To Be Reviewed...

The Leonard Peikoff lecture course, Understanding Objectivism, now in (much-less-expensive) book form. To the question, What do Ayn Rand and Objectivism have to offer to the world of philosophy?, this is perhaps the most invaluable resource out there. It needs to be critically examined as part of any serious scholarly treatment of (rather culturally influential) Randian/Objectivist ideas. Then we'll see in much clearer and more well-developed terms whether reading and studying Ayn Rand's work is really worth our precious philosophical time.

On a related note, perusing the Ayn Rand Lexicon, I see how her handling of Kant is not a good sign when it comes to assessing Rand's strength or maturity as a thinker. It is very amateurish, and not the least bit scholarly. Wouldn't a thinker such as Aristotle have done much better at interpreting a thinker like Kant? Why couldn't she be more like Aristotle, of whom she spoke so reverently (but probably understood just as amateurishly)? Or like Korsgaard, who has studied Kant indepeth and comes to much different conclusions about him?

On a further related note, why is the "scholarship" about Ayn Rand on so many left-progressive news-and-opinion sites so damn lousy? Who the F cares about a serial killer aspects of whom a very un-mature Rand spoke of in positive terms in her un-published journals - as it relates to her considered, mature, published thought? Or that she accepted social security and medicare benefits in light of her published (a) objections to such programs and (b) explanation for accepting government benefits? Selective out-of-context cherrypicking while ignoring or failing to seek out contrary evidence is not serious scholarship. These hit-pieces are by so-called journalists and not philosophy professors, yes, but does it really have to be that bad, that intellectually lazy, that anti-serious about ideas? (This means Rand is still on the hook for how she approached Kant.)

On a yet further related note, why would a "leading academic philosophy blog" give such crap any airtime whatsoever, even so much as airing the view that Ayn Rand's philosophy is inspired by a psychopath (with the implication that characters like Howard Roark are inspired by psychopaths)? (Sure enough, her reasoning about who should and who shouldn't accept government benefits is bizarre on the face of it and it's quite doubtful it could be supported by sound argument, but this was brought up on the "leading academic philosophy blog" in the first place because of her having accepted government support, and not because of her (published) reasoning behind it, of which the Leading Academic Philosophy Blogger, when calling her a "welfare queen," was nevertheless totally unaware. Hopefully these sorts of cheap, unfair hyper-partisan tactics aren't widespread in academic philosophy or the academy generally. We won't really know if Rand/Objectivism is worth studying until we apply fair, rigorous, disciplined, and scholarly standards (be they from inside or outside the academy) to her writings in the first place [see, e.g., here - a work which, by the way, is about Rand's eudaemonistic egoism - not about her comments on Immanuel Kant, or on a serial killer she never came anywhere near to writing about publicly, or about why only people who agree with her politics should accept government benefits - and which, by the way, comes out as very positive in favor of her ethical system; it looks like the ball is now in her critics' court should they choose to take up the task, unless they're content to leave it all up to Dr. Cullyer]. As to the Rand-admired-psychopaths stuff, it doesn't even merit comment, that's how ridiculous, malicious, context-flouting and manifestly unjust it is.)

On an even further related note, I'll also want to review Greg Swann's Man Alive!.

When Geniuses Fuck Up

In rummaging around (in the spirit of perfective comprehensiveness) for anything Noam Chomsky said about Ayn Rand, the first and prominent result points to this. Chomsky said:

Rand in my view is one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history.

As a person fanatically prone to differentiation and integration, my mind went quite quickly to this statement by Ayn Rand:

Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history.

Both Chomsky and Rand fucked up here. The difference is that Chomsky is just way more clueless about Rand than Rand was about Kant. A further difference, one highlighting the intellectual corruption that pervades the American Left, is that Chomsky gets a free pass from them on fuck-ups like this, while Rand does not. (So much for any pretense by the American Left to an intellectual high-ground.)

To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?

Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).

What is, after all, each thinker's context?

At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.

From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.

