Topics currently being mulled over:
(1) Abstraction as condensation (and Rand's genius in identifying/discovering this point). The centrality of measurement to cognition; differences in measurements as central to differentiation, measurement-omission as central to integration. Measurement, integration-as-abstraction, and mental condensation. The senses, concepts, and logic.
(2) Philosophy and fiction - why most fiction readers in our culture are not prepared, intellectually, for Ayn Rand's novels. (How they might be prepared for them sense-of-life-wise.) How this might relate or contrast to non-Aristotelian intellectuals' failure to grasp Objectivism (e.g., with their modern homo economicus model of interests, for example).
(3) Eudaemonism and Perfectivism - Perfectivism as a systematic working-out of the basic eudaemonist principle that one's eudaemonia (which is perfective living, which requires perfective thinking) and the happiness-as-psychological-reward involved, is the central aim of ethics and is how life's meaning is fulfilled. Rand as pioneer in ethics.
(4) Mind and force as opposites - Rand's genius in identifying/discovering the root foundation for the principle that the initiation of physical force is the basic evil in the socio-political realm, and in identifying the foundations for the principle that individuals have rights. How modern-educated readers miss this point due to modern philosophy's homo economicus (instead of eudaemonistic) model of human interests which fails to recognize the primacy of mind (and by implication the fundamental virtue of thinking) in human existence.
(5) "Pull" in politics as not based on the Marxist-Chomsky materialistic principle that dollars = power. In a representative democracy, the votes have to be delivered, and that explains why the not-especially-wealthy Bible Belt constituency exercises so much political pull. This only reinforces Ayn Rand's analyses that ideas/mind and not money/matter are more fundamental to the human condition (i.e., the materialist analysis essentially reverses cause and effect), and that what explains the psychologies of all the political actors involved are the ideas they have absorbed from their culture and from their own self-initiated efforts (or lack thereof) to focus their minds on reality. "Pull" is ultimately an effect of ideas, or ignorance and/or evasion of them, one way or another.
(6) The special appeal of Marxism to socialist intellectuals, given Marx's having a formidable-looking systematic philosophy. Put another way: Marx is distinguished by being the socialist thinker with the most impressive-looking, all-encompassing philosophical system. Given the fundamental human need for integration, and given the intimate relationship between the concepts of integration and of dialectic, Marxism best fills the psychological and intellectual needs of people who oppose capitalism. The only problem here is the package-dealing of (false) socialist ideology with the intellectual seriousness and compellingness involved (ceteris paribus) in systematic integration. Given the falsity of socialist ideology, Marxism serves as a dangerous opiate for the intellectual classes. (Marx-inspired intellectuals are under the delusion, for instance, that they have a monopoly on the concept of "dialectic" and that capitalism disregards the enlightened and magnanimous context-keeping of dialectic in favor of one-sided, plutocratic power-grabs in the Class Struggle. One thing these intellectuals are certainly not equipped to deal with is Ayn Rand's reality-based - i.e., capitalistic - alternative, and the sense of life that goes with it.) It's useful to compare this phenomenon with religion more traditionally understood, from the standpoint of the basic human conceptual-psychological need for integration (i.e., a need for proper mental habituation or automatization) and system. How that ties in with the phenomenon of political "pull" mentioned in topic (5). How that all ties in with Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis, and with properly neo-Aristotelian (non-Marxian) dialectics/integration/system.
(7) What are the presuppositions and implications of all these topics, and how do they all integrate with one another?
P.S. (8) How the kind of integrative task involved might never have been accomplished prior to the mid-1990s explosion of the internet, with its ability to aggregate information just waiting there ripe and ready to be properly, efficiently integrated. (For more on efficient integration, see back to topic (1).)
P.P.S. (9) Ayn Rand was an effing genius. (Note that she just fucking kicked ass without even having the internet at her disposal. Maybe this makes Aristotle all that more impressive? How do the non-Aristotelian intellectuals manage to miss all this? (Did the "cult-like" atmosphere nourished in NBI during the 1960s do untold damage and delay to Objectivism being taken seriously as an intellectual and cultural force, and to a proper, expedited, widespread education in Objectivism? How concrete-bound do people have to be, anyway, to equate Rand and Objectivism with the notion of a "cult" which was, at best, incidentally related to her due to the various moral and psychological failings of followers she didn't want or need? What might cause such concrete-boundedness?))
P.P.P.S. (10) Induction as essentially integration (non-contradictory assimilation of concretes into an existing unified, contextual, hierarchical cognitive whole). Induction and concept-formation. Deduction as adherence to proper rules of inference in regard to conceptual content. Processes of elimination as both inductive and deductive. The theory of measurement-omission as an answer reached through an exacting process of elimination and much testing. Induction and the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotelian dialectic as involving a process of elimination among competing theories, answers, etc. Rand's first-hand-inductive approach as involving downplaying engagement with tradition (save primarily for a hat-tip to Aristotle); advantages and perils of such an approach.
P.P.P.P.S. (11) Rand and the academy, from the standpoint of how radical a departure Rand's approach to philosophy is from that of the "academic mainstream," and when. In the 1950s there was a radical rift between Rand and the intellectual class. Since that time, Aristotle has been increasingly influential, meaning by "dialectical" necessity a move toward convergence between Rand and the academy. Given the state of academia today, with its greater Aristotelian influence, how radical a departure is Rand from today's "academic mainstream," actually? Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics (2006) signifies a turning point whereby Rand is now right there in contention for mainstream supremacy. The sunny future for the Ayn Rand Society and, hence, for America and the world.
Anyone else hooked on Perfectivism yet? ;-)
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Individualism and Modern Philosophy
In a very recent post, I cited Nozick's offered explanation for the opposition amongst the Intellectuals to capitalism. Nozick suggests basically a psychological explanation. But of course I had to press the issue to the question not just of capitalism, but of individualism. (In turning my mind to the subject of moral individualism in relation to the state of modern philosophy, I find that my thoughts keep expanding; an adequate treatment of the subject might have to be chapter-length, so I couldn't post in depth on the subject here and now.)
One might think that while opposition to capitalism among many philosophers is readily understandable psychologically, the decided lack of interest among philosophers on the subject of individualism is bizarre. If individualism extols as a primary virtue "thinking for oneself," you'd think the philosophers would be most interested in the subject. But what academic literature is there out there on the subject? Aside from Norton, and a few Rand-influenced ethical philosophers (Machan, Mack, Rasmussen and Den Uyl), and parts of Lomasky and Nozick, what literature have professional philosophers generated on the subject in recent memory? Why does so deeply American a subject as individualism interest America's intellectual class so little?
I came to these thoughts when working through possible non-psychological explanations for the widespread antipathy to capitalism among intellectuals. At some point during one of Peikoff's lectures, a short and simple philosophical explanation was given: the widespread acceptance of "altruistic" morality in its various forms (e.g., Christianity, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls). But I'm not really satisfied with that explanation. Among the intellectuals, the antipode of altruism is not capitalism or individualism, but egoism, and the intellectuals have been hard at work devising moral theories that work somewhere in between the antipodes of egoism (e.g. Rand) and altruism (e.g. Comte). They find such extremes unacceptable because (aside from any pathologically pragmatistic opposition to extremes) altruism runs up against problems of rational motivation (which Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism makes a thorough effort to confront), while egoism supposedly - supposedly - runs up against the problem of respecting all moral agents over and above their serviceability to the agent's own interests.
But what about individualism? The most widely accessible and widely-read "text" on individualist ethics is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. The theme is "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul." The political themes are there, but mainly by implication. The full implication would have to wait another 14 years. But aside from the supposedly "weird" characterizations and narrative that drive many a reader to miss the point, what about the Roarkian individualist ethos makes professional philosophers so uninterested? True, there are professional philosophers aplenty who openly oppose egoism, but I don't know of any that would dare openly oppose individualism, certainly not in America. Instead, on the subject of individualism, there's one conspicuous fact here: silence.
This might reduce back to some psychological explanations. The Fountainhead is, after all, about individualism and collectivism in the human soul, and provides certain archetypes of motivation. Roark finds himself in fundamental opposition to what, for a long time, he can only term "The Principle Behind the Dean." Keating embraces that principle; it's about the only principle a pragmatist, for all the pragmatists' opposition to principles, can willingly accept. One thing about Rand's style of writing is that she would directly confront, in the most extreme and oppositional terms, the psychology of her readers. The Roark-Keating opposition is pretty deep, and being more fundamentally a psychological rather than intellectual one, it carries more fundamental explanatory power about how people behave. (It would explain, for instance, why someone would turn toward a less intellectual life as such, as distinct from turning to an intellectual life that is, say, socialism-friendly. It also explains Ayn Rand's - the real Ayn Rand's, not the caricatured, distorted, misrepresented and smeared Ayn Rand's - behavior in regard to those who disagreed with her. She valued intellectuality above agreement as such. (There are rare exceptions, like with her treatment of Kant, but she simply did not get Kant or his context.))
This gets to something very fundamental, perhaps not as fundamental in Rand's philosophy as it was in her very soul and being: sense of life. One's views about a thing such as individualism are fundamentally conditioned by one's sense-of-life. Now, either you share Rand's basic sense of life, or you don't. (I like to think that I share her sense of life, and then some.) With Rand, on the subject of individualism, there is heroic and passionate affirmation and praise and benevolence. With someone who doesn't share Rand's sense of life, the response is one of so much indifference.
The logical conclusion to draw here is that the mainstream of the Intellectual Class does not share Ayn Rand's basic sense of life. The American People, on the other hand - the best within the American people, of course - well, they do share her basic sense of life.
And that's how modern "canon" philosophy has defaulted on its task and failed the people. Can I not help but think that modern "canon" philosophy's days are sooooo numbered?
:-)
[ADDENDUM: See any entry under "Individualism" here? For that, you have to go here. CASE CLOSED.]
