I'm continuing to try to get some Rand thoughts related to The Fountainhead out of my system so that I won't feel the need to bring them up while on the episode devoted to her more straightforwardly philosophical works. I also feel the periodic need for synthesis, to try to recap some ongoing themes in our episodes in a way that would require an overly long monologue if I tried to do this on the podcast itself. We've had a number of episodes now that weigh in on the development of the self. What I've often called the naive view of self is that advocated by Hobbes, who claimed that everyone is selfish, that all actions proceed from selfish motives.
On first blush, this seems plausible: animals fight for survival, we are motivated by pleasure and run from pain. However, as Pat Churchland pointed out, animals do exhibit selfless behavior. Moreover, saying a motive is selfish attributes to the actor an intended beneficiary, implicit or explicit, of an action, and it's not clear that animals have this. An objection we've considered extensively that may seem more baffling to this view is that the notion of a "self" is problematic, that the self is not just a physical organism, but an abstraction that requires calling some parts associated with this organism "me" and some "not me."
So if I have cancer, the cancer cells are part of me, but they are not my self and not acting in my self-interest. In fact, there are several distinct teleological processes going on physiologically within me that don't always harmonize, e.g. allergies are the result of the internal logic of a physiological process. The sex drive has its physiological and evolutionary explanations, and its rewards in terms of pleasure, but can feel foreign, and certainly doesn't always urge what's in my best interests. "My interests" is a phrase denoting a complex, socially constructed abstraction that, like many abstractions of this sort, is underdetermined by experience: it cannot simply be read off of experience by a mind that is a blank slate. What's naive about the view that everyone is selfish is the idea that the self and our interests are both clear ideas that we all understand, so that whatever culture you're in, you'll get more or less the same list of actions that will count as beneficial toward you. Of course there are some. Cutting off a limb is generally not going to be one of them no matter what your sensibilities, or making you homeless, or leaving you bereft of human affection, but beyond that: Is getting a "good job" in your interest? Entering into a "good marriage?" Getting a lot of money?
Still, you might say, yes, marriage, money, and employment are all social constructions, meaning that they'd all be practically meaningless terms if you were by yourself on an island, but given that we do live where we do, we do accept these as contributing to an ideal, so can't we then call them part of our self-interest? Well, "part," probably. But there are many variations in how the pieces can appear and fit together to form something that someone might honestly consider happiness (see our discussion with Owen Flanagan about different cultural and philosophical conceptions of happiness). There's enough commonality that you can't justify obnoxious behavior towards someone by saying they don't really have any clear "interests" that you can understand anyway, but there's enough divergence that it's very possible that even actions you take that you think to be in your interest may not really be in your interest, not just because you lack relevant knowledge of the scientific or social facts (e.g. you don't know that cigarettes will kill you, that someone you want to love is untrustworthy, or that the investment you're considering is actually worthless) but because you don't understand yourself.
Even the phrase "don't understand yourself" betrays a linguistic prejudice that there is a clear self already formed there that you just have to understand, but it's notoriously hard to justify a claim like this. If you "find yourself," did you really find something, or did you create it? And if you created it, did you do it "freely," as in you could have chosen to create any kind of self you set out to, or is the kind of self you create constrained in ways not apparent to consciousness? By virtue of our epistemic position, we can't really know this: we can only, through experience and literature and philosophy, come to understand some of the mechanics of how the care and building of a self is achieved.
Closely related to this is the phenomenology of desire. Part of identifying your self-interest is picking which desires are "you" and which are foreign incursions. If I take a drug that makes me homicidal, then from the point of view of my long-term, non-drugged self, the desire to kill would not be my own. Listeners to our Lacan episode will have an idea of how complicated this desire-claiming can be; we of course don't want to be in "bad faith" and deny that part of what is us really isn't, and we don't want to over-simplify like Plato and say that the appetitive parts of us are, if not actually foreign, the parts that need to be subjugated by reason, because reason itself then wouldn't have any motivating power: it would just be recognition of truths and relations between them without any actual desire behind it to give us "interests" we want to pursue at all.
My undergrad mentor and Nietzsche scholar Frithjof Bergmann said that as a culture, we're subject to the "poverty of desire." (Read more about Bergmann's views here and how they fit into his project here.) The passion to create a particular kind of art, for instance, needs cultivation. We need to work to get addicted to artistic creation, to get good enough at it that we're not frustrated and can tolerate and mitigate the false starts and writer's block and other creative dead ends that go with the endeavor. Many people will be familiar with this phenomenon when it comes to exercise: your body craves a good work-out only after you've gotten in the habit. Before that, you'll have lots of aches and ailments, but those won't by themselves induce the desire to exercise to address them... they're more likely to get you to eat or masturbate or go back to sleep.
In The Fountainhead, Rand seems to have successfully gotten much of this Nietzschean picture. She says that unreflective people don't have a sense of self at all and don't have any desires that are authentically theirs. Her picture of artistic creation is also appropriately arduous: it's not just a matter of "expressing yourself," but of cultivating a talent and an original vision, and that these in turn bring the desire to do it.
