Press, Tara Smith's Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.  In all the time this book has been in publication, I've never seen a Rand-basher (on reddit or elsewhere) acknowledge the existence of this book.  But it's actual philosophy, not mere social-media output.

For back-and-forth between Objectivists and non-Objectivists in a serious and genuinely philosophical format, one can consult the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, including a volume on Rand's "pseudo-intellectual masturbatory piffle" titled Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand’s Normative Theory (2011).  No upvoting/downvoting with the essays here, just plain old philosophical inquiry by professionals based on the quality and merits of the arguments presented.

Then there is the Blackwell Companion to Ayn Rand, published in 2016.  (Wiley-Blackwell isn't exactly an obscure publisher of academic materials; moreover, I read their Companions to Plato, Aristotle, and Kant and found them worthwhile.)

Awareness of this literature is next to non-existent on social media, where Rand is bashed constantly.  What does this say about the value of social media?

(This isn't even to mention Leonard Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism (UO), which was in audio format only and priced in the hundreds of dollars for close to three decades, but which has been in book form for seven years now.  UO gets into the nitty-gritty of Objectivist method - the how of arriving at its content as distinct from the what of the content - and the most detailed non-Peikoff scholarship on Rand's method in the context of the history of philosophy points to its neo-Aristotelian character.  Rand's high estimate of Peikoff as teacher of her ideas - she wasn't keen on giving out endorsements lightly - combined with Objectivists' uniform insistence on the importance of this material to grasping the philosophy properly, might have pushed the Rand-bashers in a more intellectually responsible/honest direction when it came to material called Understanding Objectivism of all things, but that hasn't happened.  [And as UO makes rather abundantly clear, even long-time Objectivists have had issues with coming to grips with its method, which contextualizes the whole way of thinking about the philosophy itself.  Besides, it's not like Aristotelian method is appreciated by non-specialists, of which there are unfortunately way too many.])

(This isn't even to mention what Rand's relatively little coverage in academic circles does or doesn't imply.  What it doesn't imply is that most academic philosophers are even familiar enough with Rand to properly dismiss or ignore it.  The key issue here is familiarity.  Hospers was familiar enough with Rand to take her seriously....)

This brings me to one hotspot of philosophy-related internet toxicity, the /r/badphilosophy subreddit.  The sub is actually correctly advertised as "not a place for learns," and yet the point of the subreddit is to highlight examples of how not to do philosophy, which is in principle quite instructive in its own right.  There are other "badX" subreddits (history and economics, for instance) which serve such a purpose.  And the subreddit - true to its nihilistic adverstising - isn't exactly consistent when it comes to banning informative discussions.  And throughout the years Rand has been among its targets, signaling to any viewers that Rand is a toxic specimen for serious philosophers to avoid.  And so we get comments like this one, with more than 20 upvotes:

Elder_Cryptidthe reals = my feels 21 points 2 days ago
I can't tell which I'm more insulted by; the notion that anything Ayn Rand did could be qualified as revolutionary or the notion that anything Ayn Rand did could be qualified as philosophy.

The intent of this comment is belied by the evidence presented above.  It itself is the very example of bad philosophy the subreddit is supposed to poke fun at - indeed, the very irony which the subreddit engages in to the point where, in many cases, satire cannot be distinguished from genuine content.  (Incidentally, one of the comments links to this twitter account, which in keeping with the format there supplies low-effort content to many thousands of low-effort users.  Philosophy books or journal articles, online or otherwise, may not stimulate the pleasure-centers the way toxic social media does, but they're more intellectually edifying.)  So much for social media as an arbiter of truth-value.

Is Harvard a safe space?

It's paywalled, but an WSJ piece from a couple days ago -
Title IX’s Witness Intimidation:
(Sub-headline: 'In a culture that presumes guilt, honest testimony on behalf of the accused can carry a high price') -
outlines how a student at Harvard can face negative repercussions for daring to testify on behalf of the accused in the now-ill-reputed, Obama-mandated academic processes for adjudicating sexual-assault cases.  Tanaya Devi, a doctoral candidate in economics, has faced social shunning for doing so.  Does Harvard do anything to discourage such nastiness?  Apparently not.  Is Harvard institutionalizing dishonesty?

