"Discard that unlimited license to evil which consists of claiming that man is imperfect. By what standard do you damn him when you claim it? Accept the fact that in the realm of morality nothing less than perfection will do. But perfection is not to be gauged by mystic commandments to practice the impossible, and your moral stature is not to be gauged by matters not open to your choice. 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."
- John Galt's radio address, from Atlas Shrugged, p. 1059 (Softcover)
Showing posts with label perfectionism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label perfectionism. Show all posts
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
The Singularity (Reprise)
My last posting on the Singularity explains how it is that the Ultimate Philosopher, through the sheer logic of it all and a process of elimination, came to own the domain name singularityhq.com.
Here is my philosophical interpretation of the Singularity, stimulated by a comment on the last posting:
The essential demarcation point for the Singularity, according to the scientific community - or at least the main "Singularity Guy," Ray Kurzweil - is the building of super-intelligent machines, presumably to occur a few decades in the future. Once a super-intelligent machine is built, it would be capable of conjuring up ever-more intelligent machines. There's just no extrapolating from current trends that would tell us, now, what's going to happen after that. It would be a leap to the Next Level of intelligence, an intelligence explosion.
My current project is aimed toward sparking an intelligence explosion well before the scientists predict. The project is premised upon something very few people acknowledge at this point: the ultimate power of the mind and of ideas as the ruling force in history. Not technology, but ideas - the mind - which is the source of all our technology to begin with.
There would be no technology without a well-developed scientific method, a systematic approach to investigating the natural world. We did not get the modern Scientific Revolution until after St. Thomas Aquinas introduced the works of Aristotle - lost for over 1,000 years - back to the West. Aristotle was the ancient grandmaster of natural inquiry, and his example inspired the Renaissance generations of natural philosophers. Their efforts have demonstrated the power of philosophy, the ultimate integrating science, to shape the course of human affairs (for the better or for the worse, depending on how good or bad an influential philosopher's thought processes were).
The exact nature of philosophy's role in shaping our history is basically unknown to the current generations brought up in our broken educational institutions. This is why both Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in their actual natures, are so egregiously, awesomely unknown to the current generation. The absolutely essential role of integration in Rand's way of thinking is pretty much entirely unknown to the wider public, drowned amidst a see of incomprehension and misdirection pointing to alleged problems in her egoist ethics and capitalist politics. Without any understanding of the significance of Rand's emphasis on integration, there's just no way for a casual reader, with no access to her vast and integrated context, to "get" her. And, with that, her emphasis on the profound significance of Aristotle, a master at the same style of integration, will also fall upon deaf ears.
As to Aristotle's significance, there is no excuse - no excuse whatsofuckingever - for the "philosophical mainstream" not to have caught on as quickly and efficiently (due to the integration of Aristotle's ideas with an existing sum of knowledge, and through sheer force of will to understand) as Ayn Rand did.
When Aristotle's work hit the American public in the early 20th century, much of America was too busy focusing on other shit to study philosophy indepth (such as fighting wars, which ultimately are due to bad philosophy). America's leading philosophers at the time had been misdirected into a rut by the dominant schools of the time - Postivism and Pragmatism - drawing all sorts of valuable intellectual resources away from the study of Aristotle. Ayn Rand was in the unique position at the time to have written The Fountainhead and then to embark on a full-scale study of the history of philosophy. Her context was such that she and she alone was capable of seeing how absolutely crucial Aristotle was to the survival of the West.
And she was the first thinker of the 20th century to adopt, in essence, Aristotle's own ways of thinking. Their conclusions differed, but their ways of thinking were the same. They are both systematizing empiricists and, consequently, ethical eudaemonists of the most sound and complete variety. (That there is widespread ignorance about the nature of eudaemonism, is another ugly testament to the power of bad thinking.)
The intelligence explosion is going to happen once our population understands and adopts the way of thinking shared by Aristotle and Rand. It is the most reality-oriented thinking going. It is the most systematic, logical, and integrated, and all based irreducibly on the evidence of the senses. (That empiricism is associated in the public mind primarily with David Hume, is yet another ugly testament to the power of bad thinking, which leads to massive and widespread point-missing - like what's happened with the public response to Rand's work.)
Now, being able identify the relevent essential similarity between Rand and Aristotle requires a context of knowledge that readers of my forthcoming opus are simply not going to have right off the bat. The goal is to communicate that context to a mass audience in as clear and efficient a manner as possible.
It's worth mentioning here that the book will most decidedly not be aimed at the middle-aged and older generations, whose contexts are so far removed from mine and Rand's, and who are all too set in their ways of thinking. This also means that it's pointless to aim this book at an academic audience. The best that can be said for the academy right now is that Aristotle - some 70-odd years after Rand had already figured him out as the philosophical Atlas of the West - is now making his inevitable headway there.
But my background context isn't primarily Aristotle; it is primarily Ayn Rand, and by implication Aristotle. (Her philosophical insights essentially subsume his, along with modern American individualism and its concept of individual rights, a Romanticist "sense of life" component she got from Nietzsche, and her own chief philosophical creation, her presently-neglected theory of concepts.) I've drawn the relevant integration regarding these three - Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand - and then, adding in the insights of David L. Norton, and noticing a vast array of historical concrete instances in the non-philosophical professions (e.g., Stanley Kubrick, Michael Jordan, Einstein, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson), I arrived at my thesis of Perfectionism.
As far as I can tell, Perfectionism is immune from criticism, for any attempt to refute or deny it implicitly presupposes it. The basic idea of Perfectionism is that the utmost application of one's cognitive apparatus - with thinking as one's basic virtue, as Rand recognized - will lead to the most perfect life for the person: happy, purposeful, productive, efficacious, efficient, empowered, supremely benevolent in the Roarkian sense.
This is why my forthcoming opus will be aimed chiefly at the most effective vehicles for the intelligence explosion: young intellectuals. In this, I am following precisely in Rand's footsteps. Get 'em when they're young, before their context has been all fucked-up by the non-Aristotelian aspects of our culture.
The strategy here is ruthlessly efficient. Ayn Rand's writings are and must be the primary driving force for the intelligence explosion. The logic here is quite inevitable. Rand is accessible, a fine introduction to philosophy (and its power) for the layperson, and already widely-read. She is most widely read and known through her novels. And so, I aim to exploit people's familiarity with Rand as best as I can. I aim to present a vindication of the (perfectionist) ideas in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and most crucially for those young intellectuals who have just encountered her and want to know more.
My path to Rand was a bit unusual. For me, it was a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal which I encountered through some good luck. (Prior to that encounter, my chief intellectual influence was Milton Friedman, the consummate pragmatic libertarian-liberal who couldn't tell you a thing about Aristotle.) But, like with many youths, I was most "blown away" initially by Atlas Shrugged. What I wasn't prepared for, philosophically, was how ideas so compellingly right as hers were so viciously and blindly denounced and ridiculed. What I didn't grasp was how foreign Rand's context was to the society's at large. The basic reason for that foreign-ness is Aristotle's foreign-ness to the public.
Had I and many other young intellectuals had a book in my first year of college like the one I presently have in the works, the intelligence explosion would have been well underway by now. The key is to get as many people as possible thinking the way Aristotle and Rand did, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
And that, in short, is how the Singularity is going to happen.
[CLIFFHANGER: What will I post next?]
Here is my philosophical interpretation of the Singularity, stimulated by a comment on the last posting:
The essential demarcation point for the Singularity, according to the scientific community - or at least the main "Singularity Guy," Ray Kurzweil - is the building of super-intelligent machines, presumably to occur a few decades in the future. Once a super-intelligent machine is built, it would be capable of conjuring up ever-more intelligent machines. There's just no extrapolating from current trends that would tell us, now, what's going to happen after that. It would be a leap to the Next Level of intelligence, an intelligence explosion.
My current project is aimed toward sparking an intelligence explosion well before the scientists predict. The project is premised upon something very few people acknowledge at this point: the ultimate power of the mind and of ideas as the ruling force in history. Not technology, but ideas - the mind - which is the source of all our technology to begin with.
There would be no technology without a well-developed scientific method, a systematic approach to investigating the natural world. We did not get the modern Scientific Revolution until after St. Thomas Aquinas introduced the works of Aristotle - lost for over 1,000 years - back to the West. Aristotle was the ancient grandmaster of natural inquiry, and his example inspired the Renaissance generations of natural philosophers. Their efforts have demonstrated the power of philosophy, the ultimate integrating science, to shape the course of human affairs (for the better or for the worse, depending on how good or bad an influential philosopher's thought processes were).
The exact nature of philosophy's role in shaping our history is basically unknown to the current generations brought up in our broken educational institutions. This is why both Aristotle and Ayn Rand, in their actual natures, are so egregiously, awesomely unknown to the current generation. The absolutely essential role of integration in Rand's way of thinking is pretty much entirely unknown to the wider public, drowned amidst a see of incomprehension and misdirection pointing to alleged problems in her egoist ethics and capitalist politics. Without any understanding of the significance of Rand's emphasis on integration, there's just no way for a casual reader, with no access to her vast and integrated context, to "get" her. And, with that, her emphasis on the profound significance of Aristotle, a master at the same style of integration, will also fall upon deaf ears.
As to Aristotle's significance, there is no excuse - no excuse whatsofuckingever - for the "philosophical mainstream" not to have caught on as quickly and efficiently (due to the integration of Aristotle's ideas with an existing sum of knowledge, and through sheer force of will to understand) as Ayn Rand did.
When Aristotle's work hit the American public in the early 20th century, much of America was too busy focusing on other shit to study philosophy indepth (such as fighting wars, which ultimately are due to bad philosophy). America's leading philosophers at the time had been misdirected into a rut by the dominant schools of the time - Postivism and Pragmatism - drawing all sorts of valuable intellectual resources away from the study of Aristotle. Ayn Rand was in the unique position at the time to have written The Fountainhead and then to embark on a full-scale study of the history of philosophy. Her context was such that she and she alone was capable of seeing how absolutely crucial Aristotle was to the survival of the West.
And she was the first thinker of the 20th century to adopt, in essence, Aristotle's own ways of thinking. Their conclusions differed, but their ways of thinking were the same. They are both systematizing empiricists and, consequently, ethical eudaemonists of the most sound and complete variety. (That there is widespread ignorance about the nature of eudaemonism, is another ugly testament to the power of bad thinking.)
The intelligence explosion is going to happen once our population understands and adopts the way of thinking shared by Aristotle and Rand. It is the most reality-oriented thinking going. It is the most systematic, logical, and integrated, and all based irreducibly on the evidence of the senses. (That empiricism is associated in the public mind primarily with David Hume, is yet another ugly testament to the power of bad thinking, which leads to massive and widespread point-missing - like what's happened with the public response to Rand's work.)
Now, being able identify the relevent essential similarity between Rand and Aristotle requires a context of knowledge that readers of my forthcoming opus are simply not going to have right off the bat. The goal is to communicate that context to a mass audience in as clear and efficient a manner as possible.
It's worth mentioning here that the book will most decidedly not be aimed at the middle-aged and older generations, whose contexts are so far removed from mine and Rand's, and who are all too set in their ways of thinking. This also means that it's pointless to aim this book at an academic audience. The best that can be said for the academy right now is that Aristotle - some 70-odd years after Rand had already figured him out as the philosophical Atlas of the West - is now making his inevitable headway there.
But my background context isn't primarily Aristotle; it is primarily Ayn Rand, and by implication Aristotle. (Her philosophical insights essentially subsume his, along with modern American individualism and its concept of individual rights, a Romanticist "sense of life" component she got from Nietzsche, and her own chief philosophical creation, her presently-neglected theory of concepts.) I've drawn the relevant integration regarding these three - Aristotle, Nietzsche, Rand - and then, adding in the insights of David L. Norton, and noticing a vast array of historical concrete instances in the non-philosophical professions (e.g., Stanley Kubrick, Michael Jordan, Einstein, Beethoven, Thomas Jefferson), I arrived at my thesis of Perfectionism.
As far as I can tell, Perfectionism is immune from criticism, for any attempt to refute or deny it implicitly presupposes it. The basic idea of Perfectionism is that the utmost application of one's cognitive apparatus - with thinking as one's basic virtue, as Rand recognized - will lead to the most perfect life for the person: happy, purposeful, productive, efficacious, efficient, empowered, supremely benevolent in the Roarkian sense.
This is why my forthcoming opus will be aimed chiefly at the most effective vehicles for the intelligence explosion: young intellectuals. In this, I am following precisely in Rand's footsteps. Get 'em when they're young, before their context has been all fucked-up by the non-Aristotelian aspects of our culture.
The strategy here is ruthlessly efficient. Ayn Rand's writings are and must be the primary driving force for the intelligence explosion. The logic here is quite inevitable. Rand is accessible, a fine introduction to philosophy (and its power) for the layperson, and already widely-read. She is most widely read and known through her novels. And so, I aim to exploit people's familiarity with Rand as best as I can. I aim to present a vindication of the (perfectionist) ideas in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and most crucially for those young intellectuals who have just encountered her and want to know more.
My path to Rand was a bit unusual. For me, it was a copy of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal which I encountered through some good luck. (Prior to that encounter, my chief intellectual influence was Milton Friedman, the consummate pragmatic libertarian-liberal who couldn't tell you a thing about Aristotle.) But, like with many youths, I was most "blown away" initially by Atlas Shrugged. What I wasn't prepared for, philosophically, was how ideas so compellingly right as hers were so viciously and blindly denounced and ridiculed. What I didn't grasp was how foreign Rand's context was to the society's at large. The basic reason for that foreign-ness is Aristotle's foreign-ness to the public.
Had I and many other young intellectuals had a book in my first year of college like the one I presently have in the works, the intelligence explosion would have been well underway by now. The key is to get as many people as possible thinking the way Aristotle and Rand did, as quickly and efficiently as possible.
And that, in short, is how the Singularity is going to happen.
[CLIFFHANGER: What will I post next?]
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Peikoff, Binswanger, Gotthelf
I isolate these three concrete instances in virtue of one crucial similarity: they are professionally-trained philosophers, still living, who attended Ayn Rand's epistemology workshops from 1969 to 1971 (now reproduced as the appendix to the 2nd edition of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology). If you want incontrovertible evidence - whatever you think of her conclusions - that Ayn Rand was an absolutely first-rate mind, have a careful and studied look at that appendix. These are things Rand was saying on the fly, without prepared notes, without anything but the vast and integrated contents of her subconscious.
(The subconscious is a chief component of what this small group of philosophical elites called "psycho-epistemology," something Rand was deeply concerned with at this time, as evidenced in her late magnum opus, "The Comprachicos". Keep in mind that "The Comprachicos" was written only a few decades after the works of Aristotle were made available in English and she was pretty much the only philosopher at the time to grasp completely first-hand the awesome magnitude of his importance to human civilization. "The Comprachicos" is a document of a world ruled not by Aristotelianism but by the anti-conceptual effects of Pragmatism. Viewed in that light, "The Comprachicos" ranks up there with Galt's speech and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology among Rand's greatest masterworks. Suffice it to say that around 1970, Rand was at the height of her powers.)
Now, two of the three ITOE-worskhop philosophers are on record for comparing Ayn Rand to Aristotle. That Leonard Peikoff is on record, is quite well known to those who've read or know about Leonard Peikoff. While Binswanger is not on record as far as I know, his doctoral work at Columbia that became his book, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, gives you a good idea of his estimate of Ayn Rand as a thinker. The other is Allan Gotthelf, who also received a Ph.D. at Columbia around this time and later started up the Ayn Rand Society, a professional society affiliated with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Gotthelf is now Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the University's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism. According to the Leiter Report, the leading source for rankings of graduate programs in philosophy, the University of Pittsburgh stands alone as having the highest-ranked program for general philosophy of science. Here's what wikipedia says about Gotthelf:
According to one of the most respected Aristotle scholars around, being at Rand's epistemology workshops "was the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room." (from 100 Voices, p. 342)
I think those limited number of people around who grasp the momentous importance of Aristotle should perk up their ears at this point. Keep in mind two fundamental similarities between Aristotle and Ayn Rand: they were both systematizing empiricists and they were both in essence eudaemonists who emphasized the central role of rationality and intelligence in a flourishing human life. I think one rightly says they are in essence both perfectionists understood in their respective ways: Aristotle understands it as a living entity achieving its form, actualizing its potentialities (the ancient term teleios signifying this perfection); Rand (and Norton) understanding the significance of individuated potentialities (with Rand - but not Norton - grasping the centrality of rationality as the human form metaphysically and the human essence epistemologically). Aristotle and Rand are agreed that the human good consists in the actualization of human (rational) potentiality.
