What quality Rand scholarship looks like

I've just had the pleasure of reading the first chapter of Volume Three of the Ayn Rand Society Philosophical Studies Series, Foundations of a Free Society: Reflections on Ayn Rand's Political Philosophy (2019).  It is by Darryl Wright (one of the members of the Society's steering committee), and is titled, "The Place of the Non-Initiation of Force Principle in Ayn Rand's Philosophy."  It is available as a free sample at the book's website.

(Polemical paragraph...)
It puts all the Rand-bashing hackery ranging from sloppy to reckless out there in a very different light.  Rand-bashing (as distinct from fair and honest criticism, which I anticipate in the later chapters of this book; the bashing basically characterizes Rand as a cruel hack herself who appeals only to pimply adolescents) is all blatantly dishonest, every last bit of it, and every Rand-basher qua such, without exception, is a blankety-blank lowlife.  Here is just one recent example of it at reddit's badphilosophy subreddit, a forum which purports to highlight and ridicule the myriad examples of usually-amateurish thinkers and ideas falling afoul of respectable and serious philosophical practice (supposedly Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris are egregious offenders in addition to Rand).  The blankety-blanks at the askphilosophy and main philosophy (sic) subreddits are little better when it comes to Rand.  (Reddit as a whole is toxic/leftist/structurally dishonest in its political aspect; its upvote/downvote model - itself structurally dishonest - is a lower-pleasure-indulging popularity contest rather than a truth-seeking mechanism.) There is no excusing said behavior given all the scholarship that's been available for decades now from professional philosophers/scholars demonstrating that Rand can be understood adequately by competent and careful interpreters, and the bashers will be judged accordingly in the eyes of history.  They have obstructed progress on the wider consideration of crucial neo-Aristotelian philosophical themes (as are in evidence in Wright's article, Den Uyl and Rasmussen's work, Tara Smith's book, Sciabarra's work, etc.).  Speaking of which, Volume Four of the Society's series, in preparation, is specifically focused on Rand's comparative relation to Aristotle, the man whom no one but philosophically ignorant STEM-lords and whatnot dare to bash (and whom, as the man said of his teacher Plato, not even the wicked have the right to praise).

One of the virtues of Wright's article is to situate Rand's thought within certain themes and controversies in philosophy as they've been traditionally approached.  It is particularly memorable how Wright masterfully summarizes (and it is only a summary or condensation) Rand's epistemology or theory of proper cognitive functioning - which, as any serious student of Objectivism knows, makes fundamental reference to the role of hierarchy and context in knowledge-formation.  I like his reference not just to concept-formation but concept-maintenance, an active ongoing process that incorporates new information.  It had always struck me as a bit odd how Rand and Objectivists would speak of the formation part without explicitly referencing the maintenance part.  Bashers might say that this is an example of Objectivists' being sloppy and incomplete, but the Objectivists (most of them, usually) are implicitly if not explicitly intellectual perfectionists doing the best with what time and resources they've got, no thanks to the so-called professional mainstream.

An example of where Wright ties themes in Objectivism to 'mainstream' disputes occurs on p. 38, footnote 26, where he brings up the familiar notion of observation being "theory-laden."  He ties this to the 'Objectivism-speak' about the "prior context of general knowledge that guides the assimilation of the evidence."  Another fine example of Wrights tying-in of themes is his characterization of Rand's concept of knowledge as awareness (Rand uses the phrase "mental grasp") as distinct from 'justified true belief.'  I remember back in the day (the previous century most likely, probably on Jimmy Wales' MDOP) first being introduced to the interpretation of Rand's conception of knowledge as awareness, and it had always struck me as very plausible or correct given the difficulties that arise with the traditional 'justified true belief' formulations.  It strikes me as one point on which epistemologists might take a helpful cue from Rand/Objectivists/Peikoff.  (Wright more than once references lecture 1 of Peikoff's Induction in Physics and Philosophy course, a lecture which also made a favorable impression on me.)

Wright raises an example of an item of genuine knowledge as follows:

"A concept classifies together a potentially unlimited class of the referents to which it applies, and an inductive generalization similarly purports to identify the attributes of or relations among an unlimited set of particular instances. For instance, a statement such as “The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” condenses a wide body of (ultimately perceptual) evidence and applies to an unlimited number of cases past, present, and future." (p. 35)

“The human body absorbs vitamin D from sunlight” is as incontrovertible an item of knowledge as any, which should tell you right off that skeptics are in the weeds and shouldn't be taken seriously.  The only issue of real concern is the how for arriving at/validating such an item of knowledge, which is a yuuuuge topic but . . . well, to apply the principle of induction here I'm going to go to the Series page at UPitt Press's website, click on the Concepts and Their Role in Knowledge: Reflections on Objectivist Epistemology (2013) link, go down to the sample link at the same location I found the Wright piece's sample link at the Foundations of a Free Society link, and voila, Gotthelf's article, "Ayn Rand’s Theory of Concepts: Rethinking Abstraction and Essence."  See?  Induction works.

One word to note in Wright's paragraph above - one that caught my attention when Peikoff used it in one of the early lectures of his Advanced Seminars on Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand course - is the word "condenses."  What conceptual knowledge/awareness does is to condense the vast range of perceptual observations/awareness, with higher-order abstractions or also what Rand terms abstraction from abstraction, condensing the more rudimentary concepts into broader classifications and ultimately into organized theories or sciences or episteme.  This condensation-function of concepts is referenced directly by Rand with her discussion of unit-economy.  I apply the principle of unit-economy a lot in my postings when I provide contextualizing hyperlinks so that all the content doesn't have to be reproduced in one blog post (since blog posts can get long enough as it is...).  They serve more as a file-folder (using Rand's imagery) to reference as the need arises.  (It helps to organize one's mental contents really well, in order to make the recall function that much more useful/effective.)  It's a very nice principle to have induced and to apply, since contextualization of bold and controversial-sounding claims (e.g., Rand-bashers qua such invariably are scum) is fucking great.

