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?).

A semi-meticulous narrowing down

Philosophers as a rule are excellent researchers; they've figured out how to prioritize their research focus to home in on the foundational meaning-of-life issues confronting all humans.  This is confirmed at least in part by the foundational place of philosophy in the wikipedia hierarchy.  (Would this have ever become clear before the days of hyperlinking?  I remember those days; "woke" millennials don't; they have no frame of reference here.)

So let's consider the population of philosophers.  A great many are in academia as full-time professionals, some are independent of that milieu.

Among that population there are those who are big on Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition.  Aristotle more or less was the first to perfect a research program (not that Plato was chopped liver).  Time and time again Aristotle has reappeared on the history-of-philosophy scene to the great benefit of the participants (as inspiration if nothing else).  The recent revival of virtue ethics when before only Kantian and utilitarian ethics dominated the scene is one case in point.

As documented extensively in this blog, there is a by-and-large formidable neo-Aristotelian stream of thought inspired by Ayn Rand.  (Now things are starting to get pretty narrowed down.)  If there's one central and crucial theme uniting the systems of Aristotle and Rand it is a focus on what I term intellectual perfection(ism).  (Narrowing things down further....)  The gist of this is that we have an ethical imperative to maximize the actualization of our intellectual potentialities; it is the best organizing principle available for better living.  And while philosophers almost to a person (I leave out pseudo-philosophers who are more like sophists) value the principle of intellectual perfection or integrity or wholeness, Aristotle and Rand are among the few to make this into an explicit defining principle of living well.  It's not just the actualization of just any set of potentials that makes for self-actualization or eudaimonia; at the foundation, center and peak expression, there is intellectual activity tending toward perfection.

Then there are those Aristotelians and Randians who are obsessively into methodological perfection(ism); the term "dialectic" comes up in connection with Aristotle and his comprehensive and sprawling research program; it's about tying together all the strands in an organized unity.  In connection with Rand the terms/concepts "context-keeping" and "integration" cover more or less the same methodological territory.  So we've more or less narrowed things down to Sciabarra (editor of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies) and his circle of associates as far as "dialectic" goes, and to Peikoff (Rand's hand-picked heir) and his circle as far as integration/context-keeping go.  But there's almost no overlap between these two groups; it is as though they exist in a condition of dialectical alienation or tension.  (As to why that is, well.  Long-ish story.)

As far as self-actualization or eudaimonist ethics goes, there is a subset of Aristotelian-Randians who specialize in ethics and who picked up on the themes of Norton's Personal Destinies.  This includes "Dougs" Den Uyl and Rasmussen and Tibor Machan, but not all that many others.  Norton integrates themes from classical eudaimonism (namely Plato and Aristotle) with modern humanistic psychology (Jung and Maslow).  I've only read some of Jung and Maslow; somehow the intellectual-perfectionism theme in Aristotle and Rand covers the widest explanatory range of the content and appeal of eudaimonism in its strongest form.  Anyway, Sciabarra - in the circle of associates with the "Dougs" and Machan - cites a massive number of sources informing his Total Freedom: Toward a Dialectical Libertarianism (2000), but Norton isn't among them.  I guess he isn't the specializer in ethical theory that the "Dougs" and Machan are?  So we encounter yet another division of sorts, resulting from a diversification of specialized knowledge.  So an avid researcher would have to home in on the most significant sources/figures cited in Total Freedom (hint: Mises, Hayek, Rand) as well as, say, Machan's Individuals and Their Rights (1989) and the "Dougs" Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand (1984) and Liberty and Nature: An Aristotelian Defense of Liberal Order (1991), to both have promising leads to Norton as well as to conjure up whatever connections Norton might have to Sciabarra's dialectical-libertarian thesis.  Along the way, such a researcher will most likely have encountered the libertarian rights theory of Eric Mack and drew meticulous comparisons/contrasts to these others' rights theories.  Further along the way, one may have encountered the 1974 volume edited by Machan, The Libertarian Alternative, which contains John Hospers' "What Libertarianism Is," which contains a memorable knock-down formulation of the synoptic libertarian norm: "other men's lives are not yours to dispose of."