However, this insight is skewed by her personal vendettas. The point of the book is to complain about how society doesn't recognize and respect genius. Society, according to Rand, does put people on pedestals, but it's the wrong people; it's the ones who play to the least common denominator (this being ironic in that Rand's work itself is often accused of that same sin: it flatters the individual reader, whipping up his resentment against those masses brainwashed by altruism who get all the breaks through their lack of integrity). When we get into specifics re. who she considers genius and who is just overrated, it becomes more clear that her preferences are idiosyncratic and not just a matter of true quality vs. pretentious bullshit. Now, The Fountainhead mostly steers clear of specifics. She talks a lot about clean, economical forms in architecture being beautiful vs. useless ornamentation only there because of tradition, but I wonder if even assenting to this in the abstract we might not disagree about what buildings actually commit this aesthetic crime. I feel like she picked architecture, which most people don't know much about, and was vague in this way to let people's imaginations fill in the details.
This trait is exhibited elsewhere in the book: for instance, on several occasions characters that are supposed to be friends are described as "talking effortlessly," as having comfortable, familiar conversation or laughing together, but Rand's actual dialogue never actually shows us comfortable speech: the comfort is always people who understand each other so well that they don't have to talk. In both this and in the case of depiction of high art, telling and not showing saves her the trouble of having to excel in the thing depicted. This is often a problem in media: if you have a story about a genius writer (like in Californication) or brilliant comedy show (I don't suppose many other people watched Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip) or composer (Mr. Holland's Opus), then you eventually have to show what this brilliant creation is, and the reality will fall short of the brilliance you're trying to depict. All this aside, still, her picture of what makes art good is very much in line with Santayana's: well-constructed forms are, even if hard to discern by the untrained eye, deeply appealing, and far superior to mere sentimentality where its not the work but what it connotes that's actually appealing, or a focus on surface aspects (the "matter" for Santayana, the ornamentation for Rand; note that Santayana isn't actually against ornamentation or matter, but sees it as the lesser part of great artistic effect).
By focusing on genius in talking about self-development, Rand gives the impression that the rest of us are just a bunch of sheep that can at best be honest with ourselves and recognize genius. One missing point here is that (as she recognizes) genius is individual, idiosyncratic, and so why would you think that being able to recognize genius in one area makes you able to recognize it in another? And I don't just mean in architecture vs. music, but even among creators in the same field, the intent and aesthetic will be different for different accomplished individuals. So from other things she wrote, we know she didn't like Shakespeare or James Joyce, two idiosyncratic geniuses often dismissed by the uncomprehending masses. There is something fake, of course, in the way that reverence for these two is passed down by academia so that those of us who haven't really invested the time into understanding them are likely to still admit their greatness without really feeling it. But the quality is there to be delved into by any that try, as is not the case for the overrated, faux artists that Rand depicts in The Fountainhead (my favorite is the guy she mentioned that wrote a whole long book without ever using the letter "o."). I have found, in general, that anything that other people honestly connect with probably has something going for it (yes, The Fountainhead included, which is part of why I'm bothering to engage Rand in this way). At this point, that's a guiding aesthetic principle for me, which means neither that I will affirm someone's greatness based on someone else's authoritative opinion nor will I discount someone because many people don't get it, though of course there are limits to the amount of time I have, and so many things that I can only look into a little bit, form what opinion I have even if it's pretty dismissive, but still state it while admitting the possibility that I might change my mind given further exposure.
Focusing on genius also defeats the purpose of making a general psychological point applicable to everyone. For an alternate model, my wife has recently made me aware of "The Happiness Project," a book and associated media that have inspired meet-ups around the country where people evaluate what makes them happy by trying different things and sharing experiences, e.g. re. exercise, food choices, job choices, time management, relationship management... really anything. This sounds like (I can't personally vouch for it) a very concrete form of self-building: figuring out what it is you actually want or, equivalently, refining those wants, that conception of your interest, by looking closely at what is actually working for you and what isn't. So while developing an original artistic vision may be one way to get addicted to life-affirming activity (and note that this certainly doesn't seem to have worked out for all our artistic geniuses, but Rand would doubtless have some diagnosis within her system for the many exceptions), it's certainly not necessary. At one point in The Fountainhead, the intellectually bankrupt frenemy of the hero of the story stops pouring his energy into his architecture, which he never liked anyway and just got into because of his mother's pressure, and spends a bunch of time painting (like George W. Bush?). In real life, finding this kind of outlet would be psychologically beneficial for the guy, no matter that he waited until late in life and doesn't have a lot of technical skill or any of that other cultivated material. The activity itself, given that he felt compelled to go do it repeatedly, would likely be rewarding and rejuvinating. But Rand pictures this activity as all hinging on the question, "Is this any good?" and when he shows his paintings to the hero, who tells him they're crap, then that's that. Rand does have a few characters, like a building foreman who works with the hero, who are neither geniuses nor corrupted by counterproductive philosophies, but there are pretty underdeveloped and by implication uninteresting.
I have on many occasions in the podcast expressed some skepticism about genius itself. My point there has not been to equivocate among all thinkers or anything like that, but to say that there just aren't magnitudes of difference between people who have put a lot of energy and time and training into thinking when they work through similar problems. What we call genius can be someone who sees a little clearly than most the next step in the dialectic, e.g. the problem with the conception of the problem itself (the "plane of immanence"), or who expresses himself with particular elegance, and/or who had the political skills to get himself in the canon or happened to be in tune with the zeitgeist either of his own time or of some time more recently when that person was rediscovered. Geniuses (artistic or philosophic ones anyway; I don't have a strong opinion about scientific or mathematical ones) aren't fundamentally different than other thinkers. The more key difference is between thinkers and non-thinkers. But even this latter difference is overrated by us academic snobs. Pretty much, if you start a conversation with anyone of reasonable intelligence, and really get into talking about what they care about, you'll find that they're not just mindlessly doing what was expected of them but have agonized a lot about what works and doesn't work for them, why they have made the choices they have, and what they think gives their lives meaning. You can still appreciate the value of philosophy without thinking everyone who doesn't explicitly pursue philosophy or a comparable intellectual pursuit is an idiot, much less doesn't have a self or any authentic desires.