It should be pointed out that Wright's article situates Rand's principle of the non-initiation of force within her broader philosophical theory, i.e., it contextualizes it for purposes of what follows in the book.  The whole point of Rand's having formulated an epistemological theory (explicated in fuller detail in Peikoff's works, most importantly OPAR) is a practical one: in order for a human being to flourish most effectively, the human must exercise the conceptual/knowing faculty most effectively, for which the human requires a systematic guide for operating, i.e., for organizing mental contents.
This has something to do with the principle of dialectic, what Sciabarra identifies in fundamental terms as the art of context keeping, which has fundamentally to do with mental integration, which fundamentally guides the principle of the wikipedia hyperlinking format as I'm sure Wales was well aware of.  I mean, heck, Wales' introduction to Objectivism was the Lexicon.  Note also that Rand's description of the fundamentality of philosophy in human cognition is exactly-correctly reflected in the hierarchical fundamentality of philosophy in wikipedia's hyperlink structure.  So to recap: Wales induces an organizing principle from the Lexicon, applies it to the now-widely-used wikipedia, proves Rand right about philosophy's fundamentality, and the Rand-bashers have what to stand on, exactly?  Zilch.  Well, they do have a point (by accident) about her polemics (most notably her Kant ones), but they're way bigger offenders themselves in that regard, so they still lose.

As one might have induced from the above, the above organizes and condenses a lot of principles into a few paragraphs, buttressed by the presumptively-knowledge-expanding function of internet hyperlinking.  (In the internet age, what's the Rand-bashers' excuse, or the excuse for blatantly ignorant opinion-formation generally?)  The perfectionistic/perfective condensing habit takes cultivation and effort to form and maintain, and that effort is one of focusing one's mind, and it is this act of focus that is the irreducible fundamental element of human volition or free will.  As I'm sure Wright explains in full detail in his next chapter in Foundations for a Free Society, "Force and the Mind," and as Peikoff explains in detail in lecture 8 ("The Evil of the Initiation of Force") of his Objectivism Through Induction course, physical force is antithetical to this volitional knowledge-formation-and-maintenance process.

Force is the partly or wholly successful attempt to substitute the free and independent judgment of a person's mind/intellect with someone else's, and that is antithetical to the cognitive requirement of objectivity, i.e., of the necessary processing of mental contents for knowledge and decision-making in the service of one's life/flourishing.  (Rand introduces this point in the language of objectivity or of the objective/intrinsic/subjective triad in her essay, "What is Capitalism?" of which no one has even attempted a rebuttal in 50+ years, it's that definitive and final in the essentials.)  Rand uses the term "physical force" to emphasize that it is a physical action that severs the relation between the victim's (free) thoughts and (coerced) actions - the closest thing to an actual real-world duality or opposition between the mental and the physical, if you will.  See also my recent posting, "The core libertarian principle explained" for more.

To wrap up: now that this post has provided a flavor of what quality, clue-having Rand scholarship and Randian method looks like, we can safely flush the willfully clueless Rand-bashers down the toilet and safely give serious Rand scholars the attention and consideration they (and Rand) deserve.  (2019's other "scholarly," university-published (yikes) Rand book, leftist scumbag Lisa Duggan's Mean Girl, provides the definitive contrast case, right down to the blatantly dishonest smear that is its title.  [The gullible ignoramuses in the comments section of a new video with Scumbag Duggan, in which they slime and smear Rand as a sociopath and her admirers as gullible ignoramuses, without showing the least bit of effort at rudimentary fairness and mutual/empathetic understanding - it's like they go out of their way and bend over backwards not to make such an effort - should take a good, hard look at themselves.])  Both the (abnormal) bashers and the (normal) critics tend to say things about how Rand just isn't rigorous or systematic enough in her writings to be taken seriously as a philosopher (or as a world-historically great or important philosopher at least on the level of, say, a Rousseau or a Marx if not a Spinoza or Nietzsche), but the case of Wright and others shows that anyone who studies the relevant materials carefully can identify and explain the rigor and systematicity in Rand's thought.

[Addendum: I've mentioned/link a number of Peikoff's courses but the one that any serious student or reputable scholar of Objectivism needs to be familiar with, just on the basis of its name alone if nothing else, is his Understanding Objectivism one (also in book form).]

[Addendum #2: re Rand's anti-Kant polemics referenced above (and again now), I will at some point address what appears to be an unacceptable part of the ethical theory as he presented it - though not really a part of neo-Kantian ethical theories I've been exposed to, just as with his infamous argument against lying to protect the innocent from a prospective murderer (as distinct from a duly contextualized virtue of honesty that rationally compels taking deceptive measures to protect the innocent from the murderously wicked). What would be unacceptable is that Kant appears to hold the view that continuing life in an indefinitely miserable state rather than committing suicide is the morally preferable option.  That's what Rand gleans from the one passage of his that she ever quotes at any length (from the Groundwork, and which is contained in her "Kant" Lexicon entry just again linked - "It is a duty to preserve one's life..."), about the man who is miserable but continues on out of a sense of duty.  Alternative and perhaps overly charitable readings of the passage are that he's merely applying the otherwise helpful inclination/duty distinction ("duty" meaning the morally obligatory recognized by the actor as such, grounded in Kant's theory in the Categorical Imperative(s) [about which Rand is unacceptably silent all the while she bashes him]).  The Aristotelian virtuous person/character is one for whom virtuous action and desire are harmoniously integrated, where (employing Susan Wolf's terminology as applied to life's meaning) subjective attraction meets objective attractiveness (or perhaps the noble or fine or kalos).  Why not say that remaining alive but miserable, or truth-tellingly exposing the innocent to the murderously wicked, is to treat one's own or the innocent's humanity merely as a means to a theoretical abstraction?  Or, is Kantian ethical method (re: e.g., respecting humanity as an end-in-itself) an empty formalism as some critics have claimed, unless supplemented or contextualized by things other ethical theories consider important?  [Note: I need to study Parfit's impressive-looking synthesis of Kantian with other ethical theories, although a maximally impressive theory would incorporate virtue ethics, of which Aristotle is the most prominent/influential exponent.]  That being said, see my "Core libertarian principle explained" link where principles widely recognized as 'Kantian' or 'deontological' are employed, although in a context that's foundationally Aristotelian/eudaimonist.  [General note about standards for effective polemics, especially philosophical ones: They should follow those Dennett/Rapoport Rules as a matter of habit, which implies that characterization of X should rise to the standard of what seasoned scholars of X accept as accurate (which is how so many anti-Rand polemics can be dismissed from the get-go; the proper standard there might be, "Would Darryl Wright or other Ayn Rand Society scholars or Leonard Peikoff take it seriously?"), and they should be done at enough length to uproot all the assumptions that lead to a complex theory worth polemicizing against.  I've pointed to Mises' polemics against Marxism/DiaMat as an example of how to do polemics, and while they meet the length requirement, I'll have to look at how his characterizations hold up after I go through the high-paywalled Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx published last year.  But he is quoting directly from Marx's condensation/summary statement of historical materialism in the Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy....]]

