Rand & Aesthetics 15

Rand's theory of music. Rand's views on music reveal far more about her basic modus operandi than they do about music. Her theory explaining the "nature of man's response music" is unique in with Objectivism in that Rand recognized it as being a mere hypothesis. Yet even this very recognition is fraught with difficulties. It has that character (so prominent amongst Rand's philosophy) of manifesting a heads-I-win,-tails-you-lose dynamic. For Rand's basic, default attitude toward music was: I am right, but I can't prove it. In other words, we are supposed to give her credit for acknowledging she couldn't prove her theory, yet she did not consider herself obliged to admit she might be wrong. She really does seem to be trying to have it both ways.

Given that her "hypothesis" about music appears no better or worse than any of her other theories, it is difficult to explain why she would consider it a mere hypothesis. Rand's theories of concepts and value are also mere hypotheses. Her attempts to "prove" or "validate" them are no more convincing than her hypothesis about music. So why did she recognize the hypothetical character of her theory of music while ignoring the fact that the rest of her philosophy was also hypothetical?

Oddly enough, her theory of music at least attempts to make use of scientific evidence (which cannot be said of most of her other theories). To be sure, the scientific evidence she references is very old: namely, Helmholtz's 1863 Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music),