The number of people who would have engaged in the research covering these works (which have already integrated a lot of source material themselves, so hopefully nothing big got overlooked in the lines of transmission), is probably quite small.  But it is, in terms of foundational importance and tradition worked in, probably the most high-efficiency philosophical research to be done.  Does anyone really do better work than the Dougs, explicit and avowed perfectionists?  Norton also uses the term "perfectionism" as more or less interchangeably with "edaimonism," "self-actualization ethics," and "normative individualism."  But he doesn't get into the more distinctively Aristotelian-Randian-style emphasis on intellectual perfection(ism).

I mention in connection with Aristotle the notion of an organized unity.  Nozick, who has a sprawling research program of his own (he probably had a lot more raw smarts than I do), spoke of value in terms of organic unity, and more specifically an organic unity made up of two criteria: (1) the range, scope, or quantity of material being organized, and (2) the "tightness" of the unity or organization.  (Philosophical Explanations (1981) and The Examined Life (1989).)  Somehow Nozick manages (I'm not clear as to how, exactly) to keep this conception of value separate from his idea of "flourishing" which he takes to be inadequate as a unifying theme in ethics.  Given what I've been saying so far, I think there is a most-viable way to unify these, uh, strands.  Are "organized life," "integrated life," and "flourishing/eudaimonic life" mapping different territories?  I don't see how.

So at this point we have the following figures mentioned: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick.

Researchers on Aristotle researchers leads one to Oxford's T.H. Irwin, author of Aristotle's First Principles (1988) and the utterly massive The Development of Ethics (2007).  Irwin is a good man, and thorough.  If one has only so much time on one's hand to study Aristotle and the history of ethics, respectively, Irwin is a good bet.  (Irwin is big on the theme of dialectical method in Aristotle, and is cited in Total Freedom.)

Ferrarin ties together the ridiculously abstruse presentation in Hegel's writings with themes central to Aristotle's philosophy of nature and spirit(/soul?), in Hegel and Aristotle (2001).  Comparative studies between Aristotle and other towering figures in the history of philosophy include Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (Engstrom and Whiting, eds., 1996) and The Highest Good in Aristotle and Kant (Aufderheide and Bader, 2015).  Leading Kant scholar Christine Korsgaard draws comparisons between Kant's conception of acting for the sake of duty and Aristotle's acting for the sake of the noble (to kalon), in a comparative essay in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (1996) (or is that a reprint from the Engstrom and Whiting collection?).  [Edit: Also, Kant and Aristotle: Epistemology, Logic, Method (Sgarbi, 2016), which I was all over like flies on shit almost the moment it was published...]  [Edit: Also, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Sherman, 1997).]

The concept of to kalon may not be limited just to the noble, but also the fine or beautiful, suggesting an aesthetic component to goodness.  On the subject of the noble, specifically, Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil (section 287) speaks of the noble soul having reverence for itself.  Not only is this mentioned by Rand in the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, but the Kaufmann translation of Nietzsche refers to Aristotle on the great-souled man as a proper lover of self.  It's like the strands just keep tying together.  I'm aware of (but have not yet read) Alexander Nehamas's well-regarded Nietzsche: Life as Literature from the '80s, but the title suggests an aesthetic conception of a desirable or choiceworthy life (although I'm not really clear at this point on how the concepts of "desirable" and "choiceworthy" fit in with Nietzsche's metaethical scheme).  In any case, these points need to be properly integrated and/or differentiated with the aformentioned theme in Nozick about organic unity and how aesthetic value specifically fits into that.

So we have a research program that includes so far: Aristotle, Rand, Peikoff, Sciabarra, the Dougs, Machan, Mack, Norton, Nozick, Irwin, Ferrarin, Korsgaard, Nietzsche, Nehamas.

The folks who've gone through the Peikoff courses thoroughly to the point of automatization/habituation of the prescriptions therein, by and large have it together pretty well.  But I part ways with that crowd mainly on matters of the proper approach to "philosophical" polemics, such as their Kant-bashing.  An effort to keep full context as prescribed in the Peikoff courses leads me to making a full effort to understand those philosophers as well as, . . . well, as well as Rand wanted her own ideas to be understood before critiqued or commented on.

Then there's Alan Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment (1998), a culmination of a long lifetime of ethical thought.  I was kind of disappointed that Norton receives such cursory treatment there, but Gewirth is also integrating a ton of other material as well.  As is an increasingly common occurrence in ethical theory these days, Gewirth synthesizes 'Aristotelian' teleology and 'Kantian' deontology.  Mack was doing this back in the '70s with his 'Egoism and Rights' dissertation/article.

