She called libertarians “hippies of the right” and “anarchists”. See “Brief Summary,” The Objectivist, September 1971 and “What Can One Do?” Philosophy: Who Needs It, both by Ayn Rand. Also, see “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty,” by Peter Schwartz in the Ayn Rand collection, The Voice of Reason.
Her principle living disciple, Harry Binswanger, with whom I’ve corresponded on more than one occasion, said:
Ayn Rand is often derided. It is not surprising because she claims objectivity in the first place, which is against academic currents. But that alone is not enough to describe why she isn’t considered a philosopher.
Was Aleister Crowley a philosopher? Was Golden Dawn a cult of personality? Well, it was a cult, anyway.
I wonder if Rand was a fan of GE Moore’s In Defense of Common Sense? I know she had read Wittgenstein, she notes as much in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. She probably liked some of what the logical positivists had said, even if they’re dreams got dashed a little by Godel.
But, what contribution did she make? Hmm. What contribution did many philosophers make that weren’t reactions to previous ones? Hume dissolved causality, Berkeley dissolved matter, positivists worked on taking down objectivity even in the mind.
And Rand, like Moore, might have said, “Here is one hand, you stupid commie bastard. I won’t let your bullshit subjectivity creep into every facet of my life so that you can tell me how great it is that you’re stealing 33% of my paycheck to fight wars on drugs and other nonsense that I wouldn’t support even if you asked me nicely!” Wittgenstein had said, “If you know that here is one had, we’ll grant you all the rest.”
I’ll read some of my ItOE tonight and see if I can come up with anything, though I highly doubt I will. She wanted to assemble an attack on what she saw as extreme subjectivity leading the way towards a slave morality (that is, what she called altruism).
What is philosophy’s impact? —I’ll ask the OP this. Rand certainly found a home in many, many millions of people. Would she have an entry in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy? I wonder. He included a few “non-philosophers” there. Because remember that politics is also the realm of philosophy. Did she create any new ideas there? :shrug: What do you mean by “new”? Was Aristotle really all that creative with his treatment of universals? Plato says that they exist on their own, and what we perceive is imperfect. So Aristotle returns to naive realism and says, “The red is in the rose. It cannot be seperated from it.*” But hell, any bushman will tell you that naive realism is the way to go, had they a way to call it naive realism (that is, reality is how it appears to be). So how original was that?
Find me a philosopher with a completely original thought, who wasn’t just responding to someone else’s ideas, or inverting them, and so on. Was Kant’s deontology so daring? Hell, the Bible lays out such universal rules for morality.
Anyway, I’ll go read ItOE tonight and see if I can find anything.
I’d like to apologize for what I see as a jumble of thoughts above. I am currently writing a book in the first person perspective, and I am currently reading two of Wittgenstein’s books in parallel, and my entire matter of discourse has changed dramatically for it.
Anyway, let me try and say this more clearly. I think Ayn Rand had the following goal: to take a common sense view of existence (specifically, human existence) and derive a political and social system from that.
In that, she was a complete failure. In that, I think, no philosopher has ever succeeded. So does that alone make Rand a non-philosopher?
A philosopher is someone who deals with the subjects of epistemology (concept formation, for example), ontology (the study of being), cosmogony (origins), ethics and morals, politics, and so on. Ayn Rand did this, she was a philosopher.
Did she do it well? Hmm, now that is getting nitpicky, isn’t it?
First, her treatment of universals left much to be desired. I’ve dealt with this before on these boards, in fact. I think she was inclined to take Abelard’s medieval resolution of the issue. She seems to have, anyway, which is some synthesis of Aristotle’s immanent realism and nominalist’s view that universals don’t exist (anyone who desires external links to this stuff just ask, I have two that detail the issue quite nicely).
Because of this, she had some issues with concept formation (that is, her epistemology). If you take an immanent realist’s view when you read her writings on concept-formation it makes sense, more or less. She chose to use new words in place of ones which already existed in popular philosophy, but that shouldn’t concern most of us.
