I was thinking recently about the debates (rather limited ones, given the nature of all the entities concerned) I've had with Objectivists online who adopted the Rand/Peikoff line against Kant; the debates concerned the idea that Rand was wrong in some major ways about Kant (most obviously the claim that he was "the most evil man in mankind's history" - remember, this is Immanuel Kant whom Rand is talking about here). The main point I usually try to make in these debates is that if you apply the principle of charity to his writings (see also: Dennett/Rapoport Rules) in the very same way that Objectivists rightly demand that Rand's commentators or critics apply to her writings (which with rare exceptions they never do), then you probably won't get the same sweeping conclusions about Kant that Rand/Peikoff did.
For example, a Kant-bashing session that makes light of his sharp dichotomy between acting from inclination and acting from duty, but doesn't bring into consideration his ideal of a Kingdom of Ends, much less other foundational and difficult things that informed Kant's argument, doesn't conform to the principle of charity or the Dennett/Rapoport Rules.
A series of polemical attacks that make minimal specific reference to or quotation from original materials, is unlikely to conform to the principle of charity or the Rules. Unless I'm mistaken, Rand made one direct quote from Kant in the entirety of her anti-Kant writings, and it is a quote that any Kant scholar would tell you requires a context of understanding that Rand's polemical attack doesn't demonstrate a grasp of. (Amazingly enough, when I make reference to serious Kant scholars, the Kant-bashing Objectivists don 't think this carries any serious epistemic weight. It's as though the Kant scholars' expertise on the subject should have no bearing on whether one's interpretations of Kant are sound, even though the very concept of expertise has to do with whether someone has come to a sound grasp of the subject matter. But an appeal to expertise is perfectly legitimate in its proper context, just as it is perfectly legitimate for me to point out that serious Rand scholars don't take 99% of criticisms of Rand seriously, since the quality of those criticisms - usually based on a sloppy "understanding" of Rand's words - is so low. The appeal to expertise is nothing other than an appeal to: "This is what people who've studied the subject indepth have come to conclude, but of course this is defeasible if you come up with a better interpretation than theirs, with - of course - specific reference to a canonical data-set about that topic."
Or, to take the most extreme claim about Kant that Rand makes - that he is supremely evil - it would help her case if she could specifically respond to the arguments Kant presents in the Antinomy of Pure Reason, a kind of lynchpin to his argument that we don't have epistemic access to any supersensible realm. But I've never gotten a Kant-bashing Objectivist to address what's going on in the Antinomy portion of the first Critique. This should be as much of a red flag as when a Rand-basher can't or won't deal specifically and head-on with matters especially of method that longtime students of Objectivism (and of courses like Peikoff's Understanding Objectivism, much less the Rand-endorsed 1976 course The Philosophy of Objectivism) are versed in well enough to know how the method-issues drive everything else in Rand/Peikoff's writings.
(And there's no good, non-self-defeating argument against Rand on these methodological issues. Sciabarra's method-focused and exhaustively researched 1995 book, Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, shows how seriously Rand should be taken in the context of the history of thought, and no rebuttal of its central thesis has happened or could happen. You just don't mess with dialectical method or systematic context-keeping without being self-defeating, is all. [The criticisms of his book from the 'orthodox' Objectivist faction surrounding Peikoff didn't address the substance of that the methodological theme but rather Sciabarra's placement of Rand in intellectual history. I'm not going to say that these criticisms were in the spirit of the principle of charity or the Rules, either.])
Part of the issue here is - to borrow a formulation from Maverick Philosopher - that polemics, while often appropriate to the adversarial realm of the political, are not appropriate to the properly collaborative realm of the philosophical. Unless there is uncontrovertible evidence that a supposed philosopher is presenting dishonest arguments, then the proper approach isn't polemical. (And there is no way around applying thoroughly the principle of charity or the Rules to arrive at the conclucion that an argument is being presented dishonestly. Once one does arrive at a conclusion that an argument is being presented dishonestly, then one should also drop the identification of the dishonest arguer as a philosopher; such a person is more accurately called a sophist.)
But here's the problem I'm leading to here: Many, many "rank and file" folks in an intellectual movement are not philosophers either by profession or by temperament. Their loyalty is often to the ideas of the movement, sometimes even to the leading personages of the movement. It's no accident that the leading academic philosophers of Objectivism have also not gotten in on the Kant-bashing act. Not only is it a matter of professional suicide if one took the Rand/Peikoff line on Kant, but just as a matter of standard academic protocol where the charity principle and the Rules are (by the nature of the discipline) encouraged to a maximal feasible extent. (Note: in actual practice, the adherence to these standards are not consistent, uniformly and fairly applied, etc. Much as academic philosophers are lovers of wisdom, and pursue intellectual perfection, that is no guarantee that they will have achieved such perfection. Some academic philosophers are Rand-bashers, i.e., taking the route of hubris and mean-spiritedness over withholding judgment where they are ignorant [and demonstrably so]. Indeed, those who adopt such a hubristic and mean attitude are, to that extent, not even being philosophical.)