One might think that while opposition to capitalism among many philosophers is readily understandable psychologically, the decided lack of interest among philosophers on the subject of individualism is bizarre. If individualism extols as a primary virtue "thinking for oneself," you'd think the philosophers would be most interested in the subject. But what academic literature is there out there on the subject? Aside from Norton, and a few Rand-influenced ethical philosophers (Machan, Mack, Rasmussen and Den Uyl), and parts of Lomasky and Nozick, what literature have professional philosophers generated on the subject in recent memory? Why does so deeply American a subject as individualism interest America's intellectual class so little?
I came to these thoughts when working through possible non-psychological explanations for the widespread antipathy to capitalism among intellectuals. At some point during one of Peikoff's lectures, a short and simple philosophical explanation was given: the widespread acceptance of "altruistic" morality in its various forms (e.g., Christianity, Kant, Mill, Marx, Rawls). But I'm not really satisfied with that explanation. Among the intellectuals, the antipode of altruism is not capitalism or individualism, but egoism, and the intellectuals have been hard at work devising moral theories that work somewhere in between the antipodes of egoism (e.g. Rand) and altruism (e.g. Comte). They find such extremes unacceptable because (aside from any pathologically pragmatistic opposition to extremes) altruism runs up against problems of rational motivation (which Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism makes a thorough effort to confront), while egoism supposedly - supposedly - runs up against the problem of respecting all moral agents over and above their serviceability to the agent's own interests.
But what about individualism? The most widely accessible and widely-read "text" on individualist ethics is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. The theme is "individualism versus collectivism, not in politics but in man's soul." The political themes are there, but mainly by implication. The full implication would have to wait another 14 years. But aside from the supposedly "weird" characterizations and narrative that drive many a reader to miss the point, what about the Roarkian individualist ethos makes professional philosophers so uninterested? True, there are professional philosophers aplenty who openly oppose egoism, but I don't know of any that would dare openly oppose individualism, certainly not in America. Instead, on the subject of individualism, there's one conspicuous fact here: silence.
This might reduce back to some psychological explanations. The Fountainhead is, after all, about individualism and collectivism in the human soul, and provides certain archetypes of motivation. Roark finds himself in fundamental opposition to what, for a long time, he can only term "The Principle Behind the Dean." Keating embraces that principle; it's about the only principle a pragmatist, for all the pragmatists' opposition to principles, can willingly accept. One thing about Rand's style of writing is that she would directly confront, in the most extreme and oppositional terms, the psychology of her readers. The Roark-Keating opposition is pretty deep, and being more fundamentally a psychological rather than intellectual one, it carries more fundamental explanatory power about how people behave. (It would explain, for instance, why someone would turn toward a less intellectual life as such, as distinct from turning to an intellectual life that is, say, socialism-friendly. It also explains Ayn Rand's - the real Ayn Rand's, not the caricatured, distorted, misrepresented and smeared Ayn Rand's - behavior in regard to those who disagreed with her. She valued intellectuality above agreement as such. (There are rare exceptions, like with her treatment of Kant, but she simply did not get Kant or his context.))
This gets to something very fundamental, perhaps not as fundamental in Rand's philosophy as it was in her very soul and being: sense of life. One's views about a thing such as individualism are fundamentally conditioned by one's sense-of-life. Now, either you share Rand's basic sense of life, or you don't. (I like to think that I share her sense of life, and then some.) With Rand, on the subject of individualism, there is heroic and passionate affirmation and praise and benevolence. With someone who doesn't share Rand's sense of life, the response is one of so much indifference.
The logical conclusion to draw here is that the mainstream of the Intellectual Class does not share Ayn Rand's basic sense of life. The American People, on the other hand - the best within the American people, of course - well, they do share her basic sense of life.
And that's how modern "canon" philosophy has defaulted on its task and failed the people. Can I not help but think that modern "canon" philosophy's days are sooooo numbered?
:-)
[ADDENDUM: See any entry under "Individualism" here? For that, you have to go here. CASE CLOSED.]
Aristotle and Modern Philosophy
Before Aristotle's complete works were translated into English in the early 20th century, the dominant trends in European and American philosophy were various offshoots of Kantianism and Humeanism, with a big smelly dose of Marxism thrown into the mix. There was logical positivism, existentialism, pragmatism, and, in ethics, utilitarianism.
Let's say that Kant didn't even live to present his developed system, but that the other players, in the hypothetical new context, remained more or less the same in their basic intellectual personalities. I think this still means we'd have had the massive movement among intellectuals toward socialism and pretty much the same disastrous consequences of such in the infamous experiments in Russia and elsewhere. What might have happened in America? Would the basic character of the Pragmatist movement be the same without Kant? The Rand-Peikoff analysis attributes much Kantian influence to Pragmatism, which supposedly adds to the villainy of Kant, but without Kant there would still have been Hume and Mill, and simple common sense tells you that, given the geographical and other limitations, American philosophy was more swiftly and directly influenced by English philosophy than by German philosophy. From Hume you get just as much a pragmatist mindset - arguably more - than you would from Kant. With Hume, there is just as much agnosticism about the "underlying character of reality" as there is in Kant. (This is one aspect in which Kantianism doesn't really even answer the Humean challenge; the concept of causation in the sense we really find interesting - i.e., an Aristotelian sense of human-independent natural necessity - is dispensed with by both thinkers.)
Kantianism never really caught on in America aside from ethics. (The leading "Kantian" of today in America is an ethicist, Harvard's Christine Korsgaard, and even she's not really a Kantian proper. There's too much Aristotelianism going on there keeping her basic moral picture sane, even if still deficient.) Humeanism, however, seems to be absolutely ingrained and dominant in the way recent academic philosophizing has been conducted in America. One thing I can say in Hume's defense is that at least he recognized what a dead-end his style of doing philosophy was, and that there was an irreconcilable gap between his philosophizing and his practical daily routine.
The mainstream American inherits this gap by dispensing with philosophy in favor of practicality. The mainstream of the academy has done extremely little to reconcile their style of doing philosophy with the concerns of the ordinary American. This has nothing to do with the fact of "specialization by experts" that ordinary Americans aren't equipped to be conversant with; rather, it is an extreme rift between the prevailing style of analytic philosophy and the needs of practical life. A certain novelist-philosopher did her damnedest to show that philosophy can be practical, and how it can be, with the academy doing just what by its nature would do - ignore, dismiss, scoff at, etc., this very attempt. It's "popular philosophy" and serious philosophy "is only done in journals." (How many people read philosophy journals? Why should they give a shit?) If "serious philosophy," meanwhile, is philosophy done in the manner of Hume and Kant, our culture faces grave perils.
Thank god, then, for Aristotle.
Were Aristotle around today (how many times will that phrase be used before this blog reaches its terminus?), he'd be conversant with the current mainstream - and he'd also overcome its limitations with his characteristic dialectical skill. So: How does Aristotle compare with Hume? Well, let's at least note this: Aristotle's approach to integration was such that he'd recognize the need to make philosophy practical, to go out of his way to align philosophy with the needs and concerns of the ordinary people. Maybe back in Greece, given its cultural and technological limitations, philosophy was effectively only for a relatively well-to-do or dedicated few. There is no such excuse for exclusivity in modern industrial society. A certain novelist-philosopher figured that out; an Aristotle today would do likewise, and applaud the efforts of that novelist-philosopher.
This raises a pretty striking point: Aristotle's response to Ayn Rand would be way, way different from what the Academy's response has been. An Aristotle worthy of his reputation would also be a staunch advocate of capitalism. That's prima facie evidence that the Academy has yet to come fully to grips with Aristotle's import to philosophy. (Sorry, being "one of the Big Three" is a deficient characterization. In the canon, there's the Philosopher, and then there's everyone else.) So, to answer the question: I don't think Aristotle would have been impressed much by Hume. He already contended with Hume-type foils back in his day.
To illustrate: Hume's dichotomous approach leads to an is-ought gap in meta-ethics. Aristotle would readily recognize the is-ought gap as based on a deficient or incomplete understanding of the facts. An Aristotelian - and commonsensical - understanding of goodness derives from the needs of living things, which are distinctively characterized by being "teleologically-ordered" systems, and which, by definition, meet those needs through the actualization of potentialities. It's quite irrelevant here what the original, ancient Aristotle had to say about the scope of teleology - and it's a base and ignoble response to Aristotle to criticize his conclusions while ignoring his methods. But that's exactly what countless people are conditioned to think when it comes to Aristotle. Time and time again I've personally touted the virtues of Aristotle, only to be met with the equation of Aristotle with his positions rather than his methods. This is quite pathological, and it would be interesting to come up with a complete accounting for this tendency, this awe-inspiring capacity for missing a point. (Or, if you like: "Awesomely committed to misconception," a phrase used by Michael Herr in reference to the clueless critics' and philistines' responses to Stanley Kubrick's cinematic genius.)
At least some academic philosophers haven't been so amateurish and point-missing, and, in fact, I find it plainly evident that the best and most sensible philosophers in the academy have strong Aristotelian (if not Randian) tendencies. It's the ones who take their methodological cues from the likes of Hume and Kant who are the problem. Even taking Rand out of the equation, the present situation in regard to Aristotle is pretty bad. Hell, anything short of full-on Aristotelian dominance in the Academy is bad. If/when empiricism can be reclaimed by Aristotelians from Hume and his descendents, and if/when eudaemonism rightly trounces its competitors in the field of ethics, some real progress might be made. That would necessarily bring Rand to greater prominence for those paying any attention to the true playing field, which would still leave the really obvious sick shit that's in need of fixing: the pervasive bias in political philosophy against the manifestly beneficial system of capitalism. I don't think Aristotle would approve of the vice going on there. Hell, even Hume and Kant would be appalled by it. Time for an overhaul there.