This willful disregard for the humanity of the many people around her infects Rand's picture of self-development. Like Hegel/Buber/Lacan, etc., Rand thinks the self is built, but she marginalizes the role of other people in how this is built. She thinks personal relations--friendships and love--are only possible among those who already have a firm sense of self, who already know who they are and what they want. While I think there's some juice to that picture, in that you can have some pretty yucky co-dependent or thoroughly one-sided relationships when one or both of the participants is too weak, it's pretty silly to say that this is the norm, that other kinds of bonding are tainted. For the other figures we've talked about, seeing yourself through the other's eyes is not just an initial stage in getting a self in the first place that every infant goes through (though it is that), and it's not just a trap that can set you on a path of just fulfilling others' expectations (though it certainly can be), but it's a vital part of what we need as people, of how we develop throughout our lives, of how we can have any objectivity and thus honesty about ourselves at all. Because of this fundamentally social nature (discussed in our Aristotle on politics episode, among other places), our self-interest, our individual good, is inextricably intertwined with others'. We don't just help others out of some calculation that doing so makes us happy or is otherwise in our personal interest, but just because "the self" itself is defined to not just encompass this individual organism with its brain and body but a wider and necessarily indistinct field that at various points brings in family, community, and even humanity (and then some) as a whole.
For a vivid picture of how this might work (that doesn't refer to Hegel or Buber or any of them), I'll point back to Doug Hofstadter's idea that for everyone we meet, we get a low-fi version of that person's self living in our brain. This is not just an image of someone else, but a structure that's not fundamentally different than the way we encode our own sense of self, so that we can see things from that other person's point of view (if we know the person enough). Rand would say we should just banish all such others from our brains and be self-sufficient, but if consciousness is a matter of activating not only our identified self-self but also the many other-selves we've got stored in there, so that "consciousness" itself is not actually equivalent to either of these but is rather a process that happens involving all of them, then that's going to be first of all impossible, and second, according to Hofstadter immoral: for him, morality is the ability to enlarge oneself, to empathize as much as possible.
Whether or not Hofstader is even close to correct in his specific account, I think once you allow as Rand does that the self is built (or found only with difficult soul searching and trying things out), then you're going to have a picture of self-interest that is quite different than anything Hobbes pictured. Though Rand in The Fountainhead describes selfishness (acting according to self-interest), and hence ethical action, in terms of doing what you deep down really want, which I agree with in broad strokes. I would add that this only counts as a basis for ethics of you're not a sociopath; Rand notably seems to disagree with this proviso, and in fact the hero of The Fountainhead displays an emotional range that, if not simply unrealistic/contrived, can only be described as f'ed up. However, as the notion of self-interest gets used politically by self-proclaimed Randians, e.g. in saying that taxes are immoral because they violate the social contract by not being a good deal for the rich that pay them (in other words, the rich have implicitly agreed only to be in a society only insofar as they're receiving services like military and police protection and so only have agreed to pay up to receive those services and not ones like Medicare, unemployment, etc.). Even though building a true self is such a rare and miraculous achievement for Rand, we can apparently forget about that for political purposes and talk about self-interest in a simple, straightforward way without even bringing up complications with the notion of self. In this sense, Randians repeat Hobbes's naive mistake even though they do not (as I have wrongly attributed this to them at some points) believe his initial doctrine that everyone is selfish. What Randians do say is that Man is such that his teleology, his nature, inclines toward selfishness, such that if he's actually acting according to his nature, as Man, then he will be selfish. It's just that apparently acting like Man--according to Man's true rational nature--is in fact rare for Man, which should tell you that something weird is going on in the use of "Man's nature" here: it's talking about a potential, an ideal, and not just describing Man, and yet per Rand's epistemology, a careful observer should be able to just read this "fact" off of experience.
I'll modify the sentiment in my previous post about the bullshittiness of philosophy to recast it in way I heard long ago in the context of some kind of Eastern philosophy but have forgotten the source of. Much of philosophy is about giving advice for living. This is largely done not by coming up with always applicable criteria for living, a recipe book that anyone can pick up and follow to learn how to live, but by the advice-giver's being like a therapist or mentor: understanding where the the one seeking enlightenment is going wrong and then steering him away from the error. It's much easier to see where some pitfall lies and preach against it than to defend a central principle, whether it be Rand's or Christianity's or anyone else's, and judge all "errors" based on whether or not the person is acting according to that principle. Rand, like Nietzsche, correctly saw that a life of asceticism, of self-sacrifice, in most cases is unhealthy. People that try to be nice all the time are usually repressing stuff that will the bubble up and make them horrible. But she in turn (according to her former follower Nathanial Branden, anyway, the founder of the self-esteem movement in psychotherapy) advocated other kinds of repression: insisting too much that all of the emotions you allow must have certain kinds of motivations and rationales. Neither is the solution to demand that no repression occur at all, nor can we define a priori what kinds of repression are healthy and which or not. Philosophy on this model is a techne, an art for living and instructing each other and learning from each other, much like and hopefully a useful component to the art of constructing a coherent and livable self.