She was a typical realist, rejecting idealism (philosophical idealism, lest anyone be confused; not the same thing as saying she was idealistic with respect to market forces, for example), and taking little issue with some problems of assuming that an objective reality exists and how we know it exists. She tended to express things with a bent toward naive realism (see previous post). So she didn’t flesh out everything with her philosophy.
That doesn’t make her a non-philosopher, either.
There is a huge gap between her somewhat shallow realist epistemology and her ideas about social structure (i.e.—govenment). She felt that man (the animal, not the sex… she was pre PC and so didn’t understand she wasn’t empowering women by using that term in the gender neutral sense) was a rational being; that is, his actions could be (in principle, and should be, morally) based on reason. This is not to say that cold logic dominates everything! If you think this, you are wrong! It is to say that one can use one’s emotions and desires in a logical context, and that, in doing so, one could synthesize the proper response, theory, idea, behavior, and so on. That is, everything is objective in this sense: when all things are laid bare, the path is obvious, clear, and rational. This is exactly how the heros of her books behaved, even though their underlying feelings might not be rational. I found it impossible to miss this point, but I seem to be in the minority there.
She had McCarthy’s fear of bogeymen. I know modern liberals and conservatives also share this fear, though where the bogeymen hide and which people are the bogeymen shift depending on who is talking, everyone sees trolls under the bridge. She sounds crazy for it. I do not think she was crazy. What she saw was an attack on freedom, that is, an attack on how she thought man should live. If you sought to attack her freedom, you were taking man into the path of a slave morality, the exact thing she fled in the early 1900’s (second decade, IIRC). She came to America because she saw that it didn’t base itself on slave morality (what she called altruism). The good of the many did not outweigh the good of the few, or the power of the individual (so she thought). If you were living how man should live, rationally, honestly, without coercive actions and without being coerced, then you were an empowered individual, you were good.
She feared that America would slip into some brand of communism/fascism (and to her they were all the same; the distinction between them with respect to the individual were non-existent; it made no difference whether they served a master, a king, a dictator, or some nebulous conception of “the common good” when you were serving). Much of her writings of specific events or people was based on this fear. But let us be careful to seperate the application of her ideas from her ideas.
When Guin tried reading Atlas Shrugged some time ago I remember her saying, “Is this how she thinks liberals think?” or something to that effect. The answer is: yes and no. She found the distinction between dictator and public works committee to be uninteresting, I think, when the goal was to box the common man (and the uncommon one; ie the John Galts) and have him work for a goal he clearly would not voluntarily sign up for. She painted her enemies with a wide brush because to her it didn’t matter what they said the differences were, she saw the effect as the same.
Did she contribute anything? Offhand: nothing to concept formation, nothing to epistemology in general (that I can see), possibly something to ethics, though others here claim to disagree by saying sunch-and-such said similar things. What similar things? I’m asking that because I’ve never found any of her enemies to understand half of what I think she was trying to get across (and it was partly the wide brush mentioned above which made her so many enemies in the first place).
IOW, if someone can tell me something that she parrotted then I will back down (or at least disagree!). I’m not trying to say she was startlingly original, but that’s because I don’t think most philosophers are. But then, perhaps, I am tainted by the idea that philosophy doesn’t reveal great truths but rearranges what was already right in front of us. My judgment tainting the OP’s serious question.
No, I haven’t forgotten that. Nobody denies that Ayn Rand believed her philosophy to be based on objectivity. That does not, by any means, imply that it was objective.
Michael Shermer has an interesting chapter on Rand in Why People Belive Wierd Things. Although he personally expresses strong admiration for Rand’s economic and technological beliefs, he acknowledges that Rand herself was a bit nutty and ended up as the center of a cult-ish group of followers. Shermer found this ironic, since Rand’s self-determination philosophy should be the exact opposite of a cult. In any event, he makes the point that the personal failings of a philosopher do not invalidate the philosophy. The amount of Rand-bashing in this thread is annoying, thrown out by people who haven’t bothered to read and understand Rand’s work, but find it easier to attack her personally.