Huemer vs. history of philosophy

three philosophers

Re Prof. Huemer's attack on "the history of philosophy" (as he describes it therein; 'Against History') and in particular his (grounds for) saying, "Please don't be an Aristotelian."

As per the previous post I'm transferring over from what is addendum/digression there to main body here:
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Obviously he's not aware, for instance, of state of the art interpretations from the likes of David Charles and Allen Gotthelf that a final cause or telos is irreducible to the other causes and associated with this idea is that the final cause achieves a good (so we're in normative/value-theory territory, not the realm of mechanics, physics, chemistry, or unevaluative(?) biology).  And more generally, from the standpoint of a perfectionistic methodology: if we learn nothing else from the history of philosophy, and if we're good learners, we glean from the study of the past greats just what about their thinking styles made them first-rate thinkers with such lasting influence (such as Aristotle has in ethics, specifically with the recently-revived virtue-ethical tradition - duh).

And if we're really perfectionistic we should be able to devise methods by which to reliably and accurately rank-order the great thinkers on a scale of greatness (be it in cardinal or ordinal terms).  By any good measurement system Aristotle comes out pretty much well ahead of the competition in virtue of a monumental body of writings (and lost dialogues likened by some of the ancient wisdom-lovers to rivers of gold to Plato's silver).

(By virtue of her identification of the principle of ordinal rankings in terms of teleological measurement, as well as the identifications made throughout the rest of the Ayn Rand Lexicon, does(n't) Rand rank pretty high on the scale of overall philosophical greatness?  By parity of reasoning, if indeed Rand along with the other giants of the history of philosophy - all by repute and nearly all in fact first-rate minds - each had their own well-edited and cross-referenced Lexicon demonstrating with great effectiveness what first-rate minds they pretty much all are, wouldn't that increase people's interest in doing philosophy?  Huemer seems to short-change this possibility or something, in which case I suggest he get more dialectical/thorough in reasoning through what value things like history of philosophy provide.)

Also, I've explained in my book (namely in the most-important second chapter, 'Aristotelianism') that I'm an Aristotelian in terms of a tradition of thought defined by certain fundamentals but not beholden to all of Aristotle's arguments (as he himself would have wanted it, duh).  And fundamental to his very-impressive-results-getting intellectual enterprise was his philosophic method, which the scholar writing about Aristotle in the Oxford Handbook identifies with dialectic.

But the dialectical method should be treated most fundamentally, not merely as a matter of consulting, giving a fair hearing to, etc., the varied learned and reasoned-sounding opinions, weighing them and deciding on a best explanation; it is most fundamentally the art of context-keeping, for which Huemer can consult Sciabarra's Total Freedom, where Aristotle is treated as the fountainhead of this methodological tradition while its being formulated in terms of Sciabarra's art-of-context-keeping fundamentals (and in terms of the proper application of "both-and" reasoning to competing and partial claims to the truth, in addition to the proper "either-or" reasoning involved).  So far as I know, no one's presented any good reason to doubt Sciabarra's thesis, not even the ultra-wisdom-loving Prof. Huemer.  Also not widely known: for Rand, her concept of mental integration is, well, integral to her concept of context(-keeping).  And that is integral to her concept of hierarchy of thought.  (A proper approach to hierarchy would help inform us on if-then style hypotheticals that philosophers to pose; what are not just the implications of the if-clause but the presuppositions?  Like, "if the Aristotelian end of history as defined in UP's book were to eventuate, then...".  Like, for instance, would UP's book have to have been written first?  Is it a realistic hypothetical in the first place?  That kinda shit you should get stoned and think through very carefully and thoroughly.

Darn it, I lost a certain train of thought here, for which I blame the weed.  Oh wait, now I remember: I supersede 'Aristotelian' and 'dialectic' in the sense that I identify my methods in terms of a principle of intellectual perfectionism, which means (among other things) doing the activity of philosophy as close to perfectly as one feasibly can, but also learning a bunch of shit (for which don't ever trust AOCs under 30) and also possibly fanatical attention to (hopefully the most crucially relevant, philosophically essential) detail.  Like Aristotle, Aquinas and/or Rand, for instance?  (Also, I think with a probability approaching 100% that a Hegel Dictionary of the sort built by, who was it, Solomon in the 1980s perhaps or Houlgate ca. 2000?), might be part of a whole revived "understanding Hegel" effort that may actually pay off for once, but idk.  Just call it the Hegel Lexicon and voila, we've got a volume 2 in a much-anticipated-by-me series.  I just get a bit of a kick out of inductively identifying tantalizing principles like that one there.)

[Background music/soundtrack to the foregoing: Pink Floyd favorites, a listing of which is available]

How to criticize Ayn Rand effectively

[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....]

Perhaps the only way a decent critical commentator on Rand might get some serious traction is to argue that this or that position or argument or claim of hers violates the methodological strictures that she and especially Peikoff (her hand-picked heir) promoted, especially in Peikoff's Rand-authorized 1976 Philosophy of Objectivism course (later adapted into his 1991 book, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand or OPAR [seminar course]; either the course or the book are pretty definitive statements of the Objectivist philosophy).  (Peikoff's later courses, after Rand's death - especially his Understanding Objectivism, OPAR Seminars, The Art of Thinking, Unity in Epistemology and Ethics, and Objectivism Through Induction get more into the meat of Objectivist method, and are invaluable whether or not Rand was around to authorize them.)

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?).