Quine and Peikoff

It is now "conventional wisdom" over there in the hallowed halls of Analytic Philosophy (like there's something in Analytic Philosophy that isn't "conventional wisdom"?) that Harvard's Willard van Orman Quine was probably the most significant philosopher of the last half of the 20th century. This is due more to "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) than any other Quine article, and it is that very article where the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction comes under attack. It also happens that Leonard Peikoff wrote an article attacking the distinction, "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy," (1967) in The Objectivist, which was under the editorship and squarely under the philosophical guidance of Ayn Rand. The basic Objectivist package-deal here - a good package deal, as it happens - is Ayn Rand's theory of concepts and Peikoff's essay on the analytic-synthetic distinction. If Rand and Peikoff basically do the same substantive work that Quine did, then they deserve every bit a spot up there among the most significant philosophers of the century.

I've read Peikoff and Rand and understand their arguments quite clearly. I've tried to read Quine and gave up trying to understand after a few pages. Here lies the fundamental difference between Objectivism and Analytic Philosophy. The practitioners' brains are simply wired/habituated to think, argue, and write differently. Academic philosophy journal articles excel in being highly technical and obscurantist. I think the model promotes a certain kind of elitism that essentially cuts off a lot of professional philosophers from rabble out there the Ayn Rand-types would appeal to. So the academic "conventional wisdom" is that it's hard to take Objectivism seriously unless or until its proponents put their ideas in academic peer-refereed journals - an effective device for separating the worth-taking-seriously from the "cranks."

Now that Objectivism is beginning to make notable inroads in the academic publishing realm, the infrastructure of the academic "conventional wisdom" on Rand is beginning to crumble. Further, Objectivism isn't the only philosophical movement that has leveled significant and notable criticisms against the analytic style of philosophy; Continental and Existentialist philosophy have also noted the detachment of analytic-style philosophy from the concerns of everyday people and life. The compounding factor here with Rand is that whispering she's an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism (/whisper), and the CW says that's a no-go. But then again, Rand's theory of concepts is of greater philosophical significance than her advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism, based on her own insistence on the primacy of epistemology over politics and on the nature of the rule of fundamentality applied to philosophical hierarchy.

Rand was fundamentally an advocate of a neo-Aristotelian, non-Platonized form of reason. This puts her right there in the philosophical mainstream, as Aristotle-without-Plato is just what the mainstream has been yearning for, for who-knows-how-long now. (Aristotle is the Philosopher of Common Sense, see, and the conscientious philosophers try to emulate Aristotle by taking a humpty-dumpty they were handed from their forerunners and doing their best to merge it with common sense, somehow.) So the task ahead is to translate that message into terms the philosophically inclined can appreciate and understand.

There is a criticism of ITOE by Gary Merrill posted on Usenet in the early 1990s. ("Usenet? What's that? Is that like Twitter or somethin'?") Merrill's review hones in on Rand's polemical style, which does leave something to be desired, but he does not discuss the content of Rand's theory of concepts. If one focuses on Rand's polemical style, it does become a convenient way to dismiss her as a thinker. ("If she doesn't take much care with respect to other thinkers' ideas, how much care could she take in presenting her own?" Actually, that would be a pretty lame basis for dismissing a philosopher's views. They do tend to spend a lot more time on their own views than those of others, after all. Or is that not true in the very conventional-wisdom-like world of academic philosophy?) Anyway, he then hones in on Peikoff's "Analytic-Synthetic" essay as an example of the same bad tendencies he sees in Rand, because it is evidently ignorant of the fact that Quine's essay had attacked the distinction some 15 years before. "Peikoff is dishonest or incompetent, take your pick." Now, come on. Please.

First off, the criticism may well be self-defeating, for if Peikoff did launch a pretty definitive attack on the distinction without knowledge of Quine's essay or its significance, then that indicates a great deal of originality on Peikoff's part. Second, Peikoff was in a very unique position, that of being a Ph.D. from a respectable graduate program in philosophy and of having had Ayn Rand as a long-time mentor. He has described the mental turmoil the back-and-forth between Rand's methodology and theirs put him through. Now, in the time that Peikoff was in the academy, studying the history of philosophy with focus on "the status of the law of contradiction in classical logical ontology," there's no compelling reason to think Quine's essay or its significance had become well-known in philosophy. This is the time, remember, that academic philosophy was so dominated by positivism that Yale's Brand Blanshard wrote a whole book, Reason and Analysis (1962), covering this dominant tendency. This book Peikoff most definitely would have been familiar with (having been reviewed by Branden in The Objectivist), but I don't see a reason that he should have known about Quine's essay. Best as I can tell, Quine didn't begin to attain his status until about a generation (surprise, surprise?) after "Two Dogmas" appeared, and the field had been cleared.