And then there's researcher extraordinaire, Mortimer J. Adler, the main organizer of the Great Books series (millennials know all about that, right?), and author/compiler of two massive books: Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought and Great Treasury of Western Thought (co-edited with Charles van Doren of Quiz Show notoriety, of all people?).  I've only gotten through some parts of the Treasury but made it all the way through the Lexicon, which was quite edifying.

A great many of these items/authors seem to me to be essential parts of a top-notch philosophical research program.  Other books that strike me as essential (but which I have not yet gotten to) include: Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985); Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (1986); S.L. Hurley, Natural Reasons (1989); and Parfit's major works, Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2010 and later).  Also on any avid lifelong learner's bookshelf should be volumes of writings by Franklin, Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.  We're talking bare essentials here, now; if you have room for Thomas Paine he should be included.

I have among my "essentials" in hard copy format (in addition to gobs of books in e-format...) a 2001 or so volume titled Moral Knowledge (ed. Miller, Paul and Paul 2001), a collection on metaethics.  Metaethics is a difficult genre; I have not yet gotten more than a few pages in that volume.

Back when I was an obsessive/completist/perfectionistic student of Econ before transferring that obsession to philosophy research (mainly due to Rand), I homed in on a particular volume titled A History of Economic Theory and Method (Ekelund and Hebert).  I've since supplemented that with Intellectual Capital: Forty Years of the Nobel Prize in Economics (Karier, 2010).  And I still have a nice volume, Austrian Economics: A Reader (Ebeling, ed., 1991-ish) which I must have discovered in a Laissez Faire Books catalog.

The Oxford Handbooks series is also a very useful, state of the art, highest-tier-university-press learning resource.  (There's even an Oxford Handbook of Lifelong Learning.  How soon do I get to it?  Before or after the Cambridge History of Capitalism?  Before or after Sciabarra-mentor Ollman on alienation and dialectical method?  Before or after the Oxford Handbook of Virtue?  And does the section on epistemic virtue therein draw close connections/integrations to intellectual perfectionism?  Does LeBar's essay on (virtue-)eudaimonism in this volume serve as an adequate condensation of sorts of his The Value of Living Well [2013]?)  One could keep busy with just this Handbooks series for a very long time.

One George F. Kennan condensed/essentialized a long lifetime of learning into his book, Around the Cragged Hill: A Personal and Political Philosophy (1993), which I happened upon in a used book store.  When do I get around to it?  Somehow I've already been pulled into reading another book found at the same store, Talents & Geniuses by Gilbert Highet; a nice read, certainly easier to get through than a metaethics text, say.

Dennett is a thorough researcher - somehow only he revived Rapoport's Rules, in Intuition Pumps? - but most of his books I've tried I made about halfway through before moving on to other things; his research priorities have him focused on other things, and that's cool.

Given constraints on time and cognitive powers, one needs to essentialize/condense as much as possible.  The above resources seem to be what best survive the process of sifting and a modest book budget.  This principle also applies to research in music and film.  There are some films I can quote nearly back to front.  Essential filmmakers include Kubrick, Tarkovsky, and Welles as tippy-top tier.  Do enough back-to-front sifting and re-sifting in major American team sports statistics, and you might develop some serious knowledge there as well.  I'm not saying I'm anywhere near Bill James' league as baseball researcher, but at least I've read James fairly indepth.  Millennials wouldn't remember that On-Base Plus Slugging (OPS), a simple but really good measure of batting prowess, was once called Production and included in the Total Baseball encyclopedia.