With Norton factored in, we know that this actualization of human potentiality has gone under the heading of "self-actualization" in humanistic psychology. Eudaemonia just is self-actualization, and is the self-perfection of the human being. Norton fills in the "social entailments" angle not accounted for in Rand, though I'm sure she would have gotten there eventually, if she had the time. Norton also adds insight into the so-called is-ought problem: once we conceive of the distinction between potentiality and actuality, we can understand "ought-ness" in terms of potentiality and "is-ness" in terms of actuality. "Is" and "ought" are united in the activity of a rational being actualizing its potentialities, and its good consists in its perfection so defined. This serves as a unified Aristotelian-Randian solution to the so-called is-ought problem and provides the most complete account to date of a eudaemonistic ethics.
Where Aristotle and Rand differed is on how to account for rationality as the essence of human beings. They were in agreement that rationality was the form or organizing principle of a human being, but rationality as a universal remained to be accounted for. And that's why Ayn Rand wrote her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Aristotelian jury, I present to you Allen Gotthelf's paper, "Ayn Rand on Concepts: Another Approach to Abstraction, Essences, and Kinds".
It is by using this approach to abstraction that Gotthelf and I drew the conclusion that Rand more than any other philosopher to date was essentially equivalent to an Aristotle as a philosopher.
And she didn't have a Plato-caliber philosopher to learn from, neither. It was all first-hand.
And it's a leading solution to the so-called problem of induction, too.
Aristotle-admirers, perhaps you might want to take a second, closer look at Ayn Rand.
That is all for now.
Thus spoke the Ultimate Philosopher. :-)
[CLIFFHANGER: What if Aristotle himself attended Rand's epistemology workshops?]
(The subconscious is a chief component of what this small group of philosophical elites called "psycho-epistemology," something Rand was deeply concerned with at this time, as evidenced in her late magnum opus, "The Comprachicos". Keep in mind that "The Comprachicos" was written only a few decades after the works of Aristotle were made available in English and she was pretty much the only philosopher at the time to grasp completely first-hand the awesome magnitude of his importance to human civilization. "The Comprachicos" is a document of a world ruled not by Aristotelianism but by the anti-conceptual effects of Pragmatism. Viewed in that light, "The Comprachicos" ranks up there with Galt's speech and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology among Rand's greatest masterworks. Suffice it to say that around 1970, Rand was at the height of her powers.)
Now, two of the three ITOE-worskhop philosophers are on record for comparing Ayn Rand to Aristotle. That Leonard Peikoff is on record, is quite well known to those who've read or know about Leonard Peikoff. While Binswanger is not on record as far as I know, his doctoral work at Columbia that became his book, The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, gives you a good idea of his estimate of Ayn Rand as a thinker. The other is Allan Gotthelf, who also received a Ph.D. at Columbia around this time and later started up the Ayn Rand Society, a professional society affiliated with the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association.
Gotthelf is now Visiting Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he holds the University's Fellowship for the Study of Objectivism. According to the Leiter Report, the leading source for rankings of graduate programs in philosophy, the University of Pittsburgh stands alone as having the highest-ranked program for general philosophy of science. Here's what wikipedia says about Gotthelf:
In the 1980s he co-organized numerous international conferences on Aristotle's biological and philosophical thought, including the 1988 NEH Summer Institute on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Biology, and Ethics (with Michael Frede and John Cooper). He edited the Festschrift in honor of David M. Balme, Aristotle on Nature and Living Things and co-edited (with James G. Lennox) Philosophical Issues in Aristotle's Biology (Cambridge University Press, 1987). Gotthelf has prepared for publication D.M. Balme's posthumous editions of Aristotle's History of Animals (HA): (a) the Loeb edition of Books VII-X (Harvard University Press, 1991) and (b) the Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries edition of the whole of HA (Cambridge University Press, vol. 1: 2002, vol. 2: forthcoming).You see where I'm going with this, right?
Gotthelf has received many honors for his work on Aristotle, including in 2004 an international conference on "Aristotle on Being, Nature, and Life", held "in celebration of his contributions to the study of classical philosophy and science"; a volume of the proceedings, Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Allan Gotthelf, edited by James G. Lennox and Robert Bolton, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. A volume of Gotthelf's collected Aristotle papers is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
He is currently doing work on Aristotle and Ayn Rand's epistemology.[1]
Most recently, at the University of Pittsburgh, he has organized various workshops and conferences on the nature of concepts and objectivity and the bearing of these issues on important topics in epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaethics.
According to one of the most respected Aristotle scholars around, being at Rand's epistemology workshops "was the equivalent of having Aristotle in the room." (from 100 Voices, p. 342)
I think those limited number of people around who grasp the momentous importance of Aristotle should perk up their ears at this point. Keep in mind two fundamental similarities between Aristotle and Ayn Rand: they were both systematizing empiricists and they were both in essence eudaemonists who emphasized the central role of rationality and intelligence in a flourishing human life. I think one rightly says they are in essence both perfectionists understood in their respective ways: Aristotle understands it as a living entity achieving its form, actualizing its potentialities (the ancient term teleios signifying this perfection); Rand (and Norton) understanding the significance of individuated potentialities (with Rand - but not Norton - grasping the centrality of rationality as the human form metaphysically and the human essence epistemologically). Aristotle and Rand are agreed that the human good consists in the actualization of human (rational) potentiality.
With Norton factored in, we know that this actualization of human potentiality has gone under the heading of "self-actualization" in humanistic psychology. Eudaemonia just is self-actualization, and is the self-perfection of the human being. Norton fills in the "social entailments" angle not accounted for in Rand, though I'm sure she would have gotten there eventually, if she had the time. Norton also adds insight into the so-called is-ought problem: once we conceive of the distinction between potentiality and actuality, we can understand "ought-ness" in terms of potentiality and "is-ness" in terms of actuality. "Is" and "ought" are united in the activity of a rational being actualizing its potentialities, and its good consists in its perfection so defined. This serves as a unified Aristotelian-Randian solution to the so-called is-ought problem and provides the most complete account to date of a eudaemonistic ethics.
Where Aristotle and Rand differed is on how to account for rationality as the essence of human beings. They were in agreement that rationality was the form or organizing principle of a human being, but rationality as a universal remained to be accounted for. And that's why Ayn Rand wrote her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Aristotelian jury, I present to you Allen Gotthelf's paper, "Ayn Rand on Concepts: Another Approach to Abstraction, Essences, and Kinds".
It is by using this approach to abstraction that Gotthelf and I drew the conclusion that Rand more than any other philosopher to date was essentially equivalent to an Aristotle as a philosopher.
And she didn't have a Plato-caliber philosopher to learn from, neither. It was all first-hand.
And it's a leading solution to the so-called problem of induction, too.
Aristotle-admirers, perhaps you might want to take a second, closer look at Ayn Rand.
That is all for now.
Thus spoke the Ultimate Philosopher. :-)
[CLIFFHANGER: What if Aristotle himself attended Rand's epistemology workshops?]
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Sunday Worship, 3/6/2011
Per Christian Malloch
I would like to think that my forthcoming opus is what Per might have written were he still around. He was effing brilliant.
And thank Rand for emphasizing the role of integration in cognitive perfection!
I would like to think that my forthcoming opus is what Per might have written were he still around. He was effing brilliant.
And thank Rand for emphasizing the role of integration in cognitive perfection!
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Generational Shift, Cont'd
Expanding upon my previous posting, I want to do a bit of a thought experiment. Say that you brought Aristotle into today's intellectual scene. What would he have to conclude on the political-philosophical front? (An alternative thought-experiment is to bring a short-list of All-Time Great Philosophers into today, but I like to keep it simple with Aristotle, since his powers of assimilation [or, in alternative terminology, dialectic] would make it kinda pointless to bring in the others. And I take it more or less for granted that, to use Rand's phraseology, Aristotle is the philosophical Atlas holding up the Western intellectual tradition.)
Now, I want to first put aside one point-missing answer that inevitably comes up in connection with Aristotle, to the effect that he endorsed questionable doctrines - universal teleology, an insufficient account of universals, a measure of political authoritarianism or collectivism, and other stuff in that vein. It misses the point that Aristotle was assimilating the best ideas of his day to come to the best answers available to him. If he were around today, with the benefit of 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, he'd have better answers on these things. For example, in light of modern political philosophy, he'd incorporate Lockean insights, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Mill, Rand, Hayek, Rawls, and Nozick. By "incorporate" (or assimilate) I mean the Aristotelian method of considering all the views, isolating their merits from insufficient one-sided applications in any given case, and abstracting-integrating a more complete answer without the weaknesses of the others. He'd have a way of assimilating, say, Spencer and Rawls that doesn't preserve the substantive oppositions between them (given the law of non-contradiction - e.g., either we have an extensive welfare state or we don't). (Sciabarra presents a helpful overview of this methodology originating in Aristotle - what Sciabarra calls dialectics, or what I'd call integration (horizontal and vertical) - in the first part of Total Freedom.)
Okay, let's now take the most representative figures whose ideas have been most influential on political philosophy in America over the last half-century. I don't mean the most representative figures in the academy per se, but the most representative figures in "the real world," those who have actually had the most influence on the formation of present-day political positions and oppositions in America. If it were the academy deciding on things, there would be a decidedly more left-liberal "center" in American politics today than there is now; in fact, though, the academy has influenced American politics less than its inhabitants would have liked, given a certain resistance to the academy in the real-world American populace.
Another consideration in selecting the representative figures I'm about to name is that we want figures who are plausibly referred to as political philosophers and can rightly be accorded the distinction of "philosopher," rather than, say, polemicist, pundit, commentator, propagator, intellectual (but short of "philosopher" status - the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, to cite prominent names in recent years on non-political matters, don't qualify), etc. I make this qualification because while the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and Kristol have been influential on conservative "movement" politics, I don't think they have much in the way of philosophical chops. (Didn't want to have to knock conservative intellectuals down a notch, but the dastardly and disreputable treatment of Rand by Buckley and Kirk makes this knocking-down quite unavoidable.) I also make this qualification because I am thinking in terms of longer-term influence which comes from having philosophical-level stature. This stems from how profound and seminal a thinker is. I also do this in order to exclude political scientists, historians, and economists who haven't contributed much by way of political philosophy proper.
Through appropriate process of elimination, I come up with six most significant figures who, taken together, best define the best of what there is on offer for influential political ideology in America. They are, in order of birth date: Hayek, Rand, Rawls, Chomsky, Dworkin, and Nozick. They all have the virtue of being "big names," and the breakdown gives us, by American political standards, three "right" figures and three "left" figures. They span the range from "radical for capitalism" to "radical for anarcho-syndicalism." If there is any one figure that best defines the "center" in America, it would be Hayek, with Rawls a close second.
One thing to note about every one of these figures is the lack of a "conservative" emphasis on the centrality of religion to politics; the closest in that regard would be Hayek, an agnostic himself who acknowledges the importance of tradition (and hence, of some aspect(s) or other of religion to social ordering). Whatever any of them might say for religion, they're all really only interested in what we can know about the natural world (including the social and political world) independent of any religious or theological commitments. In that regard, they inherit an Aristotelian sensibility - and in that regard, modern theocentric conservatisms are implicitly hostile to Aristotelian sensibilities. If Aristotle were around today, I don't think he would have much to say for these conservatisms. So there you have it as far as theocentric political conservatisms go. (A much better approach for these conservatives is to invoke the natural-law tradition without a theological package-deal; that's in fact what the better ones do.)
So, taking the above six philosophical heavy-hitters, how would Aristotle do his characteristic assimilation? The answer, I think, is not one that left-liberals are going to like. Aristotle is too systematic a philosopher not to understand the priority of ethics over politics, which puts him closest to Ayn Rand among these six. Eudaemonist ethics are now, as in Aristotle's time, the best normative-ethical theory going. If you look at the contemporary scene as far as Aristotelian scholarship goes, and further narrow down that group to scholars who are familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas, you find - quite unsurprisingly, to those with so much as clue about these things - a great deal of sympathy toward her ideas. Were Aristotle around today, he couldn't help but to notice this, and to notice the affinity between his-ideas-with-2,500-years-of-hindsight and her own.
Further, it's hard to believe he would be unfamiliar with Norton's eudaemonism which is, to my knowledge, the best-developed modern text in eudaemonist ethics. He couldn't help but notice the literature on perfectionism, and make the appropriate assimilations. Further, he couldn't help but notice that an ethical program of perfectionism, as hierarchically prior to any political program, would render a lot of issues and debates in contemporary political philosophy - which take for granted widespread lack of perfectionistic virtues - moot. That's one outcome of Aristotelian-style assimilation: rendering many debates moot. In promoting a Nortonian-Randian perfectionist program, various debates among present-day left-liberals become irrelevant; obsessions with "distribution of the social product" and egalitarian ideals fall by the wayside - just as, say, debates amongst the various factions of materialists in Aristotle's day fall by the wayside under his assimilation.
(This is evidence of how removed from the real-world American mainstream the academic political-philosophical mainstream is, if we go by who occupies the top posts at the top-rated universities. Nozick's diagnosis has plenty bite to it, and it probably doesn't tell the whole story; Rand and Hayek have things to say about this as well, and one thing they do share is a criticism of tendencies toward rationalism among intellectuals. Here I can't help but think Aristotle would endorse these diagnoses and criticisms - which is why I think the second most similar to Aristotle among the six is Hayek. If Aristotelian-style philosophizing is the standard, it's just not looking too good for left-liberal academia.)
This is not to say that Aristotle wouldn't acknowledge, take into account, etc., the good points being made by the "left" figures I've mentioned; what he would oppose is incomplete and one-sided applications of the good parts. With Rawls, he might acknowledge the merits of a theory being aimed toward principles that people could, with suitably-defined impartiality, reasonably accept. The notion there is fairly vacuous on its own, though, and aside from its intuitive appealingness to a left-liberal academic audience, the contrivance that is the Original Position doesn't suitably account for your ordinary notions of justice once you take into account Rand and Norton with their eudaemonistic approach. (Norton's developmental approach to personhood, for example, makes it exceedingly silly to formulate a theory of justice based on a veil-of-ignorance model which pays no heed to the task of discovering and actualizing one's distinctive individuative potentialities. Norton gets into this in the last chapter of Personal Destinies.)
I couldn't speak for a hypothetical present-day Aristotle, but I think that of the three "left" figures, Chomsky may well be found the most sympathetic figure, given his (implicit) observations of just how devoid of virtue the present money-power-propaganda model is. (That's my spin on it, anyway; I share many of the "left-style" criticisms of today's corrupted political scene. I differ in my diagnosis and solution, while the hard-left-wing seems quite oblivious to what Ayn Rand actually has to say about power. They certainly haven't a clue as to how her views on reason and virtue hierarchically integrate with her views on political power and corruption. The characteristic blind attack on Rand I see from hard-leftists is based on the ignorant assumption that she endorses an exploitative model in virtue of her egoism and alleged "elitism." It's really very embarrassing how ignorant and oblivious to philosophy this stuff is. At least Chomsky himself has had the good sense to refrain from commenting on Rand, about whom he has no obvious qualifications to speak.) Chomsky is of the view that if people were really not so ignorant they'd embrace his social ideals, but we also run up against a limitation with Chomsky: he's not a philosopher proper. He's a political philosopher whose primary background is linguistics and social science; he isn't known for contributions in ethics or epistemology. Aristotle would supersede him. It's interesting that a primacy-of-social-sciences view seems to dominate the far-left mentality in this country.