I just find it noteworthy that the CW-pick for "most significant philosopher since Wittgenstein" and Ayn Rand's best student both attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction. Just like I find it noteworthy that - as the academics are now beginning to discover - Ayn Rand's ethics is the best legitimate heir to Aristotle's on the contemporary field. Just like her politics is the best legitimate heir to that of "lightweights" Locke, Jefferson and Spencer.

Anyway, we know what happens if the analytic-synthetic distinction goes. That means all the pretense surrounding Immanuel Kant crumbles. (I already know it crumbles when it comes to ethics - my "area of specialization" - given the clear and immense superiority of a eudaemonistic ethics over Kant's formalism.) But if that pretense deflates, . . . then what happens to the pretense surrounding the analytic-philosophy model, of which Kant was a supreme practitioner? Maybe if Quine had written in terms non-specialists could understand, we wouldn't even be so much as wondering whether Peikoff was or should have been familiar with "Two Dogmas"?

How Aristotle beats Plato and Kant

On the tail of my last posting, I'd like to take up - briefly, not in detail - the fundamental difference between Aristotle on the one hand and Plato and Kant on the other. In my last posting I made reference to Aristotle's defense of what I termed classical realism.

Classical realism is a basic metaphysical-epistemological principle affirmed by common sense (not the social-metaphysical version of "common sense" that should be dubbed "conventional wisdom" instead - the CW has it that Rand sucks as a philosopher, for instance, even though common sense says she was a dynamo) - namely, that the reality given to us via the senses is an irreducible primary. There's nothing beyond the reality observable by the senses, and no rational justification for thinking that there is. "Reality beyond the sensible" is codeword for intellectual charlatanism and hoodwinking, a boldfaced indulging in the arbitrary.

Reality - ultimate reality if you must - is knowable through the senses and reasoning derived from sensory observation. Aristotle affirmed this. Plato and Kant explicitly deny this.

In other words, only one-third of philosophy's acclaimed Big Three is on the side of the little guy.

If this is a microcosm of the history of western philosophy and its influence, then 2/3 of the supposed reasoning intellectual class has been wasting a hell of a lot of intellectual time and resources, and fostering a hell of a lot of misconceptions.

No wonder mainstream philosophy is such a shithole!

I'd say "this is truly, plainly pathetic" but then you must realize the historical context in which philosophy came about to begin with. First, remember that for some millions of years we were hardly above the level of the monkeys. Then . . . well, think of it like a geometric progression. Philosophy comes only recently in human history; it's hardly even had time to make its mark. But if you think of human evolution in the geometric-progression terms, you're also thinking in terms of progress along all sorts of lines - including philosophy. Even in philosophy, we are moving from a state of lesser wisdom to greater wisdom over the course of 2,500 years. Of course there would be big fuck-ups along the way. Hell, maybe even two out of three major philosophers would fuck up on so basic an issue as classical realism. As that is such a glaring and fundamental fuck-up, perhaps we can say that Plato and Kant were philosophy's two biggest, most influential fuck-ups.

(Note also that religion is a primitive form of philosophy; man in his evolution went through a religious period; then, we've had a philosophical period that has overlapped with the religious one for about the last 2,500 years; the religious period is nearing a close but guess which philosophers' ideas play right into the hands of (anti-realist) religious crowd? Perhaps we might consider these philosophers' metaphysics a remnant or vestige of the religious period, of pre-philosophical anti-realism.)

