PREVIEW-Episode 78: Ayn Rand on Living Rationally

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 78 is what is it to live rationally? We read Ayn Rand's introduction to objectivist epistemology from 1967 and two essays from her book the Virtue of selfishness published in 1964, namely the objectivist ethics from 1961 and the conflicts of men's interests from 1962. You can join the discussion, get the texts, read loads of supplemental material at partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, whimsically and evasively from Madison, Wisconsin.

0:43 Seth: This is Seth Paskin abstracting from abstractions in Austin, Texas.

0:47 Wes: This is Wes Alwan rejecting the role of a sacrificial animal in Boston, Massachusetts.

0:53 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey with Reason, Purpose and Self Esteem in Middleton, Wisconsin.

1:00 Wes: All right, I was worried someone was going to take that sacrificial animal one.

1:05 Dylan: I'm surprised that there were so many juicy tidbits. I bet we all thought the other was going to take the choice ones.

1:12 Mark: Well, didn't you feel as you were reading this that you were engaging in an act of un Randian self sacrifice by reading these self abnegation.

1:22 Dylan: But Rand is encountering the nothing. No, we can't start off this poorly.

1:28 Mark: She's been more often requested than any other she has. Than any other topic. And so we'll just say that we're doing this and we waited until episode 78 to do this for the fans. And hopefully we'll have some new people besides the people who just monitor every single appearance of the word Objectivism in the media and then listen to this, only to then jump in and defend their heroine. But she's a gateway drug to philosophy.

1:53 Wes: She is objectively the 78th most important philosopher.

1:59 Mark: Objectively in that if you're reading off of experience, your experience of looking at our episode listing, that's all. It's objective. It's right there.

2:06 Dylan: It's measured.

2:07 Wes: Yes, objective.

2:10 Dylan: It's counted.

2:11 Wes: Kind of subjective.

2:12 Mark: Let's do some ground rules for our discussion, none of which actually prohibit ad hominem attacks or we're making fun of. Yeah, try not to assume our audience has read what we're talking about or has any other background in philosophy.

2:25 Dylan: That won't be a problem.

2:26 Mark: Number two, don't name drop. Just make your point. Don't say you'd understand me if only you'd read Atlas Shrugged. See, that's the whole joke. We wouldn't read that.

2:38 Wes: That's great.

2:39 Seth: I thought for sure you were gonna pull out a Murray Rothbard reference, but that is way better.

2:45 Mark: Number three will be rigorous and exact in all that we say, unless doing otherwise would be potentially more amusing. We had resolved that we would just take a serious stab at this and expose the texts. The texts in particular being the philosophical ones that she wrote after her more famous novels, the biggest and most famous of which were the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, but we did not read those. Actually, I suffered through an audiobook version of the Fountainhead and might have to pull out a few comments from that. And there are speeches that people make in those novels that are Ayn Rand saying her philosophy out loud.

3:18 Wes: And she is one of the rare philosophers to quote her own fictional characters as evidence for her position. So we do get a flavor of the. As John Galt said, let's start with John Galt.

3:32 Mark: I said this so perfectly in my novel that I think that's just her recognizing who her audience was.

3:38 Wes: But why do you say suffer through. Give us a sense of the novel. Maybe as a lead in.

3:43 Mark: It just dwells on situations and characters that are presented in a very, I would have to say, ham fisted way that the villains are so evil and so evil in the sense of saying absurd things in favor of we all really should be altruistic and give our lives to the whole. And I realize that by giving my life to the whole, even I will not benefit of that, but yet I will do it. So if you had a character like that, they're not supposed to be naturalistic characters. Actually she's writing in a self consciously contrived way.

4:15 Wes: Victor Hugo ish way. Right.

4:17 Mark: I haven't actually read him, but she

4:18 Wes: cited him as one of her influences. So it's Les Miserables for the Rich.

4:22 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

4:23 Dylan: Yeah.

4:24 Mark: Well, it's supposed to be romantic heroes and so she creates heroes and villains that are heightened but yet, you know, it's just so over the top. If it was a short story, it would be a fine illustration. Like Kurt Vonnegut has the story about the society in which everyone is made equal by the especially smart guy has to wear a helmet that will put electroshocks through his brain periodically to confuse him and keep him from focus. And he's extra strong, so he also has to have weights that will hold him down. Imagine you'd created a character for a very similar purpose and instead of just having him in a 10 page short story, you stretched him throughout a thousand Page book.

5:00 Wes: In other words, it's as if the world really were the way a conceited person imagines. They're the center of the universe and the greatest thing since sliced bread and everyone else is holding them down.

5:11 Mark: The Fountainhead is her early, more Nietzsche inspired work.

5:15 Wes: Oh, I'm thinking of Atlas Shrugged.

5:17 Mark: Yeah, I did watch about 3/4 of the first movie on Netflix, which was. Oh, so, you know, as bad as the dialogue, is the dialogue spoken aloud? Like, I thought maybe George Lucas wrote it for a second because it was.

5:30 Wes: Yeah, but then it would be so bad, it would be good. That's the new movie version, right?

5:36 Mark: Yeah.

5:36 Wes: That got like 0% on rotten tomatoes. Like, no reviewer thought it was

5:44 Dylan: lower than the L. Ron Hubbard Battlefield Earth. No.

5:49 Seth: All right, before this spins off totally out of control, let's set the foundation for kind of like, why we're doing this. So, first off, I want to make sure all of our biases are up front. All of us have read this, or most of us had read this early on in our philosophical careers or when we were.

6:04 Dylan: Not me, I'm the exception here.

6:06 Seth: You never had.

6:06 Dylan: Okay, I never read a word of her.

6:08 Wes: Okay. I haven't read her philosophy. We were forced to read.

6:11 Seth: Yeah, we all read Atlas Shrugged. Like in high school.

6:14 Mark: I never read that.

6:15 Seth: All right. We are doing this because we have gotten lots of feedback from fans. Given a choice, we would not have chosen to treat her in a serious way as a philosopher because our experience with her writings and adherence of her philosophy is such that it does not appear that such an engagement would be fruitful. That said, all the feedback from fans, both positive and negative, so they're the ones who are fans and the ones who want to see us. Take her on, if you will, finally brought us around to doing this episode. It is not my expectation that we are doing this for the purpose of engaging in a debate with objectivists.