On the subject of Kant I'll put it this way: there isn't an academically-respectable path from Kant's texts to Rand's sweeping vilification of him. There's also the issue of specialization and priorities: Rand scholars in academia are usually too focused on obtaining an adequate grasp of Rand's ideas and related issues to attain expertise on Kant; unless they have a publishable criticism of Kant the prudent thing for them is to refer to the Kant literature, SEP entries, etc. And I don't expect any time soon to see Rand scholars publishing on Kant in a way that supports Rand's claims and conclusions about him.
But with a non-philosophical person - you'll find tons of these in politics within a stone's throw - such prudence, withholding of non-expert judgment, principle of charity or the Rules, etc., are not standard practice. And applying this to certain Objectivists/Randists who also display cult-like behaviors: they are more interested in adhering to Rand's claims/conclusions about Kant than they are about where the arguments on this matter would lead. If they lead to showing Rand being seriously wrong in her claims/conclusions about Kant, that may threaten the adherent's perception of Rand as a flawless reasoner. (If I say "Rand was a tremendous reasoner on a whole host of subjects, but..." the adherent is likely to have a knee-jerk reaction along the following sort of lines: "this is what Rand-bashers do; they offer a fig leaf before they go about trying to discredit Rand." I've met this reaction myself, notwithstanding all the Rand-promoting I do. It's kinda ridiculous....) I mean, given the integrated nature of human cognition, how can someone be really good about some things but not about others? How would someone so meticulous in formulating her own ideas on the basis of exhaustive induction and integration manage to slip up when it comes to representing what other philosophers have said? Note the key distinction here: formulating one's own ideas, vs. representing others'. I don't think it's hard to figure out how a disconnect might happen here.
Aristotle said of his teacher Plato that he loved him - but that he loved the truth even more. That's my basic attitude toward Rand. I have found Rand's system to be a tremendous engine of mental and philosophic integration. That doesn't mean that her anti-Kant polemics are worth much of anything, are conducive to learning and insight, etc. If there are good anti-Kant arguments out there, they're likely from others who've put in the research and made publishable arguments.
So if you're thoroughly willing to go where the argument leads - no matter where it leads - then that's a sign you may be a philosopher. If you're not willing to do so, you may be any number of other things: dogmatist, partisan, polemicist, follower, ideologue, loyalist. And as much as this thought began with Randian Kant-bashers, it's the Rand-bashers who may actually be among the worst of these un-philosophical types. At least Rand herself, as per what her philosophical and ethical principles dictate, put forward the maximal effort to get things right, which matters more in this context than actually getting things right. Error is one thing, evasion (which includes intellectual laziness) is another.
So there are at least two distinguishing features of the philosophical mindset that I've highlighted today (the first feature having been brought up here):
1. Being guided in life by a vision of the good (over and above what is pleasurable, fun, career-advancing, family-building or loyalty-encouraging [think of the Corleone family as a contrast case], powerful, popular, etc.)
2. Being willing to go wherever the argument leads
In this post I took at least one argument where it led: if one is (rightly) dismayed by the usual Rand-bashing tactics, one should see the same red flags in the way Rand and Rand-devotees bash Kant. And there seems to be a whole lot of people out there who are willing - indeed eager - to take exception to one but not the other, i.e., they're not willing to follow the argument where it leads. The underlying problem here is exemplified in all the hypocrisy in politics we all know about (and "it's the other party that's hypocritical, not mine" is itself part of that very hypocrisy, thereby rendering all the much less clear and distinct one's understanding of the phenomenon of hypocrisy one is otherwise inchoately aware of).
Anyway. doesn't a whole lot of argument ultimately lead to, say, advocacy of philosophy for children, and doesn't that lead to advocacy of philosophy for everyone and ASAFP? It's where I keep ending up time and time again, after all. (But I'd be willing to go wherever the argument leads, even if it leads (somehow) to a rejection of these things; right now the idea of that happening sounds like a real bummer but how would it be a bummer if that's where the argument leads? (And what about some argument that (somehow) shows that one shouldn't take an argument (or just any argument) where it leads? Hopefully such an argument contains coherent advice on whether to follow that argument or not, since incoherence is a real bummer.)
I'd like to get back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza now. (I still have Hurley's Natural Reasons to get to, as well. The wheels of research grind only so fast....)