As indicated in the post title, this was a narrowing down of some kind.  Who on this planet has engaged in the research necessary to be able to list and discuss all these things above?  Not very many people.  In fact, it might be only one person.  We might, if so inclined, bring in Leibniz's famous principle of the identity of indiscernables to identify that person.  (How soon do I get to the Oxford Handbook of Leibniz?)  The one and the same person who listed and discussed all the things above also turns out to be the person who authored Prologue to an Aristotelian End of History (2015), which far (?) surpasses anything else I'm aware of in terms of the world-historic-important, fundamental essentials integrated into one work.  (From a marketing standpoint it's something of a hurdle just to get past the title.  Me, I'm all over a book with that sort of title like a fly on shit, of course.  And probably the optimal course in this regard is not to invest a lot of time/resources in marketing but in more research front-loading to the point that it's front-loaded af for the next book or series of them.)  On top of that, this author has a really thorough approach to blogging (with posts characteristically chock full of supporting/contextualizing links when needed).  On top of that, the author has homed in on a 'Better Living Through Philosophy' theme, as though that were perhaps the most perfect theme one could present to a wide reading audience, and where no one else seems to be (explicitly, systematically) taking up the idea quite so obsessively.  The progress here looks promising.  Can the research be even better prioritized for honing in on the truly most essential?

If the traces a human leaves to posterity are key to what gives meaning to one's life, it's looking okay so far in this instance; it'll look even better if/when Better Living Through Philosophy becomes a final published reality.  (Or, to adopt Norton's conceptual scheme, how does this implicit reality become actuality, where an "ought" and an "is" come into unity?  And how Hegelian is that conceptual scheme, exactly?)  But what comes before and after that final product, research-wise?  And how "self-referential" must that text unavoidably be, particularly if it must be placed within the history (and future? and end of history?) of thought?

[something of a precursor post to this one, here]

(What would a fully meticulous narrowing down look like?... Well, darn, I left out Aquinas.  Not an expert there.  Doug R most likely would most fully know the integrations/differentiations with Rand there.  My experience after about 140 pages of Stump's Aquinas (2003) was that it was coming off as distinctively rationalistic - lots of abstract conceptual architecture but hard to tie down to perceptual/concrete experience.  Then very shortly thereafter I am re-listening to one of Peikoff's most essential courses where the subject of rationalist polemics comes up, and Aquinas is mentioned right off.  Peikoff had made it his mission from Understanding Objectivism (1983) onward to root out rationalism (e.g., 'floating abstraction') in method.  Sciabarra identifies both rationalism and empiricism as one-sided/incomplete rather than dialectical, and doesn't include Aquinas among his paradigmatic dialectical thinkers (e.g., Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Rand).  For whatever any of that is worth.  Oh, and I did read through most or all of this book, which somehow caught my attention.  That, along with the fairly extensive treatment of Aquinas in Irwin's Development of Ethics, is about the extent of my Aquinas study so far.  And of course the Oxford Handbook of Aquinas awaits...)

How shitty is Lisa Duggan, leading Rand-basher du jour?

[Note 2/4/20: I finish up on demolishing Scumbag Duggan's so-called scholarship and credibility here.]

[A follow-up to my earlier post, "How shitty are Rand-bashers?"]

I've already commented on this despicable creature here, primarily on the basis of how she makes a mockery of the very activity of intellectual inquiry.  As with other leftist losers/scum, by perverting the very form of intellectual inquiry and thereby undermining its integrity, they produce junk content.  The way Duggan replied to me in email when I asked her reasonable pointed questions virtually assures that her "scholarship" is shitty.

Lisa Duggan is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.  She is the latest specimen of an author making the (futile) effort to discredit Rand in book form, with Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed (2019).  (How this piece of shit got published by a university press is a good question.  How low are the standards for the series this is a part of?  What clique of leftist scum is involved?)  She identifies herself on her twitter as a pinko/commie activist.  If Mean Girl is the "best" commentary on Rand the Left can come up with, 62 years after Atlas Shrugged, the left is kaput as a credible intellectual force.

As I pointed out in my commentary linked above, I have not read Duggan's book.  All the signs point to it being a waste of time.  The usual dishonest/slimy/scummy/lowlife/smear/sneer/strawman leftist tactics appear well on display there, and I've seen the tactics a thousand times.  The very title of the book itself is a dishonest smear.

How does Duggan promote her work in excerpt/preview form?  Here we go.  First off, the premise that Rand is "the spirit of our time" cannot possibly be true, for if it were, Duggan wouldn't be holding a university position (or, preferably, would have her act cleaned way up).  (Within the intellectual thug as we know her is an Aristotelian yearning to break out -- but that's up to her.)  For another, if it were true, a critical mass of people would have internalized the themes/content of Understanding Objectivism (i.e., become in essence Aristotelian cognizers).  But let's get to some specific claims she makes, shall we?