I do not believe that we can have a rational debate that is going to change their points of view. So this is really more us trying to outline what she's trying to say and do it seriously and then give the reasons why we think it's not really viable as a philosophical system.

7:13 Wes: I'm usually the advocate of charitable reading and trying to give that charitable account before we launch into our objections. But that said, I don't think we have to feel scorned for an author or something like that. I don't think we have to hide that because it's going to offend.

7:26 Seth: No, no, no.

7:27 Wes: Objectivists. This is probably going to offend the Objectivist, this podcast.

7:31 Seth: Absolutely. What I'm saying is I don't believe anything we say here is going to change anybody's mind if they are adherents. Because if you call yourself an Objectivist, or if you say you're a follower of Ayn Rand, let's just substitute that for some other figure in the history of philosophy. So, Wes, if I said you're a

7:49 Wes: Kantian, I often get accused of that.

7:51 Seth: You do get accused of that. What would be the expectation of me saying that? Would that mean that you're a dogmatic adherent to the categorical imperative and the notion of the manifold of intuition and all these things to the extent where you defend Kant against all comers?

8:09 Wes: I really find Kant interesting, but I'm just as interested in his failings as in his. What I consider his successes. So that's a little different than someone who becomes an apologist for a figure.

8:22 Dylan: Typically, when somebody calls someone a Kantian or accepts that they're a Kantian or a Hegelian or a Straussian or Wittgensteinian, is that they mean they're partisans of a certain sort, but they're not generally apologists, meaning they're sympathetic in that

8:36 Seth: direction to identify yourself as a Wittgensteinian or a Kantian or an Aristotelian or something like that. You mean to say, this is the perspective I'm sympathetic to, and typically it hinges on a pretty major issue. Like if you say, well, I'm kind of with Nagel on this. Right. Then you're saying something about what your beliefs are about consciousness. But it doesn't mean that you're fanatically devoted to the exclusion of all other points of view, to all of the logical consequences and writings of that particular person. It usually means you're a scholar of that particular person. There's a difference between being a scholar and an adherent, if you will.

9:12 Wes: Yeah. And there's a point where it becomes political. Right. So Marx is a good foil for this. You know, you could say someone is a Marxist. So that might mean two different sorts of things. A scholar who sort of leans in the direction of Marx on some issues, and in the other direction, it might mean someone who has certain political aspirations. Part of the reason why Objectivism is interesting and worth looking into is because it's had an influence on American politics. I was surprised in these readings by the number of things directly influential on the American political landscape.

So that includes, for instance, members of Congress who say they're adherents of Ayn Rand and even named after Ayn Rand, like Rand Paul. This type of thinking is a really important strain in American politics. And not just on the right, but on the left, there's a sort of rationalist movement, people who adhere to scientism. And what's interesting there, too, is this use of objectivism or rationalism. It sounds as if you're defending yourself in the title of your group, as if, you know, I am immune to challenge because I'm actually a proponent of reason or objectivism.

I am an inherent.

10:15 Mark: Of the truth, as opposed to truthers.

10:18 Wes: Right.

10:19 Seth: I mentioned that. We were doing this podcast today, and somebody said, what is it about her philosophy that you find problematic? And I said, well, she's polemical. She doesn't argue for. At least in the stuff we were reading. It's just sort of statements of, well, this is the way things are, and there's no attempt to justify it with either reason or evidence. It essentially is an appeal to authority as opposed to what we consider to be philosophy, which is rational dialogue.

10:44 Wes: Yeah.

10:44 Seth: And I listened Mark to that Objectivist

10:47 Mark: podcast, Leonard Peikoff, her heir.

10:50 Seth: Oh, okay.

10:51 Mark: He's actually the executor of her estate.

10:53 Seth: Okay. Well, I listened to three episodes of that. It's essentially him and somebody else answering questions that were emailed or written in or whatever to. And they're just these broad, sweeping statements without any recourse to fact. Of course, we're on a path to destruction, and there will be a dissolution of the government at some point. And you're like, on what basis are you saying these things?

11:15 Wes: I would call it an argument from contempt. In many cases, there's a lot of contemptuousness. We'll see in this. And that includes caricatures of opposing positions, dismissals without too much argument against them.

11:27 Mark: I was trying to find the author on this Ayn Rand Stanford Encyclopedia of

11:31 Dylan: Philosophy article, Neera Badhwar and Roderick Long.

11:35 Mark: Yeah, it's not one of our required readings, but I would highly recommend. It's a very valiant attempt to make Rand speak to other philosophers, because she generally refused to do so. They'll sketch out her position and then say, well, she has been accused of mischaracterizing the position she's arguing against. It's not clear.

11:54 Seth: Here's like turning Kant into an idealist. Yeah, okay.

11:57 Mark: Whenever she says something about Kant, she doesn't know what the hell she's talking about. Go listen to our couple of Kant episodes.

12:03 Dylan: I had never read anything she had written, so I started off with Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. And I really felt like I was reading an essay by one of my former mediocre students that was full of interesting little brief insights, but that I would have a much more interesting conversation with them about later to help articulate what it is they were trying to say. And that's what I felt like the Stanford article was. It made it much more clear how it could have been more interesting.

12:45 Mark: She's engaging these interesting questions. What is the given in perception?

12:49 Dylan: So she has interesting questions on her mind.

12:51 Wes: She comes across as someone who doesn't have the patience to dwell on things for too long and will make a sweeping generalization, then move on.

12:59 Dylan: Yeah, she has interesting moments and ideas that might be worth talking about, but you can't have any expectation that she's going to make them more clear. She's going to say them. So she's kind of oracular in that respect, and you have to suss them out a little bit. She was as bad a writer as. You know, it's passable. It's not utterly terrible. It's not obfuscating and frustrating in that respect, but it's just polemical. It's just like sophomore essays that I read over and over and over again where students were just trying to get something off their chest and just say it with vigor and. And you could respect that. But it was going to be an interesting conversation later. It wasn't going to be something on its own. I just had to slog through it.

13:44 Wes: She sort of takes every conceivable position, including the ones she's criticizing. So she'll sound like a nominalist. She'll sound like an Aristotelian at times, or like a Kantian or even a Hegelian. And as we go through it, I can point to these. But then at the same time, she's not just criticizing these positions, but maybe with the exception of Aristotle, she's dismissing them as ludicrous, even though she's sort of unknowingly parroting some of the same insights of each one of these positions.

