Some Holiday Reading

I'll be away from a computer most of the time over the next couple of weeks, though Greg may be posting if the mood takes him. So meantime here's a little New Year reading: David Ramsay Steele's "Alice In Wonderland", supposedly a review of Barbara Branden's "The Passion Of Ayn Rand" but really just an excuse to open up a big ol' can of his particular Libertarian brand of whup-ass on Rand and Objectivism as a whole. Here's a small sample:

"The true plot of Atlas Shrugged is: how some good-looking individuals were saved by coming to agree in every particular with Rand, and how everyone else was eternally damned."

Enjoy.

Rand's Morality: A Brief Autopsy 2

In an earlier post, Rand's argument for why man needs an "objective" and "rational" code of values was examined. We turn to the next argument in Rand, the argument for why life is the "ultimate" value and the standard by which goals are evaluated, and we immediately find ourselves in great difficulty. In a strict sense, Rand presented no argument -- or at least no strictly logically argument that could be evaulated. Instead, we get a series of disparate, elliptical suggestions:

(1) "The fact that living entitities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value."
(2) "Only an ultimate goal, an end in itself, makes the existence of values possible."
(3) "Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself."
(4) "Epistemologically, the concept of value is genetically dependent on the concept of life."

Out of these statements, or the handful of others associated with this argument, you will never logically derive the conclusion that life is the ultimate value. If, however, you can accept proposition 3, you should have little trouble accepting Rand's conclusion, because proposition 3 merely restates Rand's conclusion in other terms. Let's examine it a little more closely: "Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end of itself." Now in proposition 2, Rand equates the phrase "end in life" with "ultimate value." And since "metaphysics," for Rand, is simply that which pertains to reality or existence, we can translate proposition 3 as follows: "In reality, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself." But that's her conclusion! Nor does bringing in the epistemologically angle help Rand extricate herself from her difficulties. So what if the concept of value is genetically dependent on the concept of life? In the first place, if by "genetically" Rand means you can't form the concept of value without first forming the concept of life, it's not clear this is true. But even if, per impossible, it were true, it certainly doesn't establish that life is the ultimate value. How a person arrives at a concept cannot prove any matter of fact beyond some fact about how people arrive at concepts.

To sum up: Rand's "arguments," so-called, on behalf of her contention that life is the ultimate value remain a hopeless muddle.

Light Posting Weeks

The bustling ARCHN headquarters is on skeleton staff during the holidays, so posting will be light. Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

ARCHN Quote of the Week

"The utility of Objectivism depends on how the individual uses Rand's ideas. If he uses Rand's principles merely as a vague form of inspiration, then he may profit from them. If, on the other hand, he tries to apply Rand's principles in a narrow, excessively literal sense to specific problems in everyday life, he is likely to get himself into trouble." - Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p355

Journal of Ayn Rand Studies - Fall 2006

The Fall edition of Chris Sciabarra's "Journal of Ayn Rand Studies" has finally been published. It contains, among other interesting articles, my reply to Seddon's critique of ARCHN, wherein I, in effect, restate the case against Rand. Using evidence compiled by cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary psychologists, I challenge not merely Rand's view of man, but also her epistemology, particularly her overestimation of the role of logic in efficacious thinking. Seddon responds in turn, offering a surprisingly feeble rebutal.

In the next few weeks I will offer brief commentary on some of these articles, particularly as the relate to important issues of Randian criticism.

ARCHN Quote of the Week

"In reading over the remarks about sex scattered through the Objectivist literature, I cannot help thinking that philosophy and sex do not mix well. Most philosophers, as soon as they begin hatching abstruse theories about sex, wind up spouting some of the most ridiculous nonsense on record. Consider the following gem from Leonard Peikoff's treatise on Objectivism:

'Proper human sex...requires men and women of stature, in regard to both moral character and metaphysical outlook.' (OPAR, p348)

(If) a person of high stature in moral character and metaphysical outlook is somone who lives in accordance with Objectivist principles, Peikoff could have expressed what he wanted to say much more clearly by merely insisting that in order to have proper sex, you must be an Objectivist."
- Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p267