Let's say that Kant didn't even live to present his developed system, but that the other players, in the hypothetical new context, remained more or less the same in their basic intellectual personalities. I think this still means we'd have had the massive movement among intellectuals toward socialism and pretty much the same disastrous consequences of such in the infamous experiments in Russia and elsewhere. What might have happened in America? Would the basic character of the Pragmatist movement be the same without Kant? The Rand-Peikoff analysis attributes much Kantian influence to Pragmatism, which supposedly adds to the villainy of Kant, but without Kant there would still have been Hume and Mill, and simple common sense tells you that, given the geographical and other limitations, American philosophy was more swiftly and directly influenced by English philosophy than by German philosophy. From Hume you get just as much a pragmatist mindset - arguably more - than you would from Kant. With Hume, there is just as much agnosticism about the "underlying character of reality" as there is in Kant. (This is one aspect in which Kantianism doesn't really even answer the Humean challenge; the concept of causation in the sense we really find interesting - i.e., an Aristotelian sense of human-independent natural necessity - is dispensed with by both thinkers.)
Kantianism never really caught on in America aside from ethics. (The leading "Kantian" of today in America is an ethicist, Harvard's Christine Korsgaard, and even she's not really a Kantian proper. There's too much Aristotelianism going on there keeping her basic moral picture sane, even if still deficient.) Humeanism, however, seems to be absolutely ingrained and dominant in the way recent academic philosophizing has been conducted in America. One thing I can say in Hume's defense is that at least he recognized what a dead-end his style of doing philosophy was, and that there was an irreconcilable gap between his philosophizing and his practical daily routine.
The mainstream American inherits this gap by dispensing with philosophy in favor of practicality. The mainstream of the academy has done extremely little to reconcile their style of doing philosophy with the concerns of the ordinary American. This has nothing to do with the fact of "specialization by experts" that ordinary Americans aren't equipped to be conversant with; rather, it is an extreme rift between the prevailing style of analytic philosophy and the needs of practical life. A certain novelist-philosopher did her damnedest to show that philosophy can be practical, and how it can be, with the academy doing just what by its nature would do - ignore, dismiss, scoff at, etc., this very attempt. It's "popular philosophy" and serious philosophy "is only done in journals." (How many people read philosophy journals? Why should they give a shit?) If "serious philosophy," meanwhile, is philosophy done in the manner of Hume and Kant, our culture faces grave perils.
Thank god, then, for Aristotle.
Were Aristotle around today (how many times will that phrase be used before this blog reaches its terminus?), he'd be conversant with the current mainstream - and he'd also overcome its limitations with his characteristic dialectical skill. So: How does Aristotle compare with Hume? Well, let's at least note this: Aristotle's approach to integration was such that he'd recognize the need to make philosophy practical, to go out of his way to align philosophy with the needs and concerns of the ordinary people. Maybe back in Greece, given its cultural and technological limitations, philosophy was effectively only for a relatively well-to-do or dedicated few. There is no such excuse for exclusivity in modern industrial society. A certain novelist-philosopher figured that out; an Aristotle today would do likewise, and applaud the efforts of that novelist-philosopher.
This raises a pretty striking point: Aristotle's response to Ayn Rand would be way, way different from what the Academy's response has been. An Aristotle worthy of his reputation would also be a staunch advocate of capitalism. That's prima facie evidence that the Academy has yet to come fully to grips with Aristotle's import to philosophy. (Sorry, being "one of the Big Three" is a deficient characterization. In the canon, there's the Philosopher, and then there's everyone else.) So, to answer the question: I don't think Aristotle would have been impressed much by Hume. He already contended with Hume-type foils back in his day.
To illustrate: Hume's dichotomous approach leads to an is-ought gap in meta-ethics. Aristotle would readily recognize the is-ought gap as based on a deficient or incomplete understanding of the facts. An Aristotelian - and commonsensical - understanding of goodness derives from the needs of living things, which are distinctively characterized by being "teleologically-ordered" systems, and which, by definition, meet those needs through the actualization of potentialities. It's quite irrelevant here what the original, ancient Aristotle had to say about the scope of teleology - and it's a base and ignoble response to Aristotle to criticize his conclusions while ignoring his methods. But that's exactly what countless people are conditioned to think when it comes to Aristotle. Time and time again I've personally touted the virtues of Aristotle, only to be met with the equation of Aristotle with his positions rather than his methods. This is quite pathological, and it would be interesting to come up with a complete accounting for this tendency, this awe-inspiring capacity for missing a point. (Or, if you like: "Awesomely committed to misconception," a phrase used by Michael Herr in reference to the clueless critics' and philistines' responses to Stanley Kubrick's cinematic genius.)
At least some academic philosophers haven't been so amateurish and point-missing, and, in fact, I find it plainly evident that the best and most sensible philosophers in the academy have strong Aristotelian (if not Randian) tendencies. It's the ones who take their methodological cues from the likes of Hume and Kant who are the problem. Even taking Rand out of the equation, the present situation in regard to Aristotle is pretty bad. Hell, anything short of full-on Aristotelian dominance in the Academy is bad. If/when empiricism can be reclaimed by Aristotelians from Hume and his descendents, and if/when eudaemonism rightly trounces its competitors in the field of ethics, some real progress might be made. That would necessarily bring Rand to greater prominence for those paying any attention to the true playing field, which would still leave the really obvious sick shit that's in need of fixing: the pervasive bias in political philosophy against the manifestly beneficial system of capitalism. I don't think Aristotle would approve of the vice going on there. Hell, even Hume and Kant would be appalled by it. Time for an overhaul there.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Ayn Rand, Intellectuals, and Egg-on-Face
The intellectuals are supposed to be the best and most esteemed repositories of society's wisdom, and so when so many of them are so ignorantly (and therefore basely) opposed to an intellectual figure such as Ayn Rand, they have failed in their task of being the guardians and integrators of human knowledge. (Only those with a clue about Ayn Rand will recognize this last turn of phrase. The ignorant haters won't have a clue, because that's what's in the nature of ignorant haters, A being A and all.) Now, imagine a treatise hitting the American intellectual scene that completely blasts away at the misrepresentations, distortions, and smears of Rand and her ideas that have circulated in the intellectual scene for decades. How do the veteran and entrenched intellectuals react?
First off, the notion that academia as it is today doesn't corrupt the study of philosophy in various insidious ways would be ignorant in its own right, but the results speak for themselves. While Rand essentially delivered a rational eudaemonistic ethics over half a century ago, and provided the American People with a philosophical guide to living, the Intellectual Class has stumbled and staggered to and fro (but with ample logical hairsplitting and footnotes) trying to get at the answers Rand already had reached. The Intellectual Class, in the meantime, became enamored with John Rawls's Theory of Justice because . . . psychologically speaking, it's because it speaks to them so persuasively.
We already saw, in the early 20th century, how socialism spoke so persuasively to the aspirations of the Intellectuals, even though the leading economist of the time, Ludwig von Mises, exploded their myths and aspirations - at least he exploded them logically. He didn't explode them existentially; they plunged ahead in their support for socialism, and the result was widespread death and destruction the more socialistic the ideas that were implemented. This is a dark history that the Left is in denial about. Their dreamy ideas were a fucking disaster in the real world, and it's hard to come to terms with that.
Now, in connection with this observed phenomenon - a friendliness toward socialism and antipathy toward capitalism in the Intellectual Class, most obvious in the Humanities - Robert Nozick provided a thoughtful diagnosis. Combined with an utter fucking ignorance of Rand's ideas among some of these intellectuals, and in some cases an ignorance combined with the most malicious hostility toward Rand or anything capitalistic, the idea that the prevailing academic model produces philosophy, per se, and not a biased cognitive environment, is quite ignorant in itself. As a philosopher, I fucking hate ignorance.
Given the overwhelmingly compelling case for capitalism presented in the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, not to mention the overwhelming, real-world, not-merely-theoretical, demonstrated superiority of capitalism in practice, the opposition to capitalism in the Intellectual Class is nothing short of pathological - quite frighteningly so, in fact. It's hard to expect the Intellectual Class to take Rand seriously when it hardly takes anything pro-capitalism seriously, which in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to take the Intellectual Class seriously.
So here's how certain "types" of intellectual figures are bound to respond to such a bombshell treatise correcting the prevailing misconceptions which they should have been correcting long ago:
(1) The first type, the most intellectually curious and honest type, acknowledges that there was a big un-philosophical fuck-up that happened here, and that corrective measures needed to be adopted post haste.
(2) The second type, a somewhat mixed type, is the one whose context is so foreign to Rand's, that the response is likely to be one of caution and skepticism about new information that challenges one's prevailing opinions. This type would not be so keen on the "post haste" corrective measures, as they would call for the need for time - perhaps a prolongued period of time - to debate the ideas in the fashion that academics debate ideas, which has traditionally carried with it certain insidious tendencies - like those that led to the great degree of academic neglect of Ayn Rand's thought. This second type would be instructive to observe from the perspective of how deeply automatized and integrated a context can be, and how a new and unfamiliar context (but a deeply-integrated context in its own right) intrudes upon their understanding of the world.
(3) The third type would be the social-metaphysical second-hander or social-climber who waits and sees what the prestigious figures in the field say, and react to that. This type is part of the problem to begin with.
(4) The fourth type would be a defensive one - the kind of defensiveness you typically find when someone's long-held conceptions of things are put to severe challenge. Defensiveness can manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways depending on the case. This mentality is not very philosophical, but it can be subtly encouraged when enough like-thinking people (in this case, fellow members of one's trusted community, which is biased against capitalism) behave in like-thinking ways. A mixture of this type and type #3, and with perhaps another character trait added in, leads to the academy's lackluster response to one of their own - Nozick - destroying a great number of their bad non-capitalist views.