14:14 Mark: So that's because they're fooling themselves. They're evading.

14:17 Wes: Right.

14:18 Mark: Let me give it just an overview, a brief overview of the way these two sets of essays fit together. She'd already written these novels that lay out a vision of what the virtuous man is, the meaning of life, the goals, selfishness over altruism. All that stuff was out there. She then wanted to write some more systematic stuff to tie it down. And this objectivist epistemology essay really is an attempt to lay out an undisputable. I really think she thinks she's arguing that she's building up very much like Descartes from the obvious to lay out this position. And then she even has, in this second edition, the expanded second edition has all these notes from, I guess, seminars where she road tested this stuff with. Well, they're all listed as the people she's talking with as professors, but I don't know if they were actually professors where they then get into some of

15:08 Wes: these details of they were professors of interior design.

15:13 Dylan: Didn't she also at this point already had started the Objectivist Society or something with Nathaniel Branden? That was going on in the 50s or early 60s already. Right, so you had an explicit philosophical political movement going on.

15:29 Mark: This is written 66, first published in the Objectivist July 1966 to February 1967, which is the same place the Objectivist newsletter, that Virtue of selfishness essays are published. So actually I was thinking for some reason that the epistemology one was separate from that effort. So to me, even though they're all polemical to some extent, the epistemology ones are much more tame in terms of the virtue of selfishness essays. Many of them are just brief and dismissive. And you know, the one that we read, the main one, the Objectivist Ethics, is the text from a seminar she gave. So it's like a speech.

16:05 Dylan: It's a speech at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Yes.

16:08 Mark: So that's hardly the place that you would think that, you know, I'm going to give. Here's the definitive lay down. But there's not any more careful overview of the ethics that I found in the book or anywhere else. So that's the best we got.

16:20 Wes: Well, you mentioned Dylan, Nathaniel Branden. Right. So he was a psychotherapist who published some popular books on self esteem, I think. And we see some of this self esteem stuff and Branden's work and I quote some, I think in one of the ethics essays.

16:34 Mark: Well, he actually wrote some of the ethics essays in that book and they

16:37 Dylan: were business partners for a long time and then they had some kind of falling out.

16:42 Mark: It was a romantic quarrel.

16:43 Dylan: Okay.

16:44 Wes: No rational person has a romantic.

16:47 Mark: As depicted in the movie the Passion of Ayn Rand actually was written by Branden's wife and depicts this relationship. I did not watch that movie, but it has Helen Mirren in it, so it's probably good. In Nathaniel Branden's Wiki thing It says in 1968 Rand broke publicly with Branden and published an article denouncing him and accusing him of a variety of perceived offenses, such as philosophic irrationality and unresolved psychological problems. In response, Branden sent out a letter to their mailing list suggesting that the actual cause of Rand's denunciation of his was his unwillingness to engage in a romantic relationship with her.

And then he later explained in his memoir that he and Rand had in fact been romantically intimate for a period of time in the 50s while they were both married with other people. But it was an open marriage. He went on to become the father of the self esteem movement and eventually offered criticisms of aspects of Rand's work, naming his problems her tendency to encourage emotional repression and moralizing, her failure to understand psychology beyond its cognitive aspects, and her failure to appreciate adequately the importance of kindness in human relationships.

He apologized in an interview to every student of Objectivism for perpetuating the Ayn Rand mystique. So it's not just we've been poisoned by academia, and so that's why we're all dumping on her work. No, this guy was as into it as anybody could be and even wrote some of the essays in one of her major books. And yet eventually, even though he thought broadly there were some good things about it, thought that she was pretty full of it.

18:11 Wes: Yeah, but he's sort of not a disinterested party.

18:15 Mark: No more than that.

18:16 Wes: Yeah, let's work through the epistemology.

18:17 Seth: Yeah.

18:18 Mark: I want to say one more thing before. So I read this book, Objectivist Epistemology and the Virtue of Selfishness. Somebody on my dorm hall gave it to me, my formative philosophical years. And so this book in particular objectivist epistemology. Like it ends up saying, basically, if you can't give a definition for every word that you use, then you are full of shit. Like an explicit definition. And. Wow, that'd be a lot of work here. I thought I was doing a lot of thinking, and yet I can't produce the kind of definitions on demand that she's demanding from every single word I use. So it wasn't that long before I then read if anybody wants to listen to our Wittgenstein episode about how definitions don't quite work like that.

18:57 Wes: There is no explicit definition for anything. Yes, that works infallibly. Although Rand has a kind of response to that, and she mentions Wittgenstein in the session.

19:06 Mark: Yes, well, whether she read it, let's

19:08 Dylan: not get ahead of ourselves.

19:09 Seth: All right.

19:10 Mark: But in any case, it probably would have been good for me, since she's one of the characters that was then populating my imagination since the beginning. It's kind of like a repression that we didn't have an Ayn Rand episode, didn't acknowledge her existence. And apparently I took the opportunity at every turn to relate whatever we were talking about to Ayn Rand and Ripon specifically, not remembering even very well exactly what her positions were. So it probably would have been better for my sake just to do this along freaking time ago.

19:37 Wes: Get it out of your system.

19:39 Mark: Yes, the one sentence version is it's kind of like the logical positivists that we talked about on earlier episodes, that they're trying to be strict empiricists, so they're trying to base everything on what is actually experienced. And that means that you don't say like Locke does, that the given is sense data or something like that, because that's not what we experience. What we experience are concrete, individualized objects. And that's the only thing we can really confirm, the only thing that is real are these individual tables and chairs and things like that around us.

Now we use concepts to group these things together to be able to talk about them efficiently. And so we are abstracting from these experience of individual percepts, these individual entities that present themselves to us in much the way that we use math, to be able to fit more things in our head when we can. If we didn't have numbers and we wanted to think of more than seven specific things, it would be very difficult. I have the number 7 million, so I don't have to think of each one of those individually. I can just think of the number 7 million.

So numbers are a shorthand for talking about a lot of individual things. That's the way she thinks about concepts. They're just a mental tool that is shorthand of talking about a lot of individual concrete things. And that's the whole secret of epistemology, is to keep in mind that if you have any words that you're using that you cannot redescribe, define the terms that you are using in terms of either individual concrete things or other abstractions from individual concrete things, then you're full of shit.