ARCHN Quote of the Week

"If we define philistinism as the incapacity or unwillingness to appreciate and admire great art, then there can be little doubt Ayn Rand was a philistine...Rand only cared for art in the abstract sense. Concrete instances of art she usually disliked. In this sense, she was like those humanitarians who love mankind in the abstract yet never fail to mistreat and oppress actual individuals." - Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p333

Rand's Morality: A Brief Autopsy 1

Rand's theory of morality is the best refuted of her theories. Since there's been much wrangling about her theory in a previous post, I thought it might be helpful to reexamine Rand's arguments and point out what's wrong with them. Rand actually presents several arguments, each devoted to a specific problem. These can be summarized as follows:

(1) "Objective" and "rational" argument for why man needs a code of values based on reason;
(2) Argument for why life is the "ultimate" value and the standard by which all goals are evaluated;
(3) Argument for how happiness is achieved.

The term "argument" is here used rather loosely. Rand offers no clear-cut, formal argument for the last two positions, merely a few vague and rather puzzling hints. Let's start with the first one for why man needs a code of values based on reason. It could be summarized as follows:

(P1) Man is a living organism that faces the fundamental alternative of life and death
(P2) Life requires a specific course of action to sustain itself
(P3) Because of the need for unit-economy, the course of action required to sustain man's life must be reduced to a series of intelligible principles
(P4) Reason is the only means of figuring out the series of principles required to sustains man's life
(C) Man needs a code of values based on reason

Now I have given Rand a little help here. She does not explicitly mention the last two premises, but they are clearly things she presupposes and explicitly endorsed in other places. I will leave the logical analysis of this argument to others. I simply note that, while the first two premises are largely true (indeed, the second is a truism), the last two are dubious. A much more plausible theory states that ethical theories depend, at least in part, on tacit knowledge that cannot be adequately articulated in explicit principles. (See Hayek or M. Polanyi.) Philosophers who reduce morality to a handful of consciously articulated principles end up with ethical maxims that are too broad and leave way too much wiggle room for casuistry.

The fourth premises presents particularly serious difficulties, because it's not clear what "reason" is. If we define it analytically (i.e., as that which is required to find out the principles needed to sustain life), then the statement assumes the very point at issue. If we define it as a process whereby, through observation and "induction," one creates premises and then uses logic to deduce conclusions from those premises, then the proposition is empirically false: that view of knowledge acquisition, originally formulated by Aristotle and the scholastics, is wrong. Cognitive scientists have found no evidence that knowledge works that way, and a great deal of evidence that it works in other ways (i.e., largely through a loose kind of analogical reasoning combined with trial and error testing).

Note how the first two premises, which are the most plausible and easy to defend, are the only ones Rand explicitly enunciates. This is a common trick of rationalizing philosophers: The rationalizer parades the obvious, as if the argument depends only on that, when, in reality, it also depends on dubious presuppositions that are never acknowledged or explicitly stated.

I will examine the other arguments in later posts.

Understanding Objectivist Jargon Pt.1: 'Contextual' Certainty

The first in an occasional series that translates Objectivist jargon into plain language.

"Contextual certainty" = "Definitely maybe"

More Great Moments In Randian Argument

In the recent ARCHN Quote of the Week we discover Ayn Rand's amazing insight that the standard proper for determining the requirements of man's life is...man's life!

We realise the profundity of this insight is pretty tough to beat. But fortunately, the greatest philosopher of the past 2000 years is up to the challenge. From her "Introduction To Objectivist Epistemology" Chapter 2, Concept Formation:

"I shall identify as ‘length’ that attribute of any existent possessing it which can be quantitatively related to a unit of length, without specifying the quantity."

Yes folks, according Ayn Rand 'length' is that 'attribute' which can be 'quantitively related' a 'unit of'....wait for it...'length!'

Phew! It's just as well for Western Civilization that Rand was around to straighten out such challenging philosophical issues.