For one thing, Duggan is clueless about the history of Objectivist thought.  For instance, she writes:

Major figures in business and finance are or have been Rand fans: Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), Peter Thiel (Paypal), Steve Jobs (Apple), John Mackey (Whole Foods), Mark Cuban (NBA), John Allison (BB&T Banking Corporation), Travis Kalanik (Uber), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), ad infinitum.

Anyone who does their homework on Rand knows that one of these concrete instances as not like hte others.  Only one of them ran a 1990s internet forum, Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP) and could cite Rand chapter and verse.  Only one of them would have consumed pretty much the entire body of secondary literature on Rand (including Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical [1995], the author of which was a MDOP contributor).  Only one of them debated anarcho-capitalism with David Friedman on humanities.philosophy.objectivism.  Only one of them is aware of the hierarchical primacy of philosophy and how that is demonstrated by the hierarchical structure of wikipedia.

So why would she lump Jimmy Wales in with the rest of these business people as if they were all more or less alike in their Rand-expertise?

She makes the following claim:

Though Ayn Rand’s popularity took off in the 1940s, her reputation took a dive during the 1960s and 70s. 

Since when?  Reputation for what?  Among whom?  It was in the '60s that her cultural visibility was on an upward trajectory while it is true that the '70s was a lull period in that regard.  Anyone who has followed the history of Objectivism would know this.  At minimum this claim is sloppy and deceptive.

She writes:

Rand’s ideas are not the key to her influence. [!] Her writing does support the corrosive capitalism at the heart of neoliberalism, though few movers and shakers actually read any of her nonfiction. Her two blockbuster novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, are at the heart of her incalculable impact.

So if I understand this correctly, Rand's ideas can be separated from her novels.  That would come as news to pretty much anybody.  How sloppy a thinker is Duggan, anyway?

There are also large clusters of enthusiasts for Rand’s novels in the entertainment industry, from the 1940s to the present—from Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, and Raquel Welch to Jerry Lewis, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Rob Lowe, Jim Carrey, Sandra Bullock, Sharon Stone, Ashley Judd, Eva Mendes, and many more.

So Duggan can rattle off lists of Rand fans from this or that sector of the culture.  So why doesn't she rattle off the list of philosophy professors and other intellectuals influenced by Rand?  By not doing so she conveys the impression that those influenced by her don't include intellectuals and philosophers.  This is prima facie dishonest.  How can someone with the research tools at Duggan's disposal fail to notice the body of secondary literature from philosophers on Rand?  She cites Sciabarra's Russian Radical in the bibliography to Mean Girl (yes, I checked out the bibliography to see how selective it is . . . which it is, very much so . . . and it's heavily titled toward the biography-related, gossipy-level, intellectual-lightweight-level resources), so she can't but be aware of the very serious and comprehensive treatment Rand's ideas receive there.  (She says she consulted it for the biographical info therein.)

Let's say that a philosopher influences a bunch of scumbags who go on to wreak destruction on the world.  Karl Marx is one such philosopher.  But leftists counter that with "oh, but that's not Marxism proper and those are bad people, how about you pay attention instead to Luxemburg, Lukacs, Adorno, Marcuse, Fromm [whose Man for Himself is excellent, BTW], Cohen, Harvey, et al."  Good luck getting these same folks to acknowledge Hospers, Gotthelf, Miller, Den Uyl, Rasmussen, Sciabarra, Salmieri, Tara Smith, et al.  For leftists, their readings of Rand reign supreme and to hell with how other readers (who must not be very bright/reflective/critical) receive Rand's writings; but turn the tables on Marx/Marxism and they scream foul.

Duggan continues:

But how can the work of this one novelist (also an essayist, playwright, and philosopher), however influential, be a significant source of insight into the rise of a culture of greed? In a word: sex. Ayn Rand made acquisitive capitalists sexy. She launched thousands of teenage libidos into the world of reactionary politics on a wave of quivering excitement.This sexiness extends beyond romance to infuse the creative aspirations, inventiveness, and determination of her heroes with erotic energy, embedded in what Rand called her “sense of life.” Analogous to what Raymond Williams has called a “structure of feeling,” Rand’s sense of life combines the libido-infused desire for heroic individual achievement with contempt for social inferiors and indifference to their plight. Lauren Berlant has called the structure of feeling, or emotional situation, of those who struggle for a good life under neoliberal conditions “cruel optimism”—the complex of feelings necessary to keep plugging away hopefully despite setbacks and losses. Rand’s contrasting sense of life applies to those whose fantasies of success and domination include no doubt or guilt. The feelings of aspiration and glee that enliven Rand’s novels combine with contempt for and indifference to others. The resulting Randian sense of life might be called “optimistic cruelty.” Optimistic cruelty is the sense of life for the age of greed.