Some notes on integration

In my cognitive experience, I've arrived inductively at certain observations as they relate to the prescribed thinking methods of Ayn Rand's Objectivism, with its key concepts of integration, context-keeping, and rigorously maintaining the hierarchy of knowledge.  (All of this ties in to induction as a regulative cognitive principle, which I'll get to shortly.)  Serious students of Objectivism - the ones who've taken Rand's advice and listened to serious amounts of Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses - are continuously immersed in these concepts, continuously actively "chewing" them mentally.  Their grasp of Objectivism - their context of understanding - pretty much puts them at radical odds with how Objectivism is so often "understood" (i.e., not really understood at all) in the mainstream of our intellectually-deficient culture.  If Rand's critics don't so much as have an effing clue as to how the concepts of integration, context, and hierarchy regulate the daily thinking processes of serious Objectivists, then they really haven't a clue at all what's at the root of Ayn Rand's philosophy.  They might know that Rand says things about the need for human beings to live by reason, but that would only be lip service on her part if she didn't provide some detailed picture of what living by reason consists in - namely, in terms of how one organizes one's mental processes in such a way as to know for sure, independently and first hand, how one's practices accord with the facts of reality.

Rand wasn't bullshitting around here and wasn't into the standard-issue "self-help" game of buzzwords and bromides.  We have an absolute, indispensible need for a philosophically-formulated cognitive method that assures us that our practices accord with reality, because that's what's inescapably necessary for functioning optimally in the world.  I submit that were people to read carefully through Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged, and the "expanded" version of that speech, namely, Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (the closest thing in print (meaning both in book form, and still in print *) to an "authorized" primary source on the philosophy outside of Rand's own writings, and lived by the principles presented therein, the culture would be well on its way to another, and better, Renaissance, and that's despite whatever flaws and errors (and readily correctable ones, if one employs the very self-correcting methods prescribed therein) exist in the book.  (* - Nathaniel Branden's Basic Principles of Objectivism book - based on a course Rand endorsed - is not still in print, and is superseded anyway in key respects by OPAR.)

That's just preliminary stuff (context-establishing, if you will) to get blog-newbies oriented and regulars re-oriented.  Now the notes, in no specific pre-ordained order:

Induction: I think of induction in terms of "adding-on," that is, in terms of integrating new information into the accumulated body of existing knowledge.  This differs somewhat (though perhaps not in substance, if you perform the correct reduction) from the "popular" or Phil-101 understanding of the notion of "induction," which is about going from particulars to general propositions.  That "logical leap" from particular to general has been an unending source of confusion and red herrings for students of philosophy, thanks (or no thanks) to David Hume's framing of the "problem."  Induction in Objectivist terms, as I understand it, has a kind of open-ended quality with regard to how one mentally organizes the particulars or new incoming bits of information, which relies on a certain practical need (whether or not this approach reduces to "pragmatism" is another, and complicated, issue) for unit-economy given the inherent physical limitations of homo sapiens cognitive powers.  In what most likely involves what Rand identified as a process of measurement (whether qualitative or ultimately quantitative) and measurement-omission as a key to how concepts originate, we quite normally and virtually automatically order concrete particulars along various dimensions of characteristics they possess in common.  That is, if we're good at having and maintaining an efficient and orderly mental process, we (implicitly or explicitly) rank concrete particulars in various ways.  The rankings can be cardinal or ordinal, though a scientifically-rigorous thought process will involve making the best effort one can to base ordinal rankings in cardinal measurements.  ("List-making" is one well-known form of such activity, like in, how do we go about ranking the greatest athletes or filmmakers of all time?  Quantitive cardinal measurement adds a genuine scientific rigor to these things, as much as the idea of that is cynically mocked by many, "as only providing a pretentious mask of scientific rigor."  Don't buy into that cynical horseshit for a second; the only issue here is not whether scientific rigor can be had, but how one gets there.  It's the cynicism that's a mask for cognitive sloppiness and intellectual laziness when it comes to justifying - or not justifying - one's "opinion."  Perhaps this explains how - in stark contrast to such attitudes - Rand honed in on the phenomenon of measurement as the root of optimal cognitive functioning.)

The issue then becomes how one places this or that grouping of particulars under what cognitive-conceptual classification, in such a way as to allow for cross-classification as and when the need for such arises.  How does one classify, for instance, The Big Lebowski?  What are key features of this unit that more or less necessitate our placing it under a genre classification, for instance?  It usually gets classified primarily as a comedy - and that's cool; that's cool - but we need a philosophical accounting for this that doesn't make it arbitrary.  Why isn't it primarily classified as a mystery?  I mean, it could be classified as a mystery, but in measurement-terms is it as much of a mystery-narrative as The Silence of the Lambs?  Conversely, aren't there darkly humorous elements of the latter film?  (Of course there are!)  In some way I haven't thoroughly formalized in my mind yet, I think this process of classification is ruled by what Rand identified as the Rule of Fundamentality.  I think it's this (i.e., fundamentality) that is at the heart of any inductive-classificatory process.  Again, induction is about a certain kind of process of adding-on (or re-adding-on, as and when one needs to come back to the original concrete particular in spiral* fashion and re-integrate) plus classifying the added-on concrete particular or unit in accordance with the requirements of unit-economy and cognitive efficiency.  Fundamentality is also at the basis of efficiently comprehensive explanation* of observed phenomena.  (* - Myself, I look at the search results of these asterisked links, and quite immediately perform - or is it re-perform? - a certain kind of induction.  Notice, by the way, how Google search results are ranked on the basis of relevance, according to a scientifically-rigorous heuristic-algorithmic procedure, which I'll call "hal" for short.  And that's before applying the full powers of our own cognitive machinery to mentally organize such search results.)

Anyway, that about covers my to-date ideas concerning the process of induction.  Now some other points:

Some things integration entails in practice: First off, integration in the originative sense - the uniting of sense-particulars into mental units or concepts - is a process of induction in the sense I've been discussing.  But what else does this mean?  It means, as a cognitive habit, the virtue of rationality, which requires a constant, unrelenting focus on bringing new items of information into the sum of one's knowledge, and always expanding one's knowledge.  Put another way: it's all about intellectual curiosity, man.  It's a constant striving to add on the new bits, to always be learning, to expand the range and scope of one's cognitive awareness to fullest of one's abilities.  If this is a "bromide," then you'd think it'd be so ingrained into the everyday culture that it would go without saying.  But maybe that's just it - maybe it's "ingrained" (i.e., not really so) only as far as being a "bromide," something that gets paid a lot of lip service but isn't attended to in the way responsible philosophers would attend to it.  As long as the intellectual kids get marginalized, mocked, bullied, and beat up at school while the so-called educators and so-called parents just resign themselves to accepting it as a "normal" part of youthful upbringing, then the message hasn't really gotten through to the adults (and needlessly, tragically so).  And it certainly as shit ain't happening for real when you listen to the utter crap that flows from the boob tube and the politicians.  (How on earth did we get complete morons on the House "Science" Committee, or obviously unqualified ignoramuses kept on a presidential ticket, or a pseudo-intellectual head of state who's clueless about a key cultural figure?  A big fat fucking failure to integrate, that's how.)