Aristotle, meanwhile, has only a record of success. The reintroduction of his ideas to the West paved the way for the Renaissance and modern science. The basic methodological orientation on which all rational endeavors such as science are built - induction - originated at the philosophical level with Aristotle (and was perfected with Rand). There's the eudaemonist ethics that is gradually winning over the profession today (some decades after Rand figured this very same thing out and formulated the one true system of "virtue ethics" the profession is more or less blindly groping toward). Everywhere Aristotle pops up, progress ensues.

Classical realism. It's like a basic no-BS litmus test. Aristotle passes. Plato and Kant fail. Simple as that.

How this Philosopher is Looking out for You

There is a deep "fit" between someone's adopting the Ultimate Philosopher moniker and writing a book titled Toward Utopia, and that someone being a huge and well-informed devotee of Ayn Rand. It's really no surprise in the slightest to someone in my epistemic position - someone with tremendous amounts of intellectual curiosity combined with a deep familiarity with philosophically-sound cognitive guidelines (explicated at length by Rand and Peikoff, as it turns out). But even taking Ayn Rand out of the picture, there's Aristotle, and he was looking out for the everyday human being as skillfully as anyone.

Take some hate-filled bastard like Karl Marx. He proclaimed to be a defender of humanity, and many, many people, by the millions if not billions, bought into it. Yet the likes of Karl Marx are the biggest enemies of humanity, in virtue of lousy cognitive processes or bad character or a combination of these things. The only reason Marx seemed to have more credibility than the run-of-the-mill socialists of his day, was his ability to dress up his "findings" in respectable-sounding philosophical-level jargon. He got that pretense to respectability by adopting a Hegelian context. Marx's co-opting of Hegel was his way of coming up with intellectual cover for his monstrously bad social-economic ideas. His writings reflect a deep-seated hatred of capitalism for which he was seeking a rationalization.

The result of Marx's influence: tens of millions of people dead. Needlessly dead, of course, as the Socialist Revolution promised by Marx, and the Paradise promised by his devotees, never happened. Capitalism has triumphed for the simple and obvious that capitalism is the proper social system for human beings. (This left-wing meme that capitalism is the source of oppression, wars, plutocracy, the military-industrial complex, poverty, and such is so much biased, ignorant, cognitively-fucked, and sometimes-dishonest BS.)

So, if Marx was clearly not on the side of the people, just what other intellectual figures, in their own insidiously damaging ways, were also against the interests of the people? Turns out there are shit-ton of them. Something about the very philosophical profession as such seems to provide a bias against everyday practicality - from economics all the way up to the fundamental-level cognition philosophers specialize in. We could start, for instance, with Plato's arbitrary doctrine of the Forms - Form being an otherworldly and unseen, but perfect and pure, X that "explains" the lowly, dirty every day appearances which we need to get beyond in order to attain true wisdom. Does it really take that much imagination to see what insidious anti-man effects this notion has in practice?

Strangely enough, the philosophers - the ones who are supposed to detect and identify the insidious effects of fundamental-level ideas - have dropped the ball. This would follow naturally from their theory/practice disintegration. What sort of real-life destruction could flow from Plato's doctrine of the Forms? It's not even a question that the philosophical mainstream seems to even want to consider. There are ideas over here, and then reality over there, and philosophers like Plato are merely doing their best to understand life in fundamental terms; so how could we vilify Plato or his system? This is the instinctive reaction from non-Randians to Rand declaring Kant "the most evil man in mankind's history." I think Rand is mistaken about this, but - unlike the mainstream philosophers gleefully ready to dismiss her as a crank - I understand what Rand was getting at: Kant's ideas are extreme in their insidiously destructive effects.

It was the utter fucking mess made of philosophy by Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche and Heidegger that has turned Europe into what it is today: a people looking to America to show the way, since their leading lights don't have the answers. This is without even getting into the indirect and insidious influence these thinkers' ideas had on the course of European politics in the very bloody first half of the 20th century. Socialism was all the rage amongst the intelligentsia in the early 20th century, including by the head intellectual honcho of the time, Heidegger. The effects of socialism have been widespread death, stagnation, etc. Heidegger liked National Socialism. Is this someone the man-on-the-street can trust to be on his side?