This is not a serious analysis but a mere pretense of one.  "Contempt and indifference toward social inferiors" is not Rand's position but Duggan's (and all Rand-bashers') fevered imagining of Rand's position.  Here's how that fevered phenomenon goes: Rand denies there is some duty to serve others irrespective of one's own interests; she speaks of "the virtue of selfishness" (which she explains the meaning of throughout her book of that title); she advocates laissez-faire capitalism as premised upon and packaged together with her-idea-of-selfishness; leftists view capitalism as an inhuman system premised on their-idea-of-selfishness; and so it must be the case that Rand is a defender of an inhuman system because that's the expression of "selfishness."  That's it.  That's the entire extent of how leftists "grasp" what's going on in Rand's writings.  And they have zero grasp of her wider philosophical principles beyond the political or ethical.  About the only thing they get right about Rand is: she advocates laissez-faire capitalism.  But they have zero in-context grasp of her reasons for supporting it.

One of Rand's wider philosophical principles -- well, in a sense the fundamental one uniting all the rest -- is the necessity of integrating one's mental contents properly, placing them within their proper context and hierarchy, perhaps using the likes of Aristotle as a guide/inspiration for how it's done (most perfectionist-like).  By doing so, one should - with enough practice and input - be able to more readily identify phenomena by their essence, which is to say, in Randian terms, the most explanatorily fundamental to the phenomena.  And if you're going to get into the topic of sense of life, you might as well get into Rand's view of the subconscious and its relation to the conscious level, a topic for psycho-epistemology (covered most indepth explicitly in such places as Binswanger's lectures).

Here's part of an explanation for how someone like Rand - or Marx, or Aristotle, or other big-impact thinkers - have the influence that they do: the power of mental integration.  Taking Atlas Shrugged (or Das Kapital) as an example: the author integrates a vast sum of material that no other authors integrated to nearly such an extent.  There's nothing nearly like Atlas Shrugged in existence; perhaps the most comparable case would be Mises' Human Action, itself an integration of vast material.  (Let's not forget the work of the sole longtime student of both Mises and Rand, Reisman's mammoth Capitalism.)  She covers a vast range of subject matter, tightly hierarchically ordered, with application to a vast range of avenues of human activity.  And it isn't just the Galt speech that is the product of an integration or organizing of vast sums of material; it's the integration of plot, characterization, theme, and style into a unity (the theme of Atlas Shrugged being "the role of the mind in man's existence" and all the applications of this all-encompassing theme).

Integrating vast sums of material into a compact/condensed/essentialized form is the aim of my own work, as evidenced in my existing book (see "About Me" above) and in the scope and ambition of my current 'Better Living Through Philosophy' project.  (The principle of integration is at work just from the unit-condensation function of all the documenting links I provide in my blog posts.)  If ever there is a legitimate product of Rand's influence it's in my own work and/or the sensibility that drives its formation (to whatever degree of perfection in result).  I have an eagle-eye out for the principle of integration at work in whatever phenomena where it might be identified.  I find Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle, which covers fundamentally important subject matter as treated by two of history's most searching minds, necessarily must be integrated with the Randian project (although tons of promising leads are already there in Sciabarra, which integrates vast sums of material as reflected in his bibliographies).

I could go on.  Point being, this is the sort of project someone like Duggan is too intellectually lazy to undertake.  Aristotle and Hegel would rightly be disgusted at her intellectually small MO - a case to learn from in the how-to-avoid-intellectual-bankruptcy sense.

As to the key and central claim of Duggan's book - that Rand promotes meanness and cruelty and indifference toward others - I don't know how many goddamn times I have to quote this but here it is again, from Galt's speech:

"Do you ask if it’s ever proper to help another man? No—if he claims it as his right or as a moral duty that you owe him. Yes—if such is your own desire based on your own selfish pleasure in the value of his person and his struggle. Suffering as such is not a value; only man’s fight against suffering, is. If you choose to help a man who suffers, do it only on the ground of his virtues, of his right to recover, of his rational record, or of the fact that he suffers unjustly; then your action is still a trade, and his virtue is the payment for your help. Be to help a man who has no virtues, to help him on the ground of his suffering as such, to accept his faults, his need, as a claim—is to accept the mortgage of a zero on your values."