Now, here's something - I base this on extensive exposure to many self-styled "Objectivists" over the years - where all too Objectivists themselves need to clean up their acts and follow their own methodological advice.  And what specifically do I have in mind here?  Their attitude toward the rest of the philosophical community, of course, that's what.  Provincialism is pervasive in human cognitive and other behavior, but the whole idea of philosophy - of intellectual curiosity, of integration, of context-keeping, of hierarchy-recognizing - is to break free of such limiting cognitive biases, to the best of one's abilities.  It's a two-way street here; on the one hand we have a philosophical community that has been by and large dismissive of Rand and Objectivists, and on the other we have the same thing only in reverse.  Mutual contempt and dismissal, with (tragically) little productive dialogue.  If there's something that Objectivists could have learned from their other intellectual hero, Aristotle, it's that the traditional Randian approach to polemics is just piss-poor when you compare it to the way Aristotle and other serious philosophers responded to different viewpoints.  There's no way that a serious philosopher could imagine, with a straight face, someone of Aristotle's philosophical temperament saying a bunch of the things that Rand said about Kant.  Her views about Kant listed under the "psychological techniques" section of the Lexicon entry on Kant are particularly atrocious.  Not long ago I gave myself the assignment of going through the entirety of that entry and determining which excerpt was the least worst at providing an intellectually-empathetic characterization of his views.  The result of this exercise was not encouraging.  Even where you get some straightforwardly traditional interpretations (particularly concerning the "appearance/reality dichotomy" Kant constructed), it's usually one mostly-sensible sentence couched in a terrible paragraph consisting of bad inferences.  This is, in short, a failure to integrate.  What Objectivists need - and, again, they are far from being alone in this regard, and the Rand-bashers themselves are some of the worst offenders - is to practice what I term intellectual empathy.  It took me a while to induce this principle (and all that it entails) as a requirement of integration, context-keeping, and hierarchy-respecting.  In brief, unless one has made a connection to the cognitive context of the "other," one isn't doing one's job of integrating.  What does it mean to make such a connection?  Here's the eminently reasonable standard I would propose: that one characterizes or represents the viewpoint of another to the satisfaction of that other.

You know how cool things would have gotten, that much quicker, had Rand done that with Kant and the rest?  (Seeing as Kant wasn't around to vet Rand's or anyone else's representations, you have to do some imaginative integration here.)  Or, for that matter, if a great many of Rand's critics did that with her ideas?  Note that this is easier said than done; it took me a good deal of time and practice to make it a cognitive habit and discipline to do my best to hold myself to that eminently reasonable standard, which has also led me to recognize how much some of my older blog postings are offenders in that regard.  But hey, you know, perfectivism.  Can't be refuted.  Now.  What needs to happen, as far as putting integration into practice goes, is a much better dialogue ("dialectic," which Dr. Sciabarra poignantly describes as the "art of context keeping," only to be dismissed by all too many Objectivists who failed to live up to that aforementioned reasonable standard) between Objectivists and the academy, and basically between everyone and everyone else.  It's not easy.  Actually, I take that back.  It is easy, but also time-extensive.  It's a cognitive habit that has to be developed over time.  What would not be easy would be to make it happen overnight; but baby steps in that direction are easy, and then it snowballs from there.  Habituation is key here, a concept which most likely ties into the concept of integration as such.  Just throwing a lead out there off the cuff, for whatever it's worth.  And, of course, integration ties into (integrates with) the concept of perfection (which, of course, is not an end-state but an ongoing process in humans, hence eudaimonia-as-activity).   So the cultural Singularity (defined by culturally-pervasive cognitive integration, which would be "utopian" by the lackluster standards of the present-day) is going to necessarily presuppose that the folks have been habituated over time.

If such a potential integrative dialogue were to be actualized, I think you'd have people coming to a consensus on some things despite their differences; I mean, a consensus on real substantive issues of tremendous importance - like about the vital need to integrate, for example. ;-)  Anyway, we'd have people meeting and overcoming (in some quasi-Nietzschean, quasi-Hegelian sense, I suppose) the barriers presently erected between people's cognitive contexts, so that they aren't clashing (to use Peikoff's term) as they used to.  That's quite a challenge to embrace, but the payoff would be amazing, I think.  Objectivists, Kantians, Aristotelians, pragmatists, theists, Christians, Muslims, atheists, the whole variety of viewpoints . . . with a proper mutual understanding between them ("Oh, so that's what Thinker X was getting at!  Now it makes sense!"), they would discover not only how much they have in common but also have an enhanced approach toward Getting Things Right.  Plus humor quality and irony-detection might explode exponentially (especially with the aid of Sagan's favorite brainfood).  Perhaps when all is said and done they'll all get together and sing Kumbaya.  Oh, don't you laugh, you cynical fucks, damn you, don't you laugh.  (Movie reference there of course.)  It's like Lennon said....

(I was originally going to title this posting "Brief notes on integration," but it didn't turn out so brief.)

P.S. Reminder: 30 days left.  Tick tock, tick tock.  (Movie reference of course.)