(5) The fifth type is the flat-out evader. This is the mentality that has been poisoned, and there are some such poisoned mentalities in the Intellectual Class already. These are the people whose evasions lead most directly to damaging real-world results, and who blatantly defy their job description. Some such so-called intellectuals hold tenured positions in the academy so they can't be fired as they should be. This type will just have to die off and be replaced by someone honest.
Now, if you have a range of people, many of whom fall into these "types," you're going to have clashing contexts between Randian or Perfectivist ideas and theirs, and it's this clashing of contexts that makes for any delay between the introduction of an idea and its acceptance. Rand found out this context-gap the hard way, upon publication of Atlas Shrugged: the context of many of those in her audience had been so fucked-up that effective communication between Rand and such unfortunate souls was next to nonexistent. (That's just how dysfunctional the intellectual climate in America was ca. 1957.) You had some idiotic reviewers of For the New Intellectual declaring quite emphatically that Rand's ideas were "near perfect in their immorality." (Not that these idiotic comments were from people who were able to think philosophically, the way a serious philosopher like, say, John Hospers did.) What's ironic is just how imbecilic the fashionable "liberal" reaction to Rand was. When I think "imbecile," I usually think Sarah Palin and her ilk, but how else do you describe the behavior of fashionable liberal intellectuals who don't have a clue?
Rand was incredulous at first at how the reaction to her work could be so fucking imbecilic (and clueless). She just wasn't prepared for the degree to which irrationality had been ingrained in the culture. Well, I think I'm gonna be more well prepared upon the release of my opus than Rand was on the release of hers. The capacity for people to be proudly imbecilic and clueless seemingly knows no bounds, and the myriad ways in which the anti-Rand crowd seemingly goes out of its way to misunderstand, misrepresent, distort and smear her, are all too predictable by now. But as I said in a previous posting, the target audience for my forthcoming book is, first and foremost, the young intellectuals who have the least invested in a faulty (non-perfective) worldview. The behavioral response across demographics will be quite the interesting subject of study.
How does one avoid the embarrassment of being proven manifestly and insanely wrong about a thinker such as Ayn Rand? My best advice is not to get oneself into that sort of pride-threatening pickle to begin with. It helps not to cultivate mental habits leading to anti-capitalist idiocy, as happens to quite an embarrassing degree in the Academy. No wonder the American people despise their Intellectual Class. And I think they'll be none to pleased to find out just how destructive to their interests the Intellectual Class has been. They won't put up with it; they just won't. I think the Comprachicos' days are numbered. Just how numbered they are, remains to be seen; there is free will, after all.
[ADDENDUM: For some idea of how far behind Rand the cultural and intellectual mainstream of 1957 was, keep in mind that this was before Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" article, before the rise of Virtue Ethics as a mainstream alternative to utilitarianism and deontology - a rise that has taken longer to happen due to the amount of attention and study diverted toward Rawls's theories - and before a number of authors - e.g., Henry Veatch, Jonathan Barnes, or, popularly, Mortimer Adler - began writing books on Aristotle for more public consumption, and less than two decades after The Basic Works of Aristotle were published in America. Philosophy was experiencing what Rand referred to as a "post-Kantian disintegration," in which Aristotle was being drowned out by lesser and more destructive thinkers, where Positivism and Existentialism were dominant. Only a clueless non-philosopher oblivious to the wisdom of Aristotle would conclude that Rand's ideas "are nearly perfect in their immorality," despite her well-known advertising of her admiration for Aristotle. The fact of the matter is, Rand was just well ahead of anyone else of her time, and figured out the things that it has been taking decades for the Mainstream to figure out. I see egg-on-face syndrome as quite inevitable here.]
First off, the notion that academia as it is today doesn't corrupt the study of philosophy in various insidious ways would be ignorant in its own right, but the results speak for themselves. While Rand essentially delivered a rational eudaemonistic ethics over half a century ago, and provided the American People with a philosophical guide to living, the Intellectual Class has stumbled and staggered to and fro (but with ample logical hairsplitting and footnotes) trying to get at the answers Rand already had reached. The Intellectual Class, in the meantime, became enamored with John Rawls's Theory of Justice because . . . psychologically speaking, it's because it speaks to them so persuasively.
We already saw, in the early 20th century, how socialism spoke so persuasively to the aspirations of the Intellectuals, even though the leading economist of the time, Ludwig von Mises, exploded their myths and aspirations - at least he exploded them logically. He didn't explode them existentially; they plunged ahead in their support for socialism, and the result was widespread death and destruction the more socialistic the ideas that were implemented. This is a dark history that the Left is in denial about. Their dreamy ideas were a fucking disaster in the real world, and it's hard to come to terms with that.
Now, in connection with this observed phenomenon - a friendliness toward socialism and antipathy toward capitalism in the Intellectual Class, most obvious in the Humanities - Robert Nozick provided a thoughtful diagnosis. Combined with an utter fucking ignorance of Rand's ideas among some of these intellectuals, and in some cases an ignorance combined with the most malicious hostility toward Rand or anything capitalistic, the idea that the prevailing academic model produces philosophy, per se, and not a biased cognitive environment, is quite ignorant in itself. As a philosopher, I fucking hate ignorance.
Given the overwhelmingly compelling case for capitalism presented in the works of Ayn Rand, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Robert Nozick, Murray Rothbard, Milton Friedman, David Friedman, James Buchanan, George Reisman, John Hospers, Richard Epstein, Randy Barnett, Eric Mack, Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl, Loren Lomasky, David Schmidtz, and Chris Matthew Sciabarra, not to mention the overwhelming, real-world, not-merely-theoretical, demonstrated superiority of capitalism in practice, the opposition to capitalism in the Intellectual Class is nothing short of pathological - quite frighteningly so, in fact. It's hard to expect the Intellectual Class to take Rand seriously when it hardly takes anything pro-capitalism seriously, which in turn makes it exceedingly difficult to take the Intellectual Class seriously.
So here's how certain "types" of intellectual figures are bound to respond to such a bombshell treatise correcting the prevailing misconceptions which they should have been correcting long ago:
(1) The first type, the most intellectually curious and honest type, acknowledges that there was a big un-philosophical fuck-up that happened here, and that corrective measures needed to be adopted post haste.
(2) The second type, a somewhat mixed type, is the one whose context is so foreign to Rand's, that the response is likely to be one of caution and skepticism about new information that challenges one's prevailing opinions. This type would not be so keen on the "post haste" corrective measures, as they would call for the need for time - perhaps a prolongued period of time - to debate the ideas in the fashion that academics debate ideas, which has traditionally carried with it certain insidious tendencies - like those that led to the great degree of academic neglect of Ayn Rand's thought. This second type would be instructive to observe from the perspective of how deeply automatized and integrated a context can be, and how a new and unfamiliar context (but a deeply-integrated context in its own right) intrudes upon their understanding of the world.
(3) The third type would be the social-metaphysical second-hander or social-climber who waits and sees what the prestigious figures in the field say, and react to that. This type is part of the problem to begin with.
(4) The fourth type would be a defensive one - the kind of defensiveness you typically find when someone's long-held conceptions of things are put to severe challenge. Defensiveness can manifest itself in some pretty ugly ways depending on the case. This mentality is not very philosophical, but it can be subtly encouraged when enough like-thinking people (in this case, fellow members of one's trusted community, which is biased against capitalism) behave in like-thinking ways. A mixture of this type and type #3, and with perhaps another character trait added in, leads to the academy's lackluster response to one of their own - Nozick - destroying a great number of their bad non-capitalist views.
(5) The fifth type is the flat-out evader. This is the mentality that has been poisoned, and there are some such poisoned mentalities in the Intellectual Class already. These are the people whose evasions lead most directly to damaging real-world results, and who blatantly defy their job description. Some such so-called intellectuals hold tenured positions in the academy so they can't be fired as they should be. This type will just have to die off and be replaced by someone honest.
Now, if you have a range of people, many of whom fall into these "types," you're going to have clashing contexts between Randian or Perfectivist ideas and theirs, and it's this clashing of contexts that makes for any delay between the introduction of an idea and its acceptance. Rand found out this context-gap the hard way, upon publication of Atlas Shrugged: the context of many of those in her audience had been so fucked-up that effective communication between Rand and such unfortunate souls was next to nonexistent. (That's just how dysfunctional the intellectual climate in America was ca. 1957.) You had some idiotic reviewers of For the New Intellectual declaring quite emphatically that Rand's ideas were "near perfect in their immorality." (Not that these idiotic comments were from people who were able to think philosophically, the way a serious philosopher like, say, John Hospers did.) What's ironic is just how imbecilic the fashionable "liberal" reaction to Rand was. When I think "imbecile," I usually think Sarah Palin and her ilk, but how else do you describe the behavior of fashionable liberal intellectuals who don't have a clue?
Rand was incredulous at first at how the reaction to her work could be so fucking imbecilic (and clueless). She just wasn't prepared for the degree to which irrationality had been ingrained in the culture. Well, I think I'm gonna be more well prepared upon the release of my opus than Rand was on the release of hers. The capacity for people to be proudly imbecilic and clueless seemingly knows no bounds, and the myriad ways in which the anti-Rand crowd seemingly goes out of its way to misunderstand, misrepresent, distort and smear her, are all too predictable by now. But as I said in a previous posting, the target audience for my forthcoming book is, first and foremost, the young intellectuals who have the least invested in a faulty (non-perfective) worldview. The behavioral response across demographics will be quite the interesting subject of study.
How does one avoid the embarrassment of being proven manifestly and insanely wrong about a thinker such as Ayn Rand? My best advice is not to get oneself into that sort of pride-threatening pickle to begin with. It helps not to cultivate mental habits leading to anti-capitalist idiocy, as happens to quite an embarrassing degree in the Academy. No wonder the American people despise their Intellectual Class. And I think they'll be none to pleased to find out just how destructive to their interests the Intellectual Class has been. They won't put up with it; they just won't. I think the Comprachicos' days are numbered. Just how numbered they are, remains to be seen; there is free will, after all.
