[This post might serve as a proto-version or background material for a planned future posting or writing on "Rand and philosophy," which would be Part 2 of such a project (a full version of which would involve a comparison/contrast, i.e., integration/differentiation, of Rand with numerous canonical figures in the history of philosophy, and that requires lots of research); Part 1, "Background timeline/players," is already available here. As if Part 1 weren't enough on its own to give a strong indication of what a bunch of intellectual malefactors Rand-bashers are....]
Now, key terms of method in Objectivism are context, integration and hierarchy. Now, it would be nice to helpfully summarize in the space of a blog post what these concepts are all about, but I don't know how to do such a summary at this point. But these concepts have (more or less) to do with how to discipline one's mind to arrive at a thoroughly validated picture of the world. In fact, I can't think of any serious criticism of these disciplinary strictures to be found, anywhere, ever, and the reason for this is a little secret that (unfortunately) few are in on:
The Objectivist methodological strictures are philosophic method proper.
Establishing the proper context for one's concepts, to establish the relationship of that concept within a system of concepts, and to establish the place of a concept within a hierarchy of concepts, and doing this in a fully systematic and disciplined way . . . how does this differ from philosophic method as such?
All I know is, by adhering to the methodological strictures involved here, I've developed the ideas as they've appeared on this blog, covering a rather vast range of subject matter under a relatively few number of philosophical principles. Indeed, I've come to the rock-bottom, can't-go-any-further stuff, as it were, as it pertains to philosophical education of a citizenry as a major remedy for the ills it faces. I've arrived at a theme of fundamental importance: Better Living Through Philosophy. I've developed a sensibility about the study of the history of philosophy that respects the principle of charity and/or Dennett/Rapoport Rules. (I consider such things a matter of proper application of context-keeping: what, e.g., was the intellectual context within which, say, Spinoza or Kant was operating, and how does that relate to, or integrate with, the intellectual context of other thinkers such as Aristotle or Rand? And how does one properly differentiate and integrate such concrete particulars as these four thinkers along various axes of measurement?) I've also arrived at the idea that both philosophic method proper and the Rand-Peikoff themes about method are ways of expressing an intellectual perfectionism, and that such a perfectionist theme is at the core of the philosophical vision of the good life (whatever else is included in or subsumed under this vision).
Now, if the things that Rand and Peikoff say about method are another way of formulating what it is to engage in the method of philosophy as such - in a way that hasn't been explicated by other philosophers in history (else we'd be hearing all about context, integration and hierarchy when studying the history of philosophy) - then acknowledging such a point puts Rand-bashers in a bit of a bind: How can such philosophically negligible figures arrive at such sound methodological principles that are virtually synonymous with philosophic method?
But let's say that Rand-bashers can exercise enough good faith to figure out that these thinkers aren't the philosophically negligible lightweights the bashers pretend them to be, and they're still interested in criticizing Rand. Well, what better way to put Rand and her defenders on their heels than to show that something Rand said or argued fails to properly adhere to her own methodological advice? Then they would be effective in doing so. But note here that if "A is A" - that if Objectivist method and philosophic method are one and the same thing - then all they're really saying is that Rand, in failing to adhere to her own stated methods, is also failing to do philosophy properly (or as well as she could do it).
My advice would be for the Rand-bashers to give up their bad-faith anti-Rand position and go right for the jugular - that, e.g., Rand's argument for a standard of value or a system of virtues doesn't comport with her stated method. They would be doing the more productive thing which is to acknowledge (a la the Dennett/Rapoport Rules) where Rand is strong (indeed, very strong) before getting to their criticism. They would also have before them the task of figuring out how it is that, if philosophic thought is indeed properly all about keeping context and respecting hierarchy, philosophers other than Rand/Peikoff hadn't formulated philosophic method in those terms. (All I know is, framing one's thinking methods in those terms has been very helpful to me in thinking philosophically. This is a genuine experience that no amount of Rand-bashing from someone else can erase. So to hell with the bashers, they haven't a clue, although they have it within themselves to get one.)