Wolff, Romney, Marx, and Rand

First, a little bit of background: About a year and a half ago, in the month or so leading up to the release of the first installment of the Atlas Shrugged movie, I made the not-all-that-wise move of posting a link to a blog entry of mine in the comments section of Robert Paul Wolff's blog, which had the effect of "stealing" a bit of his audience for a bit of time before my posted comment was removed.  For that I apologize.  As I came to realize, blog etiquette tends to involve building up an audience in a more fair-and-square fashion, the exact contours of which are often discovered through a process of trial-and-error, that incident being an error on my part.  (I can only imagine what many bloggers and site admins have to put up with in comments sections; what little experience I had with it led me to turn off comments to this blog and invite feedback by email-only.  But I'm so wonderfully self-correcting, what feedback do I really need? :-)

Okay, that said, let's proceed.  Recently as I was rummaging around for content online (an ever-ongoing process, BTW, not just a recent thing - see this blog's "masthead"), I encountered this blog entry by Prof. Wolff, and I find it (in essence) chillingly spot-on:

There has been a good deal of speculation about the hour-long video that has surfaced of the now truly infamous supposedly private Mitt Romney speech to $50,000 a plate donors.  [I use the adjective "infamous" in its proper meaning, "detestable or shamefully malign," not in its current misusage as simply "widely known."]  Present in  the room were Romney, the fat cats, and servants scurrying about bringing the food and clearing the dirty plates.  The angle of the video makes it clear that it was not recorded by one of the guests, so we can only conclude that one of the wait staff managed to set up a camera and film the proceedings. 

Upper classes always ignore the presence of their servants, a fact that gave rise to an entire genre of eighteenth century French comedy.  [Think "The Marriage of Figaro" without the immortal music.]  Despite all the evidence to the contrary, they seem constitutionally incapable of remembering that the working class is populated by actual human beings with eyes and ears and fully functional intelligence.  This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature.  Were the rich and powerful of the world to acknowledge the full humanity of those they exploit, they would find it difficult to sustain the easy air of superiority that they consider their birthright.
...
At Romney's rich donor dinner, it is a virtual certainty that the wait staff consisted of men [and perhaps women -- one cannot tell from the video] who make too little money to pay federal income taxes, and hence are among the 47% whom Romney says are dependent moochers who cannot take personal responsibility for their lives.  These people were obviously in full view of Romney as he stood at the podium and spoke for more than an hour.  The fact that it obviously never occurred to him that he was talking about people present in the room says more about Romney than any formal biography or hatchet job expose possibly can.

First off, I'll take issue mainly with some things in the middle paragraph here.  "This failure is ideological, not personal, in nature."  I'm not quite sure how to take this statement.  Is it that a capitalistic ideology (which Romney & Co. do buy into in some form or other) causes people like Romney to be oblivious to the humanity of waitstaff at his gatherings, or is it a moral failing, or is it something like a cognitive bias, a problem that besets just about everyone (and which philosophers see as their duty responsibility to correct as best they can, as part of the knowledge-guarding-and-integrating process)?  Is it part of the Romney ideology that the "servants" don't possess full humanity?  Is it part of capitalistic ideology?  Is it some process by which Romney's or anyone else's having adopted a capitalistic ideology leads to ignoring the full humanity of the "servants"?  I think it is more of a personal failing, in the cognitive-bias sense rather than in a moral sense (though I won't rule out the moral sense).  Anyway, that's nitpicking one sentence.  The other sentence is the very ideologically-contentious one that there's "exploiting" going on.

But first, let's say that my idea of a much better (utopian?) society is one that is capitalistic (as Wolff's other blog posts make clear, he'd endorse markets but not capitalism) while at the same time intellectually-enlightened, philosophically-imbued.  (Would Plato, Aristotle, and Kant be capitalists [ideologically speaking, not "moneybags"] today, assuming they got together with all data available to intellectually-diligent middle-aged folks today and hashed things out among them, perhaps with Jefferson and Franklin and a bud-sharing Carl Sagan thrown in the mix?  I'll get to this more in a bit.)  So, assuming some uncorrect biases don't creep in too much, you wouldn't have Romney-types being so oblivious to the waitstaff-types.  (This is where Wolff gets it spot-on, although for all we know some of the waitstaff may be putting themselves through business school so that they can jump class-ranks. ;-)  So what we do know is that Romney is great with money (making it, minimizing tax liabilities, etc.), kind of a boring douchebag, and big on Mormonism, while his supposedly heavily-Rand-influenced running mate is also a douchebag (if only for his views on medical - medical! - marijuana and, now, same-sex marriage).

I want to also say that Prof. Wolff and I are coming from quite-different contexts.  In his "about me" section, he writes: "As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist."  I'm not any of these things; in fact I once made the observation when reading this that anarchism is the opposite of politics and atheism the opposite of religion, so what does that make Marxism with respect to economics?  Of course things are more complicated than that; he clarifies that he's an anarchist in the sense that we aren't obligated to obey the law just because it is the law (quite sensible, though what if it isn't "just a law," but a law integrally decided-upon within a separation-of-powers system? complications...).  Many people mean many different things by "atheism"; I don't identify as such but I might be one according to some folks or definitions.  (How would we know if there's a God or gods?  Haven't found a satisfactory answer yet.)  But most significantly, as far as ideological things go, is our very different context when it comes to Marxism and capitalism.  I've been ideologically a capitalist since just about the time I ever got interested in politics, which is before adulthood, and have yet to seriously entertain Marxism or socialism.  (I've had to seriously entertain anarchism in its David Friedmanite manifestation.  But still far removed from socialism.)

My intellectual context?  At this point it's been influenced by Ayn Rand well more than anyone.  It's not so much that I think Rand is so much more the be-all and end-all than everyone else out there; it's just a matter of biographical fact that I've been exposed to her ideas quite a bit more than those of any other philosopher out there.  Some folks - like a certain leading philosopher blogger I'd rather not name, but who's a complete douchebag and imbecile whenever the subject of Rand comes up - might say that this is so much philosophical time wasted.  My response to that is: you have to know my context.  There's a lot in Rand to be inspired by, though my immersion in Objectivist thought was quite extensive and thorough: I listened to well over 100 hours of Peikoff lecture courses, including the crucial, now-published-in-paperback Understanding Objectivism.  I had much exposure to Objectivist internet forums, including Jimmy Wales's Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP) back in the day.  I've interacted with real, live Advanced Students of Objectivism who are perfectly normal and fun people.  (I've had online interactions with ASO's who weren't so great, cognitively biased partisans and dogmatists a lot of them.)  I've read abundant amounts of the secondary literature - the intensively researched Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical by Sciabarra, The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand edited by "Dougs" Ramussen and Den Uyl, to name a couple - and have spent thousands of hours thinking about these ideas.  I would say that the most pivotal secondary literature is Understanding Objectivism; without that absorbed into the fiber of your being, you don't really have Objectivism as Rand meant it to be understood - not just as a doctrine, but as a way - a method - of thinking (which in turn affects one's way of living).  And I've come to the conclusion that this way of thinking is neo-Aristotelian, perfectivist (hence what's in my own "about me" section).  And you just can't refute perfectivism. :-)