[Edit: To take another example of Kant-bashing from Rand/Randians: she attributed to Kant the view that "because man's consciousness has a specific identity, it is an agent of distortion, i.e., that identity is the disqualifying element of consciousness: it's equivalent to saying that man is blind because he has eyes, deaf because he has ears, etc." Now, it would have been helpful had Rand tied this characterization to something, anything specific in Kant's texts, for some frame of reference, because I for one am at a loss as to where it is that Kant made such a line of argument. I've actually had defenders of Rand's Kant-bashing suggest that there isn't a problem about leaving the reader guessing here, that it's just a matter of common knowledge about Kant that this is an aspect of his system. [Turn the tables and apply the same kind of crap to "common knowledge" about Rand's ideas that aren't really knowledge, and you might see how I lose patience with this stuff.] I mean, I'm quite familiar with Kant's (in)famous distinction between the 'thing in itself' and its appearance or manifestation which may have a character different from the 'thing in itself' - and indeed we even seem to get such a logical absurdity in his system as a cause that is 'phenomenally' determined while 'noumenally' free (in which case the causal character of appearance and of the thing in itself are in direct conflict with one another, not merely that the character of the thing-in-itself cannot be said to have the range of qualities or determinations that the subject-conditioned appearance has; alternatively, to say that consciousness adds or guarantees qualities or determinations that we cannot attribute to the thing-in-itself is not the same as saying that consciousness generates or might well generate determinations that run counter to the character of the thing-in-itself; to say that noumenal freedom in the face of phenomenal determinism is a matter of "faith" does not resolve this problem, since not even "faith" can square a circle: either we are free or we are not). But because consciousness has identity, Kant somehow/somewhere claims that this is what gives rise to the appearance/thing-in-itself dichotomy, and that consciousness isn't merely an agent of conditioning of its object but of distortion? Something tells me that a critique of Kant's infamous distinction/dichotomy from someone like Hegel would be much more useful and informative. Something tells me that Kant scholars pay attention to critiques other than this apparently idiosyncratic one from Rand about "identity disqualifying consciousness."
Here's another one: Rand and Peikoff can't get their stories straight on the relation between desire and duty in Kant. Rand claims: "An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action." (This screams of strawman. The issue of benefit might be said to be incidental to Kant's criterion of moral value - expressed in the various formulations of the Categorical Imperative - but I don't think a single Kant scholar in the history of the planet would endorse or take at all seriously the interpretation about a benefit destroying the moral value of an action. Heck, in application of the CI, benefit comes back into the picture. It's just not foundational as the moral criterion for the CI, however. But you can certainly do something that benefits yourself, as a matter of respect for your own humanity, and Kant might even argue that this makes your action morally obligatory, a matter of duty. And Kant is plenty clear that a desire as such doesn't give rise to a moral imperative - that the desire has to be conditioned or constrained by the CI. At the very minimum there is a distinction shared by Rand and Kant and pretty much any moral philosopher in history, ever: the distinction between desire and right desire. There's no way Rand endorses a desire "out of context"; in fact she might describe this as "whim-worship.") But then, later, Peikoff says this: "In theory, Kant states, a man deserves moral credit for an action done from duty, even if his inclinations also favor it—but only insofar as the latter are incidental and play no role in his motivation. But in practice, Kant maintains, whenever the two coincide no one can know that he has escaped the influence of inclination. For all practical purposes, therefore, a moral man must have no private stake in the outcome of his actions, no personal motive, no expectation of profit or gain of any kind." So Peikoff concedes that "in theory" for Kant an inclination or desire doesn't destroy the moral value of an action. And so as if to seemingly save Rand's extreme claim to that effect, he introduces the "in practice" part, although that depends on the latter portion of the "in theory" part, where he makes the claim that for Kant an inclination can only be incidental and not part of the moral person's motivation. I suppose this reconciles the two characterizations that on their face don't seem to say the same thing (either desire or inclination destroys the action's moral value or it doesn't...), but it's fishy, and it still suffers from the strawman problem. There's also that whole matter of Kant's not using the term "happiness" the way that either Rand or the Greeks tended to use it; "flourishing" and "satisfaction of inclination" have different meanings, but Kant was going with the latter and it's not clear that Kant was well-versed in the Greeks on this point; details on this are in Aristotle, Kant, and the Stoics (Whiting and Engstrom, eds., CUP, 1996). I guess the best that might be said for Rand/Peikoff's polemics here is that they make a clear and bold stand against any moral theory, whether such a theory was in fact endorsed by Kant or not, that would tell us that inclination or desire is antithetical to moral motivation or that happiness is irrelevant to morality. So if Kant endorsed such a theory, then he is a bastard of sorts. Well, that's illuminating. I mean, who actually does endorse such a theory (under a non-strawman interpretation, of course)? Something tells me that moral philosophers tend to go out of their way to avoid ending up at such a psychologically implausible notion of moral motivation, or to avoid being mistaken for advancing such a notion. And of course none of the Rand/Peikoff characterizations of Kant account for the actual source of Kant's appeal and/or influence in ethical theory, which has a shit-ton more to do with the CI (both its grounds and application) than with some inclination/duty distinction which is really just another way of making a distinction - between desire and right desire (the latter usually grounded in reason) - endorsed by all moral philosophers. I just don't see anything in Rand's anti-Kant writings that moral philosophers can make use of that furthers their understanding in any way - unlike with her main writings on ethics, virtue, method, etc. See more on this in my subsequent post.]