Alright, enough for beating up on the left. I do want to now give a brief comment on what Aristotle would say about Ayn Rand, and it's probably not going to sit well with her more devoted admirers. While Aristotle would greatly admire Rand's methodological prescriptions, the integration of theoretical and practical, her substantive ethical views (eudaemonism), and quite likely her political philosophy (radical liberalism), he would not have approved of her very non-Aristotelian approach to other philosophers. In place of Rand's over-the-top caricatures and demonizations of Immanuel Kant, he'd have done something way more effective and Aristotelian: fully understand him, characterize Kant's views in his own terms, acknowledge his context, and proceed to refute him. Taking an adversarial stance carries the dangers of partisanship; Aristotle could do so without falling into partisan otherization and demonization, which we find so common in political rhetoric.
For all her methodological emphasis on integration and context, Rand's polemical style was very one-sided. That style has been insidious, a shortcoming that has fed upon itself in really nasty ways. It has been a huge impediment to her ideas taking hold in a timely fashion. It has been insidious, because it has attracted a certain kind of following consisting of adherents who emulate that style, often in increasingly offensive and bizarre ways. Some of the worst of it came out in the writings of Peter Schwartz and in other contributors to The Intellectual Activist in the '80s and '90s. It's why David Kelley, for whatever his shortcomings, couldn't stand it any longer and realized something had to get better.
What happened is that between Rand's heyday up through the 1990s, there were devoted adherents of Objectivism who best understood its methods as presented in Peikoff's courses, but who failed to consistently integrate those methods due to insidious bad practices. That's how you ended up with a movement were a Peter Schwartz was a de facto leader, while there was thorough ignorance of such magnificent ideas and sensibilities as Norton's. It's disgusting, really, that this kind of thing happened in a movement devoted to reason and reality. Not until the 2000s do we see serious attempts to repair this tendency. I think there is a lot to be learned from this problem, given all the cultural progress delayed by it. Rand was simply wrong to say things like, "Kant was the most evil man in mankind's history," and the various attempts I've seen over the years by the devout, to save Rand's condemnation of Kant, just don't hold up. She fucked up here, is all. She had shortcomings and blind spots, and of the sort that Aristotle would not have had or put up with.
But that's the genius of Aristotle. He could acknowledge where the shortcomings, fuck-ups, mistakes, personality flaws, etc. were in Rand's mode of philosophizing, and he could acknowledge and understand the context that led to these unfortunate tendencies, and still extract-and-assimilate the good stuff (of which there is a shit-ton), just as current-day Aristotle scholars like Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, Rasmussen and Den Uyl have picked up on. And, I believe, he'd also have, Sgt. Hartmann-like, ripped the present-day academy a new gaping asshole for failing so badly to notice this good stuff. With an Aristotle-caliber philosopher, it's all about holding everyone to the highest standards. Perfectionism, you see.
[CLIFFHANGER: Will the next blog posting be that Sgt. Hartmann-like gaping-new-asshole-tearing? Stay tuned, because, whatever it'll be, you won't want to miss it!]
Now, I want to first put aside one point-missing answer that inevitably comes up in connection with Aristotle, to the effect that he endorsed questionable doctrines - universal teleology, an insufficient account of universals, a measure of political authoritarianism or collectivism, and other stuff in that vein. It misses the point that Aristotle was assimilating the best ideas of his day to come to the best answers available to him. If he were around today, with the benefit of 2,500 years of philosophical hindsight, he'd have better answers on these things. For example, in light of modern political philosophy, he'd incorporate Lockean insights, as well as those of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Mill, Rand, Hayek, Rawls, and Nozick. By "incorporate" (or assimilate) I mean the Aristotelian method of considering all the views, isolating their merits from insufficient one-sided applications in any given case, and abstracting-integrating a more complete answer without the weaknesses of the others. He'd have a way of assimilating, say, Spencer and Rawls that doesn't preserve the substantive oppositions between them (given the law of non-contradiction - e.g., either we have an extensive welfare state or we don't). (Sciabarra presents a helpful overview of this methodology originating in Aristotle - what Sciabarra calls dialectics, or what I'd call integration (horizontal and vertical) - in the first part of Total Freedom.)
Okay, let's now take the most representative figures whose ideas have been most influential on political philosophy in America over the last half-century. I don't mean the most representative figures in the academy per se, but the most representative figures in "the real world," those who have actually had the most influence on the formation of present-day political positions and oppositions in America. If it were the academy deciding on things, there would be a decidedly more left-liberal "center" in American politics today than there is now; in fact, though, the academy has influenced American politics less than its inhabitants would have liked, given a certain resistance to the academy in the real-world American populace.
Another consideration in selecting the representative figures I'm about to name is that we want figures who are plausibly referred to as political philosophers and can rightly be accorded the distinction of "philosopher," rather than, say, polemicist, pundit, commentator, propagator, intellectual (but short of "philosopher" status - the likes of Dawkins and Hitchens, to cite prominent names in recent years on non-political matters, don't qualify), etc. I make this qualification because while the likes of Buckley, Kirk, and Kristol have been influential on conservative "movement" politics, I don't think they have much in the way of philosophical chops. (Didn't want to have to knock conservative intellectuals down a notch, but the dastardly and disreputable treatment of Rand by Buckley and Kirk makes this knocking-down quite unavoidable.) I also make this qualification because I am thinking in terms of longer-term influence which comes from having philosophical-level stature. This stems from how profound and seminal a thinker is. I also do this in order to exclude political scientists, historians, and economists who haven't contributed much by way of political philosophy proper.
Through appropriate process of elimination, I come up with six most significant figures who, taken together, best define the best of what there is on offer for influential political ideology in America. They are, in order of birth date: Hayek, Rand, Rawls, Chomsky, Dworkin, and Nozick. They all have the virtue of being "big names," and the breakdown gives us, by American political standards, three "right" figures and three "left" figures. They span the range from "radical for capitalism" to "radical for anarcho-syndicalism." If there is any one figure that best defines the "center" in America, it would be Hayek, with Rawls a close second.
One thing to note about every one of these figures is the lack of a "conservative" emphasis on the centrality of religion to politics; the closest in that regard would be Hayek, an agnostic himself who acknowledges the importance of tradition (and hence, of some aspect(s) or other of religion to social ordering). Whatever any of them might say for religion, they're all really only interested in what we can know about the natural world (including the social and political world) independent of any religious or theological commitments. In that regard, they inherit an Aristotelian sensibility - and in that regard, modern theocentric conservatisms are implicitly hostile to Aristotelian sensibilities. If Aristotle were around today, I don't think he would have much to say for these conservatisms. So there you have it as far as theocentric political conservatisms go. (A much better approach for these conservatives is to invoke the natural-law tradition without a theological package-deal; that's in fact what the better ones do.)
So, taking the above six philosophical heavy-hitters, how would Aristotle do his characteristic assimilation? The answer, I think, is not one that left-liberals are going to like. Aristotle is too systematic a philosopher not to understand the priority of ethics over politics, which puts him closest to Ayn Rand among these six. Eudaemonist ethics are now, as in Aristotle's time, the best normative-ethical theory going. If you look at the contemporary scene as far as Aristotelian scholarship goes, and further narrow down that group to scholars who are familiar with Ayn Rand's ideas, you find - quite unsurprisingly, to those with so much as clue about these things - a great deal of sympathy toward her ideas. Were Aristotle around today, he couldn't help but to notice this, and to notice the affinity between his-ideas-with-2,500-years-of-hindsight and her own.
Further, it's hard to believe he would be unfamiliar with Norton's eudaemonism which is, to my knowledge, the best-developed modern text in eudaemonist ethics. He couldn't help but notice the literature on perfectionism, and make the appropriate assimilations. Further, he couldn't help but notice that an ethical program of perfectionism, as hierarchically prior to any political program, would render a lot of issues and debates in contemporary political philosophy - which take for granted widespread lack of perfectionistic virtues - moot. That's one outcome of Aristotelian-style assimilation: rendering many debates moot. In promoting a Nortonian-Randian perfectionist program, various debates among present-day left-liberals become irrelevant; obsessions with "distribution of the social product" and egalitarian ideals fall by the wayside - just as, say, debates amongst the various factions of materialists in Aristotle's day fall by the wayside under his assimilation.
(This is evidence of how removed from the real-world American mainstream the academic political-philosophical mainstream is, if we go by who occupies the top posts at the top-rated universities. Nozick's diagnosis has plenty bite to it, and it probably doesn't tell the whole story; Rand and Hayek have things to say about this as well, and one thing they do share is a criticism of tendencies toward rationalism among intellectuals. Here I can't help but think Aristotle would endorse these diagnoses and criticisms - which is why I think the second most similar to Aristotle among the six is Hayek. If Aristotelian-style philosophizing is the standard, it's just not looking too good for left-liberal academia.)
This is not to say that Aristotle wouldn't acknowledge, take into account, etc., the good points being made by the "left" figures I've mentioned; what he would oppose is incomplete and one-sided applications of the good parts. With Rawls, he might acknowledge the merits of a theory being aimed toward principles that people could, with suitably-defined impartiality, reasonably accept. The notion there is fairly vacuous on its own, though, and aside from its intuitive appealingness to a left-liberal academic audience, the contrivance that is the Original Position doesn't suitably account for your ordinary notions of justice once you take into account Rand and Norton with their eudaemonistic approach. (Norton's developmental approach to personhood, for example, makes it exceedingly silly to formulate a theory of justice based on a veil-of-ignorance model which pays no heed to the task of discovering and actualizing one's distinctive individuative potentialities. Norton gets into this in the last chapter of Personal Destinies.)
I couldn't speak for a hypothetical present-day Aristotle, but I think that of the three "left" figures, Chomsky may well be found the most sympathetic figure, given his (implicit) observations of just how devoid of virtue the present money-power-propaganda model is. (That's my spin on it, anyway; I share many of the "left-style" criticisms of today's corrupted political scene. I differ in my diagnosis and solution, while the hard-left-wing seems quite oblivious to what Ayn Rand actually has to say about power. They certainly haven't a clue as to how her views on reason and virtue hierarchically integrate with her views on political power and corruption. The characteristic blind attack on Rand I see from hard-leftists is based on the ignorant assumption that she endorses an exploitative model in virtue of her egoism and alleged "elitism." It's really very embarrassing how ignorant and oblivious to philosophy this stuff is. At least Chomsky himself has had the good sense to refrain from commenting on Rand, about whom he has no obvious qualifications to speak.) Chomsky is of the view that if people were really not so ignorant they'd embrace his social ideals, but we also run up against a limitation with Chomsky: he's not a philosopher proper. He's a political philosopher whose primary background is linguistics and social science; he isn't known for contributions in ethics or epistemology. Aristotle would supersede him. It's interesting that a primacy-of-social-sciences view seems to dominate the far-left mentality in this country.
Alright, enough for beating up on the left. I do want to now give a brief comment on what Aristotle would say about Ayn Rand, and it's probably not going to sit well with her more devoted admirers. While Aristotle would greatly admire Rand's methodological prescriptions, the integration of theoretical and practical, her substantive ethical views (eudaemonism), and quite likely her political philosophy (radical liberalism), he would not have approved of her very non-Aristotelian approach to other philosophers. In place of Rand's over-the-top caricatures and demonizations of Immanuel Kant, he'd have done something way more effective and Aristotelian: fully understand him, characterize Kant's views in his own terms, acknowledge his context, and proceed to refute him. Taking an adversarial stance carries the dangers of partisanship; Aristotle could do so without falling into partisan otherization and demonization, which we find so common in political rhetoric.
For all her methodological emphasis on integration and context, Rand's polemical style was very one-sided. That style has been insidious, a shortcoming that has fed upon itself in really nasty ways. It has been a huge impediment to her ideas taking hold in a timely fashion. It has been insidious, because it has attracted a certain kind of following consisting of adherents who emulate that style, often in increasingly offensive and bizarre ways. Some of the worst of it came out in the writings of Peter Schwartz and in other contributors to The Intellectual Activist in the '80s and '90s. It's why David Kelley, for whatever his shortcomings, couldn't stand it any longer and realized something had to get better.
What happened is that between Rand's heyday up through the 1990s, there were devoted adherents of Objectivism who best understood its methods as presented in Peikoff's courses, but who failed to consistently integrate those methods due to insidious bad practices. That's how you ended up with a movement were a Peter Schwartz was a de facto leader, while there was thorough ignorance of such magnificent ideas and sensibilities as Norton's. It's disgusting, really, that this kind of thing happened in a movement devoted to reason and reality. Not until the 2000s do we see serious attempts to repair this tendency. I think there is a lot to be learned from this problem, given all the cultural progress delayed by it. Rand was simply wrong to say things like, "Kant was the most evil man in mankind's history," and the various attempts I've seen over the years by the devout, to save Rand's condemnation of Kant, just don't hold up. She fucked up here, is all. She had shortcomings and blind spots, and of the sort that Aristotle would not have had or put up with.
But that's the genius of Aristotle. He could acknowledge where the shortcomings, fuck-ups, mistakes, personality flaws, etc. were in Rand's mode of philosophizing, and he could acknowledge and understand the context that led to these unfortunate tendencies, and still extract-and-assimilate the good stuff (of which there is a shit-ton), just as current-day Aristotle scholars like Gotthelf, Lennox, Miller, Rasmussen and Den Uyl have picked up on. And, I believe, he'd also have, Sgt. Hartmann-like, ripped the present-day academy a new gaping asshole for failing so badly to notice this good stuff. With an Aristotle-caliber philosopher, it's all about holding everyone to the highest standards. Perfectionism, you see.
[CLIFFHANGER: Will the next blog posting be that Sgt. Hartmann-like gaping-new-asshole-tearing? Stay tuned, because, whatever it'll be, you won't want to miss it!]
Thursday, February 24, 2011
David L. Norton's Personal Destinies
My current book project was initially conceived as something somewhat less ambitious (although the logic of it eventually led me to what it is now), and that was more or less a comparison between Ayn Rand's normative ethics and the ethics of David L. Norton's masterful Personal Destinies: A Philosophy of Ethical Individualism. I ended up making it my own personal destiny to write an ultimate book with the ideas of these two still at the substantive core, just teasing out the implications.
The very idea of connecting Rand to Norton in a close way seemingly hadn't occurred to anyone before, but you'd think it might have since the parallels are so compelling. They're both ethical individualists. They're both eudaemonists. They both have a compelling normative ethics - so darned compelling that were they widely known, understood, adopted and implemented, utopia would be automatic. So perhaps you can say that the mission of Toward Utopia is to make this normative-ethical vision so obviously compelling, so indisputable, so undeniable that a helluva lot of people ought to get on board right quick so that we fast-track right toward utopia.
Here's the gist of the program: We understand Ayn Rand's normative ethics as, in essence, a self-actualization ethics. The ground of virtue is the need to self-actualize, and we recognize self-actualization to be an inherently desirable thing. Rand and Norton conceive of the fundamental virtue in distinct but complementary ways (which can be integrated): Norton conceives of virtue as integrity to the self to be actualized; Rand conceives of virtue as rationality, or the optimal exercise of the human cognitive faculty, reason being the basic human mode of functioning. Rand's epistemology comes into play here because her entire philosophy is built toward a practical end, which is living our lives to the utmost. This is best achieved through mental unit-economy, which stems from following proper cognitive guidelines; the perfection of our cognitive faculty leads to optimal cognitive efficiency, effectively raising our IQ. (There is a genius, i.e., daemon, in all of us, see.) That fast-tracks us toward self-actualization, and when people cooperatively pool their now-enhanced cognitive resources, things get fast-tracked even more, which frees up yet more cognitive resources to enhance, and so forth. So I'm just playing my part in getting this avalanche started. After that, there is just no room for the cycnicism, pessimism, and defeatism (in addition to all that cognitive inefficiency and irrationality) currently holding us back from achieving a better world.