Now, my understanding of Rand probably parallels Wolff's understanding of Marx.  By much the same token, my understanding of Marx is probably comparable to his understanding of Rand, i.e., I wouldn't go to him as a source on what Rand said and meant.  Also by the same token, it's evident that he has built up an impressive edifice of thought surrounding Marx's economic doctrines.  I'd have to spend thousands of hours of integration to know what he knows; this is simply the nature of specialized expertise, just like Romney has his own specialized expertise requiring thousands of hours of integration of knowledge.  As Rand said, integration is the cardinal function of human consciousness.  It's right there in the Lexicon. :-)  I have no idea if Marx said something similar.  But this gets to another point I want to make: the nature of dialectic.  Could there be a productive dialectic between a Rand and a Marx, despite their clashing contexts?  ("Clashing contexts" is a phrase that may be recognizable to ASO's.  But it would be applicable in the context of Sciabarra's treatment as well, dialectics being "the art of context-keeping" in his phrasing).  If Rand and Marx could adequately grasp each other's context - which is an aim of dialectic if not a simple matter of empathy - if they could be set walking in the same direction rather than arguing at cross-purposes, what kind of "synthesis" might emerge?  I ask this as a perfectivist.  We all have the same set of empirical facts in front of us; how do we go about integrating them in a commonly-accepted way?

Above I asked what the result of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant dialecticizing might be.  Would they support capitalism?  Socialism?  Something else?  Before we even get to that question, though, what are things they would agree about?  Being philosophers, they would (I'm pretty sure) agree that using our powers of reasoning to the utmost would be most desirable as a policy of living.  Guess what - Rand agrees with that.  Would they agree about ethics being eudaimonistic in a more or less strictly Aristotelian sense?  A perfectivist sense, which I think Aristotle was?  (Perfectivism says: If Aristotelian eudaimonism is found faulty, let's find something better; indeed, let's find the best thing we can possibly find within the limits of our cognitive abilities.  But isn't that perfectivist attitude that of Aristotelian eudaimonism?  Can it be refuted?  Put another way, aren't philosophers qua philosophers cognitive perfectivists?  Is perfectivism different from a most rigorous application of dialectical ability, or is it synonymous with it?  If the latter, how do you refute that?)  Anyway, I'm big on eudaimonism, which I take to be a practical (from praxis) corollary of cognitive perfectivism.  I think Rand would agree on that as well.

Let's take a couple key statements by Rand, indicating her approach to philosophical hierarchy ("hierarchy" being another term well-known to ASO's seeing as it's a central focus of Understanding Objectivism, after all, and further indicative of cognitive perfectivism).  First, there is her statement about the theme of Atlas Shrugged.  (Hold on, I've got to review/refresh, spiral-like - oh there's another UO term - my understanding of Rand's ideas about literary theme.  You're invited to join me here; that link should help you.  I might have to click on some of the cross-referenced links for integration purposes, so this could take a bit of time.  You do realize that Rand put forth formulations of her philosophy in more than novels, right, newbies?  What, did you already know what the theme of Atlas Shrugged was?  That it isn't "The superman gets to prosper, while the weak can rot"?)


"Its theme is: the role of the mind in man’s existence—and, as corollary, the demonstration of a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest."  --For the New Intellectual, 88


Now, the morality of rational self-interest as a corollary.  See above about eudaimonism as a corollary of cognitive perfectivism.

So, we have "the role of mind in man's existence."  Now, another quote: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute."  (Heroism or nobility - didn't Rand approvingly quote something from Nietzsche about nobility - see the 1968 introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead - and didn't Kaufmann in a footnote to that and another aphorism direct our attention to . . . Aristotle?  Damn.  [Integration, see.])  And then there's this: "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.  This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism."  And what - in full - does Rand mean by "reason"?  It's spelled out in detail - well, in outline form - in the chapters on epistemology in Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand ("OPAR"), and in fuller detail (i.e., with respect to cognitive integration, hierarchy, and context) in Understanding Objectivism.  (Noticing a pattern here?)  Then we get Rand's statement on the basic virtue of her ethical system, the virtue of rationality.  (What, she didn't say that man's basic virtue is selfishness?  But but, but but but, what about the title to her book?  Consider the context of her titling her book that way, such as the time period she did so, and then consider what she actually says in the introduction and the lead essay, "The Objectivist Ethics," where the first selection in the Lexicon entry on rationality comes from.)

Now comes something ostensibly more controversial in substance: Individualism.  If one bothers to pay attention to Galt's radio address, one encounters this: "By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man - every man - is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose."  In full context, is there something - anything - objectionable here?  Do we go out of our way, as intellectually mediocre Rand critics often do, to misunderstand "for his own sake"?  (Personally I construe it to be the same in meaning as the title of chapter 1 (along with the substance of the book's essential theme) of paradigmatic eudaimonist David L. Norton's Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism: "The ethical priority of self-actualization."  But maybe that's just me, reading too charitably into Rand's "new concept of egoism."  Hah!)  In any case, we have in Rand's philosophical hierarchy an individualistic ethics, prior to her advocacy of capitalism in politics and economics.

Is capitalism the logical extension of individualism to politics?  Is political libertarianism (in the usual sense - e.g., the political philosophy of Nozick or Eric Mack or, indeed, of Rand herself) genuinely expressive of individualism, or of respecting the humanity of persons, or treating persons as ends in themselves?  Would Marxism as an alternative value individualism?  I would have to ask someone, like Prof. Wolff, who has studied Marx very indepth.  On a charitable reading, I would guess that Marx thought that capitalism produced an "alienated individuality," an atomistic individuality, one that undermined sociability and community, one that is ahistorical, perhaps (supposedly) a "Stirnerite" version Marx is famous for critiquing.  But isn't it most fortunate that Rand did not endorse such an "individualism"!  Need I post the Lexicon entry for "altruism" as Rand actually meant it?  (I'm kind of tired out with posting links at this point.)  Need I quote and re-quote Rand's statement about man being a social being but not in the sense that the moral cannibals (see We the Living) mean?  Need I refer to Sciabarra for the appropriate context-keeping treatment of the subject?  And of course, if we have a perfectivistic eudaimonism, we have to take into account Aristotle on sociability.