-Mark Linsenmayer
taking this in light of the recent post on literature and philosophy it’s hard not to think of Alan Bloom’s Nietzschean Anxiety of Influence which is taken up by Richard Rorty in his book on Contingency, Irony and Solidarity:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/koopman/courses_readings/rorty/rorty_CIS_full.pdf
Not to nitpick, but I think you mean Harold Bloom 🙂
I add this only because I know Harold hates being compared to the much more conservative Alan, also to perhaps help with Google searches and such.
While I agree Ayn Rand’s (Alisa Zinov’yevna Rosenbaum) heroes and especially in the Fountainhead are very Nietzschean supermen I think some context or seeing their her eyes or from her plane of imminence would help. So we can see what problems she thought she saw and the reasons why she created the concepts and characters she did to solve the problem(s).
Let me first say that I do like her philosophy and books. And while her philosophy isn’t necessarily original she was through her books a great popularizer of Classical Liberalism. The foundations of modern Liberal democracies.
Ayn Rand: A Leading Lady of the Classical Liberal Tradition
She was born in Russia and her father Zinovy Rosenbaum was a successful pharmacist, eventually owning a pharmacy and the building in which it was located. he was twelve at the time of the February Revolution of 1917. Her father’s pharmacy business was confiscated and the family displaced. After graduating from high school in the Crimea at 16, Rand returned with her family to Petrograd (the new name for Saint Petersburg), where they faced desperate conditions, on occasion nearly starving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand
And so I would suggest seeing her philosophy and reading her books with this as the back drop that she’s arguing against. Which if you know this about her life it is very easy to see in all of her books.
Much of her philosophy is an argument for the American system of separation of powers, Bill of Rights, free markets,etc.
Many confuse her ideas with libertarians which she despised. Not because she necessarily disagreed with free markets but because for her the free market system was not the primary value. For her free markets were the axiomatic extension out from her ethics. Libertarians agree with her politics more or less but they reject her metaphysics,epistemology, and her ethics.
“In a free market, all prices, wages, and profits are determined—not by the arbitrary whim of the rich or of the poor, not by anyone’s “greed” or by anyone’s need—but by the law of supply and demand. The mechanism of a free market reflects and sums up all the economic choices and decisions made by all the participants. Men trade their goods or services by mutual consent to mutual advantage, according to their own independent, uncoerced judgment. A man can grow rich only if he is able to offer better values—better products or services, at a lower price—than others are able to offer.” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal
An aside on economics. Socialism is not an alternative economic system to capitalism. Communism was an attempt to do way with markets. You did not get paid for working. You did not own your home or the business you worked at. Socialism depends on capitalism to produce goods, services, and money the government can then redistribute. We see what happens in Greece, Spain,etc. when people forget this.
RS51 – Joseph Heath on Economics Without Illusions
http://www.rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/rs51-joseph-heath-on-economics-without-illusions.html
And we have keep in mind the time she’s writing these things 50’s/60’s.
We forget that the Republican party was the party of freedoms. The Democrats or southern Democrats were the pro-segregationists. The Republicans were the party that had Robert G. Ingersoll, the Geat Agnostic as speech writer. Ingersoll was the best-known political speechmaker in 19th century America. In 1876 he gave a speech before the Republican National Convention in Cincinnati.
Ayn Rand also was aware unlike most Americans who associate communism with atheism but it actually came from Christianity and the Bible.
The League of the Just was founded by German émigrés in Paris in 1834. This was initially a utopian socialist and Christian communist group devoted to the ideas of Gracchus Babeuf.
After Marx and Engels joined it later became the Communist League.
The communist doctrine each according to his need came from Acts 4:32–35, “All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had […] there were no needy persons among them […] the money […] was distributed to anyone as he had need.”
And aware the abolition of slavery, the right to vote for women, etc were victories against the church and the Bible. The Bible was quoted as justification for slavery, denying women rights, as it is now quotes to deny gays to marry and have equality before the law.
And in the 50’s/60’s this is when “in God we trust” went on the money and in the pledge of allegiance.
She saw the Republicans moving toward or being over taken by the religious right.
Ayn Rand – Conservative Sellout of Capitalism
So Ayn Rand’s project whether she was successful at it or not was to lay out a rational non-mystical justification for the American system and for Rights. And on this I do have some sympathy and agreement with her.
For me this was a beautiful laying out of her theory of rights and is some what spoiled by libertarian jabs at “Obamacare”, public schools, and social security. Which I’m personally very much for public schools, social security, public roads, etc..
Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society (mp3)
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/audio/ayn-rand-theory-rights.asp
Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights:
The Moral Foundation of a Free Society (text)
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2011-fall/ayn-rand-theory-rights.asp
So people may or may not like her, agree with her or not, but that’s kind of the plane of imminence that she’s working within and so she sees certain problems and creates concepts/characters/etc.
Many people misunderstand her use of “selfishness” but she means more that each person has the right to decide for him/herself what career they want to have, who they can or can’t marry, what they can and can’t do, say, or think.