21:13 Dylan: Be sure to link this up with her notion of measurement. This is one of the ways in which she abstracts the notion of measurement. Each of these concepts and the way in which one makes them is a kind of measurement as far as she's concerned, in that it's quantified. At first I was thinking, well, she's just doing Descartes without ever mentioning Descartes at all. Descartes wanted to turn everything into extent and all extent was the analog of distance. But her notion of measurement isn't explicitly quantified in that way. It's any kind of distinction really amounts to a measurement, a way of bounding something.

21:55 Wes: The measurements are omitted. So a concept is a mental integration of two or more units possessing the same distinguishing characteristics with their particular measurements omitted. So she's using this idea of measurement to get a concept. But obviously we're not using numerical measurements when we're using concepts.

22:14 Dylan: Yeah, but in some funny way, they're abstracted from, so they're implied. But it didn't seem to me that she was going to be utterly consistent in this. The way she wants to make a big deal about measurement in this kind of empiricist way that Mark was referring to. And I think in the end, her idea of making something objective and part of reality turns on this idea that everyone can lay their senses on it in the same way, so that it's there and available for them.

22:46 Seth: She talks about that. Philosophy's kind of gone off the rails. It's gotten seduced by metaphysics and some other things. And what we need is a very strong epistemology to ground things. Because in a weird way, she's sort of allied with Deleuze. You know, she thinks the fundamental activity that human beings engage in, what differentiates us from animals and what differentiates smart people from stupid people is concept creation. And so what she's trying to explain here is how concept creation works. So in that sense, insofar as Deleuze thinks that philosophy is the act of creating concepts and that it's creative, she thinks the act of creating concepts is determined by what she calls facts.

And that rather than being creative, it's an expository exercise. So there's a structure to the world, there are facts. And insofar as your concepts accord with the facts of reality and you have a better or worse conceptual apparatus. And so she thinks of concept creation as an organic developmental activity that is done well or poorly, depending on how your capacities are as a human being and how much experience you have. So what Dylan and Wes were just talking about in terms of the measurement and mathematical and all that is, to use an analogy, you see one thing, you see two things, you see three things, and after exposure to multiple units over time, you come up with the concept of multiplicity.

So you see three things over and over and over again. And eventually you come up with the concept of three. In just the same way, she thinks that you see one dog, two dog, three Dogs. And over time, eventually you come up with the concept of dog in no uncertain terms. As far as this text is concerned, that is how we come up with concepts.

24:41 Dylan: And she has a kind of slapdash embryological psychology, evolutionary psychology thing going on. The evidence for this being the way in which we understand tables and dogs and apples and fruit is because we see children doing this. That's the way they accumulate their concepts. I found that whole portion somewhat fantastical, but that's the psychological base of her argument. Yes, Descartes makes a very similar but importantly different argument when he's talking about how you make the connections in a method so that you understand a function out of its points. And he has this very, very interesting essay that he wrote a draft of before the geometry called I want to say, on the Right Ways of Thinking.

25:32 Mark: Rules for the direction of the Mind.

25:33 Dylan: That's it. Rules for the direction of the mind. Thanks. And he talks about how when we go over individual instances in our mind, we have to connect them together into a chain. And he's very concerned about utter clarity and utter certainty, which is one of the reasons he moves towards extent as being the nub of being able to have clarity. And so things are clear and distinct. And by linking things that are clear and distinct, the things that we know, you can then improve the certainty of them. And that's why he makes these links to mathematics in this respect, that I understand the claim at the beginning of the proof and then I work my way to the end.

And it's by understanding, making the chain between the clear and distinct pieces along the way. And I have as small of a gap as possible between one step and the other, so that I can have my intellect go from one step to the other in one fell swoop to get that continuity that then I can make the whole length of the argument and know that the argument is certain. And implicit in that is the kind of continuity and discreteness problem where you have individual facts. And the problem is I see the clear and distinct nature of this one claim or this one fact.

How do I link them together? So he's making this argument that while I do that by having a motion of my mind through them. So there's something similar in what she's doing with trying to have measurements be the form of these concepts that are built up one on top of the other, she takes it in a different direction.

27:10 Wes: One of the important things about concept formation is this idea of the unit. A unit is an existent, regarded as a separate member of a group of two or more similar members. And it involves this act of consciousness. And it's not an arbitrary creation of consciousness. It is a method of identification or classification according to the attributes which consciousness observes in reality. I think one of the things she thinks she's fighting against in a lot of different philosophical theories is a kind of relativism, the idea that everything is, let's say, socially constructed or that our concepts are purely a matter of our particular cognitive constitution and have nothing to do with reality.

At the same time here it almost sounds like she's leaning in an Aristotelian direction. And then she'll. Especially when we get to the section on definitions where it almost sounds like she's basing her epistemology in sort of real definitions of things in the Aristotelian sense, it sounds as if there are natural kinds. These units are not simply the way human beings carve up the world according to certain pragmatic considerations or because their brain happens to be a certain way. But when we see a deer, there really is this natural kind deer, then she gets to the point where she explicitly rejects that sort of Aristotelian realism.

And of course she rejects Platonism. So it's not that we can ground our use of concepts in natural kinds, we can't ground them in Platonic ideals. And yet she's not a nominalist, or at least she seems to want to reject nominalism. She's trying to avoid all the different pitfalls of the different philosophical alternatives of how you would epistemologically ground knowledge, the problem of universals. But it's unclear to me exactly what her solution is, unless it's this kind of neo Kantian solution where you say, well, yes, objective knowledge has something to do with the relationship of our cognition to the world.

On the one hand, it's not entirely arbitrary, but on the other hand, it doesn't even make sense to speak of knowledge independent of the structure of the mind or the structure of the brain, however you want to think about it.

29:22 Mark: Well, the biggest advantage that I got out of looking at the Stanford article was that it actually distinguished in a way that Rand doesn't, between objective and intrinsic. Rand makes. It sounds like everything is either just a matter of individual whim, it's subjective, or it's. It's real, it's objective, it's there. And just relying on our intuitive notion of what that means, which is if we were all dead, if there are no human beings on earth, those things would still be the case. Something like that would actually be intrinsic. So if there were natural kinds, if there really was a natural kind, deer in the way Aristotle thinks, that would be not objective.