So basically to criticize Rand effectively you also have to concede that there's something about her/Peikoff's thought and writing that's unassailable, and that this something is very fundamental to her thought. This is an example of going where the argument leads, even if one initially thinks that where the argument leads (that Rand/Peikoff are right on philosophically fundamental matters) would be a real bummer, a blow to one's low estimate of Rand. So, whether or not the Rand-bashers are prepared now to follow the argument here where it leads, one can raise the legitimate question: would they ever be prepared to follow the argument here where it leads, as intellectual honesty would require? Are they seriously prepared to entertain the suggestion that they simply got it very wrong about Rand? Are they seriously prepared to acknowledge that intellectual perfectionism leads them to recognize that Rand endorsed intellectual perfectionism as a way of life?
And, heck, once they grasp in basic form the idea that Rand's entire ethical system - her concept of egoism - basically has this intellectual perfectionism as its formal characteristic, where does this leave them qua Rand-bashers and qua intellectually credible commentators? (An alternative route in which they attack the principle of intellectual perfectionism itself doesn't sound viable; how would such an attack not be self-defeating? Put another way, philosophy always buries its undertakers. As anyone who's thought this through carefully knows, philosophy is foundational to the hierarchy of knowledge which is why the conceptual hierarchy of wikipedia leads one ultimately to philosophy. We also have Rand herself emphasizing this point in her own discussions of philosophy itself, and in releasing a lecture/article as well as a book under the title/theme "Philosophy: Who Needs It." Why the f isn't a critical mass of philosophers writing books and articles along these lines, as is arguably their moral imperative to do given the implications for human flourishing and/or respect for humanity?)
On the merits, the prospects for Rand-bashing at any time in the future are exceedingly slim to none. (This says something not so good about the intellectual character of Rand-bashers.) This leaves room only for the usual ordinary give-and-take forms of criticism, but even there, given what I'm saying above, it vindicates Rand/Peikoff on fundamentals and necessarily narrows the scope of what can be criticized (since we already saw above that you can't coherently attack intellectual perfectionism, context-keeping, etc., which cannot be separated from Rand's egoism as understood the way a Dennett/Rapoport-caliber critic would understood it, i.e., as she understood it).
I take issue with Rand's largely polemical approach to the history of philosophy, and I'd say this is a very ripe area where one can take issue with Rand using all the proper tools of philosophy and/or her own method. What I'm not clear on is how one could prove that her case against Kant is lousy and also have this be a critique of her own, intellectual-perfectionist egoism. It really strikes me as an area where the things she says are not tied inherently to the fundamentals of her system, the way (e.g.) her new concept of egoism is tied to its intellectual-perfectionist fundamentals.
(This parenthetical turned into a lengthy digression: Follow the argument where it leads? That's an egoistic attitude in Rand's framework. It's in one's rightly-understood interests - one's right desires - to have right opinion about the world. Does such a concept of egoism turn out to be vacuous or uninteresting? Is that the best critique we might arrive at? Why not call the intellectual-perfectionist philosopher who experiences no conflict between feeling or inclination/desire and virtue (this harmonious condition would be virtue proper, and not incontinence or continence or akrasia) a shmegoist? How does egoism/schmegoism not then line up with morality proper, thereby making the "egoism" concept superfluous, not explanatory of anything, or something like that? What work does the concept of egoism do here? IOW: why not just call it "schmegoism" instead, and define a schmegoist as anyone who fulfills his rightly understood interests? I think it has to do with Rand's tight formal connection between actor and beneficiary in the sense that the actor is the rightful beneficiary of activity directed toward the good life. So if universalizability (Kantian or otherwise) is a formal constraint on good-life-directed activity, then acting in accordance with such constraints would fulfill the actor's rightly-understood interests and the actor would be the beneficiary (in some non-vacuous sense) of this universalizability-respecting action. Now, I've made a published case that Rand's argument for rights involves a form of universalizability-reasoning; she employed it in her own writings as a matter of what a logically consistent actor does. At the same time, the case I made also holds that Rand's egoism itself involves such universalizability reasoning, as a matter of context-keeping - what are the requirements for life qua man, any individual man and not just John G., say - and that the common grounding requirement for life qua man - something about the ability to direct one's own intellect in the characteristically human act of thinking, free of external compulsion - points to both egoism (Randian form) and to rights. This all becomes very tightly bound up: egoism grounds rights and respect for rights informs what it is to be a (Randian) egoist, and to escape any circularity here we need to acknowledge something about formal characteristics of a good human life (namely, freedom) that is fundamental to the case for both (Randian) egoism and rights. The very point of a code of values is to achieve happiness and to achieve happiness you need to life according to the requirements of life qua man, and both happiness and life-qua-man are roughly synonymous with rational self-interest, but when we fill this in with substantive content we get (among other things) rights, which philosophers had traditionally said is not an outcome of egoism (traditionally construed). If we use Aristotelian notions of eudaimonia or self-actualizing, the social component of one's individual