“Rational self interest” might be a better wording or maybe not.
And many misunderstand her uses of “moochers” and looters”. For her there was moral issue. It wasn’t some one is hungry don’t give them food. Her idea was more like how we use the words “users” and “exploiters”.
In Atlas Shrugged the heroes are the ethical freethinkers. The villains are not just the lowly users and exploiters they are also the bankers, corrupt politicians, lobbyists, etc..
One can debate if she was successful or not but her point was to argue against communism and against the idea that we need religion – Christianity- to be the basis of our rights.
“A “right” is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man’s freedom of action in a social context.”
Ayn Rand
““Rights” are a moral concept—the concept that provides a logical transition from the principles guiding an individual’s actions to the principles guiding his relationship with others—the concept that preserves and protects individual morality in a social context—the link between the moral code of a man and the legal code of a society, between ethics and politics. Individual rights are the means of subordinating society to moral law. ” Ayn Rand
much respect
I’m curious to hear more about her difference with libertarians. I remember Rand arguing, as many libertians today do, that the Civil War was a fait accompli because no culture so backward and rights-denying as the South could have hoped to triumph over the technological prowess of the more rational North. This is hooey, yes? The south wasn’t out for triumph over the north, merely secession from it — which is precisely what Galt & Co. do in Atlas Shrugged when a government tries to override their confederacy of geniuses.
Rand then went on to say, as many libertarians today do, that the Civil Rights Acts were wrong because they make restrictions on the conduct of private business. Rand Paul still hasn’t explained his enduring objection on these terms — and he can’t because the internal logic of the objectivism/libertarian system makes no distinction between money and selfhood. So Rand and Rand Paul can say that a business that refuses admission to black people is perfectly legal … but don’t worry, it’s doomed to fail out of stigma. This is the privilege of hindsight — a hindsight and a privelege that we would not have if the Civil Rights Acts had not passed in the first place. By this logic, the Civil War should have been fought by having the North withdraw from the South out of proteset for their inhumane labor practices — and this simply did not happen.
It’s especially galling view of human relations because it bars any concept of human rights distinct from economic concerns. The Civil War was about the bloody intersection of who one is and what one owns — who counts as something that can be owned. But if you prize commerce and private property above all other claims to rights, you cannot free the slaves — you can only say that people are free to express their displeasure and boycott slave-holders, etc. … all of which is nice but does precisely jack to address the central contention of human, not just economic, rights. After all, the Emancipation Proclamation was not a delcaration of right, but a *confiscation of property*! To follow Rand as consistently as she would like to be followed, the North should not have protested at the South seceding from the Union for that was their fallacious choice that would doom eventually. And the slaves are free to free themsleves, good luck. But the successes of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Acts turn on the belief that there are certain things you cannot own (people) and certain things you cannot do (discriminate), even with your own money and private property. This doesn’t trouble most people because most people have a self-concept that is only partially determined by their money. But for an airtight system like Rand’s to work, art is not merely good but correct and all human relations can and must be rendered according to cold cash value.
“Many libertarians justify their political views using aspects of Objectivism. However, the views of Rand and her philosophy among prominent libertarians are mixed and many Objectivists are hostile to non-Objectivist libertarians in general”
Responding to a question about the Libertarian Party in 1976, Rand said:
The trouble with the world today is philosophical: only the right philosophy can save us. But this party plagiarizes some of my ideas, mixes them with the exact opposite—with religionists, anarchists and every intellectual misfit and scum they can find—and call themselves libertarians and run for office.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism_and_Objectivism
Why Objectivism disowns Libertarianism (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erytcpYpzRk
“So Rand and Rand Paul can say that a business that refuses admission to black people is perfectly legal … but don’t worry, it’s doomed to fail out of stigma.”
Well I agree with your moral rejection of this and I add that right now it is legal for religious groups to discriminate based on race (there was recently a case of a church that wouldn’t marry a white girl and a black guy), and gender and sexual orientation, and a religious group can even discriminate against people with disabilities ( a recent Supreme Court case).
This is the reason many on the right want to do away with public schools.
They don’t want secular schools in the first place and secondly they can’t undo desegregation.
But if it’s a religious school it can refuse black people or women or gays.
“It’s especially galling view of human relations because it bars any concept of human rights distinct from economic concerns”
(copied and pasted from above)
For me this was a beautiful laying out of her theory of rights and is some what spoiled by libertarian jabs at “Obamacare”, public schools, and social security. Which I’m personally very much for public schools, social security, public roads, etc..
Ayn Rand’s Theory of Rights: The Moral Foundation of a Free Society (mp3)
http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/audio/ayn-rand-theory-rights.asp
I’m not sure you actually read my comment above or any other comment on this.
I’m not here to defend Ayn Rand nor do I agree with a lot of her ideas.
I was trying to give some context to understanding her.
much respect
Thank you for sharing all that you did, but I’m trying to pursue a line of reasoning peculiar to her work and undergoing something of a renaissance today. I promise I’m not holding you responsible for her. Your remark about slavery caught my eye and I started my reply by asking for more about this difference between libertarians and objectivists. Thank you for obliging with your wiki link. Philosophically speaking, I still see much overlap between the two movements alive today and that’s the spin-off thread I was pursuing.
How else may I prove that I’ve read you?