And what is virtue, the basis upon which such help is warranted?  It is - in essence - putting forth the effort to use one's mind to the fullest:

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

So how much thinking and use of Duggan's mind went into writing Mean Girl?

Duggan continues:

Her novels engage fantasies of European imperial domination conceived as technological and cultural advancement, rather than as violent conquest.

Pathetic.  Since the theme of her largest novel is the role of the mind in man's existence, her novel is meant to illustrate that in myriad applications.  And she has many examples to go on in the history of business.  Today she would point to the examples of companies such as Amazon, as being guided by the integrating/organizing vision of Bezos.  (Today's business titans may be ideologically mixed or indifferent, which is beside the point: no one else qua businessman seems to integrate quite at Bezos' level today.  [More here.])

Duggan:

[Rand's novels'] logic also depends on a hierarchy of value based on racialized beauty and physical capacity—perceived ugliness or disability are equated with pronounced worthlessness and incompetence.

Quite the chutzpah to use the phrase "hierarchy of value" in connection with Rand and then completely bastardize how Rand applied that concept, huh?  The dishonesty of injecting race into this should go without saying.  And it gets lower still (hold your noses; we're descending from the intellectual gutter into the sewer):

Through the forms of romance and melodrama, Rand novels extrapolate the story of racial capitalism as a story of righteous passion and noble virtue. They retell The Birth of a Nation through the lens of industrial capitalism. They solicit positive identification with winners, with dominant historical forces. It is not an accident that the novels’ fans, though gender mixed, are overwhelmingly white Americans of the professional, managerial, creative, and business classes. 

Identification with dominant historical forces?  What the fuck is she talking about?

Where are we now? Is the long career of optimistic cruelty, of contempt and indifference to human inequality, at its height? Or is the culture of greed surrounding zombie neoliberalism so pronounced now that it is effectively exposed and may finally be displaced as an acceptable political feeling? Cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has argued that Rand’s mad adoration of capitalism, her excessive overidentification with it, only serves to make its inherent ridiculousness clearly perceptible.

(The one piece by Zizek I could stomach to read all the way through was his Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (JARS) article, "The Actuality of Ayn Rand," which Duggan cites in her bibliography.  Opening up to a few different pages of his Living in the End Times I find the prose of a pretentious twit.  Early in his Less Than Nothing: Hegel and... this "leading cultural critic of the left" cited the conversation between Mahler and Sibelius as follows: "Mahler emphasized how a symphony has to encompass the entire world, while Sibelius pleaded for restraint and reserve."  His statement about Mahler is accurate but his statement about Sibelius is completely idiotic on its face.  (I count Sibelius's 2nd and 7th symphonies among my very favorite, with the 6th not far behind; Tapiola is arguably his greatest work.)  Sibelius's actual statement as reported was: "I admire the symphony's style and severity of form, as well as the profound logic creating an inner connection among all of the motives."  After encountering this piece of sloppiness from the pretentious and unreliable Zizek, I put down Less Than Nothing and have since sought out Hegel scholarship such as Ferrarin's, Houlgate's, and the Oxford Handbook.)

What's telling about Duggan's intellectual character here is that while she cites Zizek's JARS article, she doesn't show any particular concern to cite or study any other article in that journal.  Shouldn't that sort of thing be a red flag on its face?  A careful and attentive reader would look at her bibliography would notice that there is this thing she cites from called the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and the only article she cites from that journal is from a non-Objectivist leftist - as though there were no other articles of interest in that journal that an academic writing for a university press on the subject of Rand might have discovered.  Did she make an effort to go beyond the Zizek article so she isn't just some leftist citing another leftist, all echo-chamber/circlejerk-like as is the standard leftist MO now?  When she saw that there was a Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, was she curious enough to find out whether there were other insights in that publication to draw from, that might have made her work more useful and informative?  Clearly not, because Duggan is an intellectually dishonest piece of shit whose aim is not to learn about Rand, but to smear her.