flourishing becomes integral to the good-life picture. In any event, it seems of crucial importance to understanding why Rand uses the term "egoism" that it specifies the individual actor as the proper beneficiary of that actor's efforts - that the social components of the flourishing life redound to the benefit of the actor. It's just that this flourishing life not only doesn't look like egoism traditionally construed (and it definitely doesn't, otherwise Aristotelian ethics would traditionally be identified as an egoism and not just a eudaimonism) but it also incorporates others' interests in such a way that it becomes something of an issue why one would bother to use the term "egoism" where such putatively egoistic behavior involves taking a great interest in the self-actualizing of others. Rand would probably put in terms of there being a community grounded in virtue (and virtue in essence is, or is expressive of, intellectual perfection). Galt's Gulch might be such a society. But then we're rather far removed from any of the usual lines of strawman-like criticisms of Rand as an advocate of some sort of asocial or atomized "individualism." We basically have an Aristotelian ethics updated to specify the proper beneficiary of eudaimonic activity as ultimately the actor herself and in which the actor makes free judgments based on her own unique and individualized hierarchy of values as to how to "fit" the (eudaimonic) interests of others into her value-scheme. The objectivity of human values requires that values be freely chosen based on the actor's hierarchy of values, which excludes the "altruistic" alternative in which some alien set of values is demanded or imposed (by force) on the individual irrespective of how those values are supposed to integrate with the actor's own. The "altruistic" alternative is a form of intrinsicism where the "values" to be acted upon are imposed from without, i.e., without respect for the context of the individual's own knowledge and decision-making. Here we are back to that basic methodological concept, context. This stuff really is all tightly interconnected in Rand and its appeal should be plenty clear to those who do their homework and think this through. Just from this post there are leads to any number of closely interconnected concepts: context, life qua man, judgment, intellectual perfection, interests, objectivity, virtue. It just rings to me at this point that without some well-developed understanding of the interrelationship of all these concepts, one is unlikely to understand what Rand was really up to in her philosophical writings. You might as well glide your eyes over the pages of her writings without integrating any of it. I'm coming to think - with the aid of some secondary scholarship - that Hegel's system has a similar feature whereby the web of (perhaps mutually-supporting) conceptual interrelations in his system can't be approached in a casual manner with any expectation of serious grasp or understanding. The further complication in Hegel's case is his abstruse presentation - its needless abstruseness is in evidence by the fact that secondary scholars seem to be able to translate his verbiage into more accessible terms. So . . . can someone like Hegel much less Aristotle be construed as an egoist in Rand's terms? I guess it all comes down to whether or not one understands egoism in terms of the beneficiary-criterion spelled out above with reference to the individual's own rationally- and hence freely-integrated hierarchy of values. So applying the "schmegoism?" challenge and pursuing that where the argument leads, do we still get anything like a serious critique of Rand that should lead to some kind of dismissive attitude toward her work? We certainly don't seem to be going down any line of careful argument or critique that we'd expect from a Rand-basher, and we certainly seem to end up tying a lot of Rand's ethical concepts back to formal characteristics like intellectual perfectionism and context-keeping, which no one can coherently reject.)
So, to sum up, I think to criticize Rand effectively one must by necessity make a number of concessions about Rand's greatness as a thinker, in such a way that she enters squarely into the conversation with the likes of Aristotle and Hegel (would that she weren't such a shallow Hegel-basher?) and with the rest of the philosophical canon on some issues of fundamental philosophical importance. As opposed to the usual criticisms of Rand of downright terrible quality that are all over the internet, what we should end up with instead is a treatment of Rand by philosophers much as they treat the other philosophers in the canon: with careful, context-respecting, principle-of-charity commentary. In other words, the kind of effective criticism of Rand that might be made is almost nonexistent to date. Nozick and Huemer deserve credit for proceeding as philosophers should proceed. (Note a key feature in common here: they're libertarians, assessing the strengths of various different arguments for libertarian ideas. So they have a motivation that is probably not to be found all that widely among non-libertarian philosophers.) Rand-bashers typically will cite Nozick and Huemer without acknowledging the responses to their arguments. (Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" doesn't address the way actual Objectivists reason about things, so there's a rather glaring problem there as far as criticism goes. As things I've said above indicate, Rand's egoism entails, among other things, universalizability constraints and even empathy, if you can believe it. The Rand-basher will take Huemer's "Objectivist in a hurry" argument as the final word, as though Objectivists haven't come up with any kind of rebuttal in over 20 years. The Rand-basher will also "somehow" fail to recognize the existence of the Den Uyl and Rasmussen rebuttal to Nozick, which is quite effective as pushback goes.) But at the very least the Nozick argument and the published rebuttal to it are an example of how people of a philosophical sensibility can argue about the merits of Rand's ideas, and that's even without touching upon the methodological core of Objectivism (distilled more or less in chapter 4 of OPAR, if a single published resource is what you're looking for).