Her overall contribution, as far as I can tell, was to provide a moral framework for capitalism (itself a fairly recent concept) at a time when capitalism was being viewed as a self-evident evil. Call someone a “capitalist” or a “banker” in 1935 and you were effectively damning them. Rand is more reflexive than original, writing in defense of something rather than creating something new. I find her to be the ultimate anti-communist, and since she was born in St. Petersburg (emigrating to the U.S. in 1926), she had first-hand knowledge of how horrific communism could get.
From Rand’s HUAC testimony on October 20, 1947:
If Rand isn’t a philospher, then I don’t see how Marx qualifies, since each were writing about economic systems, though her writings were meant to discredit his.
Rand also despised the mindless brutality of fascism, equating it philisophically with communism. The former demands an individual surrender himself for the good of the race, while the latter, demands the individual surrender himself for the good of the state. There is no difference. In the years leading up to and during WW2, it was by no means certain that capitalism and freedom would ultimately prevail. In fact, victory isn’t even assured. Extreme fundamentalism is arguably a form of fascism, and it shows no signs of abating anytime soon.
SS: *Rand rejected Plato. If Rand were a scientist, she’d be an experimentalist. *
? As opposed to a theorist? Are theoretical scientists somehow intrinsically Platonist and experimentalists Aristotelian? How you figure? (I realize that as a historian of science, I am used to seeing these terms used in fairly specific and technical ways, so there may be a more general common-sense meaning that you intended that I’m just not getting.)
I didn’t mean that every thing the U.S. did in its infancy embodied Rand’s principles.
Okay, then I presume you didn’t mean that all the abuses in the Soviet Union embodied the principles of “altruism”, either. If you’re going to try to paint entire societies as representative of particular philosophies, you have to take the bad consequences along with the good.
I was speaking particularly of the philosophy embodied in things like the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence, which are all about the individual and the right of the individual to live in freedom to seek his own happiness. I think you knew that, but it’s just too tempting to throw the slavery straw man into the mix.
It’s not a straw man at all: it’s a valuable corrective to your simplistic and biased examples’ implication that selfishness automatically has only good consequences (individual freedom, happiness, etc.) and altruism automatically has only bad ones (Siberian gulags and collectivization). (In fact, one could make quite a strong case for the idea that heavily individualist/selfish/capitalist beliefs were partly responsible for the official establishment of slavery in the early US, since they led the Founding Fathers to overvalue the property rights of slaveowners while undervaluing the human rights of the slaves; but that’s another thread.)
By the way, Rand didn’t deny the existence of subjectivity. She recognized that the senses are flawed, and that perception is tainted. What she was saying was that subjective opinion does not displace objective reality.
Fair enough, but the big logical problem with that, which she never managed to overcome, is that the senses and perception are inextricably part of our access to “objective reality” (except, as I noted above, in very limited and artificial contexts). What’s the use of demanding that people adhere to objective reality if their “tainted” and “flawed” epistemic abilities prevent them from ever fully knowing what it is?
Nightime: You [I don’t remember whom this was addressed to, and it doesn’t matter here] are forgetting that Ayn Rand believed human interests themselves to be objective. That each individual has objective biological and psychological needs.
IMHO the response to this comes naturally out of your earlier discussion of the issue:
Your biggest mistake is that you are completely unaware of what Ayn Rand meant by “selfishness.” It does not mean “making decisions based on personal desires.” In fact, making decisions based on personal desires would not fit in her definition of selfish. […]
Ayn Rand believes human interests are objective. We each have objective biological and psychological needs.