[ADDENDUM: For some idea of how far behind Rand the cultural and intellectual mainstream of 1957 was, keep in mind that this was before Anscombe's "Modern Moral Philosophy" article, before the rise of Virtue Ethics as a mainstream alternative to utilitarianism and deontology - a rise that has taken longer to happen due to the amount of attention and study diverted toward Rawls's theories - and before a number of authors - e.g., Henry Veatch, Jonathan Barnes, or, popularly, Mortimer Adler - began writing books on Aristotle for more public consumption, and less than two decades after The Basic Works of Aristotle were published in America. Philosophy was experiencing what Rand referred to as a "post-Kantian disintegration," in which Aristotle was being drowned out by lesser and more destructive thinkers, where Positivism and Existentialism were dominant. Only a clueless non-philosopher oblivious to the wisdom of Aristotle would conclude that Rand's ideas "are nearly perfect in their immorality," despite her well-known advertising of her admiration for Aristotle. The fact of the matter is, Rand was just well ahead of anyone else of her time, and figured out the things that it has been taking decades for the Mainstream to figure out. I see egg-on-face syndrome as quite inevitable here.]
When Geniuses Fuck Up
In rummaging around (in the spirit of perfective comprehensiveness) for anything Noam Chomsky said about Ayn Rand, the first and prominent result points to this. Chomsky said:
To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?
Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).
What is, after all, each thinker's context?
At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.
From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.
Rand in my view is one of the most evil figures of modern intellectual history.As a person fanatically prone to differentiation and integration, my mind went quite quickly to this statement by Ayn Rand:
Kant is the most evil man in mankind’s history.Both Chomsky and Rand fucked up here. The difference is that Chomsky is just way more clueless about Rand than Rand was about Kant. A further difference, one highlighting the intellectual corruption that pervades the American Left, is that Chomsky gets a free pass from them on fuck-ups like this, while Rand does not. (So much for any pretense by the American Left to an intellectual high-ground.)
To further stress the "integration" theme, can we also say that Kant fucked up with his inescapably radical subjectivism, his radical distinction between appearance and the mysterious thing-in-itself (most obviously blowing up in his face when positing on a compatibility between natural necessity and freedom of the will), and with his flimsy rejection of eudaemonism in ethics?
Rand, of course, provides for a corrective in this matters, by distinguishing errors of knowledge from breaches of morality. Applying that distinction, all three of these geniuses fucked up, but rightful ascriptions of evil to someone requires more evidence than of their having fucked up, or of their having faulty thinking processes (like those that the dualistic/non-integrative and therefore not-very-practically-useful Cartesian-Humean-Kantian - i.e., non-Aristotelian - model of thought encourages).
What is, after all, each thinker's context?
At the least, we can say that Chomsky, on some things, is a flat-out ignoramus who knows not of what he speaks. What remains open is whether Chomsky should easily have known better than to be ignorant of Rand's actual ideas (or of the other prominent libertarian intellectuals Chomsky bashes so boldly in that interview). Rand, for her own part, actually once gave positive mention of a review of Skinner by Chomsky, in "The Stimulus and the Response" (Philosophy: Who Needs It). She qualified her comments by noting that he was part of the New Left. A far cry from the idiocy Chomsky showed in return.
From the way he speaks and analyzes things, Chomsky is clearly brilliant and hits upon a great number of quality insights, but he can also be way in over his head on some matters of which speaks, and he doesn't seem to realize when he's way in over his head, which is an intellectual vice on his part. His antipathy to capitalism has really been insidious and costly to his credibility in matters of social science. And his powers of analysis definitely do not meet or exceed Ayn Rand's. Nor, in political economy, could they hope to match Mises's. That's why he's the Linguist, Mises the Economist, and Rand the Philosopher. But Rand did fuck up about Kant, who also fucked up, and his fuck-up was of greater philosophical significance and insidiousness. (For evidence, see the intellectual state of Europe today, base and ignoble sophists running too and fro, wallowing in a subjectivist paradigm. America's doing what America would do - slowly and surely integrating Aristotle and Aristotelianism, including Randism.) The only one here who hardly ever fucked up at all in his analyses, is Mises, a most perfective thinker. Just so we're clear on all that.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Animals and Fetuses in a High-Tech Future
Are Peter Singer and other leading animal-rights ethicists not being progressive and forward-thinking enough about human fetuses? The main gist a casual observer gets from Singer & Co. is that animals deserve strong moral consideration in virtue of being sentient, but that human fetuses, not being sentient or advanced in development, are not and needn't be accorded strong moral consideration as against "a woman's right to choose." The first position (about animals) is pretty radical by today's standards (and I'm highly sympathetic to say the least, despite not being an ethical utilitarian), but the latter position (about fetuses) is pretty mainstream today.
The course of Western history has included, over extended periods of time, progressive "reading-in" of classes of morally-significant beings to more full-fledged consideration or membership in the moral community. We have seen in America, by progressive stages, the abolition of legal slavery, then suffrage for women, then the Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the transformation of the traditional family model starting in the '60s toward greater independence for women (hence the current not-very-fetus-friendly laws), and, most recently, the eminently sensible push for marriage equality regardless of one's choice of consenting adult partner.
Animals currently have some protections under the law against behavior we might vaguely (in moral terms, independent of whatever non-vague language of the law) refer to as "needlessly cruel." Fetuses begin seeing legal protections only after the first trimester of pregnancy. Both of these represent about the most effective pragmatic compromise we might expect under present law given prevailing widespread moral attitudes. We are well short of the expectations of the radicals who seek a greater measure of equality under the law for animals and fetuses, respectively.
The opposition raised between the pragmatic mainstream and the radicals is an opposition between a supposedly "considered and wise" course and a supposedly "morally enlightened" one. The "morally enlightened" argument is that, in history, previously marginalized or discriminated-against classes of morally-relevant human beings ended up winning equal respect under the law, and certain already-existing morally-relevant features is the reason their equality was eventually recognized. It takes a progressive, forward-looking, enlightened mindset to identify these morally-relevant features and then to work to knock down the unreasonable, retrograde mindsets that keep these features from being recognized. At least that's a take on it that the radicals would endorse.
The pragmatic mindset, meanwhile, notices how upsetting to a stable order radical change can be, and so resists these overnight pushes toward an ideal. The current system works well enough; it is not so obviously broken that it needs to be overthrown in one fell swoop. Just look at what happened to Soviet Russia when that was tried.
This pragmatic-idealist opposition (a false dichotomy a Perfectivist doesn't accept) is well-presented and explained in Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Sowell's distinction, which essentially lines up with this one, is between the "constrained" and the "unconstrained" vision of human beings.
Anyway, what leads me to this is posting is my thinking about what a technologically-advanced future would look like in regard to the legal protections of animals and fetuses. I do this because I think that the current resistance to radicalism on these subjects is borne not of willful moral blindness necessarily, but definitely a certain moral blind spot engendered by the pragmatic mindset. Both sides ("pragmatic" and "idealist") fall into faulty diagnoses and rationale. But focusing on the problem with pragmatism for a moment: it inhibits visionary thinking, the ability to even creatively explore and challenge the structural weaknesses of the present paradigm. It also results in a tendency toward skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism.
One thing pragmatism is noted for is the skepticism about universal and eternal "categories" that might somehow impress themselves upon us if only we just look and see. That attitude is actually a reaction in the opposite direction from Platonism and "metaphysics" (the investigation of "ultimate reality" as logically prior to the fleeting and ephemeral experience). This notion hardly seems new in the history of philosophy - it comes up in various sects of lesser philosophers in ancient Greece, e.g., the Skeptics and the Cynics - but it is the prevailing, dominant "sense of life" and mindset in America, or at least was half a century ago.
(How many effing times did Rand quote a weak, wishy-washy, or villainous character in Atlas saying, "We've got to be practical--" and stopping, like it needs no further explanation, other than that one shouldn't stand on principle? She was reporting on the state of reality at the time. Rand wasn't alone in this, by the way; Mises once got up at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society and informed the appeasers and compromisers there that they were all socialists. How impractical! Trump card: By what standard do we regard something as practical? What was Roark's standard of the practical? Would selling out his principles be practical according to his sense of self and standard of value? Notice who the Pragmatist in The Fountainhead is. Actually, there are two of them. One is a mediocrity, the other a slave to the whims of the mob.)
Since half a century ago, Randism has become a cultural force and Aristotelianism has been (slowly but surely) emerging triumphant in the academy. One thing about Aristotelianism (in the broad sense, not Aristotle's own conclusions per se) is that it doesn't succumb to criticism. It just doesn't. Just as the sophists, skeptics, and cynics couldn't hold a candle to Aristotle back then, so American-style pragmatism can't hold a candle to Aristotelianism 2,300 years later. The opposition to Plato-style eternal categories doesn't apply to Aristotelianism, and also falls apart in the face of Aristotelianism. An Aristotelian framework does speak in terms of natural laws within the context of a realist systematizing empiricism.
Here's the different ways pragmatism and Aristotelian respond, respectively, to the present gaps between human knowledge and natural laws in their entirety: Pragmatism dispenses with the notion of "natural law," because, all said and done, there is no "cash value" to be had in the idea of natural law over and above observed regularity. The Aristotelian response is to simply ascribe the gap to the limitations of our knowledge at any given time, and that present ignorance about natural laws does not mean there aren't any or that we can't speak meaningfully about them. Rand takes this analysis to its extreme: denying natural law is effectively tantamount to committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, or perhaps even more strongly, to denying that existence has primacy over consciousness (i.e., to denying that consciousness is identification of already-existing facts, regularities, etc.). Or, perhaps even stronger yet, we could invoke the principle of Affirmation through Denial: inasmuch as we do philosophy well, we're thinking as perfectively, i.e., as comprehensively as to subject matter as Aristotle did, like Rand did.
