Saving The Appearances 2: Notes on Cultism in "The Logical Leap"

If "The Logical Leap" is a Rand-cult book, we should expect it to conform strictly to the Prime Directive of cultism: that the Ayn Rand is the greatest individual that ever lived. Rand-cult books like James Valliant's "The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics" are written to promote the moral supremacy of Ayn Rand; "The Logical Leap" to promote her intellectual and philosophical supremacy.

However just as the insurmountable conflicts between the Prime Directive and reality forced Valliant's book into sycophantic absurdity, this case presents enormous problems for the true believer. For unlike the problem of universals, or the "is/ought" problem, which Rand claimed to have solved (even though it seems that she neither solved, nor even understood them), with the problem of induction she is on record as stating she had not solved it, and had not even begun to do so.

Even worse, the problem of induction was posed by one of the chief villains of Objectivist mythology, David Hume, which in turn inspired the philosophy of the Ultimate Objectivist Villain - "the most evil man who ever lived", as Rand described him - Immanuel Kant. How could the greatest philosopher of all time not have an answer to the two most evil philosophers of all time? How could Rand, who prided herself above all on her supposedly epochal "epistemological" achievements, blank out on this decisive epistemological question? Hence the problem of induction has been a ticking time bomb under Objectivism for the last 40 years.

From the cultist point of view, there is really only one way to defuse the situation: it has to be shown that Rand's work already somehow contains the solution to the problem of induction - that, being the Greatest Philosopher of All Time, she solved it even though she didn't solve it. Hey, she did it without even trying! Now, Rand's Theory of Concept Formation, expressed in a handful pages of vague jargon within the mere 90 odd pages that she contributes to the Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology is the obvious candidate for such a claim, even though this meisterwerk is originally only supposed to solve the problem of universals. It's also critical that her acolytes are not seen to make any distinctive contribution themselves - to do otherwise, to imply that there was anything fundamental that Rand did not ultimately anticipate, that they are anything more than passive vessels communicating the guru's supreme vision is to violate the Prime Directive.

Therefore we can expect two things from The Logical Leap:

1) At some point Rand's Theory of Concept Formation will be presented as the direct and fully sufficient answer to the problem of induction

2) Neither Harriman, the ostensible author of the book, nor Peikoff his "collaborator" will have any directly identifiable contribution to any important part of the problem's solution.

Of course considerable effort behind the scenes will be required to "save the appearances" of Rand's greatness. Fortunately Harriman and Peikoff have the basic cult tools discussed previously to help engineer this: 1) the "thought terminating cliches" of Objectivist jargon 2) the sharply divided world of the Objectivist founding mythology and 3) their own idolatrous and and naiively uncritical attitude to Rand's ideology. In my next post we'll see how this all comes together.