Okay. Exactly how do you tell the difference between a “personal desire” and an “objective psychological need”? It’s easy enough to dream up artificial philosophical categories to make distinctions between them, but in the real world of lust and masochism and glee and tenderness and depression and friendship and all the other innumerable complexities of the human psyche, how are you supposed to tell “subjective desires” and “objective needs” apart?
First, can I ask if this is an attack on philosophy or an attack on Rand alone?
But to answer the question, Kimstu, the same way I tell “socialism” apart from my feelings of it.
Rand thought that man was a specific kind of being. He had specific qualities, specific interests, and a goal most suited to those qualities and interests. That goal was to live a life of virtue, defined as living rationally, expanded to be living without having to sacrifice your effort to someone else’s will, unless you chose to do such a thing.
I don’t believe she ever intended to box man philosophically as that quote seems to suggest. She had a range of personal tastes, and a range of action which would be tolerated because it was volitional and didn’t harm anyone. Rand would not have everyone be John Galt if it meant forcing them. So long as porno actors chose to make pornography, then there would exist pornography. And if people wanted to buy it, it would be sellable. She did not intend to tell you how to feel, unless how you felt was that you should be doing something to force people’s will into serving interests they wouldn’t voluntarily submit themselves to.
erl: *It’s easy enough to dream up artificial philosophical categories to make distinctions between them, but in the real world […] how are you supposed to tell “subjective desires” and “objective needs” apart?
First, can I ask if this is an attack on philosophy or an attack on Rand alone? *
Well, I didn’t really intend it as an attack at all: I meant to point out one of the basic issues that all philosophy must confront (the relationship between verbal concepts and the “reality” they attempt to describe), and criticize Rand’s failure to confront it successfully in this case.
*But to answer the question, Kimstu, the same way I tell “socialism” apart from my feelings of it. *
This doesn’t make sense to me at all. If you want something, how do you know whether that’s a personal desire, or an objective need?
*That goal was to live a life of virtue, defined as living rationally, expanded to be living without having to sacrifice your effort to someone else’s will, unless you chose to do such a thing. *
That sounds all nice and objective, until we realize that “virtue”, “rational”, “sacrifice”, “will”, and “choice” are all somewhat vague concepts that can’t be defined without some subjective input. Randian “objectivism” doesn’t actually attain objectivity: it just sweeps subjectivity under the rug and into the tacit definitions of the words she claims to be using objectively.
Ayn Rand was a self-proclaimed philospher in the same self-referential way that L. Ron Hubbard was a theologian. Agree or disagree?
The key difference between them is that any loon can claim to be a theologian, Hubbard included. Rand’s body of work may not be as complete or original as the philosophies of others, but her work was well-reasoned (as opposed to Hubbard’s baseless revelations) and she doesn’t deserve to be dismissed out of hand.
First of all, I only dropped Atlas Shrugged somewhere around the 900 page mark because I realized that the author clearly had nothing to say that hadn’t been said dozens of times already. Friends have assured me that the ending doesn’t contain any new ideas either, so I believe that I am qualified to claim that I understand Ayn Rand.
And yes, she did have “corporate villians”, in as much as she had villians who were associated with corporations. However, they were all actually promoters of socialist ideas, so she was using them as just another means by which to attack government activity. In real life, almost all the leaders of corporatations that accept government handouts would say that they are advocates of a free market, and would strongly object to any attempt at regulation of their businesses by the government that’s providing them with all the extra cash (a good example of this is Jack-in-the-Box CEO Jack Nugent, who brags about how he swindles millions from various federal programs, but throws a temper tantrum when anyone suggests that the government should prevent him from selling meat that’s tainted with E. Coli.) Ayn Rand never actually provided criticism of corporate welfare as it exists in the real world.
The earliest and best example I can think of is The Republic, and Plato makes it look embarrassingly easy. Certainly others have followed, with varying results.