Now, as to animals and fetuses. I anticipate changes in the law in the future regarding the treatment of animals and fetuses because of changes in technology. In regard to animals, for instance, we will eventually be able to synthesize meat without having to use animals in the process. Food would be assembled in large labs or factories, etc. Likewise, technology will exist in the future that would enable embryos to be removed from the mother's body and stored safely. And the law would mandate that because of the unique potentialities for self-actualized personhood that exist in principle within each embryo. It would be a crime, morally, to dispense of that potentiality it can be saved safely and with little cost. (A technological trump card here would be more completely effective contraceptive practices, so that the inconveniences of unwanted pregnancy don't even become an issue.)
Now, to envision this kind of futuristic scenario requires some thinking-outside-the-box that pragmatism doesn't deal in and doesn't regard as practical. To the pragmatist, we have to deal with the here-and-now, and here and now people get significant enjoyment from eating animals. Hey, it seems to work well enough (despite the tendencies toward bad health that the recently-emerging eating habits have been creating). What's more, the pragmatist doesn't really get into the business of challenging the base and ignoble rationalizations people will offer for eating factory-farmed meat. To call those rationalizations "base and ignoble" is to presuppose a standard that the pragmatist won't endorse. But they are rationalizations born of a blindness or ignorance (whether it's willful blindness or ignorance depends on the individual case). The self-serving rationalizations one is likely to hear are creepily similar to the self-serving rationalizations people would offer at various times for slavery, the subjugation of women, racial discrimination, marriage discrimination, etc. And the pragmatist has no answer to them, because "We have to be practical--"
Let's not mistake something here: the present situation of cruelty to animals and relative indifference to fetuses ("zygotes aren't people/citizens/etc.") is the result of a pragmatic mentality, just like slavery, subjugation, etc. in previous eras were. The Founding Fathers did espouse natural rights, but to get a new country going, they had to pragmatically compromise on slavery. This is not to say that this didn't constitute an improvement over things prior to the founding of the United States. But it is to say that they were willing to "go along and get along" with an evil (under natural law) because that's the best they could do at the time. It would seem that the history of legal rights is a history of the greatest deal of human and/or animal dignity consistent with economic feasibility.
But to deny that there are natural rights is, while the cashing-in (if you will) of Pragmatism, it is opposed to the ideals upon which this country was founded. And when the last century in America was dominated by Pragmatism rather than Aristotelianism, that provides a very compelling explanation for a widespread resistance to Ayn Rand's idealism. (An explanation with much . . . cash value, wouldn't you say?) But if Americans do have a good understanding of their country's founding roots, and if they do understand therefore the value and practicality of idealism, then they're quite ripe and ready for an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian-Perfectivist program of idealistic education and therefore of a revolution for the better.
With that period of a new Enlightenment, a Second Renaissance, people just wouldn't get away with peddling the open irrationalities we see all over the place; they would be called out and refuted way more resoundingly and effectively than they are now. (This includes capitalism-bashing Comprachicos with top-flight professorships.) This also means that self-serving rationalizations, pragmatic compromises, and the like, would be discredited and rejected that much more quickly. Then, just like with slavery, women's subjugation, etc., people will look back on the treatment of animals and realize just how ignorant, self-serving, and economic-feasibility-based the previous generations' "moral" reasoning was, given the absolute facts of the matter.
. . . and that's why I've adopted Perfectivism. :-)
[ADDENDUM: I've mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again: Pragmatism encourages dis-integration. How do you best judge the merit of a philosopher? By how extremely, how radically, how emphatically, how heroically the philosopher stresses the systematic integration of knowledge in accordance with the absolute requirements of our conceptual mode of consciousness. Pragmatism is disqualified from the get-go. And that's why America is floundering at the moment. What America needs is a realist philosophy to support its "common sense" ethos - realist metaphysics, systematizing-empirical epistemology, eudaemonist ethics, benevolent individualist social ethics, capitalist political economy, Romantic aesthetics. "Let your mind and your love of existence decide."]
[ADDENDUM #2: By "self-serving rationalization" above I mean, of course, rationalization which serves a current self that is not a fully-actualized self, i.e., the self as it might be and ought to be.]
The course of Western history has included, over extended periods of time, progressive "reading-in" of classes of morally-significant beings to more full-fledged consideration or membership in the moral community. We have seen in America, by progressive stages, the abolition of legal slavery, then suffrage for women, then the Civil Rights movement of the '60s, the transformation of the traditional family model starting in the '60s toward greater independence for women (hence the current not-very-fetus-friendly laws), and, most recently, the eminently sensible push for marriage equality regardless of one's choice of consenting adult partner.
Animals currently have some protections under the law against behavior we might vaguely (in moral terms, independent of whatever non-vague language of the law) refer to as "needlessly cruel." Fetuses begin seeing legal protections only after the first trimester of pregnancy. Both of these represent about the most effective pragmatic compromise we might expect under present law given prevailing widespread moral attitudes. We are well short of the expectations of the radicals who seek a greater measure of equality under the law for animals and fetuses, respectively.
The opposition raised between the pragmatic mainstream and the radicals is an opposition between a supposedly "considered and wise" course and a supposedly "morally enlightened" one. The "morally enlightened" argument is that, in history, previously marginalized or discriminated-against classes of morally-relevant human beings ended up winning equal respect under the law, and certain already-existing morally-relevant features is the reason their equality was eventually recognized. It takes a progressive, forward-looking, enlightened mindset to identify these morally-relevant features and then to work to knock down the unreasonable, retrograde mindsets that keep these features from being recognized. At least that's a take on it that the radicals would endorse.
The pragmatic mindset, meanwhile, notices how upsetting to a stable order radical change can be, and so resists these overnight pushes toward an ideal. The current system works well enough; it is not so obviously broken that it needs to be overthrown in one fell swoop. Just look at what happened to Soviet Russia when that was tried.
This pragmatic-idealist opposition (a false dichotomy a Perfectivist doesn't accept) is well-presented and explained in Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions. Sowell's distinction, which essentially lines up with this one, is between the "constrained" and the "unconstrained" vision of human beings.
Anyway, what leads me to this is posting is my thinking about what a technologically-advanced future would look like in regard to the legal protections of animals and fetuses. I do this because I think that the current resistance to radicalism on these subjects is borne not of willful moral blindness necessarily, but definitely a certain moral blind spot engendered by the pragmatic mindset. Both sides ("pragmatic" and "idealist") fall into faulty diagnoses and rationale. But focusing on the problem with pragmatism for a moment: it inhibits visionary thinking, the ability to even creatively explore and challenge the structural weaknesses of the present paradigm. It also results in a tendency toward skepticism, subjectivism, and relativism.
One thing pragmatism is noted for is the skepticism about universal and eternal "categories" that might somehow impress themselves upon us if only we just look and see. That attitude is actually a reaction in the opposite direction from Platonism and "metaphysics" (the investigation of "ultimate reality" as logically prior to the fleeting and ephemeral experience). This notion hardly seems new in the history of philosophy - it comes up in various sects of lesser philosophers in ancient Greece, e.g., the Skeptics and the Cynics - but it is the prevailing, dominant "sense of life" and mindset in America, or at least was half a century ago.
(How many effing times did Rand quote a weak, wishy-washy, or villainous character in Atlas saying, "We've got to be practical--" and stopping, like it needs no further explanation, other than that one shouldn't stand on principle? She was reporting on the state of reality at the time. Rand wasn't alone in this, by the way; Mises once got up at a meeting of the Mont Pelerin society and informed the appeasers and compromisers there that they were all socialists. How impractical! Trump card: By what standard do we regard something as practical? What was Roark's standard of the practical? Would selling out his principles be practical according to his sense of self and standard of value? Notice who the Pragmatist in The Fountainhead is. Actually, there are two of them. One is a mediocrity, the other a slave to the whims of the mob.)
Since half a century ago, Randism has become a cultural force and Aristotelianism has been (slowly but surely) emerging triumphant in the academy. One thing about Aristotelianism (in the broad sense, not Aristotle's own conclusions per se) is that it doesn't succumb to criticism. It just doesn't. Just as the sophists, skeptics, and cynics couldn't hold a candle to Aristotle back then, so American-style pragmatism can't hold a candle to Aristotelianism 2,300 years later. The opposition to Plato-style eternal categories doesn't apply to Aristotelianism, and also falls apart in the face of Aristotelianism. An Aristotelian framework does speak in terms of natural laws within the context of a realist systematizing empiricism.
Here's the different ways pragmatism and Aristotelian respond, respectively, to the present gaps between human knowledge and natural laws in their entirety: Pragmatism dispenses with the notion of "natural law," because, all said and done, there is no "cash value" to be had in the idea of natural law over and above observed regularity. The Aristotelian response is to simply ascribe the gap to the limitations of our knowledge at any given time, and that present ignorance about natural laws does not mean there aren't any or that we can't speak meaningfully about them. Rand takes this analysis to its extreme: denying natural law is effectively tantamount to committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, or perhaps even more strongly, to denying that existence has primacy over consciousness (i.e., to denying that consciousness is identification of already-existing facts, regularities, etc.). Or, perhaps even stronger yet, we could invoke the principle of Affirmation through Denial: inasmuch as we do philosophy well, we're thinking as perfectively, i.e., as comprehensively as to subject matter as Aristotle did, like Rand did.
Now, as to animals and fetuses. I anticipate changes in the law in the future regarding the treatment of animals and fetuses because of changes in technology. In regard to animals, for instance, we will eventually be able to synthesize meat without having to use animals in the process. Food would be assembled in large labs or factories, etc. Likewise, technology will exist in the future that would enable embryos to be removed from the mother's body and stored safely. And the law would mandate that because of the unique potentialities for self-actualized personhood that exist in principle within each embryo. It would be a crime, morally, to dispense of that potentiality it can be saved safely and with little cost. (A technological trump card here would be more completely effective contraceptive practices, so that the inconveniences of unwanted pregnancy don't even become an issue.)