Kant said that morality is about following abstract universal principles with very murky substantive guidance, rather than about achieving happiness and self-actualization. Is Kant on your side?

Kant said that he had found it necessary to deny human knowledge of the "thing in itself" to make room for faith. Whether or not his intention was to keep religion and reason separate, this could only have the effect of emboldening the pro-faith crowd; the cashing-in is Dinesh D'Souza and his fellow illiberal theocrats. So, is Kant on your side?

Kant said that human perfection isn't possible in this world, and that morality demands that we act as if there were an infinite afterlife in which only then perfection might be achieved. So, is Kant still on your side?

Hegel's reaction to Kant's dualistic approach to philosophy (one emulated to an appalling extent in the mainstream academy) is to dissolve all distinctions into identity; the World, in other words, is a manifestation or emanation of Idea; Object is identical with Subject. Is Hegel on your side?

Schopenhauer intuited that the "thing-in-itself" is Will and that if we can detach in the way prescribed by Eastern mysticism, we'll not suffer so much. Is Schopenhauer on your side?

Bertrand Russell played a bunch of linguistic parlor-games that had no positive practical effects for life, for morality, for common sense, or for political freedom, i.e., capitalism. Is Russell on your side?

John Rawls said that whether you have a right to keep the product of your mind and efforts depends on whether your doing so satisfies his Difference Principle. Is Rawls on your side?

I could go on, but the concretes mentioned already should establish the essential point. We should judge a philosopher on the basis of how well he or she fulfills the job a philosopher is supposed to fulfill, and that job necessarily involves working on behalf of - not against - human beings.

It is no wonder that philosophy has gotten such a bad reputation in the mainstream. It has the reputation for head-in-the-clouds impracticality. At the hands of Plato, Kant, Hegel and others, that reputation is deserved. What the mainstream - not just the ordinary folk but also the mainstream of intellectuals - doesn't yet know is that these thinkers' abstract ideas do have massive practical effects. No philosopher sets out to create an impractical or destructive system of philosophy; the philosopher has a basic worldview and seeks the greatest intellectual fortification for it. It's that process of fortification that has the greatest potential real-world effects. If the fortification runs contrary to the actual requirements of reason, happiness and freedom, then it can have tremendously damaging effects on these values. It is precisely in virtue of the impracticality of a well-fortified worldview like Plato's that it can have the most damaging practical effects when people - whether knowingly or not - adopt such ideas and attempt to implement them.

The solution isn't to toss the philosophy baby out with the anti-practicality bathwater, but to fundamentally transform what philosophers do so that they are finally working in unison on behalf of ordinary people. We might start with repudiating those philosophers who are most clearly against the interests of ordinary people, which are the philosophers opposed to capitalism. The likes of Marx are the most obvious charlatans. But remember what made Marx's prominence possible: Hegel. That means doing higher-level, more abstract work at the greatest level of fundamentality: metaphysics and epistemology. (Again, this is why David Kelley's working-with-libertarians strategy is such a futile waste.) And at that level, we need philosophers who are on our side: Aristotle and Ayn Rand.

This is the goal of my blog and my work. I aim to be the philosopher who writes and works on your behalf. I affirm the classical realism first defended expertly by Aristotle. I affirm that cognitive clarity and sound thinking methods on fundamental questions can be achieved. I affirm the pursuit of happiness in ethics. I affirm the right to the pursuit of happiness in politics. I affirm that human beings, given the right conditions, are capable of mind-blowing greatness. I affirm that capitalism is the only social system proper to human beings where they can seek and achieve greatness and enjoy the product of their efforts.

I affirm that free will means the possibility of greatness and moral perfection, not an excuse for moral failings and for projecting perfection onto an unknowable infinite afterlife. I affirm that the popular practice of wondering about whether we're all brains in a vat (or, better/worse yet, "why there is being rather than nothing") is so much sophomoric, context-dropping BS. I affirm that "the problem of induction" can be solved by actually looking at how sound real-world thinking processes are inductive in their essence. I affirm that you can't attack these principles without implicitly affirming them.

Anyone notice, by the way, how no BS ever got past Roark or Galt? Isn't it time for the anti-Rand types to take a hint?