Give Me Death

The tireless Randzapper brings us more oozings from the pro-genocide, pro-infanticide wing of the Ayn Rand fanbase:

Step forward Mr Fred Weiss:

"I can't imagine her regarding the Arabs as anything but something approaching sub-humans who should be bombed back to the Stone Age if necessary and if that were required to get them to behave. That's pretty much how she viewed the American Indians and she (Rand) fully supported their annihilation."

And Mr Bob Kolker:

"I have no problem with infanticide on a day old infant or a week old infant. I get antsy around a month. This is based on experience with my own children."

So the guy would clearly get a little "antsy" about murdering his own children if they were around a month old - but not before. Get a little "antsy"?

ARCHN Quote of the Week

"An organism's life depends on two factors: the material or fuel which it needs from the outside, from its physical background, and the action of its own body, the action of using that food properly. What standard determines what is proper in this context? The standard is the organism's life, or; that which is required for the organism's survival." - (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, p 16)

This passage demonstrates to perfection Rand's method of demonstration. She begins with an appalling banality: life depends on "the material or fuel which it needs" and on "the action of its own body." This vacuous assertion is used to introduce the next appalling banality. Rand asks:"What standard determines what is proper in this context?" (ie., in the context of the requirements of man's life)? Rand answers: "The standard is the organism's life." In other words, the standard proper for determining the requirements of man's life is man's life! Imagine the profundity of the woman who could come up with such an insight.
- Greg Nyquist, ARCHN, p211

Mises.org reviews OPAR

Regular commenter Neil Parille over at his Objectiblog points us to David Gordon tearing Leonard Peikoff a new one over at Mises.org. Enjoy. (warning, PDF. Scroll about halfway to find the review)

Charge the Electrodes

There are the intelligent, thoughtful and articulate Ayn Rand fans. And then there are the others. Thus we at ARCHN hail the new Randzapper blog, boldly trolling the internets seeking the nuttiest Randian commentators - so you don't have to. The ARCHN team recognise at least one batshit crazy unit from round these parts, and should the mysterious owner of Randzapper wish to drop us a line sometime, we're sure we can throw a few other gems their way. (hat tip to Michael Prescott)

ARCHN Quote of the Week

"While it is true that Rand's philosophy of Objectivism officially adopts the view that all knowledge ultimately comes from experience of the external world, this concession turns out, on closer examination, to be shallow and unrigorous. All philosophers like to believe their doctrines are in accord with empirical reality. The question, however, is whether this belief is justified." - ARCHN p. xvii

Is Objectivism Dangerous?

It would be a mistake to assume that merely because Objectivism is misguided or wrong, it is therefore dangerous. The assumption that a wrong philosophy must ipso facto be a dangerous one is naive. It fails to take account of (1) to what extent conduct is or is not affected by philosophical beliefs, and (2) what sort of people are likely to embrace a given set of philosophical ideas.

Although Objectivist ideas are intensely moralistic and political, they tend to discourage political involvement. There are several reasons for this. To begin with, Objectivist political principles are impractical and unrealistic. The phrase "laissez-faire," so important to the Rand's political philosophy, is a slogan rather than a coherent policy of political economy. All political action is conducted in the context of intense ideological, personal, and economic rivalries. It is grossly implausible to assume either that one interest or ideology can "impose" laissez-faire on all the others, or that all interests, all ideologies (or even a majority of ideologies and interests) would ever agree to adopt laissez-faire economic policies. And even if (per impossible) laissez-faire could be established, whether by force or consensus, it is not clear that an advanced industrial economy with sophisticated asset markets can be maintained by a strict hands-off approach. Markets require a sophisticated framework of law defining property, contracts, and credit. The notion that any governing body could just declare a "separation" between the state and economy and then proceed to sit back and do nothing cannot be taken seriously. Only a rationalist with no first hand experience with law and economic policy could ever believe that.