Now, to envision this kind of futuristic scenario requires some thinking-outside-the-box that pragmatism doesn't deal in and doesn't regard as practical. To the pragmatist, we have to deal with the here-and-now, and here and now people get significant enjoyment from eating animals. Hey, it seems to work well enough (despite the tendencies toward bad health that the recently-emerging eating habits have been creating). What's more, the pragmatist doesn't really get into the business of challenging the base and ignoble rationalizations people will offer for eating factory-farmed meat. To call those rationalizations "base and ignoble" is to presuppose a standard that the pragmatist won't endorse. But they are rationalizations born of a blindness or ignorance (whether it's willful blindness or ignorance depends on the individual case). The self-serving rationalizations one is likely to hear are creepily similar to the self-serving rationalizations people would offer at various times for slavery, the subjugation of women, racial discrimination, marriage discrimination, etc. And the pragmatist has no answer to them, because "We have to be practical--"
Let's not mistake something here: the present situation of cruelty to animals and relative indifference to fetuses ("zygotes aren't people/citizens/etc.") is the result of a pragmatic mentality, just like slavery, subjugation, etc. in previous eras were. The Founding Fathers did espouse natural rights, but to get a new country going, they had to pragmatically compromise on slavery. This is not to say that this didn't constitute an improvement over things prior to the founding of the United States. But it is to say that they were willing to "go along and get along" with an evil (under natural law) because that's the best they could do at the time. It would seem that the history of legal rights is a history of the greatest deal of human and/or animal dignity consistent with economic feasibility.
But to deny that there are natural rights is, while the cashing-in (if you will) of Pragmatism, it is opposed to the ideals upon which this country was founded. And when the last century in America was dominated by Pragmatism rather than Aristotelianism, that provides a very compelling explanation for a widespread resistance to Ayn Rand's idealism. (An explanation with much . . . cash value, wouldn't you say?) But if Americans do have a good understanding of their country's founding roots, and if they do understand therefore the value and practicality of idealism, then they're quite ripe and ready for an Aristotelian-Jeffersonian-Randian-Perfectivist program of idealistic education and therefore of a revolution for the better.
With that period of a new Enlightenment, a Second Renaissance, people just wouldn't get away with peddling the open irrationalities we see all over the place; they would be called out and refuted way more resoundingly and effectively than they are now. (This includes capitalism-bashing Comprachicos with top-flight professorships.) This also means that self-serving rationalizations, pragmatic compromises, and the like, would be discredited and rejected that much more quickly. Then, just like with slavery, women's subjugation, etc., people will look back on the treatment of animals and realize just how ignorant, self-serving, and economic-feasibility-based the previous generations' "moral" reasoning was, given the absolute facts of the matter.
. . . and that's why I've adopted Perfectivism. :-)
[ADDENDUM: I've mentioned it before, but it bears mentioning again: Pragmatism encourages dis-integration. How do you best judge the merit of a philosopher? By how extremely, how radically, how emphatically, how heroically the philosopher stresses the systematic integration of knowledge in accordance with the absolute requirements of our conceptual mode of consciousness. Pragmatism is disqualified from the get-go. And that's why America is floundering at the moment. What America needs is a realist philosophy to support its "common sense" ethos - realist metaphysics, systematizing-empirical epistemology, eudaemonist ethics, benevolent individualist social ethics, capitalist political economy, Romantic aesthetics. "Let your mind and your love of existence decide."]
[ADDENDUM #2: By "self-serving rationalization" above I mean, of course, rationalization which serves a current self that is not a fully-actualized self, i.e., the self as it might be and ought to be.]
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Perfectivism: Some Rough Ideas
Intro comments: This is from an email I wrote earlier today to fellow eudaemonists who are in academia, in its original (unedited) but copy-pasted form. The subject of the email is "eudaemonism as perfectivism." I consider this to be the absolute state of the art in ethical theory, and encourage anyone reading this to forward this onto anyone that might find it of interest. The terminology and discussion here is somewhat technical and presupposes some familiarity with the ethical tradition (the eudaemonist tradition in particular) and with the academic literature. I'm fairly confident that the basic idea - and most especially the spirit animating these investigations - passes the highest possible philosophical muster, academic or otherwise. (The opposition to Rand is toast, guaranteed.)
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I think the term "perfectionism" carries with it a lot of unhelpful baggage, so I've decided to adopt a new term, perfectivism. I think a perfectivist account of eudaemonia or flourishing is the best, most complete, most (ahem) perfect account. Here is it: eudaemonia has gone under wide range of headings, terms, associations, etc. The usual translation of eudaemonia as "happiness" is misleading since happiness refers to the psychological reward associated with eudaemonia. Eudaemonia isn't just a psychological condition but something more comprehensive than that, something I would sum up in the phrase "perfective living." I'm aiming to provide the most complete account of that, something that someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would aim for (and I think that's the concept he himself was aiming for).
Someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would look at the tradition and identify the good parts that varying thinkers were aiming for, while discarding the limitations, mistakes, one-sided understandings, etc. So my perfective account by its very nature has to take into account and integrate with it the best in Rand and Norton; I'm also going to be reading Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment shortly (first chapter is here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6413.pdf ), since one way of rendering eudaemonia might well be "self-fulfillment," a term which is supposed to be more encompassing than self-actualization.
Here's the contribution each of the other thinkers makes to the perfectivist understanding of eudaemonia: Norton does an eminently plausible job of linking the familiar term "self-actualization" to the ancient concept of eudaemonia. At the minimum, eudaemonia incorporates self-actualization into a complete account. The Merriam-Webster definition of "self-actualization" is fitting: to reach one's full potential, which has Greek/Aristotelian accounts of goodness or perfection written all over it. Norton makes his account of eudaemonia as complete as he can by referring to eudaemonia as both a condition and a feeling that attends the satisfaction of right desire. The feeling itself of eudaemonia he doesn't translate into any other term (though I think that feeling is best captured by the term "happiness"), but he does speak of it as its own intrinsic reward; the feeling itself could not be perfected upon; it is the feeling of completeness that comes with the condition of living completely. In thinking through this, I've come to understand eudaemonia as encompassing the condition (the perfective activity of self-actualization) and the feeling (happiness) under something integrating these two into a whole: complete or perfective living, fulfilled living, self-fulfillment. This is an inclusive-end eudaemonia, incorporating, integrating and encompassing as completely as possible the goods that constitute it.
Now, Rand. Rand is most Aristotelian in terms of her identification of the human good with rational activity, that activity expressive of our distinctive mode of excellence or perfection. She comes at eudaemonia from the aspect of our rational natures, based on the identification that the human mode of flourishing (I don't know whether to say "flourishing" is more synonymous with eudaemonia or with the condition-aspect of it, i.e., self-actualization; also, if a feeling is also a condition of sorts, then I think we can speak of eudaemonia and flourishing as synonymous, flourishing referring to all those conditions, including the feeling of happiness, that make up complete living) arises from the perfective application of the characteristic mode of human functioning: rational activity. So we have a eudaemonism that is a virtue-ethics in which the fundamental/primary/basic virtue that explains all the other virtues as applications of this primary virtue, which is the virtue of rationality. I think of rationality in terms of perfective intellectual activity, which (self-referentially?) involves the seeking of the best and most complete explanations of the phenomena in our capacity as philosophers, and involves the practical application of rationality to the specific individuated life-pursuits of each person. (I think that this is to say, perhaps in very Aristotelian fashion, that eudaemonia cannot happen without philosophy integrated into one's life, even if one isn't a philosopher by profession. I know that saying this is in very Randian fashion, if "Philosophy: Who Needs It" is any indicator.) The whole point of Rand's epistemology - a point I think is sorely missed - is a perfective account of rational activity with a supremely practical aim in mind (which she gets to when she talks about concepts as devices to achieve unit-economy, i.e., mental efficiency and, in turn, mental potency), keeping in mind the basic thesis of Atlas Shrugged: the role of the mind in human existence. (Also, the basic thesis of her work: the primacy and supremacy of reason over egoism and capitalism.) It is by perfecting one's cognitive processes through rigorous application of a systematizing-empirical-inductive approach to inquiry that we will be most well-equipped to deal with the challenges of life. Whether this puts Rand and/or Aristotle into the "perfectionist" category in the Hurka-ian sense, I'll leave that for debate.
For philosophers-per-se, this perfective intellectual activity is captured by the term "contemplation," I think. So any eudaemonic life does involve a philosophical or contemplative aspect (you can't have someone who is eudaemon who isn't possessed of wisdom or a love of it). But with a figure like Rand, and I'm assuming like Aristotle, there isn't a dichotomy between theoretical and practical; the ultimate (eudaemonic) purpose of this intellectual activity is practical application to individuated, particular, concrete problem-solving, challenge-meeting, etc. In the Nortonian sense, this involves discovering and actualizing one's distinctive potentialities or excellences; for the person whose eudaemonia consists in philosophizing by profession, this means its own distinctive form of theoretical and practical unity; ideally, the practical life for the philosopher is the theoretical life. The Randian angle here is that the philosopher should aim for accessibility and clarity to the wider public. (I say "aim for"; if you looked at the "dialogue" section of the expanded 2nd edition of ITOE, it involves only specialists and long-time students. Apparently at some point the philosopher ends up spending at least some time communicating/collaborating with only high-level specialists who share the appropriate context.) I'm assuming it's an Aristotelian angle as well, as I'm sure Aristotle's long lost dialogues would have made quite evident.
Okay, I'm tapped out for the moment. Thoughts?