That would be intrinsic objective. And the way Rand explicitly talks about this is a matter of how objectively the mind interacts with things. In other words, it's not a matter of our personal choice. It's not a matter of our cultural preferences. It's not anything like that. It's a fact about human nature. So how does human nature interact with the world?

30:17 Wes: That's a Humean and Kantian use of the word objective.

30:21 Mark: So Rand would never admit to that, because she thinks that Kant is the font of all subjectivism. But actually, her view is, according to this Stanford article, has been called, not that different from Kant's in that she distinguishes the purely subjective and the intrinsic from the objective. And a very clear picture of that was given in our very last episode of the way that Santayana wants to talk about what is beauty is. He just looks at how people actually, as a matter of fact, react to things in the world. And if you can find systematic patterns of that, you know, if everybody found something beautiful in such and such a situation, then you've got to say that the beauty is objective in that it is not just a matter of people choosing it, but there is something in the phenomena itself that makes it the case.

And that's all Rand needs. She says, look, people can't insist that these categories, these definitions, exist without human beings, that they be objective in that sense. That's like saying just because the eyes have a particular way of seeing, that they have a nature, they have a point of view. Therefore they can't see reality. No, reality has to be something that is accessible to human beings when we're talking about human knowledge.

31:32 Wes: Right on. 41. In my version of this, she sort of sums up by saying, it's time to grant a man's consciousness the same cognitive respect one grants to his body, that is the same objectivity. So this is where she goes from sounding like a Kantian to sounding almost like a Hegelian. I think this relates to your Santayana example, where you're saying, yes, our cognition of things, our knowledge of things, depends on the structure of the human mind. And it couldn't make sense to talk of knowledge without that, which is basically Kant's point. But we have to give the mind some sense of objectivity, which is a kind of breakout into Hegel territory. And that's why we can speak of knowledge as not being merely subjective, which is what she thinks. The implication of Kant's position is.

32:16 Dylan: Well, she has that Kantian aspect of trying to put consciousness in the way of our experience of the world. So make it so that it is the activity of our minds, our thinking, our rationality that is the source of our interaction with the world. So some ways it's personal or might seem subjective in that respect. The difference is these intrinsic characteristics that are in things in the world. She seems to say that by right thinking we have direct access to them and that all right, thinking people would have the same direct access to those things.

And it might require some work, there might be some concept creation going on, but there is going to be a pretty straightforward way that that's going to develop because it's going to ultimately be born out of direct access to those intrinsic characteristics. They're plain and written on the front, even if they're sophisticated, even if they're several steps removed.

33:18 Wes: But the important thing here is the direct access. It's not like it's. We're merely passive. So this is again, the Kantian sounding stuff we're actively doing, stuff we're categorizing, we're classifying. And what we get direct access to, what we call objects are already these constructed things, although at times what's confusing. And she objects to that language of saying they're constructed. But still, I think Mark's point is important, that whatever we have direct access to is not the intrinsic or the thing in itself or the, say, the natural kind.

Her most explicit rejection of this in this essay is where she sidles up to what sounds like an Aristotelian real definition. Then she backs off it and says, no. That kind of lines up with the Stanford article talking about her rejection of our direct access to the intrinsic. No, our conceptualizations. It's not like a direct access intuitive. You know, she rejects this notion of intuition or a sort of passive receptivity to these, let's say, natural kinds or the reality of things.

34:13 Dylan: Yeah, but she's not a constructivist the way a pragmatist would admit to being, and then willing to say, well, I will stick with things that are good enough for now and I might end up revising them later. She wouldn't admit a Kuhnian critique of science or concept formation in that respect.

34:29 Wes: Well, she does have this thing where concepts are sort of provisional, right?

34:33 Mark: Yeah. You could get more information. And this is a matter of how do you interpret it. So the Peikoff stuff, Peikoff her successor addresses this directly and talks about within the context of the knowledge that I have gained. So Far this definition that I've come up with or this fact is certain, if you define it contextually like that, then you can even say gaining more information later doesn't invalidate the original claim. So the example given is again Newton to Einstein. Sure, that Newton makes these claims that yes, they are valid for the systems that he was analyzing. And if you learn more about it, you might want to recast the larger laws that he describes of nature. But there is some translation of Newton's principles into the new language that you can see how it actually means the same thing as his Newton's original claim, and that those were certain as certain can be.

35:26 Wes: Yeah, so it's always relative to the rest of our knowledge. And as she talks about this on page 21, this idea of context, concepts are not and cannot be formed in a vacuum, they are formed in a context. Process of conceptualization consists of observing the differences and similarities of existence within the field of one's awareness. Italicized, the field of one's awareness I take to be a sort of system of beliefs and current system of knowledge. And then she talks, compares a child's grasp of a concept to a more sophisticated scientific grasp of the same concept. And those two things just have different context. And so the child's more primitive grasp is not invalid, it's just sort of open ended and can be filled out. The same would go for say, yeah, Newtonian mechanics versus relativity. I'm not sure it's going to work.

36:15 Dylan: Ultimately the vision is that rationality is on a kind of rails, right? That you get on the train and you keep all going in the same correct direction. And the difference between how far you are along the railway is just a question of sophistication and refinement. And there's no such thing as getting off the rails or getting on the wrong train or anything like that. So the Newtonian mechanics going to relativity, going to quantum mechanics is not such a bad story. Right, but it's very convenient to omit. All the history of science and scientific development is littered with dead ends.

36:52 Wes: Yeah, it almost sounds like there can't be error because she sums up that context part by saying even if the scope of his knowledge is modest and the content of his concepts is primitive, it will not contradict the content of the same concepts in the mind of the most advanced scientists. Well, of course there's a sense in which Newtonian mechanics and Einstein's special relativity are contradictory. Unless you say, well, implicit in the Newtonian mechanics is, you know, only for speeds not close to the speed of light or something like that. Right. You could insert these caveats that would save the original proposition from being false.

37:29 Dylan: Yeah. But another example would be, like, caloric. Right. So early versions of the theory of heat involved having heat be a substance, and so it was a quantity like water or mass or something like that. And eventually that was just dropped altogether for the kinetic theory of heat. It's not like it was refined. It's not like it was said. Okay, well, there is a range of speeds in which that works just fine. And it's a useful concept. That's the kind of continuity that you have with Newtonian mechanics and special relativity. What you end up doing is revising space and time and saying that Newtonian mechanics is valid because it's an approximation of true mechanics in a very convenient way. And in some ways that's great, and it makes you feel like you understand something, but it also might be just a really convenient accident.