So this posting is about Personal Destinies. I don't intend it to be a review so much as a brief exposition and commentary in which I can barely hold back my fawning. If I had to name a single favorite philosophy book, it would be this one. There's a good reason why this is. First, my philosophical specialty is ethics, and ethics has a certain centrality in philosophy that the other branches of philosophy don't have. (Epistemology has a centrality of its own. Perhaps the contrast here is this: epistemology is more basic, while ethics is more central.) Second, it's expertly and beautifully crafted. Just brilliant. It also has the "cred" of coming from a leading university press, so there's no reason, no fucking reason, for academics to (continue to) overlook it. Third, it's true - chock full of true.
There's one downside: it is obscure. That is to say, it is written in an obscure style. I say this because some years ago, as I was in college and then in grad school, I tried on two occasions to venture into the book, and barely followed what Norton was saying. Now, when a graduate student in philosophy specializing in ethics reads this book and doesn't get what's going on, that's pretty good evidence that it's obscure. And I still say it's obscure. In fact, while there are parts of the book that I understand - and like a lot - there are still parts of the book quite hard for me to follow even on the basis of two recent readings. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, another tidbit as to how I re-encountered this book, if this is any clue as to the completist-perfectionist nature of the mental process involved.
See, when I first delved into the book way back when in school, I noticed that some chapters were devoted to critics of "recent eudaemonisms," including that of Nietzsche. The idea of Nietzsche as a eudaemonist struck me as odd and/or intriguing, which is why it stuck in the back of my mind for later retrieval. It was then a discussion in early 2010 on the SOLO forum in which Rand commentator Jennifer Burns and Rand-defender James Valliant were participating, where links between Rand and Nietzsche were discussed - I think it was about their respective celebrations of human excellence - and that's when it clicked. I had to go back and scrounge up my Norton book. Then I "got it." The first chapter (the most accessible) had me hooked.
(To even think of drawing the connection between Rand, Nietzsche and Norton requires a context of knowledge that only a few people possess. Hell, how did I even know about Norton to begin with? Only because he was mentioned in the works of Machan, Rasmussen and Den Uyl. And how many people have read them indepth? That demographic is limited to people interested in Rand, in ethics, and in academic-style philosophy. A small group to begin with. So what are the odds Norton's book would have fallen into total obscurity were it not for the works of these Rand-influenced philosophers? [Insert angry rant about Rand and the academy here.])
Now, about the book. I mentioned the first chapter. The first chapter is enough to sell a reader on the basic idea. I knew just from reading the first chapter that there was a book project in the making. The chapter's title is "The Ethical Priority of Self-Actualization." Norton here is doing an ambitious integration of his own here: in a manner hardly at all accomplished in any of the other literature, Norton ties the ancient concept of eudaemonia to the 20th century concept of self-actualization popularized first and foremost by Abraham Maslow. I mean, how was that connection so badly missed outside of Norton's work? To top that, Norton mentions in his first footnote (in the Preface) that he uses the terms "eudaimonism" (his spelling) and "self-actualization ethics" and "perfectionism" interchangeably, and that "formally and inclusively" he he employs the term "normative individualism." It just all comes together!
Norton, in characteristically beautiful style, illustrates the concept of the "daimon" by analogy to the hollow clay busts of the semi-deity Silenus fashioned by ancient Greek sculptors, which contained inside them a golden figurine to be revealed when the bust is broken open. The golden figurine is akin to our inner daimon, i.e., the inner self. Our ethical task, in short, is to bring this self to outward actuality, so that (citing the passage from the Phaedrus which Norton quotes at the very beginning, before the Preface) the inward and the outward self may be at one. I mean, already you can tell this is an awesome ethical system. This is where the virtue of integrity comes in - you act so as to harmonize the inward and outward self. The parallels to Howard Roark are obvious to anyone in the habit of drawing integrations. Going back to the title of the first chapter: self-actualization has ethical priority. It is the chief and fundamental concern of ethics, from which other ethical considerations follow. Rand again! (How did so many miss this connection, again? HOW????!!!)
Norton is careful to distinguish self-actualization from self-realization. His claim is that the inward self is real whether actualized or not. It exists as potentiality. Moreover, Norton expands upon both Aristotle and Rand by emphasizing more than just the generic human potentiality of rationality; he uses the phrase (among the many wonderful phrase-coinings in this book) "innate distinct potentiality," which is the self. Each individual has his own "unique and irreplaceable potential worth" in virtue of his unique innate nature. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl would later distinguish generic and individuative potentialities, the actualization of both of which are necessary to self-actualization or eudaemonia. The normative enterprise consists, then, in self-knowledge or self-discovery and engaging in the work to progressively actualize that potentiality.
That's the basic idea, upon which the rest of the book builds. Chapters 2-4 critique "recent eudaemonisms," in turn: British Absolute Idealism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then the Existentialism of Sartre. I assume these chapters would be of interest to those who are reasonably well-versed in these thinkers, which admittedly I am not (for the moment, only for the moment). I do have a basic idea as to the differences between Existentialism and a Grecophile eudaemonism, namely, as to whether "existence precedes essence." Norton (and Aristotle, and Rand) affirm that we do have an essence or nature from the onset of our existence; this defines our potentialities to be actualized.
Chapter 5, titled "The Metaphysics of Individualism," is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the book; not having specialized in metaphysics, a lot of his discussion here goes over my head. (I should mention here that there's a silver lining to the difficult parts of Norton's book: it affords the opportunity to come back for subsequent readings and get something out of it. How many books can one say that about?) One very intriguing thing Norton does in this chapter is to address the meta-ethical question of goodness and "ought" in relation to natural facts. The gist of Norton's answer here consists in conceiving "ought" as potentiality in relation to actuality (thereby answering Hume, who treats fact in terms of actuality without discussing such concepts as potentiality), and in describing the basic promissory nature of human actions. (I think this latter aspect may correspond to Rand's "initial choice" upon which obligation is grounded, in connection with facts about, essentially, our potentialities.)
Chapter 6, "The Stages of Life," provides Norton's conception of the person as informed by developmental psychology, starting with childhood, then adolescence, and then maturation, and, finally, old age. There are distinctive principles of behavior applying to each stage, while the transition between stages involves what Norton refers to as "world-exchange" by the person. Childhood essentially involves dependency; the stage of adolescence is characterized by creative exploration of potentialities; maturation or adulthood is the "main phase" for which eudaemonistic principles see their application; old age is . . . well, it sounds kinda drab the way Norton describes it. I don't want to think about old age until I approach it.
Chapter 7, "Eudaimonia: The Quality of Moral Life in the Stage of Maturation," describes the condition of "living in truth to oneself," or "being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do." That sounds like a rare phenomenon in the present-day world, but the whole point is that we all have this daimon in us that can in principle be actualized under the right conditions. Norton refers to eudaemonia as a feeling and a condition; in the first chapter, he describes it as both a feeling and condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire, which distinguishes it from many prevailing conceptions of happiness (though in line with the ancient Greek conception of happiness). Eudaemonia is "marked by a distinctive feeling that constitutes its intrinsic reward and therefore bears the same name as the condition itself." My favorite part of this chapter - a fascinating one, at least - is the last part, where Norton discusses the "post-mortem life." To wit:
(This reminds me of Lester Burnham's final monologue in American Beauty.)
Chapter 8, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," is also rather technical and difficult; he describes the process of "participatory enactment" in which we recognize in ourselves a world of possibilities only one of which is actualized in our own person, but this set of possibilities enables us to see those within others that are or can be actualized. I think the basic concept here is an explanation of how a self-actualizing individual recognizes and adopts a principle of universalizability, respect for persons, and taking an interest in the self-actualization of others.
This leads into chapter 9, "Social Entailments of Self-Actualization: Love and 'Congeniality of Excellences.'" Norton explains at length the distinction between love ("the aspiration to higher value"), passion, eros, and friendship, and brings up another wonderful phraseology, "diverse and complementary excellences," which is fairly self-explanatory. Chapter 10, "Intrinsic Justice and Division of Labor in Consequent Sociality" applies the social-entailment idea to the concept of justice. Here Norton brings up a principle of justice that I can't exactly describe as capitalistic, since he describes principles of justice in terms of what an individual is entitled to in virtue of his own distinctive excellence; this is presented as an alternative to the theories of justice advanced by Rawls and Nozick. Since I take the Nozickian principle to be the correct one, that has priority over what Norton says. Norton does have interesting things to say about what use a philosopher has for a sports car, though he seems to rule out that a philosopher can't also be interested in possessing sports cars. But it is plausible in the sense that philosophers, especially, aren't inclined toward seeking enrichment via material possessions such as sports cars. That idea is hardly new, and it may need modification (and certainly some kind of resolution with Rand's celebration of money-making).
Minor note: Norton uses the term "egoism" in a fairly standard sense, which is not Rand's, and rejects egoism in the standard sense as being morally inadequate. He does, however, commend the "egoistic" flavor of the ancient eudaemonists for rightly recognizing the priority of self (for which interest in others' self-actualization is an expression).
It is my hope that, in time, Personal Destinies will be mass-published and easily affordable; did I already mention that I think the world would be a better place if this book (or, say, a popularization of its ideas) were widely read? One thing's for sure: it has been a chief source of inspiration for me philosophically, as an example of how good a book can be.
The very idea of connecting Rand to Norton in a close way seemingly hadn't occurred to anyone before, but you'd think it might have since the parallels are so compelling. They're both ethical individualists. They're both eudaemonists. They both have a compelling normative ethics - so darned compelling that were they widely known, understood, adopted and implemented, utopia would be automatic. So perhaps you can say that the mission of Toward Utopia is to make this normative-ethical vision so obviously compelling, so indisputable, so undeniable that a helluva lot of people ought to get on board right quick so that we fast-track right toward utopia.
Here's the gist of the program: We understand Ayn Rand's normative ethics as, in essence, a self-actualization ethics. The ground of virtue is the need to self-actualize, and we recognize self-actualization to be an inherently desirable thing. Rand and Norton conceive of the fundamental virtue in distinct but complementary ways (which can be integrated): Norton conceives of virtue as integrity to the self to be actualized; Rand conceives of virtue as rationality, or the optimal exercise of the human cognitive faculty, reason being the basic human mode of functioning. Rand's epistemology comes into play here because her entire philosophy is built toward a practical end, which is living our lives to the utmost. This is best achieved through mental unit-economy, which stems from following proper cognitive guidelines; the perfection of our cognitive faculty leads to optimal cognitive efficiency, effectively raising our IQ. (There is a genius, i.e., daemon, in all of us, see.) That fast-tracks us toward self-actualization, and when people cooperatively pool their now-enhanced cognitive resources, things get fast-tracked even more, which frees up yet more cognitive resources to enhance, and so forth. So I'm just playing my part in getting this avalanche started. After that, there is just no room for the cycnicism, pessimism, and defeatism (in addition to all that cognitive inefficiency and irrationality) currently holding us back from achieving a better world.
So this posting is about Personal Destinies. I don't intend it to be a review so much as a brief exposition and commentary in which I can barely hold back my fawning. If I had to name a single favorite philosophy book, it would be this one. There's a good reason why this is. First, my philosophical specialty is ethics, and ethics has a certain centrality in philosophy that the other branches of philosophy don't have. (Epistemology has a centrality of its own. Perhaps the contrast here is this: epistemology is more basic, while ethics is more central.) Second, it's expertly and beautifully crafted. Just brilliant. It also has the "cred" of coming from a leading university press, so there's no reason, no fucking reason, for academics to (continue to) overlook it. Third, it's true - chock full of true.
There's one downside: it is obscure. That is to say, it is written in an obscure style. I say this because some years ago, as I was in college and then in grad school, I tried on two occasions to venture into the book, and barely followed what Norton was saying. Now, when a graduate student in philosophy specializing in ethics reads this book and doesn't get what's going on, that's pretty good evidence that it's obscure. And I still say it's obscure. In fact, while there are parts of the book that I understand - and like a lot - there are still parts of the book quite hard for me to follow even on the basis of two recent readings. I'll get to that in a bit. But first, another tidbit as to how I re-encountered this book, if this is any clue as to the completist-perfectionist nature of the mental process involved.
See, when I first delved into the book way back when in school, I noticed that some chapters were devoted to critics of "recent eudaemonisms," including that of Nietzsche. The idea of Nietzsche as a eudaemonist struck me as odd and/or intriguing, which is why it stuck in the back of my mind for later retrieval. It was then a discussion in early 2010 on the SOLO forum in which Rand commentator Jennifer Burns and Rand-defender James Valliant were participating, where links between Rand and Nietzsche were discussed - I think it was about their respective celebrations of human excellence - and that's when it clicked. I had to go back and scrounge up my Norton book. Then I "got it." The first chapter (the most accessible) had me hooked.
(To even think of drawing the connection between Rand, Nietzsche and Norton requires a context of knowledge that only a few people possess. Hell, how did I even know about Norton to begin with? Only because he was mentioned in the works of Machan, Rasmussen and Den Uyl. And how many people have read them indepth? That demographic is limited to people interested in Rand, in ethics, and in academic-style philosophy. A small group to begin with. So what are the odds Norton's book would have fallen into total obscurity were it not for the works of these Rand-influenced philosophers? [Insert angry rant about Rand and the academy here.])
Now, about the book. I mentioned the first chapter. The first chapter is enough to sell a reader on the basic idea. I knew just from reading the first chapter that there was a book project in the making. The chapter's title is "The Ethical Priority of Self-Actualization." Norton here is doing an ambitious integration of his own here: in a manner hardly at all accomplished in any of the other literature, Norton ties the ancient concept of eudaemonia to the 20th century concept of self-actualization popularized first and foremost by Abraham Maslow. I mean, how was that connection so badly missed outside of Norton's work? To top that, Norton mentions in his first footnote (in the Preface) that he uses the terms "eudaimonism" (his spelling) and "self-actualization ethics" and "perfectionism" interchangeably, and that "formally and inclusively" he he employs the term "normative individualism." It just all comes together!
Norton, in characteristically beautiful style, illustrates the concept of the "daimon" by analogy to the hollow clay busts of the semi-deity Silenus fashioned by ancient Greek sculptors, which contained inside them a golden figurine to be revealed when the bust is broken open. The golden figurine is akin to our inner daimon, i.e., the inner self. Our ethical task, in short, is to bring this self to outward actuality, so that (citing the passage from the Phaedrus which Norton quotes at the very beginning, before the Preface) the inward and the outward self may be at one. I mean, already you can tell this is an awesome ethical system. This is where the virtue of integrity comes in - you act so as to harmonize the inward and outward self. The parallels to Howard Roark are obvious to anyone in the habit of drawing integrations. Going back to the title of the first chapter: self-actualization has ethical priority. It is the chief and fundamental concern of ethics, from which other ethical considerations follow. Rand again! (How did so many miss this connection, again? HOW????!!!)
Norton is careful to distinguish self-actualization from self-realization. His claim is that the inward self is real whether actualized or not. It exists as potentiality. Moreover, Norton expands upon both Aristotle and Rand by emphasizing more than just the generic human potentiality of rationality; he uses the phrase (among the many wonderful phrase-coinings in this book) "innate distinct potentiality," which is the self. Each individual has his own "unique and irreplaceable potential worth" in virtue of his unique innate nature. Dougs Rasmussen and Den Uyl would later distinguish generic and individuative potentialities, the actualization of both of which are necessary to self-actualization or eudaemonia. The normative enterprise consists, then, in self-knowledge or self-discovery and engaging in the work to progressively actualize that potentiality.
That's the basic idea, upon which the rest of the book builds. Chapters 2-4 critique "recent eudaemonisms," in turn: British Absolute Idealism, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and then the Existentialism of Sartre. I assume these chapters would be of interest to those who are reasonably well-versed in these thinkers, which admittedly I am not (for the moment, only for the moment). I do have a basic idea as to the differences between Existentialism and a Grecophile eudaemonism, namely, as to whether "existence precedes essence." Norton (and Aristotle, and Rand) affirm that we do have an essence or nature from the onset of our existence; this defines our potentialities to be actualized.