Also: doing a google search for "harvard wsj defend accused" yields results pertaining to Harvard's admissions policies which discriminate against Asian applicants.  (Let's face it: under any definition of racism, including the left's Newspeak version - "it's racism only if it involves a power structure" - this is racist; Harvard's power to confer status on its graduates is undeniable.)  It appears that Harvard's way of penalizing Asian applicants is through its "personality score."  Isn't that dishonest on its face?  Is Harvard institutionalizing dishonesty?

If Harvard is pulling this kind of shit, it's hard to see how the rest of academia (save for Hillsdale, I guess?) doesn't follow suit.

How much is an Obama endorsement worth?

(Okay, I guess I'm not totally giving up on spreading philosophy after all; I just can't resist.  But it may not be pretty from here on out, ha ha.)

Former president Barack Obama endorsed AOC in last year's mid-terms.  You can look it up.  What does an endorsement mean, exactly?  You figure it out.  But come 2020, an Obama endorsement of a Dem candidate will amount to jack shit.  He squandered his endorsement-credibility big-time, the goddamn fool.

Anyway, AOC's 'Green New Deal' [link added 2/9] is completely idiotic and immoral.  (Think of it like a Soviet 5-year plan, only 10 years this time.  Like all socialisms, it begins with "good" intentions and ambitions but turns ugly in practice, and fast.)  So much for her superior moral compass.  She's not just a dolt, she's a moral dolt.  Many people would die if it were implemented.  It couldn't be implemented, just as pure socialism could never be implemented.  The closest that anyone tried was Mao with his 'Great Leap Forward': scores of millions of people perished through famine.  Do the socialism-embracing millennials have a clue?  Now they have to redefine 'socialism' to mean Scandinavia to maintain a semblance of credibility, except there are free markets in Scandinavia.  And now AOC want's to abolish those, plus seize the imaginary proceeds to fund Scandinavian-style welfare (the moral-dolt part...).

AOC doesn't care about doing her homework before coming up with a policy position.  Did she do any homework for her so-called Econ degree from Boston U.?  Exactly how lazy a student was she?  What is a degree from Boston U. worth?  About as much as an Obama endorsement?  Did she ever read a word of Mises or Hayek?  Did she spend a minute in the HB section of her university library?  (How about the B section, where any serious student of the liberal arts would spend oodles of time?)  These are legitimate questions.

If she had done her homework, she would know that homework-doing people like NASA's James Hansen propose nuclear power as a viable alternative to fossil fuels if we really want to get serious about combating their evident effects on climate change

[Edit 2/8: it appears that details about nuclear energy in AOC's 'Deal' are hard to come by this early on. (Shitty mainstream media.)  No matter; I can just 'do the AOC thing' and recklessly and unaccountably assert things about it, right?] [Edit 2/9: the text of the 'Deal', now linked above, doesn't mention nuclear, but: "The ultimate goal is to stop using fossil fuels entirely, Ocasio-Cortez's office told NPR, as well as to transition away from nuclear energy."  ffs, nuclear would be required to make this proposal credible, and AOC's track record already sucks credibility-wise.]

Any 'Green New Deal' would be especially idiotic if it required the USA to make changes unilaterally while nations like China continue their carbon-intensive ways.

She just doesn't fucking care about what's realistic, does she.  (Echoing the rightists who embraced Palin for VP, "she has the right valyoos" and for such mentalities that's all that matters.)  Just always remember, though: Obama endorsed AOC.  How fucking stupid is he?

The left - however you care to define it, be it the commies, the socialists, the socialists-lite (i.e., the "mainstream" left), the pinkos, the pomos, the SJW intersectionalists, Ta Nehisi-Coates, the Democrat Party, "progressives," CNN, MSNBC, the lower-IQ university disciplines, the "higher-IQ" disciplines at Boston U., the University of Pennsylvania (where did the anti-Waxers ever get the idea that their anti-debate, strawman, outrage-mob approach was appropriate, and for an academic setting no less, I wonder?), social media moral-outrage mobs, Obama - are in intellectual free-fall.  The evidence is all over the place.