Perhaps Paul doesn’t qualify as a true Objectivist, but let’s leave that to the various club-houses to sort out for themselves. Rand rejected from consideration anyone who compromised, so by definition any and all politicians are disqualified. My point was that his reasoning w/r/t Civil Rights matches, chapter and versee, the reasons Rand herself gave fifty years ago and they are just as fallacious then as now. Context is always important but the parallels *between* the planes of immanence are quite vivid in this instance.
You had pointed out that people used religion to justify slavery, but all the abolitionist movements were religious, my friend. They were also abolitionist well before it was cool. Both sides used religion to make their case. The voices of practical reason, including Lincoln, were trying to broker a trade-off so that slavery could continue within certain limits. Pivoting off this, my point was how Objectivism, read straight, allows for the same inhumanities in practice. That’s not a rebuke to you; it’s just me extending the conversation into areas of contemporary relevance and teasing out the implications of her belief system. I think you lay out a number of appealing components to her work, and I guess I’m just going back to the unappealing ones.
Without a doubt, Randian rationalism cuts through much that was oppressive in her own time. She built an atheist capitalism to match the atheist communism that was ravaging her family and country (Marx and Engels may have had spiritual roots, but not the murderous Lenin and Stalin who stole her dad’s store). Someone once floated the idea that Ayn was really the dutchess Anastasia out for revenge, but Ayn’s own biography suffices to arouse our sympathy. Thing is, I’m pretty sure Ayn doesn’t want our sympathy — for her or for any ethical calculation. Reason love her, she never shook the spell of utopianism that made communism and fascism so brutal and inhumane in practice.
” I started my reply by asking for more about this difference between libertarians and objectivists”
Libertarians start with liberty and free markets are a primary value.
Objectivists start with ethics as a primary value based on their metaphysics and epistemology.
For there politics and economics are an axiomatic extension out from their ethics.
“Philosophically speaking, I still see much overlap between the two movements alive today and that’s the spin-off thread I was pursuing.”
Absolutley the diference is almost like shia and sunni Mulims. But for them it is significant and importanrt.
“My point was that his reasoning w/r/t Civil Rights matches, chapter and versee, the reasons Rand herself gave fifty years ago and they are just as fallacious then as now. Context is always important but the parallels *between* the planes of immanence are quite vivid in this instance.”
Many libertarians try to use Objectivst reasoning to justify their position.
But for Ayn Rand she was very much against any form of racism and advocated open borders.
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage—the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors.”
“Racism claims that the content of a man’s mind (not his cognitive apparatus, but its content) is inherited; that a man’s convictions, values and character are determined before he is born, by physical factors beyond his control. This is the caveman’s version of the doctrine of innate ideas—or of inherited knowledge—which has been thoroughly refuted by philosophy and science. Racism is a doctrine of, by and for brutes. It is a barnyard or stock-farm version of collectivism, appropriate to a mentality that differentiates between various breeds of animals, but not between animals and men.”
“Like every form of determinism, racism invalidates the specific attribute which distinguishes man from all other living species: his rational faculty. Racism negates two aspects of man’s life: reason and choice, or mind and morality, replacing them with chemical predestination.”
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/racism.html
“The policy of the Southern states toward Negroes was and is a shameful contradiction of this country’s basic principles. Racial discrimination, imposed and enforced by law, is so blatantly inexcusable an infringement of individual rights that the racist statutes of the South should have been declared unconstitutional long ago.”
” The Southern racists’ claim of “states’ rights” is a contradiction in terms: there can be no such thing as the “right” of some men to violate the rights of others. The constitutional concept of “states’ rights” pertains to the division of power between local and national authorities, and serves to protect the states from the Federal government; it does not grant to a state government an unlimited, arbitrary power over its citizens or the privilege of abrogating the citizens’ individual rights. ”
“It is true that the Federal government has used the racial issue to enlarge its own power and to set a precedent of encroachment upon the legitimate rights of the states, in an unnecessary and unconstitutional manner. But this merely means that both governments are wrong; it does not excuse the policy of the Southern racists”.
http://freedomkeys.com/ar-racism.htm
“You had pointed out that people used religion to justify slavery, but all the abolitionist movements were religious, my friend.”
What the Bible says about Slavery
Exodus 21:2
If thou buy an Hebrew servant….
Exodus 21:7
If a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant….
Exodus 21:20-21
And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money.
Exodus 22:3
If he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft.
Leviticus 22:11
If the priest buy any soul with his money….
Leviticus 25:39
And if thy brother that dwelleth by thee be waxen poor, and be sold unto thee….
Leviticus 25:44-46
Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land: and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen for ever.
Ephesians 6:5
Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ.
Colossians 3:22
Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.
1 Timothy 6:1
Let as many servants as are under the yoke count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed.
Titus 2:9-10
Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things; not answering again; Not purloining, but shewing all good fidelity; that they may adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour in all things.
1 Peter 2:18
Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward.
You would think that Jesus and the New Testament would have a different view of slavery, but slavery is still approved of in the New Testament, as the following passages show.
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear. Serve them sincerely as you would serve Christ. (Ephesians 6:5 NLT)
Christians who are slaves should give their masters full respect so that the name of God and his teaching will not be shamed. If your master is a Christian, that is no excuse for being disrespectful. You should work all the harder because you are helping another believer by your efforts. Teach these truths, Timothy, and encourage everyone to obey them. (1 Timothy 6:1-2 NLT)
In the following parable, Jesus clearly approves of beating slaves even if they didn’t know they were doing anything wrong.