Oh, also, this account of eudamonia incorporates Randian and Nietzschean (and, I'm guessing, Aristotelian) ideas of goodness in terms of "life-affirmingness," where eudaemonia is then understood as the most life-affirming mode of activity. And the most life-affirming activity is synonymous with perfective activity. Something like that. I think Rand subtly though understandably got some concepts confused here: Our understanding of goodness comes, as it does with Foot in Natural Goodness, from life-phenonema, where we can understand life-processes in terms of need-fulfillment (with a Maslow-inspired "hierarchy of needs" analysis applying to the relation between life and flourishing). Where Rand got her terminology mistaken is her definition of "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep," but she implicitly retreats from this in a footnote on goal-directed action. It turns out that by "goal" she didn't mean "goal" in the usual (correct) sense but something more broad than that, i.e., "directed toward a result [telos?]." Here's how I think the value-language applies: Goodness is biocentric; value is dependent upon sentience. (That is to say, plants and amoebae don't pursue values since value-pursuit depends upon at least a basic-level awareness of that which is good for the organism.) Norton's answer to the is-ought problem identifies the relation of "ought" to "is" in terms of potentiality in relation to actuality. Actually, I think that this is an appropriate identification of the relation between goodness and nature, i.e., as instantiated in life-phenomena. The narrower subdivision of that is the "fact-value" relationship, and if value is dependent upon sentience, then we understand the facts (sentient life) that give rise to the concept "value." Then we get the narrower subdivision of the fact-value relation, the "is-ought" relation, that which applies to specifically human goodness, resting upon the ability of human beings to recognize and act for reasons. If the standard of goodness is life-affirmingness and the standard of value a psychological rewardingness, we come to a moral standard that incorporates these two, i.e., a eudaemonic one. I think this is exactly what Rand was aiming for with the best arguments and understanding she had at her avail at the time. For that reason, her argument - or perhaps way better yet, her (systematic-empirical) method of approach, which contains in it means of self-correction for faulty or incomplete arguments - merits a very close second look. (The expensive way of going about studying that approach is to immerse oneself in Peikoff's lecture courses. The inexpensive way I aim to essentialize for a wide audience in Perfectivism. It's Aristotelian-dialectical in its basic orientation, so it definitely has that going for it.)
-----
I think the term "perfectionism" carries with it a lot of unhelpful baggage, so I've decided to adopt a new term, perfectivism. I think a perfectivist account of eudaemonia or flourishing is the best, most complete, most (ahem) perfect account. Here is it: eudaemonia has gone under wide range of headings, terms, associations, etc. The usual translation of eudaemonia as "happiness" is misleading since happiness refers to the psychological reward associated with eudaemonia. Eudaemonia isn't just a psychological condition but something more comprehensive than that, something I would sum up in the phrase "perfective living." I'm aiming to provide the most complete account of that, something that someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would aim for (and I think that's the concept he himself was aiming for).
Someone of Aristotle's dialectical sensibilities would look at the tradition and identify the good parts that varying thinkers were aiming for, while discarding the limitations, mistakes, one-sided understandings, etc. So my perfective account by its very nature has to take into account and integrate with it the best in Rand and Norton; I'm also going to be reading Gewirth's Self-Fulfillment shortly (first chapter is here: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s6413.pdf ), since one way of rendering eudaemonia might well be "self-fulfillment," a term which is supposed to be more encompassing than self-actualization.
Here's the contribution each of the other thinkers makes to the perfectivist understanding of eudaemonia: Norton does an eminently plausible job of linking the familiar term "self-actualization" to the ancient concept of eudaemonia. At the minimum, eudaemonia incorporates self-actualization into a complete account. The Merriam-Webster definition of "self-actualization" is fitting: to reach one's full potential, which has Greek/Aristotelian accounts of goodness or perfection written all over it. Norton makes his account of eudaemonia as complete as he can by referring to eudaemonia as both a condition and a feeling that attends the satisfaction of right desire. The feeling itself of eudaemonia he doesn't translate into any other term (though I think that feeling is best captured by the term "happiness"), but he does speak of it as its own intrinsic reward; the feeling itself could not be perfected upon; it is the feeling of completeness that comes with the condition of living completely. In thinking through this, I've come to understand eudaemonia as encompassing the condition (the perfective activity of self-actualization) and the feeling (happiness) under something integrating these two into a whole: complete or perfective living, fulfilled living, self-fulfillment. This is an inclusive-end eudaemonia, incorporating, integrating and encompassing as completely as possible the goods that constitute it.
Now, Rand. Rand is most Aristotelian in terms of her identification of the human good with rational activity, that activity expressive of our distinctive mode of excellence or perfection. She comes at eudaemonia from the aspect of our rational natures, based on the identification that the human mode of flourishing (I don't know whether to say "flourishing" is more synonymous with eudaemonia or with the condition-aspect of it, i.e., self-actualization; also, if a feeling is also a condition of sorts, then I think we can speak of eudaemonia and flourishing as synonymous, flourishing referring to all those conditions, including the feeling of happiness, that make up complete living) arises from the perfective application of the characteristic mode of human functioning: rational activity. So we have a eudaemonism that is a virtue-ethics in which the fundamental/primary/basic virtue that explains all the other virtues as applications of this primary virtue, which is the virtue of rationality. I think of rationality in terms of perfective intellectual activity, which (self-referentially?) involves the seeking of the best and most complete explanations of the phenomena in our capacity as philosophers, and involves the practical application of rationality to the specific individuated life-pursuits of each person. (I think that this is to say, perhaps in very Aristotelian fashion, that eudaemonia cannot happen without philosophy integrated into one's life, even if one isn't a philosopher by profession. I know that saying this is in very Randian fashion, if "Philosophy: Who Needs It" is any indicator.) The whole point of Rand's epistemology - a point I think is sorely missed - is a perfective account of rational activity with a supremely practical aim in mind (which she gets to when she talks about concepts as devices to achieve unit-economy, i.e., mental efficiency and, in turn, mental potency), keeping in mind the basic thesis of Atlas Shrugged: the role of the mind in human existence. (Also, the basic thesis of her work: the primacy and supremacy of reason over egoism and capitalism.) It is by perfecting one's cognitive processes through rigorous application of a systematizing-empirical-inductive approach to inquiry that we will be most well-equipped to deal with the challenges of life. Whether this puts Rand and/or Aristotle into the "perfectionist" category in the Hurka-ian sense, I'll leave that for debate.
For philosophers-per-se, this perfective intellectual activity is captured by the term "contemplation," I think. So any eudaemonic life does involve a philosophical or contemplative aspect (you can't have someone who is eudaemon who isn't possessed of wisdom or a love of it). But with a figure like Rand, and I'm assuming like Aristotle, there isn't a dichotomy between theoretical and practical; the ultimate (eudaemonic) purpose of this intellectual activity is practical application to individuated, particular, concrete problem-solving, challenge-meeting, etc. In the Nortonian sense, this involves discovering and actualizing one's distinctive potentialities or excellences; for the person whose eudaemonia consists in philosophizing by profession, this means its own distinctive form of theoretical and practical unity; ideally, the practical life for the philosopher is the theoretical life. The Randian angle here is that the philosopher should aim for accessibility and clarity to the wider public. (I say "aim for"; if you looked at the "dialogue" section of the expanded 2nd edition of ITOE, it involves only specialists and long-time students. Apparently at some point the philosopher ends up spending at least some time communicating/collaborating with only high-level specialists who share the appropriate context.) I'm assuming it's an Aristotelian angle as well, as I'm sure Aristotle's long lost dialogues would have made quite evident.
Okay, I'm tapped out for the moment. Thoughts?
Oh, also, this account of eudamonia incorporates Randian and Nietzschean (and, I'm guessing, Aristotelian) ideas of goodness in terms of "life-affirmingness," where eudaemonia is then understood as the most life-affirming mode of activity. And the most life-affirming activity is synonymous with perfective activity. Something like that. I think Rand subtly though understandably got some concepts confused here: Our understanding of goodness comes, as it does with Foot in Natural Goodness, from life-phenonema, where we can understand life-processes in terms of need-fulfillment (with a Maslow-inspired "hierarchy of needs" analysis applying to the relation between life and flourishing). Where Rand got her terminology mistaken is her definition of "value" as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep," but she implicitly retreats from this in a footnote on goal-directed action. It turns out that by "goal" she didn't mean "goal" in the usual (correct) sense but something more broad than that, i.e., "directed toward a result [telos?]." Here's how I think the value-language applies: Goodness is biocentric; value is dependent upon sentience. (That is to say, plants and amoebae don't pursue values since value-pursuit depends upon at least a basic-level awareness of that which is good for the organism.) Norton's answer to the is-ought problem identifies the relation of "ought" to "is" in terms of potentiality in relation to actuality. Actually, I think that this is an appropriate identification of the relation between goodness and nature, i.e., as instantiated in life-phenomena. The narrower subdivision of that is the "fact-value" relationship, and if value is dependent upon sentience, then we understand the facts (sentient life) that give rise to the concept "value." Then we get the narrower subdivision of the fact-value relation, the "is-ought" relation, that which applies to specifically human goodness, resting upon the ability of human beings to recognize and act for reasons. If the standard of goodness is life-affirmingness and the standard of value a psychological rewardingness, we come to a moral standard that incorporates these two, i.e., a eudaemonic one. I think this is exactly what Rand was aiming for with the best arguments and understanding she had at her avail at the time. For that reason, her argument - or perhaps way better yet, her (systematic-empirical) method of approach, which contains in it means of self-correction for faulty or incomplete arguments - merits a very close second look. (The expensive way of going about studying that approach is to immerse oneself in Peikoff's lecture courses. The inexpensive way I aim to essentialize for a wide audience in Perfectivism. It's Aristotelian-dialectical in its basic orientation, so it definitely has that going for it.)
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Ayn Rand on Human Perfection
"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)
- John Galt's radio address, from Atlas Shrugged, p. 1059 (Softcover)
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!]
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