I think that to be called a philosopher one should meet at least one of two requirements: first, to have a good knowledge of the history and landscape of philosophy (authority); second, to make contributions of worth to the field. I just don’t see Rand making either milestone, particularly as she was ignorant of most seminal philosophers and philosophies (and in some pathetic cases tried to “reinvent the wheel”).
A word of caution about Shermer: the guy is a sweetheart, particularly in that one book. He correctly realized that simply deconstructing “weird things” irritates some readers, particularly the ones who just so happen to believe in the weird things. His solution is to go out of his way to say something good about the personalities or concepts that he debunks, even if, like his comments on Rand, it reads somewhat out of place.
While I like that book a lot and find it contains some very good (if occasionally limited) treatments, I always got the impression that Shermer is at times sucking up to a specific portion of his readers, with his excessive appreciation of certain nutcases and their work (Rand being one of them). It’s a mitigating debunking tactic and perhaps it works on a greater number of “believers in weird things” than other methods, but in certain places I find the technique a little bit dishonest.
Of course, his point that a person does not equal his/her work is a valid one. But then again Rand’s philosophy is so sloppy, and it is so evident that her personal failings played roles in the formation of her beliefs, that it seems appropriate to remind ourselves that she was indeed a nutcase. A conceited pseudo-intellectual at best, a megalomaniacal charlatan at worst. Regardless, I still don’t see that she made any significant positive contributions to philosophy–in fact I see no evidence that she even had a grasp on philosophy.
And any loon can claim to be a philosopher too, this is, after all, a free country. But we can expect that a loon that really was a philosopher and dead twenty years to be in an encyclopaedia of philosophy along with other nut ball philosophers, if they were in fact philosophers, and not writers of dystopian science fiction with delusions of grandeur becuase they believe their political prejudices are a systematic system of logic. Hell, Lyndon LaRouche thinks that and has followers too. No, Ayn Rand was not a philosopher anymore than I am a baked bagel, despite her pretensions to the contrary. The University I went to didn’t teach her books in the Philosophy, Political Science or English departments. Hell, since I started posting on this board, I’ve developed a following (nevermind that they are fast and carry torches and pitchforks) for my way of thinking and politics, that doesn’t make me a philosopher.
And the conceit of claiming that this is derivative of Aristotle is a sidesplitting howler. Sorry guys, but Aristotle and Plato invented the two branches if Western philosophy (like Al Gore invented the internet, way to go Al), Rand posed. Rather gracelessly at that. That a bunch of people were taken in by the certainty of her pronouncements means no more than an bunch of LaRouche acolyotes being taken in by is brand of crypto-whatever it is this week.
The best that can be said for her is that she took the Chicago school of economics, put her own name on it and passed it off as her own.
If she ever had an original idea of her own, academia, the home of philosophers, would give her a worthy entry in a reference guide.
One thing to remember is that you cannot separate her philosophy from her personality-because that’s where it came from.
She considered herself the epitomy of all humans. She praised reason, but was unreasonable, irrational and could NOT hold a civil debate-instead she would simply resort to ad hominem attacks and call her opponents evil. She would NEVER have lasted on the SDMB.
One thing to remember is that you cannot separate her philosophy from her personality-because that’s where it came from.
She considered herself the epitomy of all humans. She praised reason, but was unreasonable, irrational and could NOT hold a civil debate-instead she would simply resort to ad hominem attacks and call her opponents evil. She would NEVER have lasted on the SDMB.
Agreed, and here’s proof that philosophers can be as nutty as anyone.
I heard a fellow confess on the radio that he got his Ph.D. in Philosophy by defending the notion that “Truth is not knowable.” Years later, he realized that his thesis was self-refuting, and to this day, he’s ashamed of it. He’s also disappointed that his own professors didn’t catch this glaring error.
Yeah, that’s pretty much how I feel.