The servant will be severely punished, for though he knew his duty, he refused to do it. “But people who are not aware that they are doing wrong will be punished only lightly. Much is required from those to whom much is given, and much more is required from those to whom much more is given.” (Luke 12:47-48 NLT)
Christians try to rationalize the barbarity we find there by saying, oh, this was appropriate to the time, it was appropriate to the ancient world. No, it wasn’t. It was within the moral compass of human beings then to recognize that killing somebody for adultery was evil. The Buddha managed it, Mahavira, the Jain patriarch managed it, numerous Greek philosophers managed it. So Jews and Christians are simply lying to themselves when they talk about the impediments to morality that prevailed in the 5th century BC.
And theother thing to notice is that rationalizing the barbarism we find in the Old Testament merely renders it irrelevant, it doesn’t render these books morally wise. (Sam Harris)
Sam Harris on “Free Will”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g
Another reason I think is partly why Christianity holds onto free will because it lets God of the hook for a lot of things by blaming the individual as responsible.
So to with Rand her attachment to contra-causal free will allows her to not have compassion in her ethics. People are responsible for their actions/choices/situations so as in Atlas Shrugged to just die and suffer just as in Christianity the sinner can just go to hell and suffer eternally.
This is why some on the right can say “let them die” because contra-causal free will lets them off the hook morally in their minds.
much respect
Wow, Mark, this is quite a blog. I say this, simultaneously recalling my sister’s advice years ago to remember soft focus, how others’ cue in on facial expressions when collaborating and working together on community initiatives.
I’m glad your wife mentioned Jonathan Haidts work. Plus, from what I can tell, he excels in communication in collaboration–an area I need to work on at present. But, in trying to understand community goals, my failures re group collaboration about community involvement, I don’t leave as I’ve entered–happy. That’s not to say, it’s the groups fault, just an observation that has made me slowdown and question why.
Anyway, I’ll have to switch to Word as I read a second time. Jeez…I’m just rather speechless, thinking about similar running threads in Deleuzian philosophy that I’m wrestling with or attempting to grasp.
Mark–
Articulate, more than ever. Several excellent points, especially:
“a guiding aesthetic principle for me, which means neither that I will affirm someone’s greatness based on someone else’s authoritative opinion nor will I discount someone because many people don’t get it.”
Love the picture of that little girl with her dolls 🙂
qapla–
Nice to see your familiarity with Rand and ability to verbalize her quest for the genuine.
Well said! Well written. Going to have to read this a few more times. For some reason for the last few weeks I have been thinking aout rene girards mimetic desire, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Girard
Mark, thanks for letting loose on these blogs whenever you “feel the periodic need for synthesis” as this is one of your strengths that cannot reach full expression in a podcast focused on a single topic.
I agree with your short and sweet summary of what is missing from Rand, but what I related to most in this blog was your reference to Doug’s idea about low-fi copies of other people living in our heads (and then immediately followed the link to the Strange Loop blog to try to get a better idea of this new-to-me concept). I am only three weeks and a dozen episodes in and already am very happy to have little copies of Mark, Seth and Wes in my head. Because I “know” you from these podcasts, I hear your voice and intonations speaking in my head as I read your blog posts, which really humanizes it for me.
Like many, I have family and friends and a career, but was still intellectually starved and really needed people like you in my life. Thanks man! And welcome to your own little part of Donald’s brain.
Really enjoyed this. Very well written and nuanced…what a great use of Rand’s oversimplified views on the self as a jumping off platform.
As someone who looks to philosophy (among a few other things like art, etc), this line jumped out at me:
” …we can only, through experience and literature and philosophy, come to understand some of the mechanics of how the care and building of a self is achieved.”
Great work.
@ Wayne Schroeder
I appreciate that. I expected to come back and get slammed for my comment.
One I typed it out so fast as I had to go to work, but had the thoughts running through my head after reading the blog post. Reading back over it I see I should have written it differently and even a typo “their her eyes” instead of “through her eyes”.
And secondly I consider myself a liberal and although I have some friends on the right I mostly interact with people on the left at a Freethought group, a Humanist group, a philosophy group, and a zen group.
And I can tell you it doesn’t always go well to try to say something nice about Ayn Rand.
Usually the person hasn’t actually read anything by her, which I don’t think is the case here at Partially Examined Life, but usually I get as some kind of refutation of Rand an argument against Libertarianism or Anarcho-capitalism or libertarian anarchism. Which is not her philosophy at all.
As I mentioned above capitalism/free markets were not a primary value for her. As they are for libertarians.
For her ethics was a more primary value. We see this in Atlas Shrugged where it is the unethical people who make money by pay offs, pulling strings, lobbyists, etc.
Ironiclly the only way to have her capitalist ideal of each person being an ethical trader of value for value to mutual benefit, a kind of no harm principle, is to have the markets regulated.
As I said above I like her novels and some of her ideas, but that does not mean I agree completely with them.
An easy one is her idea of a gold standard as objective money. First gold is objective in that it’s an object I guess but its value is highly subjective. Even more than oil or copper which have a rather pragmatic kind of utility.
There are the objective supply and demand issues, but some cultures like China valued jade higher than gold and the vikings generally valued silver more.