38:21 Wes: It sounds like she's saying these concepts are true for their time or within the context of what was known. It's a weird sort of caveat which would make anything true at a given time. Right. It almost sounds scandalously close to the relativism she's trying to avoid. And Dylan, as you just pointed out, it doesn't fit well with what we know about scientific progress. Although she may have a point about other sorts of concepts. Right. It may be there's nothing contradictory between a child's primitive concept of something and more advanced scientific concept in that sense. So while it wouldn't get at, say, progress of science over time, it would get at the difference between our more intuitive concepts and our more sophisticated elaborations of those concepts.

39:05 Seth: I want to bring up this idea that she has about the essentially defining characteristic. We've already talked about how you can abstract from any number of. Let's call them tokens or examples of a particular thing and come up with a general concept of the thing. So it can be number. It can be dog. Or she constantly uses the example man. And she says in order to do that, if you're going to abstract from all these different instances so that you can correctly identify an existing thing as falling into that classification or not, is that you need to know the essentially defining characteristic of that particular thing.

39:47 Wes: Yeah. This is page 23 in my.

39:50 Seth: Okay. Part of the process of concept creation is they say, okay, well, we see dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, dog, or specific dog. Specific dog. Specific dog. And you come up with the concept of dog. And somewhere as part of that Process, you identify the essential characteristic of what it is to be a dog that differentiates it from cat and from human being and from table and from chair. So your concept of dog is something like four legged. You don't have a concept of mammal yet, but somehow you have a definition that makes sense and it identifies the essential characteristic that distinguishes dogs from all other four legged things, from all other furry things, from all other warm blooded things. Whatever your experience tells you, Seth can't

40:33 Mark: produce the definition on command, so he must not really know what a dog.

40:36 Seth: I don't, I don't.

40:38 Mark: In a philosophically correct way.

40:40 Seth: The truth is I can't produce the definition of anything.

40:43 Wes: She will end up saying that being able to say a verbal definition is not the measure of all this. Right. She starts to sound like she's saying it's use, but. And then she goes on to say, no, Wittgenstein is wrong.

40:53 Seth: Right? Yeah. Which takes 50 fucking pages, but yeah.

40:56 Wes: But here it does sound like she's saying that definitions are a matter of these. You know, a living thing that walks on two legs and has no fur and stuff like that.

41:04 Seth: But the important thing about that is, in the context of your developmental or historical scientific thing, is that if we are wrong about heat, that if the vast majority of right thinking, rational human beings think that heat is a substance and somebody comes along and says, well, actually it's not, then it's not simply a matter of trying to make sure that we were partially right, it's that we as a collective group were wrong about the essential characterization of heat. It has to come back to that epistemological stance. Either you are right or you're wrong. And either we're all wrong if there's consensus or we're all right, or if there's a dispute about something that's kind of like a live issue, somebody is right and somebody is wrong. That has to be the way that works in this system.

41:59 Wes: But in her account of the child's evolving definition of human being, let's say beginning with a living thing that walks on two legs and has no fur, or then it becomes a living thing, that being that speaks and does things no other living beings can do. And then that ceases to be valid about the time of the child's adolescence, and then we end up with the concept of rational animal. I mean, in each of these stages, none of these are wrong. Exactly. Even though she uses that phrase ceases to be valid, the concept is becoming more sophisticated.

42:28 Mark: Well, it's getting a hold of what the essential is.

42:31 Wes: Yeah, yeah, so she said he reaches the one and only valid definition of man within the context of his knowledge and of all mankind's knowledge to date. So then she puts that caveat in. So again, that caveat is important. This contextual caveat that she's using and that one valid definition is a rational animal. That's what man is. So but she does say, observe that all the versions of a definition of man were true, were correct identifications of the facts of reality, and were valid qua definitions given the context. This is the part that gets confusing, that true given the context. But on the other hand, the one true definition is rational animal.

43:08 Mark: She's playing on what would be the context in which we could find out that that's an invalid definition? Well, if we ran into an alien or something that seemed to be rational. Philosophers love that kind of hypothetical. And she just completely thinks that that is irresponsible, that we need to be working when we think about these things only with actual or easily conceivable possibilities. In other words, is my wallet in my purse or is it not like those are possibles that we can consider. But if you're talking about possibles that go beyond any known experience, like aliens, whenever you say within the present context, and you think about, well, what about a different kind of rational creature? Or something like. That's just not something she thinks is a legitimate consideration to take into account.

43:53 Wes: But it is important that the concept be open to revision and expansion. The problem with saying true in context is anything that's false is true in context. Caloric is true in context. Context just means the existing state of human knowledge. It's a weird way to.

44:09 Mark: Why would you say anything that's false is true in context? I mean, clearly, because.

44:12 Wes: No.

44:13 Mark: That are false are going to remain false, right?

44:15 Wes: No, but there's a sense in which those previous definitions of human being were false. They're not the right definition. Man is not just a thing which walks on two legs and has no fur. That's not the essential characteristic. But in a strict sense it's false. But it's only in this contextual sense that it's true. And again, that's context means existing state of knowledge. So I think Dylan's objection would hold there, which is that you could say something like caloric. And I don't know how she would treat an example like that. Obviously she's not going to want to say everything, anything is true just because people happen to be ignorant at the time of some fact.

44:48 Dylan: Her picture Seems to me is that if you are being rational, everything is a matter of refining to the true. It's not possible to be rational and be wrong.

45:00 Mark: Well, if you're ignorant of a relevant fact, that if you knew it, you would change your view. Yes, in that sense. But you can't be wrong given what you know. Anybody else that has that amount of information should come to the same conclusion that you do. Because that's how rationality works. Yeah, like you're saying.

45:14 Dylan: So if you got new facts, you would refine what you had before.

45:17 Mark: This makes it very clear her attitude towards skepticism, that she just doesn't take skepticism seriously. It's really only given a passing treatment here. But she doesn't take the skeptical arguments from the ancient skeptics or Descartes about does perception really give us what's going on in reality? Because first she thinks that the Cartesian skepticism about the existence of the external world just is false by definition. False by definition.