Was it bound to happen, given the nature of leftism?  Yes.  Leftists have shit the bed time and time again, and it's high time we all figured out why.  They're shit at dialectic and doing their homework.  Applying Mises' dictum about Marxoids to socialists/leftists generally: they cling to socialism/leftism and stubbornly refuse to listen to its critics because they want socialism/leftism for emotional reasons.  Whatever usefulness lefties had when it came to civil rights (including some form or other of equal legal treatment for gay couples - although even Ted Olson is a conservative), is now outlived.  Even on cannabis legalization - where the Blue States are well ahead of the Red Ones (Red States can be stupid, too, and it's high time to figure out why) - the libertarians have been way ahead of them this whole time.

Leftists don't do philosophy these days; they do political activism first and foremost, with the smallness of intellect that comes with that.  In lieu of Better Living Through Philosophy, they've reduced themselves to offering Better Living Through Big Government.  Pathetic.

Before you know it, lefties will be debating (amongst only themselves, before insisting the results lightning-fast on everyone else) whether it is transphobic to regard "She is a good man" as linguistically incorrect.

Obama endorsed AOC, after all.  He gave the accelerated intellectual free-fall the green light.

This is on him.

[Addendum: (a fresh facebook comment of mine)  I propose entertaining the hypothesis that the nature of leftism itself is to degenerate into a toxic version of itself over time. The higher-ed (sic) sector has devolved over time into something more and more insulated from conservative/libertarian/capitalist thought and I have doubts that the more reasonable 'liberals' know how to contain the degeneration (without taking 'rightist' ideas a lot more seriously, giving them an honest hearing...which leads if not to Rand then to more academically-beefed up versions like the Dougs [Den Uyl and Rasmussen] and Sciabarra who tend toward dialectical completeness). The 'liberal' left has the habit of mind that the coercive institution that is the state is a legitimate mechanism for "improving people's lives," and is short on ideas for how people can actually realize their potentials, Aristotelian-like, via the mediating institutions of civil society as well as irreducibly individual initiative.  Both are bad habits of thought that, left unchecked, very probably lead to toxicity.  "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied in time a thousandfold." [Aristotle] What if the truly best minds in political philosophy have already gravitated toward Aristotelian and Randian and libertarian and better strains of conservative thought [e.g., Krauthammer, a Democrat until the 1980s - what's the rest of the Democrats' excuse?], leaving the left with only the superficial semblance of having the best minds?  Their hubris combined with insulation from serious debate already tells a lot of the story.  Not even to mention the minds that go into the business world. Hence my hypothesis.]

Why don't people learn? Why bother?

My blogging over the past couple months has been magisterial but has had next to zero impact despite various efforts to promote it in various different online venues.  Even philosophy for children, an obvious no-brainer to anyone who takes a good look at the research, meets inertia (or even, in some cases, refusal to take a good look at the research).  All while a shitshow of culpable dysfunction streams across my data sources on a daily, hourly basis.  It has made me angry, frustrated and discouraged to say the least.  (Evidently I don't possess the wisdom....)

This all got me to thinking, and I realized . . .

Plato wrote his Republic, Aristotle created his monumental body of work, and Jesus delivered a message of love over three thousand years ago.  The materials have been available all this time, and yet people have only managed to partly get their act together in all that time.  The Republic has a pretty simple message - that philosophy or love of wisdom can transform people's lives for the better - and yet people have managed every which way to miss that point.  "Philosopher-King?  How outlandish is that?"  Then they manage to miss the point that Marcus Aurelius, a non-obscure figure in the history of philosophy, was also a Roman emperor.

The American Framers were philosophers, as I have pointed out.  Yet their legacy has been squandered and we have the political clown-car we witness today.

It's obvious that the internet hasn't made people better thinkers/knowers; it's only made available more data for people to ignore as pleases their biases.