Chapter 5, titled "The Metaphysics of Individualism," is perhaps the most difficult chapter in the book; not having specialized in metaphysics, a lot of his discussion here goes over my head. (I should mention here that there's a silver lining to the difficult parts of Norton's book: it affords the opportunity to come back for subsequent readings and get something out of it. How many books can one say that about?) One very intriguing thing Norton does in this chapter is to address the meta-ethical question of goodness and "ought" in relation to natural facts. The gist of Norton's answer here consists in conceiving "ought" as potentiality in relation to actuality (thereby answering Hume, who treats fact in terms of actuality without discussing such concepts as potentiality), and in describing the basic promissory nature of human actions. (I think this latter aspect may correspond to Rand's "initial choice" upon which obligation is grounded, in connection with facts about, essentially, our potentialities.)
Chapter 6, "The Stages of Life," provides Norton's conception of the person as informed by developmental psychology, starting with childhood, then adolescence, and then maturation, and, finally, old age. There are distinctive principles of behavior applying to each stage, while the transition between stages involves what Norton refers to as "world-exchange" by the person. Childhood essentially involves dependency; the stage of adolescence is characterized by creative exploration of potentialities; maturation or adulthood is the "main phase" for which eudaemonistic principles see their application; old age is . . . well, it sounds kinda drab the way Norton describes it. I don't want to think about old age until I approach it.
Chapter 7, "Eudaimonia: The Quality of Moral Life in the Stage of Maturation," describes the condition of "living in truth to oneself," or "being where one wants to be, doing what one wants to do." That sounds like a rare phenomenon in the present-day world, but the whole point is that we all have this daimon in us that can in principle be actualized under the right conditions. Norton refers to eudaemonia as a feeling and a condition; in the first chapter, he describes it as both a feeling and condition attendant upon the satisfaction of right desire, which distinguishes it from many prevailing conceptions of happiness (though in line with the ancient Greek conception of happiness). Eudaemonia is "marked by a distinctive feeling that constitutes its intrinsic reward and therefore bears the same name as the condition itself." My favorite part of this chapter - a fascinating one, at least - is the last part, where Norton discusses the "post-mortem life." To wit:
"...It follows that the individual who is living in truth to himself is ready to die at any time. The sense of this is conveyed in a report by Abraham Maslow of his feelings upon completion of what he identifies only as an 'important' piece of work. 'I had really spent myself. This was the best I could do, and here was not only a good time to die but I was even willing to die . . . It was what David M. Levy called the "completion of the act." It was a good ending, a good close.' What follows the good close is termed by Maslow 'post-mortem life.' He says, 'I could just as easily have died so that my living constitutes a kind of extra, a bonus. It's all gravy. Therefore I might just as well live as if I had already died.' What comes next in Maslow's account sounds a new note. 'One very important aspect of the post-mortem life,' he says, 'is that everything gets doubly precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things -- just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.'
"For myself, I cannot imagine a better evocation of the wonder that must have filled Adam in the moment when he first opened his eyes upon the world. . . .
"By the eudaimonic individual death is not feared as the 'period' by which a tragic fate cuts short the unfinished sentence. In the biography of the good life every sentence is a fitting epitaph and is the epitaph until it is succeeded by the next sentence. . . .
"Therefore to the good life death is no stranger, no alien event opposed to life, and death does not 'take us by surprise, as Sartre says, nor 'alienate us wholly in our own life.' Death is life in its consummation, and because consummation is perpetually within the well-lived life, so likewise death is within that life. The conception of death as alien to life is the product of a death-aversion which, by attempting to banish death from the sphere of life, precludes to life its consummation and its worth." (p. 239-240)
(This reminds me of Lester Burnham's final monologue in American Beauty.)
Chapter 8, "Our Knowledge of Other Persons," is also rather technical and difficult; he describes the process of "participatory enactment" in which we recognize in ourselves a world of possibilities only one of which is actualized in our own person, but this set of possibilities enables us to see those within others that are or can be actualized. I think the basic concept here is an explanation of how a self-actualizing individual recognizes and adopts a principle of universalizability, respect for persons, and taking an interest in the self-actualization of others.
This leads into chapter 9, "Social Entailments of Self-Actualization: Love and 'Congeniality of Excellences.'" Norton explains at length the distinction between love ("the aspiration to higher value"), passion, eros, and friendship, and brings up another wonderful phraseology, "diverse and complementary excellences," which is fairly self-explanatory. Chapter 10, "Intrinsic Justice and Division of Labor in Consequent Sociality" applies the social-entailment idea to the concept of justice. Here Norton brings up a principle of justice that I can't exactly describe as capitalistic, since he describes principles of justice in terms of what an individual is entitled to in virtue of his own distinctive excellence; this is presented as an alternative to the theories of justice advanced by Rawls and Nozick. Since I take the Nozickian principle to be the correct one, that has priority over what Norton says. Norton does have interesting things to say about what use a philosopher has for a sports car, though he seems to rule out that a philosopher can't also be interested in possessing sports cars. But it is plausible in the sense that philosophers, especially, aren't inclined toward seeking enrichment via material possessions such as sports cars. That idea is hardly new, and it may need modification (and certainly some kind of resolution with Rand's celebration of money-making).
Minor note: Norton uses the term "egoism" in a fairly standard sense, which is not Rand's, and rejects egoism in the standard sense as being morally inadequate. He does, however, commend the "egoistic" flavor of the ancient eudaemonists for rightly recognizing the priority of self (for which interest in others' self-actualization is an expression).
It is my hope that, in time, Personal Destinies will be mass-published and easily affordable; did I already mention that I think the world would be a better place if this book (or, say, a popularization of its ideas) were widely read? One thing's for sure: it has been a chief source of inspiration for me philosophically, as an example of how good a book can be.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Imperfection as Insidious: An Example
The most perfectionistic philosopher to date once wrote, "The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold." That's why anal-retentive perfectionism is so damned important. (Well, duh!) I want to apply this principle to something that caught my eye - and my ire - as I proceeded through the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Ayn Rand, viz:
As much as one might applaud the efforts of the entry authors to make Rand accessible to students and professors of (basically analytical) philosophy, this shit just doesn't cut it. It's downright amateurish in comparison to what you would get from Ayn Rand's best student. What's more, to invoke that wonderful quote from Aristotle at the beginning of this entry, who knows just how the fuck this subtle misinterpretation of Rand on the nature of the objective can be spun into thousandfold-multiplied errors of interpretation, or how many massively-wasteful false leads this sort of thing generates, or how many failures to see the forest for the trees might ensue. (This last phenomenon is downright pathological when it comes to way too many people's responses to Rand. Just observe the cognitive meltdown that occurs when Rand's use of the term "egoism" plays out in the hands of many a clueless critic, to name just one example. Then someone like yours truly comes along and notes that Howard Roark can be described uncontroversially as an Egoistic Perfectionist, and it all comes together, like a sort of Copernican Revolution, a simple perspective shift without the need for the messy epicycle-adding style of analysis so often involved in "interpreting" Rand's egoism in light of commonsense morality.) I'm going, like, "No wonder Rand got so pissed when others would 'interpret' her and screw up - especially when the interpreters are academic philosophers." See, there's more to the nature of objectivity than just the relational, there's also the volitional - in which case the "I-O-S" trichotomy simply doesn't apply to attributes of entities (or to sensory qualities). (Also, to close a loop above, concepts are to percepts as moral values are to values generally, the relevant criterion for the analogy being the difference between the volitional and the automatic. Ergo, a more perfect title for that section in OPAR would have been, "Moral Values as Objective.")
What's more, I have grave doubts that those who aren't students of Peikoff's work would be in a position to catch this sort of interpretive error. In fact, there's a reason to believe that Peikoff's students would be especially attentive about an error like this.
For those who are basically out of the loop on high-quality, high-level Objectivism interpretation - i.e., for those who haven't taken the time, effort and attention to understand and integrate Peikoff's writings and courses, which means frighteningly close to 100% of the people out there - here's a little anecdote to clue you in just a tiny little bit: Peikoff himself succumbed to that very error in his earlier lecture courses. In his 1970 course on modern philosophy, which ended with two lectures on Objectivism as providing the solution to various problems generated by the modern philosophers, he applied the "I-O-S" trichotomy to sense perception. This theme, however, dropped out of the scene in his later lectures, after he and Rand chewed the issue, identified the error, and corrected it. There's a reason, see, that Rand appointed him his successor: he had actually gone through the process of coming to a full understanding of her ideas and of weeding out the interpretive errors that arose along the way. (Don't fucking tell me there isn't analytical rigor in understanding Objectivism's fine points. It's pretty much necessitated by its own prescribed methods. It's about time its critics in this regard got a clue, and it's about fucking time Peikoff's work was integrated more seamlessly into any and all serious Rand Studies.)
(There's evidence that even so, Peikoff wasn't immune from interpretive error later on, such as the subtly insidious deviation from the Rand-endorsed 1976 "Philosophy of Objectivism" course on the nature of the arbitrary in relation to the true and false. You can have a careful look at the truly official source, the Lexicon entry, if you don't believe me. There, the formulation is that the arbitrary is not to be regarded as true or false. In OPAR we get a bizarre deviation from the correspondence theory of truth, in which the arbitrary is neither true nor false. At least Peikoff provided a disclaimer in his preface to OPAR that it is not "official Objectivist doctrine," since Rand was not around to see its contents and could not be responsible for any errors it might contain. That's only appropriate given that - as he'd be the first to tell you - she's the world-historic genius, he a mere student.)
I suppose it just takes an extra-special effort and mindset to Get Things Right - the failure at which, lamentably, explains the low state of things right now in terms of the Intellectual Community's understanding of Rand, and in terms of philosophy generally. Hell, just think of all the nasty consequences flowing from many importantly-situated folks' failures to Get It about Aristotle over the many centuries, and all the thousandfold-multiplied disasters that have resulted - or, conversely, the flourishing of civilization that has ensued when the rare Aquinas-caliber figure has given him his due.
One thing we do know for sure: Anyone coming to the Stanford Encyclopedia to learn about Ayn Rand is not going to be getting a first-rate presentation of her ideas. And that fucking sucks. (Here's a more promising lead.)
And, so you see, this is why the concept of perfectionism plays such a central role in my current project. In the field of philosophy, most especially, we can't afford screw-ups.
[ADDENDUM: Now, to provide another illustration by way of an exercise: just consider all the thousandfold-multiplied errors swirling around in the academic community since Rawls's Theory of Justice, and not Norton's Personal Destinies, has occupied so much of people's attention. All the false leads, all the failures to see the forest, all the failures to integrate, etc. Thanks a lot, academia.]
[ADDENDUM #2: In the Integration Department, there is also this earlier blog entry, which certainly ties into this one. Big, long sigh is right! And I haven't even gotten past the "concept-formation" section in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry yet....]
[ADDENDUM #3: This reminds me of that scene in The Godfather, where Sonny is beating the crap out of Carlo. He clearly fails to "land" a punch, but the impact sound effect is still there. Kubrick would not have stood for that shit on his own productions. Do 150 goddamn takes if you have to, but GET IT RIGHT. Coppola's imperfectionism becomes more and more manifest after the '70s, of course. He even screwed up the "redux" of Apocalypse Now by weaving in the footage he rightly cut from the original release - again, something Kubrick would never dream of doing to one of his own films. On a lighter note....]
Nor, again, should the discovery that attributes like color are not intrinsic features of entities be taken to imply their subjectivity; inasmuch as such attributes depend not on consciousness alone but rather on the relationship between consciousness and its objects, they are neither intrinsic nor subjective, but rather objective. (Thus an entity can exist intrinsically even if some of its attributes exist only objectively.)Now, if Ayn Rand were to read this about her ideas in an entry in an encyclopedia of philosophy of all places, she would jump through the fucking roof. I'll leave it to Rand's best student to explain the essence of the matter:
(2nd to last paragraph under section titled "2.2. Perception")
The term "objective," let me stress here, does not apply to all values, but only to values chosen by man. The automatic values that govern internal bodily functions or the behavior of plants and animals are not the product of a conceptual process. Such values, therefore, are outside the terminology of "objective," "intrinstic," or "subjective." In this regard, automatic values are like sense data. Sense data are neither "objective" nor "nonobjective." They are the base that make possible man's later cognitive development; they thereby make possible all the standards, including "objectivity," which are eventually defined in order to guide human choices.I should mention that this is my first time going through the Stanford Encyclopedia entry with any close attention to detail. (Ah, attention to detail. The hallmark of the pain-in-the-ass perfectionist.) There are a number of oddly-worded glosses on Rand's ideas that raised my eyebrows and caused me to pause as I read along, before coming to this. This one, though, seemed significant enough that I had to stop and give some time to think what was going on here, since it kinda seemed a reasonably accurate take, but maybe not. I had to spend a good hour or so going through through my background context of knowledge about Objectivism, such as how values and concepts are described in analagous ways by Rand and Peikoff using the "Intrinsic-Objective-Subjective" (or "I-O-S-") trichotomy. I remembered Peikoff titling the last section of the chapter in OPAR on The Good, "Values as Objective." I remembered that both Rand and Peikoff spoke of objectivity at least partly in terms of the relation of an aspect of reality to man. I then had to think and re-think how the analogous nature of concepts to values plays out. Such thoughts came to mind as, "Concepts are to percepts as values are to...what?" I was going 'round and 'round trying to square this circle, knowing that something indeed hinged on the volitional character of concept-formation. I had to go back and read the applicable Lexicon entries to re-refresh my memory. That still didn't quite clear it all the way up for me, though those entries made it reasonably clear she was discussing values as they relate to man's distinctive form of awareness. Then I had to go and see Peikoff's section on "Values as Objective" to make double-sure Peikoff hadn't deviated in some way by characterizing all values, even including the automatic values of non-human valuers, as "objective." Then, of course, I encountered the paragraph above from p. 234. And that's when I got just a little pissed about what I had been reading in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry.
(Leonard Peikoff, Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, p. 243; emphasis mine)
As much as one might applaud the efforts of the entry authors to make Rand accessible to students and professors of (basically analytical) philosophy, this shit just doesn't cut it. It's downright amateurish in comparison to what you would get from Ayn Rand's best student. What's more, to invoke that wonderful quote from Aristotle at the beginning of this entry, who knows just how the fuck this subtle misinterpretation of Rand on the nature of the objective can be spun into thousandfold-multiplied errors of interpretation, or how many massively-wasteful false leads this sort of thing generates, or how many failures to see the forest for the trees might ensue. (This last phenomenon is downright pathological when it comes to way too many people's responses to Rand. Just observe the cognitive meltdown that occurs when Rand's use of the term "egoism" plays out in the hands of many a clueless critic, to name just one example. Then someone like yours truly comes along and notes that Howard Roark can be described uncontroversially as an Egoistic Perfectionist, and it all comes together, like a sort of Copernican Revolution, a simple perspective shift without the need for the messy epicycle-adding style of analysis so often involved in "interpreting" Rand's egoism in light of commonsense morality.) I'm going, like, "No wonder Rand got so pissed when others would 'interpret' her and screw up - especially when the interpreters are academic philosophers." See, there's more to the nature of objectivity than just the relational, there's also the volitional - in which case the "I-O-S" trichotomy simply doesn't apply to attributes of entities (or to sensory qualities). (Also, to close a loop above, concepts are to percepts as moral values are to values generally, the relevant criterion for the analogy being the difference between the volitional and the automatic. Ergo, a more perfect title for that section in OPAR would have been, "Moral Values as Objective.")
What's more, I have grave doubts that those who aren't students of Peikoff's work would be in a position to catch this sort of interpretive error. In fact, there's a reason to believe that Peikoff's students would be especially attentive about an error like this.