A case in point being the (yawn) earth-shaking pronouncement that perception is different from reality. Ho-hum. A classic case of re-inventing the wheel. Frankly, I don’t understand why some Rand-ists seem to think that this tired, well-established premise merits bestowing the name of “objectivism” on Rand’s philosophizing.
Kimstu
I meant to point out one of the basic issues that all philosophy must confront (the relationship between verbal concepts and the “reality” they attempt to describe), and criticize Rand’s failure to confront it successfully in this case.
Because that way lies madness! She did not approve of linguistic analysis, first of all, so it would irritate her to be asked to play that game (consider some dopers dogmatic aversion to semantic arguments). The concept was abstracted perception, or abstracted abstraction (and most likely some of each), and that is the level we operate on.
What can I tell you? Man needs … Can you fill in that blank without subjectivity? Now, can you sit down and outline what man, an animal with more specific needs and desires than that, an animal with unique behavior, can you add to that? That is what Rand felt she did.
In my readings last night I didn’t find anywhere where she claimed to have completed the examination. That is why it was even an Introduction to [etc]. I think she wanted her successors to carry it on. Whether they have to any success, I don’t know. I no longer agree with Rand WRT philosophy.
Gah, but that statement is objective! You expect me to look at it as a fact, undeniable. So how do you know that those aren’t objective qualities? Rand didn’t say no one could live subjectively, she felt that it was absurd to do so and did not make you a competent human being, a true individual, and probably a good person since that very subjectivity would lead you down the road to servitude.
Abe
If you say so. How can I disagree with this, other than to say that I don’t believe The Republic is a good example of deriving a state of existence from basic principles (which is what I said Rand didn’t do), all the way down to the level of concept-formation?
I want to add too a comment to Kimstu WRT “those are all subjective qualities”.
First, I said it was an objective statement to say that (which I am not going to back out of), but not only that, we all speak the same language, and though we might disagree with their use in some specific way or other (“I don’t think that is a sacrifice”; “Yes, but how is that virtuous?”; etc) they also find very common use where no one really disagrees.
It is all well and good to say, “But what is virtuous behavior to you?”, then disagree with the response and determine that virtue must be subjective. Ok. But Rand felt that she had grasped what man was all about, and what behaviors best fit those essences (I hesitate to use that word as she would have hated me for it, but it is clear enough I hope; if not I can clarify).
In Rand’s concept formation, a concept consisted of an idea along which specific measurements were left out, and all qualities which may be understood at the level of the concept could vary along some quantity (she specifically mentioend that this was true for something like love). To have a concept of man, then, you have an idea of what all men have in common and omit specific measurement (or perhaps omit anything but a range of values; for example, men aren’t 0.5 feet tall). She didn’t feel (from what I could tell) that this concept was the be all, end all concept, because as our experience increased all relavent concepts changed. Perhaps as we encountered more and more chairs we would find additional (or less) things which may be common, minus their specific measurements (think of measurement generally, too, in that it is merely some quantitated quality which varies in some fashion).
But there is no cry of subjectivity here, unless scientific experiments are also subjective (and if they are then of course Rand is a liar, you’ve put subjectivity in as an initial assumption and you’ll never agree with her about anything).
So she examined her concept of man and wondered what behaviors suited him. Do we here creep into subjectivity? Why, for example, did she determine that man was meant to be individualistic and own property rather than communal and share property (or have no conception of property)? I don’t want to go on here unless we agree, and if we disagree (or you have other comments to make) then I will attempt to respond as I can.
Huh. The board swallowed my post. I’ll try again.
Eris: Rand is not listed in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy. That proves nothing however, as Russell conceived the book when he delivered a series of lectures during the 1930s. Wittgenstein and Popper are not mentioned either, for example.
Some 20th century philosophers and some contributions to thought:
Rawls (original position, veil of ignorance)
Singer (extends utilitarianism into the animal world)
Kuhn (Buddy can you paradigm?)
a number of other philosophers of science, such as Popper (falsifiability).