People who favor impractical political principles tend to get pushed to the margins in democratic politics. But when they are also unwilling to compromise, this further pushes them out of the mainstream. Representational government is essentially government through compromise. The political mechanism of democratic elections is a kind of game that is played to see which political factions get the lion's share of political power. Coalitions are required to win elections and to pass legislation, and compromise is necessary to form coalitions. Those who refuse to compromise for moral reasons (i.e., because compromise is "evil," as Rand would put it) condemn themselves to having no say in legislative decisions.

Rand appears to have intuitively sensed that she could not change anything through political means. Her experiences campaigning for Wendel Wilkie in 1940 presidential election turned her against political activism. Refusing to play a game in which she could never have her own way, she instead began arguing that metaphysics and epistemology are "fundamental," that is, prior and determinative of ethics and politics, so that if you want to change a society's politics, you must first change their metaphysics and epistemology. Hence, the Randian doctrine that real political change can only be brought about by solving the problem of universals.

Now let us consider for a moment the sort of people who would be attracted to a philosophy that contends that political goals can achieved without ever engaging in political action. Will it attract people eager to engage in politics, people who have a talent for political action, people full of energy and vigor and charisma who are willing to get hands dirty and fight for a place at the political table? No, an anti-political philosophy like Objectivism will turn off such people. This will leave only the dispirited, the lackluster, the armchair intellectuals—those who, in brief, lack energy and initiative and would rather talk about politics than do anything about it. In other words, it leaves just the sort of people we find running the Ayn Rand Institute.

So is Objectivism dangerous? Not in a political sense. Politically, Objectivism is largely impotent and hence does not pose a serious threat or danger to the community. Objectivists may say things that sound dangerous or scary, but without any political power, such verbal histrionics are no more efficacious than the idiotic howlings of a pack of demented, toothless curs.

Get Your DIM On

Peikoff's lecture series outlining his DIM hypothesis is available on line at the ARI. It's free - all you need to do is register.

http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer

There are 15 sections, each in two parts, and each part seems to be about 45mins to an hour or more long. So anyone who's got a mere 20-30 hours to spare can, apparently, get the vital philosophic context that is necessary to understand Peikoff's recent nutso remarks.

The ARCHN site's team of trained analysts will of course be sparing no effort to parse Dr P's utterances whilst doing the dishes, folding the washing etc for the next 6 months...;-)

A Short Theory of Objecti-Schisms

This should really be a longer post, but apropos of the latest Objecti-schism, I want to touch briefly on the recurring topic of exactly why Objectivism is particularly prone to such upheavals - especially over what seem to outsiders as minor issues. There are a number of competing, and often complex theories as to why this is the case, involving the history of the movement, Ayn Rand's particular personality, the machinations of evildoers etc.

However, I'm going to suggest that that there is a simple, logical mechanism that accounts for this, and that logic extends from a basic proposition at the heart of the movement. I will roughly summarise this proposition as follows:

Everything is reducible to philosophy.

That is to say, all human feelings, thoughts, emotions, theories, hopes, preferences, ambitions, and character qualities are, in theory, all consistent with and ultimately reducible to a specific set of philosophic propositions. These propositions in turn can either be correct (ie: Objectivist) or incorrect (anything else).

Once you have accepted the Objectivist propositions, this supposed philosophic consistency offers the possibility of having what is called a "fully integrated" personality, where all one's character traits, from opinions to emotions to subconscious thoughts, are not only perfectly consistent with each other, but also consistent with a true fundamental philosophical basis. This happy ideal would see a perfect harmony from the fundamental to the trivial, both within ourselves, and ultimately between all our fellows, and perhaps is why Rand thought that there could be no conflict between rational men.

However, what is less discussed is what happens when you run the logic the other way: that is if you have disagreements about theories, hopes, preferences, emotions, character qualities etc between Objectivists. Because if we accept that there is no human activity - n matter how trivial - that does not have a fundamental philosophic basis, therefore there is, in principle, no disagreement so trivial that it cannot be explained by a fundamental philosophic disagreement. And as philosophy is the vitally important, all encompassing part of human existence, it is likewise possible - and perhaps even necessary - to escalate trivial disagreements into vitally important, all-encompassing ones!