For those who are basically out of the loop on high-quality, high-level Objectivism interpretation - i.e., for those who haven't taken the time, effort and attention to understand and integrate Peikoff's writings and courses, which means frighteningly close to 100% of the people out there - here's a little anecdote to clue you in just a tiny little bit: Peikoff himself succumbed to that very error in his earlier lecture courses. In his 1970 course on modern philosophy, which ended with two lectures on Objectivism as providing the solution to various problems generated by the modern philosophers, he applied the "I-O-S" trichotomy to sense perception. This theme, however, dropped out of the scene in his later lectures, after he and Rand chewed the issue, identified the error, and corrected it. There's a reason, see, that Rand appointed him his successor: he had actually gone through the process of coming to a full understanding of her ideas and of weeding out the interpretive errors that arose along the way. (Don't fucking tell me there isn't analytical rigor in understanding Objectivism's fine points. It's pretty much necessitated by its own prescribed methods. It's about time its critics in this regard got a clue, and it's about fucking time Peikoff's work was integrated more seamlessly into any and all serious Rand Studies.)
(There's evidence that even so, Peikoff wasn't immune from interpretive error later on, such as the subtly insidious deviation from the Rand-endorsed 1976 "Philosophy of Objectivism" course on the nature of the arbitrary in relation to the true and false. You can have a careful look at the truly official source, the Lexicon entry, if you don't believe me. There, the formulation is that the arbitrary is not to be regarded as true or false. In OPAR we get a bizarre deviation from the correspondence theory of truth, in which the arbitrary is neither true nor false. At least Peikoff provided a disclaimer in his preface to OPAR that it is not "official Objectivist doctrine," since Rand was not around to see its contents and could not be responsible for any errors it might contain. That's only appropriate given that - as he'd be the first to tell you - she's the world-historic genius, he a mere student.)
I suppose it just takes an extra-special effort and mindset to Get Things Right - the failure at which, lamentably, explains the low state of things right now in terms of the Intellectual Community's understanding of Rand, and in terms of philosophy generally. Hell, just think of all the nasty consequences flowing from many importantly-situated folks' failures to Get It about Aristotle over the many centuries, and all the thousandfold-multiplied disasters that have resulted - or, conversely, the flourishing of civilization that has ensued when the rare Aquinas-caliber figure has given him his due.
One thing we do know for sure: Anyone coming to the Stanford Encyclopedia to learn about Ayn Rand is not going to be getting a first-rate presentation of her ideas. And that fucking sucks. (Here's a more promising lead.)
And, so you see, this is why the concept of perfectionism plays such a central role in my current project. In the field of philosophy, most especially, we can't afford screw-ups.
[ADDENDUM: Now, to provide another illustration by way of an exercise: just consider all the thousandfold-multiplied errors swirling around in the academic community since Rawls's Theory of Justice, and not Norton's Personal Destinies, has occupied so much of people's attention. All the false leads, all the failures to see the forest, all the failures to integrate, etc. Thanks a lot, academia.]
[ADDENDUM #2: In the Integration Department, there is also this earlier blog entry, which certainly ties into this one. Big, long sigh is right! And I haven't even gotten past the "concept-formation" section in the Stanford Encyclopedia entry yet....]
[ADDENDUM #3: This reminds me of that scene in The Godfather, where Sonny is beating the crap out of Carlo. He clearly fails to "land" a punch, but the impact sound effect is still there. Kubrick would not have stood for that shit on his own productions. Do 150 goddamn takes if you have to, but GET IT RIGHT. Coppola's imperfectionism becomes more and more manifest after the '70s, of course. He even screwed up the "redux" of Apocalypse Now by weaving in the footage he rightly cut from the original release - again, something Kubrick would never dream of doing to one of his own films. On a lighter note....]
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
On the Singularity
What is the Singularity? The term is associated most with futurist Ray Kurzweil. (See: "Ray Kurzweil: That Singularity Guy.") However, I, of all people, have had the audacity to buy the domain name singularityhq.com and point it right to this blog. What kind of possibly delusional stuff is that all about?
In my previous post, regarding utopia, I made the observation that my thesis of utopianism and perfectionism covers more ground by centering on ethics, epistemology, and philosophy rather than politics. Politics is subordinate and derivative. The philosopher as such needs to discover the primary and the fundamental, i.e., to cover the greatest possible ground with each new integration. This process requires a huge amount of intellectual curiosity - the need to identify what items of fundamental importance one can in one's cognitive field of vision - and so, naturally, curiosity leads to encountering information about something called the Singularity, and to the realization that the concept of the Singularity would tie in with my concept of utopia. Not exactly anything mysterious going on here, at least yet, right? So just stick with this and see what "delusional" implications just might occur.
Now, as philosopher, I recognize that philosophy, in covering the most ground, takes hierarchical precedence over technology, which is Kurzweil's domain. I just have a more all-encompassion domain of vision than he does, in virtue of thinking more like a philosopher. He thinks like a technological inventor and futurist, so his knowledge in that domain would vastly exceed mine. But that doesn't affect my point. By virtue of our respective avenues of endeavor and interest, I can only say so much about technology, and he can only so so much about philosophy.
Now, what is technology, basically? It is a product of human conceptual consciousness. In this relation, human conceptual consciousness is the primary, technology is the secondary and derivative. This means human conceptual consciousness is more hierarchically primary than technology. Now, take a wild guess as to which domain of study focuses on the basic principles governing the functioning of human conceptual consciousness: philosophy, or technology?
With me still? Okay. Now, what would be of greater momentous import for human civilization: a technological maturity, or an intellectual and moral maturity? Now, if you were to ask Ray Kurzweil what he thinks intellectual and moral maturity consists in, and if he couldn't expertly tie his response to the ideas of Ayn Rand, David L. Norton and Thomas Hurka within a few seconds, then you're probably asking this question of the wrong "authority." You should be asking a philosopher.
And so, to cut a long story short, that's why a philosopher - the Ultimate Philosopher, in fact - bought the domain name singularityhq.com.
:-)
In my previous post, regarding utopia, I made the observation that my thesis of utopianism and perfectionism covers more ground by centering on ethics, epistemology, and philosophy rather than politics. Politics is subordinate and derivative. The philosopher as such needs to discover the primary and the fundamental, i.e., to cover the greatest possible ground with each new integration. This process requires a huge amount of intellectual curiosity - the need to identify what items of fundamental importance one can in one's cognitive field of vision - and so, naturally, curiosity leads to encountering information about something called the Singularity, and to the realization that the concept of the Singularity would tie in with my concept of utopia. Not exactly anything mysterious going on here, at least yet, right? So just stick with this and see what "delusional" implications just might occur.
Now, as philosopher, I recognize that philosophy, in covering the most ground, takes hierarchical precedence over technology, which is Kurzweil's domain. I just have a more all-encompassion domain of vision than he does, in virtue of thinking more like a philosopher. He thinks like a technological inventor and futurist, so his knowledge in that domain would vastly exceed mine. But that doesn't affect my point. By virtue of our respective avenues of endeavor and interest, I can only say so much about technology, and he can only so so much about philosophy.
Now, what is technology, basically? It is a product of human conceptual consciousness. In this relation, human conceptual consciousness is the primary, technology is the secondary and derivative. This means human conceptual consciousness is more hierarchically primary than technology. Now, take a wild guess as to which domain of study focuses on the basic principles governing the functioning of human conceptual consciousness: philosophy, or technology?
With me still? Okay. Now, what would be of greater momentous import for human civilization: a technological maturity, or an intellectual and moral maturity? Now, if you were to ask Ray Kurzweil what he thinks intellectual and moral maturity consists in, and if he couldn't expertly tie his response to the ideas of Ayn Rand, David L. Norton and Thomas Hurka within a few seconds, then you're probably asking this question of the wrong "authority." You should be asking a philosopher.
And so, to cut a long story short, that's why a philosopher - the Ultimate Philosopher, in fact - bought the domain name singularityhq.com.
:-)
Monday, January 31, 2011
Roarkian Soul
Roarkian soul: do you have it?
On the automatized and surface level, this is a matter of sense-of-life. Either you have a concept of and reverence for the greatness of soul possible to human beings, or you're tragically stunted, perhaps a victim of overwhelming cynicism. "Love for man at his highest potential" seems to be a rare phenomenon. How many people ever have a sense of that feeling in their lives? How many have a sense of radiant benevolence and a real commitment to making the most of their potentials? How many can connect, at that basic sense-of-life level, with the saying that "A noble soul has reverence for itself"? How many, on the other hand, see examples of human achievement and are struck immediately, in sense-of-life terms, with envy, resentment, bitterness, etc.?
How many are committed to a life of learning and growth and integrity, as opposed to a satisfying ignorance, or stagnation, or compromise? How many have the courage to stand up for a vision of their own which exalts actual or potential human greatness? How many can think in terms of principles, or an integrated view of existence? How many exalt an intellectually-disciplined commitment to reason as one's basic guide to belief and action?
How is it that a reader of The Fountainhead would come away with either a "getting it" and therefore positive attitude, a (necessarily ill-defined) negative attitude, or a not-getting-it attitude? Does one have any sort of vision of the human ideal - one that doesn't require some well-worn supernatural mythology? Does one understand that perfection - in the realistic, Aristotelian sense of the term - is possible to human beings?
Does one believe that strength resides in courage, integrity and rationality, or that it resides in numbers?
Apply this question to the behavior of the present-day "philosophical community," which - most unphilosophically - plays a version of the "strength in numbers" game. Now, here's a good question for anyone of any intellectual worth to entertain: shouldn't a big-time philosopher these days be able to take a careful look at the ideas of Ayn Rand and then assess its merits vis a vis leading ideas in the analytic-philosophy field? If Aristotle were around today, what would he do? Would he neglect having a disciplined look at a controversial and influential figure, especially one who espouses ideas remarkably congenial to his? No, he would not: Aristotle's policy wasn't to ignore, but to integrate.
Take Aristotle's approach with respect to the materialists and idealists of his day, for instance: he had to account for either side's appeal while showing both to be mistaken. Yes, to properly credit Sciabarra here, he engaged in a "dialectic" with the prevailing opposed ideas to show how the illicit dualism or lack of integration involved with the prevailing opposition will generate views which present only a partial perspective on the truth, whereas Aristotle's hylomorphism provides a completed (perfected!) perspective.
Clearly there are no "big-name professional philosophers" these days presently up to the task of engaging the intellectual playing field the way Aristotle was. Not while they ignore rather than integrate what it is that accounts for the appeal of allegedly "outsider," "fringe" figures like Ayn Rand. (Comparing Rand to, say, Scientology simply wouldn't cut it. Scientology is a supernaturalistic religion which is accorded the appropriate epistemic status of such by "the philosophical community.") That certainly rules out the possibility of any of them being the "ultimate philosopher" if there is one. Meanwhile, here's what I think must be the case: anyone who could be called the "ultimate philosopher" in our time would have to have Roarkian soul.
My job as philosopher is to emulate the likes of Aristotle and Roark as best I can, see.
On the automatized and surface level, this is a matter of sense-of-life. Either you have a concept of and reverence for the greatness of soul possible to human beings, or you're tragically stunted, perhaps a victim of overwhelming cynicism. "Love for man at his highest potential" seems to be a rare phenomenon. How many people ever have a sense of that feeling in their lives? How many have a sense of radiant benevolence and a real commitment to making the most of their potentials? How many can connect, at that basic sense-of-life level, with the saying that "A noble soul has reverence for itself"? How many, on the other hand, see examples of human achievement and are struck immediately, in sense-of-life terms, with envy, resentment, bitterness, etc.?
How many are committed to a life of learning and growth and integrity, as opposed to a satisfying ignorance, or stagnation, or compromise? How many have the courage to stand up for a vision of their own which exalts actual or potential human greatness? How many can think in terms of principles, or an integrated view of existence? How many exalt an intellectually-disciplined commitment to reason as one's basic guide to belief and action?
How is it that a reader of The Fountainhead would come away with either a "getting it" and therefore positive attitude, a (necessarily ill-defined) negative attitude, or a not-getting-it attitude? Does one have any sort of vision of the human ideal - one that doesn't require some well-worn supernatural mythology? Does one understand that perfection - in the realistic, Aristotelian sense of the term - is possible to human beings?
Does one believe that strength resides in courage, integrity and rationality, or that it resides in numbers?
Apply this question to the behavior of the present-day "philosophical community," which - most unphilosophically - plays a version of the "strength in numbers" game. Now, here's a good question for anyone of any intellectual worth to entertain: shouldn't a big-time philosopher these days be able to take a careful look at the ideas of Ayn Rand and then assess its merits vis a vis leading ideas in the analytic-philosophy field? If Aristotle were around today, what would he do? Would he neglect having a disciplined look at a controversial and influential figure, especially one who espouses ideas remarkably congenial to his? No, he would not: Aristotle's policy wasn't to ignore, but to integrate.
Take Aristotle's approach with respect to the materialists and idealists of his day, for instance: he had to account for either side's appeal while showing both to be mistaken. Yes, to properly credit Sciabarra here, he engaged in a "dialectic" with the prevailing opposed ideas to show how the illicit dualism or lack of integration involved with the prevailing opposition will generate views which present only a partial perspective on the truth, whereas Aristotle's hylomorphism provides a completed (perfected!) perspective.
Clearly there are no "big-name professional philosophers" these days presently up to the task of engaging the intellectual playing field the way Aristotle was. Not while they ignore rather than integrate what it is that accounts for the appeal of allegedly "outsider," "fringe" figures like Ayn Rand. (Comparing Rand to, say, Scientology simply wouldn't cut it. Scientology is a supernaturalistic religion which is accorded the appropriate epistemic status of such by "the philosophical community.") That certainly rules out the possibility of any of them being the "ultimate philosopher" if there is one. Meanwhile, here's what I think must be the case: anyone who could be called the "ultimate philosopher" in our time would have to have Roarkian soul.
My job as philosopher is to emulate the likes of Aristotle and Roark as best I can, see.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
If Kubrick directed House
One noticeable stylistic difference would be the lack of shaky camera movements. How did such amateurish shit become part of the mainstream television aesthetic today? Why do viewers put up with it? (Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the rules?)
(I've also noticed, production-values wise, that Fox News's "static" camera is much preferable to the "floating" camera used on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Hell, Fox News is simply better, production-values wise. For the life of me I don't know why MSNBC doesn't take some hints.)
(I've also noticed, production-values wise, that Fox News's "static" camera is much preferable to the "floating" camera used on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Hell, Fox News is simply better, production-values wise. For the life of me I don't know why MSNBC doesn't take some hints.)
Thursday, January 20, 2011
America: A Dumbed-Down Plutocracy?
The Left and the Right are all about constructing narratives targeted toward certain segments of the population. The Left tend to be more self-aware about this; after all, that's where I get the phrase "constructing narratives." The Right usually aren't that bright. Their constructed narrative, after all, is that American Decline is attributable to increasing secularism - "turning away from God." Now, that's a really stupid narrative-construction right there. I'm not sure it's more stupid, though, than the Left's constructed narrative - in effect, that American Decline is attributable to a dumbing-down to serve the interests of a corporatist oligarchy-plutocracy.
The Left's narratives are a holdover from another religious viewpoint - Marxism. It's about as anti-reality an ideological narrative as whatever spews forth from the Right. Anyone with anything resembling a sound understanding of economics is quite familiar with the ideas of Mises and Hayek on the benefits of the private property, i.e., capitalistic order, while the Marxian-inspired ideas are against the Mises-Hayek understanding of things. So if you apply the neo-Marxian analyses to the current state of America - with its demonstrably-ill-informed public and corporate ownership of politics - you end up with the theory that this is an outcome of the capitalistic order. More wealth accumulates in fewer hands, which in turn fuels more pro-wealthy policies at the expense of the populace, who are further dumbed-down in the process, etc. This stuff is very cliche' and could fit right on a napkin just like the Laffer Curve (which is a truism, actually, while Marxism in its various guises is pure shit).