Rand's writings stand outside of the philosophical "tradition" or "canon" in certain ways; they stand especially outside of the academic mode of philosophical writing with its abundant footnotes and whatnot. (I readily imagine referees calling Rand to task for her controversial yet undocumented characterization of, e.g., Aristotle's view about value-justification in "The Objectivist Ethics." But as a paper delivered at an academic symposium - which it was - it does overall the job it's supposed to do, and it presents a serious alternative to the dominant ethical positions of the time (1961), enough so as to place "The Objectivist Ethics" within the neo-Aristotelian, virtue-ethical canon that was nearly nonexistent in 1961. I can understand the professionals at the time not taking up Rand on her virtue-ethical alternative, given the relative unfamiliarity to them of the conceptual structure of virtue ethics. And while Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958) gets plenty of acknowledgment and credit for being a seminal virtue-ethical essay, I don't get the impression that Anscombe's essay was widely credited or embraced at the time. (Did Veatch's Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962) get much traction either?) But now it is canonized after the philosophical community has had time to come to grips with it. Well, the philosophical community has had plenty of time (given the three-year proximity of the two essays, although the essentials of Rand's argument were originally published before Anscombe's, in a 1957 fiction book) to come to grips with Rand's argument as well. Those in the community don't seem to have come up with a compelling refutation of it, or a reason to dismiss it as unserious. But there are a relatively few of those in the community (again, listed here) who have come to analyze Rand's argument and find merits in it, and even to debate its merits in published forums such as the first volume of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies series. So the attention and discussion is happening, just not all that much. But this notion that there's some vast divide between the respective merits of Anscombe's and Rand's articles is little other than a myth peddled by people with anti-Rand biases. The differing amounts of serious attention paid to these two articles among academic philosophers might have to be explained by something other than their respective merits.) Rand was by an large hostile to how the academy was doing philosophy, the main exception being her relationship to Hospers. (Whatever exactly the academy was doing wrong in Rand's view, I don't really have a good idea - my best guess is that it supposedly indulges in methodologically-inferior "rationalism" or play with concepts not rooted in concrete, readily accessible and practical reality - but evidently she didn't think Hospers was part of that problem.) So for a philosophical community not already committed to Rand or even the Aristotelian tradition to take up a figure such as Rand would require overcoming certain barriers, to communication or otherwise. Time and priorities might even dictate more or less the course of action many philosophers are on already, such that they're more inclined to focus their energies and interests on Aristotle's own writings. The Aristotelian virtue-ethical tradition has seen a revival in academia, after all, which is all for the (ahem) good. It just seems to me (and to many Rand-fans who are academic philosophers) that this revival can be further sped up and enhanced by incorporating Randian insights into the virtue-ethical framework - e.g., her emphatic intellectual perfectionism which ties into her core methodological commitments; or, the specific virtues (e.g., independence, integrity, productiveness) Rand sets forth as essential. But the wheels of research turn slowly; how exactly does a philosopher go about setting the virtue-ethics tradition in relation to, say, the themes of Parfit's On What Matters?
And here I was supposed to be getting back to the Oxford Handbook of Spinoza already. I've done written enough in this one post as it is. Long story short, you basically have to invoke Rand's greatness in order to deny it, so you might as well affirm it (and then, if you want to critique her, make a case showing in effect that she might have been greater, although that opens up another can of worms; let's just say for now that if Rand had had a Plato-caliber teacher, for purposes of perfecting the art of dialectic, of course, she may well have been as great as Aristotle; given what she did have to work with as teachers/associates and circumstances go, what good reason is there to think she didn't do her very best?).