Anyway, I don't know if Prof. Wolff would object to a proper individualism; but let's say that he does.  We then come to the question of whether capitalism is expressive of, or instead undermines, individualism.  This is a very serious and important question.  On the question of the proper socio-political system for human beings, many (individual, invaluable, potentially-flourishing) lives hang in the balance.  If capitalism is inherently exploitative, it means some humans treating others merely as means, not respecting their humanity fully (whether they intend it or not), it means individuals to that extent alienated from one another, it means a suppression of human flourishing.  For all the appearance of capitalist acts between adults being consented-to, do the relations involve presuppose an unjust power-dynamic?  This requires a serious answer without begging important questions or dismissing "Marxists" in the unforgiving (and arguably quite context-insensitive) fashion that some Objectivists have recommended.  There is a dialectical tension here crying out for resolution.  And let's make it clear: Rand advocated reason and individualism as primaries.  If capitalism is somehow shown to undermine these, then it's capitalism that has to go.  I take Rand at her word; individualism is primary to her normative philosophy, and not some post-hoc rationalization for capitalist politics (as many of her intellectually-mediocre and suspiciously projective-sounding opponents charge).

At this point in time I do not have a knock-down argument (by which I mean one that could convince someone like Prof. Wolff) showing that capitalism is the only right social-political system on individualist grounds - or, as Rand would put it, the only system proper to humans given their requirements for living as rational beings, given "the role of the mind in man's existence."  I do think that an intellectually-enlightened "Aristotelian utopia" would have the resources to deal voluntarily and charitably with people's safety-net needs should (capitalistic) institutions based on private ownership of the means of production fail to meet those people's flourishing-based needs.  (When I hear socialists describe their own views, I tend to hear "worker ownership of the means of production," but really haven't given that idea much thought given my context of reading Mises and Nozick: "What if a worker saves enough money and decides to open and direct his own business, using entrepreneurial skill?"  Where does it go from there?  Is that okay, but corporate-forms of ownership not?  Do we need to distinguish private property or capitalism from corporatism?  In an intellectually-advanced society, do people become their own independent bosses anyway, making the corporate form obsolete?  Can the corporate-form realistically be reformed for the better?  Etc....)  But, thinking in more comprehensive terms than that, such a "utopia" would also have the intellectual resources by which to resolve disputes concerning whether capitalism is indeed the best system for human beings.*  I really don't know how Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Jefferson, Franklin, and Sagan (and Marx and Nozick and Rawls and Rand and Chomsky and Mises and...), after giving all sides a full and fair hearing would resolve these existing disputes to everyone's high standards of satisfaction.

I'd like to think that eudaimonistic individualism, however, is not so much open to dispute.  (And understood in perfectivist terms, how would it be?)  One thing that needs to happen in any event for a productive debate on politics to happen is for people to adequately understand their opponents' viewpoints to the opponents' satisfaction.  I've seen misunderstandings from opponents of other people's ideas (not just of Rand's ideas, though perhaps especially of her ideas) happen way too much and to too ridiculous an extent for there to be much of a productive debate as things stand now.  That's why hierarchy matters: what we need, first, is a (perfective) betterment of people's cognitive faculties so that such misunderstanding becomes one less (major) obstacle we have to deal with in the pursuit of what is true and right.

* - The intellectual resources in such a scenario would be put to use addressing a lot of challenges - perhaps most importantly scientific ones, perhaps most importantly spiritual ones - and not just this one.

EDIT: This article just crossed my field of vision.  "Gee, what's this whole Ayn Rand thing all about in American political discussion?"  From the perspective of someone who thinks in terms of "spiral progression of knowledge," "sense of life," "psycho-epistemology," "measurement-omission," "rule of fundamentality," "rationality as the primary virtue," and other such Objectivism-isms, I find a major clashing of contexts going on here.  Right now we've got a bunch of ordinary citizens and Randophobes (the author's term, I like it!), many of them on the MSNBC-watching Left, running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to come to grips with "the Rand thing."  ("She espouses such monstrously hateful things, how can anyone take her seriously?  Premises have to be checked here!"  Indeed.)  So how does one "present Ayn Rand" (interpretively, that is) to folks who are only superficially intellectual - perhaps having read only the novels - who get a lot of their ideas from op-eds and cable news and soundbites and whatnot?  You can't exactly point them to Sciabarra, Peikoff, Tara Smith, or Gotthelf books and say, "Read them, will you, please?  Then we'll talk."  But then what do you do exactly?  Give televised lectures on C-SPAN (who watches that?) which don't - can't - go into philosophical depth?  Go on cable news and have the usual talking-head shouting matches?  What do you do?  I suppose you can throw 30,000 darts at a wall (the Fountainhead high-school essay contests) and get one or two Objectivists into a possible tenure-track position at a well-ranked university every few years, but that's been done and these people still ignore the output.  (Ever hear one mention - one fucking mention - of Tara Smith's, or Peikoff's, or Sciabarra's work in the lamestream media?  On the usual "liberal" news sites like the Huffington Post?  Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish?  The political blogosphere?  Hell, the "leading" "philosophical" blogs?  I think the total count here is approximately zippo, nada, rien, nicht.  I think once, maybe twice, there was a mention of the Ayn Rand Society somewhere.  Barring a fucking miracle, would we expect something different to happen after Wiley publishes the forthcoming Gotthelf-edited book?  In short, it's really, really pathetic what's going on here, folks.)  This actually points to a wider problem: how do you present philosophically-imbued ideas, period, in an intellectually-dysfunctional culture?  How do you make it an intelligent discussion about things like integration and virtue and not just about politics and economics?  I mean, shit, philosophers - any of them that you could name; Rand is hardly an exception - are bound to be misunderstood by a large segment of the public.  How does one raise the standard, other than a (commonsensical?) approach to educational reform with emphasis on critical thinking skills?  How fucking hard could it be, really?  Can't we at least begin at the margins and work from there?  Wh- wh- what, has the whole world gone crazy? ;-)