The basic reason we have what we have in America today is that people are often very pragmatic: they go with what they think is the best available to them, all things considered. The current set-up we have now, is what we have because that's what the American people have chosen. They do realize in a pretty clear-cut way that the current state of things is pretty lousy; they have a commonsense "instinct" that the politicians are totally cynical and aren't squaring with them; they have a commonsense understanding that their government has done things in their name that are not too admirable; they have a commonsense perception that they are indeed ill-informed but what can they really do about it? What better alternatives are there, anyway? In a country with a mixed culture - a product, fundamentally, of mixed premises - the best results you can expect will be mixed.
If, however, Americans were shown a viable alternative that's clearly better than the status quo, then there's hope for this country after all. They just haven't been shown the better alternative yet. That better alternative does not, however, come enmeshed in left-wing narratives about a dumbed-down plutocracy that needs to "go Euro" to save itself. Rather, it comes enmeshed in a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels. That means not fucking up a commonsense understanding of what capitalism, i.e., the private property order, is all about. It means abandoning the various retarded (usually Marx-inspired) notions that capitalism is, in effect, zero-sum and exploitative. It means actually embracing the capitalist ethos, while recognizing what it takes, intellectually, on the whole, to do so - again, a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels, which entails enhanced cognitive (and therefore economic) efficiency. Americans do want to think critically; they have the intimation that doing so would greatly enhance their flourishing; they just need a guidebook of some sorts that they haven't yet gotten....
(Next on my radar: the Right's obvious narrative failures - fundamentally, a disrespect for the intellect and reason, purportedly in the name of spiritual enrichment.)
The Left's narratives are a holdover from another religious viewpoint - Marxism. It's about as anti-reality an ideological narrative as whatever spews forth from the Right. Anyone with anything resembling a sound understanding of economics is quite familiar with the ideas of Mises and Hayek on the benefits of the private property, i.e., capitalistic order, while the Marxian-inspired ideas are against the Mises-Hayek understanding of things. So if you apply the neo-Marxian analyses to the current state of America - with its demonstrably-ill-informed public and corporate ownership of politics - you end up with the theory that this is an outcome of the capitalistic order. More wealth accumulates in fewer hands, which in turn fuels more pro-wealthy policies at the expense of the populace, who are further dumbed-down in the process, etc. This stuff is very cliche' and could fit right on a napkin just like the Laffer Curve (which is a truism, actually, while Marxism in its various guises is pure shit).
The basic reason we have what we have in America today is that people are often very pragmatic: they go with what they think is the best available to them, all things considered. The current set-up we have now, is what we have because that's what the American people have chosen. They do realize in a pretty clear-cut way that the current state of things is pretty lousy; they have a commonsense "instinct" that the politicians are totally cynical and aren't squaring with them; they have a commonsense understanding that their government has done things in their name that are not too admirable; they have a commonsense perception that they are indeed ill-informed but what can they really do about it? What better alternatives are there, anyway? In a country with a mixed culture - a product, fundamentally, of mixed premises - the best results you can expect will be mixed.
If, however, Americans were shown a viable alternative that's clearly better than the status quo, then there's hope for this country after all. They just haven't been shown the better alternative yet. That better alternative does not, however, come enmeshed in left-wing narratives about a dumbed-down plutocracy that needs to "go Euro" to save itself. Rather, it comes enmeshed in a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels. That means not fucking up a commonsense understanding of what capitalism, i.e., the private property order, is all about. It means abandoning the various retarded (usually Marx-inspired) notions that capitalism is, in effect, zero-sum and exploitative. It means actually embracing the capitalist ethos, while recognizing what it takes, intellectually, on the whole, to do so - again, a neo-Aristotelian respect for reason at perfectionistic levels, which entails enhanced cognitive (and therefore economic) efficiency. Americans do want to think critically; they have the intimation that doing so would greatly enhance their flourishing; they just need a guidebook of some sorts that they haven't yet gotten....
(Next on my radar: the Right's obvious narrative failures - fundamentally, a disrespect for the intellect and reason, purportedly in the name of spiritual enrichment.)
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
On Being an Ultimate Blogger
Without people like Glenn Greenwald around, I would not have found inspiration to become The Ultimate Philosopher. Greenwald is someone with an (almost) unparalleled ability to condense issues down to their very essence. Consequently, he sees pretty much of all that counts as "mainstream narrative and debate" in this country as corrupted through and through, in some fashion or other. His approach to the whole Wikileaks/Assange farce is one such instance of this.
(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)
Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.
Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.
There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?
Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.
What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.
[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]
(From what I can tell, the very charismatic some-sort-of-genius-figure Glenn Beck is invoking America, Ah, America (tears) against the "threat" posed by Assange, nevermind what Judge Napolitano was saying on your very network not hours before. You know, America's News Network. You know, GOP figurehead Roger Ailes's brilliant Network-ized media experiment. You know, America and Democracy. And we all have a good laugh at that one.)
Greenwald recognizes what the whole farce the "left-right" "mainstream" discourse is in this country. The politicians are . . . politicians, you idiots!. You just can't expect to have serious, honest, principled, heartfelt debates from weasels, can you? Everything in politics these days is going to the highest bidders, and those very high bidders are the same ones running the media, so what better can you expect than the kind of media we're getting? There's a reason an Ultimate Commentator like Glenn Greenwald would not get any interviews on Fox News - because Greenwald is in the business of exposing in the nakedest terms the hypocrisy of our present-day political system, and Fox News is right in the middle of all that hypocrisy. Hence, The Media get the "Julian Assange - Terrorist!" discussions going. It's so obvious what's going on here to anyone who's paying attention. Greenwald, despite his credentials for intellectual integrity, just doesn't serve "the content needs" of Fox News, Inc. Network-ized, remember. Always remember that. "But how did things get to be the Network-ized way?" asks The Ultimate Philosopher, who knows about Rand and Hegel in addition to various and sundry other items of considerable interest and how they all interconnect.
Greenwald has come to the naked essence of matters concerning him as a constitutional attorney and a Jeffersonian at heart: the political system we have today is a farce of what the Framers envisioned for us. What we have here are two distinctive phenomena: (1) America, and (2) the political system currently situated within America. No one worth taking seriously is against America or at least the idea of America. But the politicians already know that and pander to that America-love to continue their farcical political games. We as a nation have forgotten the original lesson of America: keep your affairs from the hands of politicians as much as you possibly can. Rely on your selves and your communities, governed by some basic virtues like common sense. It's the whole notion of politicians as we know them that's against the ideals of America. But Greenwald also points out how the media establishment is in on the whole cynical farce, in which case the media as we know it - a vehicle of infotainment rather than enlightenment first and foremost - is also against the ideals of America, where the media is supposed to exercise an intellectual independence from the political system.
There's a way out of all this, says The Ultimate Philosopher. Does Greenwald see things at that great a level of generality and essence? Greenwald is describing the many symptoms of severe dysfunction in regard to his areas of expertise, in a better way than anyone else in his profession has described, but has he diagnosed the core problem with the country?
Is he aware of things beyond constitutional law and politics, such as philosophy or maybe Ayn Rand? Does he diagnose things at a level a philosopher would aim to diagnose it? I don't recall any time he has mentioned a specifically philosophical issue or demonstrated a familiarity with the great philosophers in his blog. He is just really good at what he specializes in, though.
What I'm saying is that my aim is to philosophize at the level that Dr. House diagnoses illness. Perfectionism and whatnot, at least on my part. (Dr. House is lost for the time being as a person, though; I don't admire his cynical-amoral methods.) Even if that doesn't make either of us popular or well-liked by the many.
[ADDENDUM: The mainstream media coverage and discourse in regard to the shootings in Arizona has been about as low as one would reasonably have come to expect with this country lately. The fact that Dingbat, a.k.a. Sarah Palin, is at the center of it all is confirmation of that point.]
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Randian Heroes as Perfectionists
I am coming to grips with what all I am prepared to say and what I am not yet prepared to say in my book. Tying my central perfectionist thesis to the issues that the leading academic philosophers - particularly those in epistemology - are concerned with, it just not going to be possible in this first book. I do not have the requisite training (from self or others) and context for it. I am quite rusty at my academic-style philosophizing after a decade away from graduate school. Further, my book is conceived as aiming squarely at the intelligent layperson; and the intelligent layperson is far removed from what Quine's "Two Dogmas" is all about. The perfectionist in me says this tying-in would make a good candidate for a second book, though.
My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.
Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.
What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.
(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)
Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.
The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?
My academic area of specialty was ethics and political philosophy. My grasp of these issues is a lot more sound than the issues that the likes of Quine, Kripke, Davidson and David Lewis specialize in. However, I think my perfectionist thesis is plenty good enough to blow away the competitors in the field of ethics, and that includes the leading "contemporary" moral philosopher, Rawls.
Ethical perfectionism is a synonym for eudaemonism, which is best defended in the "canon" literature by Aristotle in The Nicomachean Ethics. Up until about 30 years ago, the main alternatives in ethical theory (aside from forms of rejection of moral theories) were "utilitarianism" (or, more broadly, consequentialism) and "Kantianism" (or, more broadly, deontology). This alternative is what was being presented to students in college philosophy courses as the best that philosophers had to offer in the field of ethics. Pretty sad, huh? So, since that time, Aristotle and "virtue ethics" have surged into prominence, and as recent or contemporary literature is scoured for "virtue-ethical" positions within this Aristotelian tradition, Ayn Rand's name naturally comes up. Her ethical egoism is hardly dissimilar to ancient Greek and especially Aristotelian ethics on the matter of being self-centered in ethics, with virtue defined in terms of promoting self-actualization or eudaemonia or real happiness. Whether the academic literature has fully made the identification yet, eudaemonism and perfectionism and self-actualization and virtue ethics (with some kind of stress on the needs of the self foremost hierarchically) are synonymous because they all are descriptions of the same basic concept. As academic literature goes, David L. Norton's Personal Destinies is the best contemporary statement of eudaemonist or virtue ethics.
What really reveals someone's ignorance of Ayn Rand and of the history of philosophy, is comparing her ethics and her idealized heroes to Nietzsche's Ubermensch, usually package-dealt with some strawman claim that Rand, "like Nietzsche," is an elitist, and more likely than not looking for a moral justification (through hijacking Nietzsche, more or less) for capitalist exploitation. Yes, it's one of those eye-rollers students of Objectivism have been confronted with thousands of times. Why don't these idiots appreciate Rand for what she actually said, the students of Objectivism keep asking. (Good question, actually.) Further, it really reveals a lack of intellectual sophistication to hone in on similarities to Nietzsche rather than similarities to Aristotle.
(Let's say that Nietzschean-style "nihilism" is the main alternative modernity has to clinging on to religion-and-morality. I mean, that's what has plunged the political left into a deep-structural moral vacuum (see the '60s and its effects), and the right into fear that the world will collapse without a return to religion-and-morality (see the right from Buckley to today). Aristotelian-Thomistic-Lockean-Jeffersonian-Randian "natural-law" perfectionism is the third way that would give us the fix we need, but unfortunately there is massive ignorance of this tradition. So the typical little left-wing college know-it-all has a context where Nietzsche is taken to be a, or the, leading voice of the secular world, and where leftists succeeded in rewriting America's history into a class-war context rather than an individualist one, and compares Rand to other thinkers in that context. Really lame and so cliched, right?)
Randian heroes are perfectionists. Rand is clear about this in some of her Letters ca. 1946, so it gives some idea of where Rand was in her intellectual development at that time, and how she viewed the relation between moral perfection and traditional religion. (This was around the time she was most embroiled in discussions with Isabel Paterson about all the Big Issues - God, religion, morality - and "Pat" informed her that her ethics had a character all its own, simply distinct from the egoists Nietzsche and Stirner.) This is around the time she was also studying the history of philosophy, with emphasis on the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions; this was around the time that the significance of the "problem of universals" became known to Rand, and the time she made her earliest identifications leading to her theory of concepts. In her maturest stage of intellectual development, her ideas were far more Aristotelian or Thomistic than Nietzschean. This goes for her eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics.
The heroes represent what a eudaemonist-perfectionist ethics lived-out might look like. Her heroes were always reflections of her husband Frank or herself, and there's nothing of an "Ubermensch" character about them (either the heroes, Frank, or herself); they're just normal human beings reaching their full potentials through virtue (rationality), and doing so with an individualistic pride - like what America's supposed to be about, right?
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
Where Did the Singularity Begin?
While this blog is your headquarters for the Singularity, where did the Singularity actually begin? I'm referring, of course, to the real Singularity, the one signifying the maturation of the human race as such, and not just a technological maturity discussed by Kurzweil and the like. So . . .
Did it begin here?
Or was it here, perhaps?
Or here?
Or was it here?
Applying the Rule of Fundamentality, I'm leaning toward #2 right now. That is to say, the Singularity may have been gathering for quite a while now, just at a non-accelerated pace. Then again, did it begin some millions of years ago with the first rudiments of humanoid reason, and only show signs of acceleration with #2?
Also, why have Kurzweil and the like not delved into this at the greatest level of fundamentality available? Does technology just expand on its own, materialist-like, as an extrapolation of biology? Wherever might they have gotten that idea?
Did it begin here?
Or was it here, perhaps?
Or here?
Or was it here?
Applying the Rule of Fundamentality, I'm leaning toward #2 right now. That is to say, the Singularity may have been gathering for quite a while now, just at a non-accelerated pace. Then again, did it begin some millions of years ago with the first rudiments of humanoid reason, and only show signs of acceleration with #2?
Also, why have Kurzweil and the like not delved into this at the greatest level of fundamentality available? Does technology just expand on its own, materialist-like, as an extrapolation of biology? Wherever might they have gotten that idea?
Monday, December 13, 2010
New Book Edited by Gotthelf and Lennox
It has come to my attention that Metaethics, Egoism, and Virtue: Studies in Ayn Rand's Normative Theory, edited by quality Rand (and Aristotle) scholars Allen Gotthelf and James Lennox, is now out. One thing you can be sure of, with Gotthelf and Lennox as editors, is that the articles show a solid understanding of Rand's ideas, versus the usual go-out-their-way-to-misunderstand approach seen all over the place elsewhere. The blurb on the back cover from U. of Michigan's Peter Railton is a nice and unexpected touch.
The floodgates are opening . . .
The floodgates are opening . . .
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Methodological Issues in "Egoism and Rights"
On the subject of the relation between egoism and rights, the work of Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmusssen and Douglas Den Uyl stood out above the rest for pretty much three decades or so. The "Dougs" have spelled out the essence of the correct position in fullest detail, while Mack has offered valuable insights of his own in thinking about the issue, especially from a Randian angle, with his emphasis on the core moral notion that "man is an end in himself."
The basics of the difference between their two approaches is covered in an issue of Reason Papers. The gist is that Mack's approach is dualistic and Kant-inspired, which reflects his more hardcore-academic style, while theirs - following Aristotle and Rand - is integrative. Mack's work on this subject began with his own "Egoism and Rights" (1973, The Personalist) and culminating in a series of increasingly technical academic essays over the years; his most developed viewpoint is represented in "On the Fit Between Egoism and Rights" (1998, Reason Papers). The "Dougs" work culiminates in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Norms of Liberty (2006). Their characteristic style and content is represented well in the Reason Papers symposium in the first link above.
My own, article, "Egoism and Rights," (see link in "About Me" to your right) represents the "state of the art" on the subject in an academic format, stated in brief essentials. There are, also, some methodological concerns to address there.
Some relevant background: As I have had a fiercely independent sense of life from very early on, I have staunchly repudiated any forms of authoritarianism or other varieties of unreason, especially when associated in any way with Ayn Rand. I took Rand's central dictum, "Think for yourself," most seriously, and repudiated social metaphysics wherever I saw it. I saw an authoritarianism in the "ARI" brand of promoting Objectivism, which I saw at the time as being against careful, reasoned, dialogue-respecting activity. I took Rand's unscholarly polemics as representative of her overall style of doing philosophy. I was more ready to buy into the picture fostered by the apostates, the Brandens, and then David Kelley. The toxically effective smear-jobs perpetrated by the combination of the Branden accounts was effective at breeding a cynicism that nearly destroyed me (and, I'm sure, many others) in the end. The essential upshot: "If not even this woman lives up to her ideals, so much for ideals." Thanks a lot, Nathan.