Not to mention as with any commodity its value/price can be artificially manipulated and it goes up and down any ways.
I’ve had to argue against this one with people on the left and right. Because the “value” of anything is subjective and objective and inter-subjective in a social/cultural/market setting.
The second is her commitment to contra-causal or libertarian free will.
The increasing amount of evidence coming out of neuroscience seems to say that we do not have free will in this contra-causal or libertarian sense.
Sam Harris on “Free Will”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCofmZlC72g
Even as an atheist she could let go of a big god up there but not able to let go of a small god in her head.
Another reason I think is partly why Christianity holds onto free will because it lets God of the hook for a lot of things by blaming the individual as responsible.
So to with Rand her attachment to contra-causal free will allows her to not have compassion in her ethics. People are responsible for their actions/choices/situations so as in Atlas Shrugged to just die and suffer just as in Christianity the sinner can just go to hell and suffer eternally.
But it seems that perhaps seeing that there is no contra-causal free will and seeing that there is no separate “self” go together.
Brain Science podcast
The Self Illusion: How the Social Brain Creates Identity, by Bruce Hood
http://brainsciencepodcast.com/bsp/the-self-illusion-with-bruce-hood-bsp-88.html
Thanks for your additional info and perspective on this!
thank you
much respect
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/
dmf great link to a great laying out of her philosophy
“If ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with practice, then in a sense all of Rand’s philosophy is ethics”
and
“If feminism is the view that women are, and ought to be recognized as, men’s intellectual, moral, sexual, and political equals, then the Objectivist philosophy of human nature is inherently feminist, since it applies equally to all human beings, regardless of gender (or race) (N. Branden 1999). Decades before it was considered acceptable for women to lack “maternal instincts” or pursue careers, Rand created heroines who lack the first and pursue the second, free of guilt or self-doubt. Kira (We the Living) wants to be an engineer, and Dagny (Atlas Shrugged) runs Taggart Transcontinental, the largest and most successful transcontinental railroad in the country. None of Rand’s heroines sacrifices her interests, intellect, or principles for the man or men in her life. One literary critic argues that Dagny is the first, and perhaps only, epic heroine in Western literature because of the grandness of her vision, her courage and integrity, her unusual abilities, and her national importance (Michalson 1999). Rand’s depiction of her heroines’ enjoyment of sex and their freedom from all merely conventional norms about sex anticipates the sexual liberation movement of the 20th century by at least 30 years. In all three novels, it is the heroine who has the power to choose which of the men who love, admire, and desire her (and only her) she will have. Rand was also an ardent champion of a woman’s right to control her own reproductive choices.”
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ayn-rand/
much respect
Branden’s points are well-taken (and remarkably gracious given what he and Rand did to each other and their spouses), but Rand also maintained certain objective differences between the sexes that grate against modern conceptions of gender equality, to wit: a woman should not be President because her proper disposition is one of admiration of men (when Rand uses the neutral “man” in her statements, she’s being something less than neutral). So Dagny may be a vivacious, accomplished woman, but it is all still ultimately in service to a superior male.
I think Rand deserves credit for following her system through to its atheistic conclusion (You’d think she’d have been an ardent Reaganite but she could never forgive his fusion of religion and politics.). And her positions on the pill and abortion are consistent with the hedonism of her system, too. But at the end of the day men are still the dominant creatures and while women should be free to labor to their heart’s content, their heart’s content is still supposed to channel toward the governing desires of men. A man needs to do a great deal to be worthy of this submission, but submission is still the root craving of womanhood, in her telling.
All valid points.
She certainly was not a perfect person nor was her philosophy perfect, and let us not even go into the personal lives and contradictions in some philosophers lives and their philosophies.
But let us not forget she was mostly writing a lot of this in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s and born in 1905.
So for that time the idea that a girl could be an engineer or run a rail road or even be a philosopher would have been rather progressive.
Would she have been a better person had she been able to see her own contradictions?
Absolutely.
Do I like her books and some aspects of her philosophy and do I respect her for being bold woman doing philosophy?
Yes.
Do I agree with her on every thing or even much of any thing ?
No.
And I find it a curiosity that Ayn Rand gets a degree of personal scrutiny and attack that we wouldn’t apply to Niezsche or Heidegger or even Deleuze.
Some of my favorite philosophers despite their contradictions.
Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari”s plane of imminence would be a good way to think of it. People do not step outside of their enculturation and historic event and norms.
A philosopher does not step outside of living in ancient Greece or the 1940’s or 2013.
In that way maybe we can not condone or agree with but forgive or over look Heidegger for being a Nazi and swept up by nationalism.
But sadly I have harder time with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir for their hypocrisy
( and I mean no offense to Jewish people who probably disagree )
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-559137/Dangerous-liaisons-sex-teens-The-story-Sartre-Beauvoir-told-before.html
much repsect
I just read back over this.
“and I mean no offense to Jewish people who probably disagree”
Was in reference to Heidegger.
And for Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir I should have said that they were serial pedophiles (sexual predators) and hypocrites.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-559137/Dangerous-liaisons-sex-teens-The-story-Sartre-Beauvoir-told-before.html
much repsect
I thought the first 5 – 7 paragraphs of this post, pointing out the complexity of what we call “self” and therefore the ambiguity of “self-interest”, were really good. Thanks Mark.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip is probably the greatest single-season TV show of all time. That is all.