45:43 Wes: Well, it's self contradictory because it presupposes some of the faculties that it's trying

45:47 Mark: to down first the structure of consciousness. We've said in many other podcasts all consciousness is consciousness of something. Consciousness has an object. Now she takes that to be proof, conceptual proof, immediate given and experience proof of the existence of the external world, of the physical, that consciousness is consciousness of this external physical object, of there being an external world itself, that even before you have any concepts, before you're individuating things, you're given the existent right.

46:17 Wes: Which is a preconceptual thing. Yeah.

46:20 Mark: Yes. So we cannot coherently doubt the existence of the external world. That's part of it. But more specifically, she says that any argument that you're making against the senses always uses the senses in the argument, if you put the stick in the glass of water and the stick looks bent and you say maybe all of our perception is screwed up in that way. Well, you're relying on perception. You're relying on you seeing the stick in the water and being able to report on the colors and the shapes and things. So she thinks that by itself is enough to make it so. Skepticism of that sort doesn't make sense.

46:52 Wes: Or in the case of dreaming, if we were always dreaming, then there's no coherent distinction between dreaming and not dreaming.

46:59 Mark: And likewise, just to raise it up a level, ultimately this is supposed to found an ethics and you already brought up the definition of the human being, that this definition of man as rational animal is supposed to be apodictically true. It's just given by a correct reading of the data of experience. And this in turn will imply a whole ethics and a whole political system. This is the whole point of this book, is to ground the rest of her philosophy that she'd already worked out in these ethical works in the novels and say this is what any reasonable person will come up with.

Yeah, and if you try to criticize that and say, hey, reason doesn't do that. Reason just gets you from premises to conclusions. It doesn't tell you what premises to buy. And it only works in deductive arguments. Inductive arguments always have a degree of uncertainty to them. You know, if you start criticizing reason and say reason is limited, she's going to give you the same argument. She's saying, ha, you're using reason to criticize reason. And that doesn't make sense. That's a contradiction.

47:58 Wes: Well, would she though? I didn't see that because I mean that would be a terrible argument to make. Of course reason can limit itself. It can say it's limited in some ways. There's nothing self contradictory about them.

48:09 Mark: Well, she does say that specifically in the Fountainhead. That that's. She actually gives an argument that's an extension of Nietzsche's master slave issue, that the bad forces, the irrational forces that are ruining society, they want to hold down the talented people. This is, would be right out of Nietzsche. But one of the ways they do it is by denying reason. They don't deny it by just saying reason doesn't exist or something like that. No, they say reason is limited. That's their pernicious, sneaky, underhanded way of then making it so that the Übermenschen, that the truly talented people cannot be sure of themselves. We all have to go around in a state of meek uncertainty and modesty that I could be wrong. She thinks that that is inimical to human flourishing to go around not being sure of the basic things on which our lives rest.

48:57 Wes: The inimical to human flourishing obviously wouldn't be a good argument. But I think the whole reason thing, this is an important point which is that it's not just logical relationship between premises and conclusions. It's this idea that you can determine an essential characteristic. So when you're conceptualizing things, it's not just willy nilly or by whim, a word she loves to use, grouping things together by one characteristic or another. We have this ability when creating definitions to say what the essential characteristic is of something.

And that's the characteristic that is a proper defining characteristic of the concept. I think that's where reason does more than go from premises to conclusions. Right. It allows us to drill into some aspect of the real. Do we agree on that? That her expansion of the notion of reason beyond logic is this, this idea of getting at essential characteristics?

49:48 Mark: Yes. It's not this narrow concept of logic, of formal symbolic logic, but of reasonableness, of being able to look at the data. And if you are clear minded, this is what you will get out of it.

50:00 Seth: When you guys say it that way, you make it sound like it's this Platonic fetishism of reason. But the reality is, if the priority here is on the epistemological, all reason needs to do is be good at discriminating facts into concepts.

50:16 Wes: Yeah, but what does it mean to be good at that? It can't just be willy nilly, right?

50:19 Seth: No, no, of course it's not willy nilly.

50:21 Wes: Like I'm referring to page 23 on the screen, this whole essential characteristics stuff.

50:26 Mark: Read a quote.

50:27 Wes: So she's going through concept formation. Now observe on the above example the process of determining an essential characteristic for concept formation, the rule of fundamentality. When a given group of existence has more than one characteristic distinguishing it from other existence, what we would normally think of as, let's say, other accidental characteristics, man must observe the relationship among the various characteristics and discover the one on which all the others or the greatest number of others depend. That is the fundamental characteristic without which the others would not be possible.

This fundamental characteristic is the essential distinguishing characteristics of the existence involved and the proper defining characteristic of the concept. So this is where I'm saying she's sidling up to the Aristotelian real definition, which she's about to reject. But she's getting awfully close. Right, and this is where I think again, she's expanding the notion of reason. Reason is allowing us to pick out this essential characteristic. It gives us some grasp of reality. And it's not simply willy nilly. Oh, because the mind is organized this way, we're going to put some time and space on this and then organize it according to causality and then do some other tricks and that's how we get experience.

51:37 Dylan: It's a real broadening of the idea of biological natural kinds to all concepts, all thought things.

51:45 Wes: Yeah, except then she's going to say, oh, if you thought I was going Aristotelian on you, I'm not.

51:51 Seth: Well, there's what she claims and denies about herself and then there's what she actually says in the text. She might say she's not going all Aristotelian on us, but she's basically Aristotelian. And so she's just saying, well, but I'm talking about epistemology, not metaphysics.

52:06 Mark: And the fact that you could do that with table. That's her example. And I've even used this in a class repeatedly as an example of something that's really hard to come up with a consistent definition of. And she thinks that this is just obvious.

52:19 Wes: Right.

52:20 Mark: And the cases that I would bring up is, of course, we know what the paradigmatic examples of tables are. But what about like a little table in a dollhouse or a flat surface on a rock that you then use as a table? You know, so this, to me, pointed out that something like Wittgenstein's analysis of concepts is correct, that there are paradigm cases and there are borderline cases. And for some particular purpose, you might say that a borderline case counts or does not count, but there's no fact of the matter. It's just how we choose to use the word. And the normal use of the term is not specific enough to give us a verdict either way on the borderline cases.