Speaking of Nathan, he's a friend of Chris Matthew Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, in which "Egoism and Rights" appeared in 2006. There were things I know now that I did not know at the time. Three significant things in particular: (1) James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics appeared in 2005, and it's like the veil had at last been lifted: You know what, Ayn Rand was pretty darn swell after all, and Nathan is an unspeakably unjust scumbag who single-handedly fueled a culture-wide ad hominem against Objectivism's founder. That man is persona non grata. (2) Evidence of lying and backstabbing behavior in 2006 by Chris Sciabarra against then-friends Diana Hsieh, Lindsay Perigo, and James Valliant, evidence that - to my knowledge - has gone unanswered and unrebutted to this day. (3) A falling-out, in 2006, between yours truly and JARS's associate editor, Robert Campbell, over a series of increasingly stupid things he was saying on public internet forums, debasing JARS's reputation in the process. (Last I checked a few months back, Campbell was spewing some nonsense about me "prostrating [my]self in front of Leonard Peikoff." This is what JARS has been reduced to. Purely coincidentally, the journal is now running well behind schedule.) All this was in addition to the fiasco over at the closely-aligned Objectivist Center (then re-named the Atlas Society), where TOC/TAS's director, David Kelley, a spineless pragmatist, took no stand on the Branden matter (Branden being a TOC/TAS speaker) in the wake of Valliant's book.
Anyway, before that, I was more friendly toward the JARS model, or what I thought it to be. It's respectful, responsible and scholarly dialogue, and as an added bonus, Rand and I win the argument! Also, the culture at ARI today is just different - it just has a different feel, sense-of-life even - than it was back in the days of Schwartz and his emulators. Less of an insular, sectarian, authoritarian and social-metaphysical vibe given off to the wary fiercely-independent type. (After all, these folks were quite terribly ignorant about Mack and the Dougs. I just fucking hate ignorance.)
Here's another piece of the puzzle: I'm one of the "fortunate" few to meet the following criteria: (1) Familiarity with academic-style philosophy; (2) Familiarity with Ayn Rand's ideas; (3) Familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses; (4) Familiarity with Mack and the Dougs' work; (5) Background in economics; (6) Lots of intellectual curiosity. Combined, these put me in select company. A close match (to say the least) for all these criteria is Chris Sciabarra. The guy knows his stuff, whatever else you say about him - even if the stuff is presented in the terrible jargon and style of academia, which it is. Well, what finally got me interested in Peikoff's courses is their inclusion in the massive bibliography to Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). From Peikoff, I was introduced to the history of philosophy - most wonderfully, to Aristotle - and then to the advanced courses in Objectivism. Those courses center around methodology.
Methodology was Sciabarra's central focus in writing Russian Radical; he thinks that Hegel and Marx have some useful insights on this subject. (For the kind of anti-dialoguing I instinctively rebelled against, there's John Ridpath's unfairly brutal "review" of the book in the ARI-aligned Intellectual Activist. If the only criterion were the presentation style, then he'd be spot-on. If it's that similarities to thinkers like Marx or Hegel are too preposterous to take seriously, then he needs an argument in the face of Sciabarra's evidence, and he never gives one. That's why I fucking hated the "accepted ARI style" of the time.) It's not surprising that any number of thinkers could all touch upon a similar point, when they've given such matters so much of their intellectual attention. Rand had a systematic approach to thinking, like Hegel did. There's something to be learned from that as we differentiate and integrate concretes like Rand, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc. Ignoring the relevant similarities is a pro-ignorance strategy, and I just fucking hate ignorance.
Anyway, my intellectual curiosity led me to the Peikoff courses despite his Branden-and-Kelley-fostered image as an authoritarian cultist. The courses were, in time, a saving grace intellectually, on many levels. What the courses do show is that Rand's methodology is as sound as it needs to be, without ever having needed Hegel or Marx's dialectical methods to amplify or explain thing further. Anyone who knows Rand knows that she came up with a shit-ton of identifications independently of other thinkers; that's just how she rolled. What we don't get from Hegel or Marx is a path to a theory of induction. With Aristotle, of course, the similarities to Rand are much greater; the approach taken by the (neo-Aristotelian) Dougs is very close methodologically to Randian-Peikoffian integration. Plenty of other Rand scholars and Aristotle scholars have noted the deep similarities as well. In the Sciabarrian scheme, it only makes sense to mentally organize the concretes so that Aristotle has a lot higher "similarity-score" to Rand than do Hegel or Marx. Unfortunately, this is not an effect of the style and presentation of Russian Radical.
So, familiarity with the ideas of Mack, the Dougs, Rand, Peikoff and Sciabarra culminated in my article, "Egoism and Rights." This emerged from another, longer, unpublished piece trying to cover a lot more ground in limited space, the subject being ethics and how the concept of integration (e.g., theory-practice, fact-value, individual-social) applies there. Integration as a basic thematic and methodological concern made JARS a very friendly venue. Sciabarra's framing of the integration-theme was "a revolt against dualism." One result of a revolt against dualism is a revolt against Kant-emulating academic style, a product of rationalism, which is one fork of the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy that Peikoff spent most of Understanding Objectivism railing about. "Egoism and Rights" took one such example of academic dualism - in essence, "Rand is either a deontologist or consequentialist; She is an egoist; Egoism is consequentialist; Consequentialism is incompatible with rights; Therefore, egoism is incompatible with rights" - and subjected it to methodologically-informed refutation. Lost in that whole rationalistic deduction from a false alternative was Rand's actual views, which could be had by reading her own actual descriptions and depictions of egoistic behavior.
One methodological issue I want to mention here conerns what might have led me to state certain points the way I did. One thing that does not sit well with me now is how I talk about the rightful beneficiary of action being a derivative or less fundamental issue than the standard of value. The correct view would be to develop those points in unison - as Rand did. It would be correct to say that both the issue of the standard of value and the issue of the beneficiary are distinct conditions which both have to be met for judging a moral action or principle, but that neither condition precedes the other hierarchically. Perhaps a harmless-looking mistake to treat their relation as I did, but I'm a perfectionist, see, and harmless-looking little things can be insidious and damaging long-run. Much as I was on an "integration"-thematic kick at the time, it wasn't so well integrated with other, related methodological subjects - hierarchy, essentializing, reduction, context. Integration isn't done for its own sake, after all, but to aid in sound cognition and practical action.
Also, in the time since I wrote "Egoism and Rights," my concerns have shifted more toward the fundamental area Rand eventually shifted focus to - epistemology. The ethics stuff is a piece of cake by comparison at this point; of greater interest is how the ethics integrates with the whole hierarchical system of thought. (An epistemological-practical thematic unity I picked up on in the process: perfectionism.)
For its purpose, however, "Egoism and Rights" succeeds remarkably, through an essentializing, straightforward style (by academic-journal standards), considerable familiarity with Objectivist method, and a pretty much irrefutable take on Rand's "new concept of egoism." (This was well before I ever even noticed the extreme similarities between Rand's and Norton's eudaemonisms. Eudaemonism, of course, necessitates rights.) Even if it gets hierarchy wrong at a point, the important points still get out there.
More observations about "Egoism and Rights" as or when they occur...
The basics of the difference between their two approaches is covered in an issue of Reason Papers. The gist is that Mack's approach is dualistic and Kant-inspired, which reflects his more hardcore-academic style, while theirs - following Aristotle and Rand - is integrative. Mack's work on this subject began with his own "Egoism and Rights" (1973, The Personalist) and culminating in a series of increasingly technical academic essays over the years; his most developed viewpoint is represented in "On the Fit Between Egoism and Rights" (1998, Reason Papers). The "Dougs" work culiminates in Liberty and Nature (1991) and Norms of Liberty (2006). Their characteristic style and content is represented well in the Reason Papers symposium in the first link above.
My own, article, "Egoism and Rights," (see link in "About Me" to your right) represents the "state of the art" on the subject in an academic format, stated in brief essentials. There are, also, some methodological concerns to address there.
Some relevant background: As I have had a fiercely independent sense of life from very early on, I have staunchly repudiated any forms of authoritarianism or other varieties of unreason, especially when associated in any way with Ayn Rand. I took Rand's central dictum, "Think for yourself," most seriously, and repudiated social metaphysics wherever I saw it. I saw an authoritarianism in the "ARI" brand of promoting Objectivism, which I saw at the time as being against careful, reasoned, dialogue-respecting activity. I took Rand's unscholarly polemics as representative of her overall style of doing philosophy. I was more ready to buy into the picture fostered by the apostates, the Brandens, and then David Kelley. The toxically effective smear-jobs perpetrated by the combination of the Branden accounts was effective at breeding a cynicism that nearly destroyed me (and, I'm sure, many others) in the end. The essential upshot: "If not even this woman lives up to her ideals, so much for ideals." Thanks a lot, Nathan.
Speaking of Nathan, he's a friend of Chris Matthew Sciabarra, editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, in which "Egoism and Rights" appeared in 2006. There were things I know now that I did not know at the time. Three significant things in particular: (1) James Valliant's The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics appeared in 2005, and it's like the veil had at last been lifted: You know what, Ayn Rand was pretty darn swell after all, and Nathan is an unspeakably unjust scumbag who single-handedly fueled a culture-wide ad hominem against Objectivism's founder. That man is persona non grata. (2) Evidence of lying and backstabbing behavior in 2006 by Chris Sciabarra against then-friends Diana Hsieh, Lindsay Perigo, and James Valliant, evidence that - to my knowledge - has gone unanswered and unrebutted to this day. (3) A falling-out, in 2006, between yours truly and JARS's associate editor, Robert Campbell, over a series of increasingly stupid things he was saying on public internet forums, debasing JARS's reputation in the process. (Last I checked a few months back, Campbell was spewing some nonsense about me "prostrating [my]self in front of Leonard Peikoff." This is what JARS has been reduced to. Purely coincidentally, the journal is now running well behind schedule.) All this was in addition to the fiasco over at the closely-aligned Objectivist Center (then re-named the Atlas Society), where TOC/TAS's director, David Kelley, a spineless pragmatist, took no stand on the Branden matter (Branden being a TOC/TAS speaker) in the wake of Valliant's book.
Anyway, before that, I was more friendly toward the JARS model, or what I thought it to be. It's respectful, responsible and scholarly dialogue, and as an added bonus, Rand and I win the argument! Also, the culture at ARI today is just different - it just has a different feel, sense-of-life even - than it was back in the days of Schwartz and his emulators. Less of an insular, sectarian, authoritarian and social-metaphysical vibe given off to the wary fiercely-independent type. (After all, these folks were quite terribly ignorant about Mack and the Dougs. I just fucking hate ignorance.)
Here's another piece of the puzzle: I'm one of the "fortunate" few to meet the following criteria: (1) Familiarity with academic-style philosophy; (2) Familiarity with Ayn Rand's ideas; (3) Familiarity with Leonard Peikoff's lecture courses; (4) Familiarity with Mack and the Dougs' work; (5) Background in economics; (6) Lots of intellectual curiosity. Combined, these put me in select company. A close match (to say the least) for all these criteria is Chris Sciabarra. The guy knows his stuff, whatever else you say about him - even if the stuff is presented in the terrible jargon and style of academia, which it is. Well, what finally got me interested in Peikoff's courses is their inclusion in the massive bibliography to Sciabarra's Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (1995). From Peikoff, I was introduced to the history of philosophy - most wonderfully, to Aristotle - and then to the advanced courses in Objectivism. Those courses center around methodology.
Methodology was Sciabarra's central focus in writing Russian Radical; he thinks that Hegel and Marx have some useful insights on this subject. (For the kind of anti-dialoguing I instinctively rebelled against, there's John Ridpath's unfairly brutal "review" of the book in the ARI-aligned Intellectual Activist. If the only criterion were the presentation style, then he'd be spot-on. If it's that similarities to thinkers like Marx or Hegel are too preposterous to take seriously, then he needs an argument in the face of Sciabarra's evidence, and he never gives one. That's why I fucking hated the "accepted ARI style" of the time.) It's not surprising that any number of thinkers could all touch upon a similar point, when they've given such matters so much of their intellectual attention. Rand had a systematic approach to thinking, like Hegel did. There's something to be learned from that as we differentiate and integrate concretes like Rand, Aristotle, Plato, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc. Ignoring the relevant similarities is a pro-ignorance strategy, and I just fucking hate ignorance.
Anyway, my intellectual curiosity led me to the Peikoff courses despite his Branden-and-Kelley-fostered image as an authoritarian cultist. The courses were, in time, a saving grace intellectually, on many levels. What the courses do show is that Rand's methodology is as sound as it needs to be, without ever having needed Hegel or Marx's dialectical methods to amplify or explain thing further. Anyone who knows Rand knows that she came up with a shit-ton of identifications independently of other thinkers; that's just how she rolled. What we don't get from Hegel or Marx is a path to a theory of induction. With Aristotle, of course, the similarities to Rand are much greater; the approach taken by the (neo-Aristotelian) Dougs is very close methodologically to Randian-Peikoffian integration. Plenty of other Rand scholars and Aristotle scholars have noted the deep similarities as well. In the Sciabarrian scheme, it only makes sense to mentally organize the concretes so that Aristotle has a lot higher "similarity-score" to Rand than do Hegel or Marx. Unfortunately, this is not an effect of the style and presentation of Russian Radical.
So, familiarity with the ideas of Mack, the Dougs, Rand, Peikoff and Sciabarra culminated in my article, "Egoism and Rights." This emerged from another, longer, unpublished piece trying to cover a lot more ground in limited space, the subject being ethics and how the concept of integration (e.g., theory-practice, fact-value, individual-social) applies there. Integration as a basic thematic and methodological concern made JARS a very friendly venue. Sciabarra's framing of the integration-theme was "a revolt against dualism." One result of a revolt against dualism is a revolt against Kant-emulating academic style, a product of rationalism, which is one fork of the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy that Peikoff spent most of Understanding Objectivism railing about. "Egoism and Rights" took one such example of academic dualism - in essence, "Rand is either a deontologist or consequentialist; She is an egoist; Egoism is consequentialist; Consequentialism is incompatible with rights; Therefore, egoism is incompatible with rights" - and subjected it to methodologically-informed refutation. Lost in that whole rationalistic deduction from a false alternative was Rand's actual views, which could be had by reading her own actual descriptions and depictions of egoistic behavior.
One methodological issue I want to mention here conerns what might have led me to state certain points the way I did. One thing that does not sit well with me now is how I talk about the rightful beneficiary of action being a derivative or less fundamental issue than the standard of value. The correct view would be to develop those points in unison - as Rand did. It would be correct to say that both the issue of the standard of value and the issue of the beneficiary are distinct conditions which both have to be met for judging a moral action or principle, but that neither condition precedes the other hierarchically. Perhaps a harmless-looking mistake to treat their relation as I did, but I'm a perfectionist, see, and harmless-looking little things can be insidious and damaging long-run. Much as I was on an "integration"-thematic kick at the time, it wasn't so well integrated with other, related methodological subjects - hierarchy, essentializing, reduction, context. Integration isn't done for its own sake, after all, but to aid in sound cognition and practical action.
Also, in the time since I wrote "Egoism and Rights," my concerns have shifted more toward the fundamental area Rand eventually shifted focus to - epistemology. The ethics stuff is a piece of cake by comparison at this point; of greater interest is how the ethics integrates with the whole hierarchical system of thought. (An epistemological-practical thematic unity I picked up on in the process: perfectionism.)
For its purpose, however, "Egoism and Rights" succeeds remarkably, through an essentializing, straightforward style (by academic-journal standards), considerable familiarity with Objectivist method, and a pretty much irrefutable take on Rand's "new concept of egoism." (This was well before I ever even noticed the extreme similarities between Rand's and Norton's eudaemonisms. Eudaemonism, of course, necessitates rights.) Even if it gets hierarchy wrong at a point, the important points still get out there.
More observations about "Egoism and Rights" as or when they occur...
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