Of course, one way out of this bind is to simply reject the idea that everything can be reduced to philosophy. But this would be a major rejection of a central Randian doctrine.

Who is the False True Objectivist?

In comments,(scroll down)Dragonfly notes the arrival of Schism #1,376 in Objectivism, triggered by the following statement:

"In my judgment, anyone who votes Republican or abstains from voting in this election has no understanding of the practical role of philosophy in man’s actual life—which means that he does not understand the philosophy of Objectivism, except perhaps as a rationalistic system detached from the world."

- Leonard Peikoff, founder of the Ayn Rand Institute, and self-described as 'the world's foremost authority on Ayn Rand's philosophy, Objectivism.'

It seems that absolute agreement with the ARI leader on politics is necessary in order to be a True Objectivist. Sadly, it seems other True Objectivists disagree - here, here, and here for example. This can only mean one thing: that someone has to be the False True Objectivist. But who will it be? Game on!

Hoisted from comments: Nyquist on the Dualism(s)

From comments on our "Double Trouble" thread below, Greg Nyquist chips in with his take on dualisms in Objectivism:

The apologist(s) for the Randian position have spread more heat than light on this issue of dualism, which is actually critical since it touches upon an important area of difference between those of us who are critics of Rand and those who defend the author of Atlas Shrugged. So a restatement may be in order.

There are two major forms of dualism related to this issue: epistemological dualism and psycho-physical dualism. Epistemological dualism is the view that an idea is not identical with the thing in reality that it represents. Hence the idea of a cat is different from the cat itself. The idea is a mere representation of the cat. This is a view held most famously (and in a rather crude form) by Locke and Descartes. According to the malicious critics of knowledge (i.e. idealists), this is severely problematic, because it leads to a supposedly unanswerable problem, which the philosopher Santayana introduced as follows: "How is it possible to posit an object [i.e., the existence of external object] which is not a datum [i.e., not an idea], and how without knowing positively what this object is can I make it the criterion of truth in my ideas? ... If I know a man only by reputation, how should I judge if the reputation is deserved? If I know things only by representations, are not the representations the only things I know?"

Now how does Rand answer this question? Well, she doesn't really answer it directly, but through scattered remarks throughout her works, we piece together a rather inadequate reply. She begins by accepting the idealist critique of epistemological dualism, which caricatures this dualism as a complete separation of ideas and their objects. But epistemological dualism doesn't separate objects from ideas, it merely distinguishes them. Then Rand conflates epistemological with psycho-physical dualism and dismisses the former as being tainted with the (alleged) mysticism of the latter. Then having dismissed epistemological dualism, she sets up in its stead a view that is, for all intents and purposes, a version of epistemological dualism. For she accepts nearly all the positions held by epistemological dualists. She agrees with them, for example, that ideas (or, in her terminology, concepts) are not identical with the objects in reality they stand for. She also agrees that the mind does not mirror reality. So where does she differ from epistemological dualism? She differs only in that she wouldn't agree with the inevitable conclusion of epistemological dualism. How in fact is the leap from idea to object justified? Rand actually never addresses this issue specifically. Even in IOTE she ends up, perhaps unwittingly, addressing a separate issue (i.e., the relation between sensation and percepts on the one side, and concepts on the other). She dodges the whole issue of how percipient representations "correspond" with their existential objects. It is fairly obvious why she would do so. The simple fact of the matter, there is no viable solution to the problem that Rand would accept, because Rand believed that you had to prove or validate knowledge in order for knowledge to be useful and trustworthy. This is a false ideal deriving from Rand's theory of history. Those who appreciate and understand the problem of epistemological dualism realize that the only viable solution is one that embraces the conjectural nature of knowledge. The leap from idea to object is, as Santayana put, made under the steam of "animal faith," so that knowledge becomes "faith mediated by symbols." But this is not an arbitrary, groundless faith caricatured by Rand, but a justified faith corroborated by every moment of intelligent wakefulness.