Rand-bashers are as big of pieces of shit as ever, refusing to understand what she actually said, despite the ever-mounting evidence that she is worth taking very seriously, evidence as easily accessible as ever.

"Progressives," who run the schools, are too full of themselves to have figured out that the path to greatest progress for humankind is philosophy, in which case they would be promoting the study of philosophy rather than envy-driven 70+ percent tax rates on people who do work that no one else can.

It's not like a lot of the message Plato and Aristotle delivered about the benefits of philosophy for humankind is difficult to grasp; it's not like we're dealing with Leibniz's monadology here or something.  It's a fucking no-brainer.

It's like they're casting pearls before swine.

I give up.

In the queue: Trump's alleged racism and...

Fresh off the digital presses, copypasting from an email (with a few key weblinks added and text additions in brackets):

I now have in my head for the blogging queue the subject of whether Trump is a racist. I'd indicated in a previous couple blog posts that the evidence supports a low to medium probability that he is a racist. The only good piece of evidence that I know of is the policy of his housing company in the early '70s that got him in legal jeopardy. (Question: Is someone who engages in racial discrimination for monetary/business reasons thereby a racist? What if that's the only solid data point we have to go on and it's nearly 50 years old?  [Nevertheless, this piece of evidence has the virtue of being evidence of something he did, not just of what he said, where Dems have applied the policy of assuming worst.]) The other data points that the Democrats use only serve to support my claim that the Democrats are an intellectual basket case - or, that the evidence that they are an intellectual basket case exceeds the evidence that Trump is racist. There are legitimate alternate explanations for any number of the racially-charged statements he's made [his political inexperience, say; or any number of zany things he's said in the campaign and elsewhere which he subsequently backed off from, say; his penchant for over-the-top rhetoric, say; his being an equal-opportunity offender, say], which *Democrats didn't bother to consider* before jumping to the conclusion that they're evidence of racism. This damns the Democrats more than anything. The fact that one could bring up alternative explanations and *then* have them debate those explanations doesn't erase the fact that they didn't bother previously.

This has a lot to do with the Dems being in an echo-chamber and not listening to the other side. This ties into the lack of viewpoint diversity on campus. Do you know about the ugly episode at U Penn with Prof. Amy Wax? I don't see any evidence that the Dems/lefties/"progs" want to face up to what happened there, and the "trigger" there ("bourgeois values") was even less than anything Trump ever said. This also ties into the thoroughly slimy approach the Dems took to smearing Kavanaugh, and definitely ties into the standards of evidence assessment they used there. I will submit in the post that their standards for convicting Kavanaugh is the same as their standard for convicting Trump, which means their intellectual credibiltiy is shot.

Whataboutism about the GOP (the fact that it nominated Trump, say [even if he was supposedly the only candidate who could "beat HRC"]) won't help the Dems' credibility (who looked the other way from their candidates' setting up that server without so much as seeking State Dept. approval - which she would not have gotten - and all the wikileaks stuff). The Dems pride themselves on that intellectual and moral superiority, a false pride they derive from their campus experience in good part, but there's no good evidence that they have an edge over the GOP. A comparison of the WSJ and NYT op-ed pages can confirm this. Speaking of which, the NYT signed Bret Stephens over from the WSJ well over a year ago and the numerous times I've looked at the NYT pages since he hasn't appeared there, even though he's better than the names I keep seeing there. What gives?

Before I even get to the topic of Trump's alleged racism blog-wise, though, I'll probably address the question of whether the average American is intellectually equipped to assess the evidence properly - they'd have to get into being able to define 'racism' adequately for example - and to address that question one would need to examine what the current American cultural/intellectual infrastructure is like compared to, say, a generation or two ago. I will use as one obscure but important data point the fact that Mortimer Adler's monumental works 'Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought' and 'Great Treasury of Western Thought' are out of print and there is no adequate substitute for them. The fact that there is not a (well-known) public intellectual comparable to Adler('s level of learning) around right now is troubling. (That's even before considering the lack of any adequate well-known substitutes around these days for Rand.)

[Addendum: What a month, huh?]