52:58 Seth: I would even be willing to grant that there's a fact of the matter if there was some kind of, like, pragmatic way of coming to a consensus. But the idea that you can create a definition is the piece that doesn't. And I'm not saying I want to say there's a fact in the matter about everything, but I totally agree with you that. Sorry, I'm getting worked on.

53:14 Dylan: Well, there's no consensus. The idea that there would be consensus in any kind of pragmatic or provisional

53:20 Seth: way is anathema about table.

53:22 Mark: She does think that tables are created for a specific purpose. And so you have to say that they are of flat surface.

53:29 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

53:29 Mark: That they can fulfill their purpose of holding objects on top of them. If they're in a dollhouse, they can't do that. You'd have to say, this is doll furniture. That's a separate category.

53:38 Dylan: Yeah. Subclassified as a miniature table.

53:41 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

53:41 Mark: But the fact that it's a human, this concept was created for humans to use is enough to lock it in, to have a definitive definition on these things. And I think the same would go then for even biological categories that, you know, why do we care about the difference between two starfish or something? If you're going to make a species division between starfish, there would have to be some analytical upshot, some essentially practical upshot.

54:07 Wes: Reproductive isolation is actually because distinguishing species can be such a Difficult thing that your best bet is reproductive isolation. And even that's not entirely reproductive isolation, meaning they either don't or can't mate with each other. If you have two sets of starfish who have either their populations are distinct enough that they don't mate or they simply can't mate with each other, then you have a distinct species.

54:31 Mark: And I have to be on a population level. Not because, you know, a little tiny dog and a large dog can't get it on practically, but then they could both get it on with the medium sized dog maybe.

54:41 Wes: Yeah. It can be so difficult to distinguish species, you know, through phenotype and the borderline. I mean, if you look at, I happen to be looking at some of this recently, the whole question of distinguishing species, and that is just ridiculously complicated. And the borderline cases, there's so many subspecies and there's cases of separate species that can mate with another. Well, anyway, we don't need to get into that, but it's complicated. She gives us. It's on 37 of my text, this whole objection to the borderline thing. 37 to 38. They mean existence.

Who share some characteristics with the reference of a given concept, but lack others. Certain primitive organisms that biologists are unable to classify. No, not just primitive. Ayn Rand. What these doctrines do demonstrate is a failure to grasp the cognitive role of concepts. That is the fact that the requirements of cognition determine the objective criteria of concept formation. The conceptual classification, newly discovered existence depends on the nature and extent of their differences from and similarities to the previous known existence.

Does anyone understand this?

55:48 Mark: Read the thing about black swans.

55:50 Wes: In the case of black swans, it is objectively mandatory to classify them as swans because virtually all their characteristics are similar to the characteristics of the white swans and the difference in color is of no cognitive significance. So she's going to say, okay, well, if you had a definition of swan that included white and then you came across a black swan, just get rid of white. It wasn't really a defining characteristic. I guess that's the answer.

56:13 Dylan: She says in the case of existence, whose characteristics are equally balanced between the reference of two different concepts, such as primitive organisms or the transitional shades of a color continuum, there's no cognitive necessity to classify them under either or any kind concept. Here she's referring earlier to, well, is this shade of red really red or is that shade of red really red? She doesn't have any patience for that distinction and she says the choice is optional. One may designate them as a subcategory of either concept or in the case of a continuum, one may draw approximate dividing lines on the principle of no more than X and no less than Y.

Or one may identify them descriptively, as the nominalists are doing when they present the problem. And then she goes and say the problem is a straw man in the sense that it is a problem only to the traditionalist, realist theories of universals, which claim that concepts are determined by and referred to archetypes or metaphysical essences.

57:08 Wes: Right. Which it sounded like she was doing the Aristotelian version. So now I'm looking at page 26 in mind, where she backs off the Aristotle stuff. So let us note at this point the radical difference between Aristotle's view of concepts and the objectivist view, particularly in regard to the issue of essential characteristics. Aristotle regarded essence as metaphysical objectivism regards it as epistemological. Objectivism holds that the essence of a concept is the fundamental characteristic of its units on which the greatest number of other characteristics depend.

And thus the essence of a concept is determined contextually and may be altered with the growth of man's knowledge. Here we get this whole hedging thing again, where on the one hand, it sounds like real things in the world are the basis of this, in which case borderline concepts. Right. Would be a problem. She's saying, oh, you don't even have to characterize it. Well, what's. We want to know what reality is. What do you mean? We don't have to classify it. But now it sounds like, again, we've sort of retracted ourselves to this sort of Kantian framework where we're talking about knowledge in context.

58:05 Mark: It's a matter of the objective interaction of the subjects with the objects. So that is enough to give you objectivity. Yes, it depends on human purposes, but those human purposes are determined by our nature and by our cognitive faculties. So they are not going to be socially relative to a particular point in history or social structure or any of that.

58:27 Wes: Right. The metaphysical reference of the man's concept is not a special separate metaphysical essence, but the total of the facts of reality he has observed. And this total determines which characteristics of a given group of existence he designates as essential.

58:40 Dylan: So that's a perfect example of a quote that's just loaded with all kinds of implicit claims.

58:46 Wes: It's not clear. In the end, Mark gives the best formulation of that. The idea of taking man's nature in relation to the world, and that looking down from on high at that set

58:56 Mark: of facts, making a claim like that, that a lot of our knowledge is a matter of the interaction of organisms in the environment and what will come out of that in a law like way is not the same as saying that it is objective in the sense of this is the way it would be whether or not human beings were involved. I can't think that most objectivists, when they think about this, aren't considering objective in that stronger, what the Stanford person calls intrinsic way.

59:25 Wes: The naive realist way.

59:26 Mark: Yes, and there are things in here that make her sound like a naive realist. I mean, even just that very beginning. So just to return to that point of all consciousness is consciousness of something, therefore naive realism is true. If you've listened to our other episodes, that has been a fundamental tenet of people of vastly different metaphysical stripes. To say all consciousness has an object is not to make a metaphysical claim is to make a claim about the structure of experience itself.

59:53 Wes: Right.

59:54 Mark: It's not to say that there really is for sure then a world out there. It could just be that everything is still an idea in my mind, but the idea is structured such that it has an object part and a perceiver part. A noesis and noema, if you will return to Edmund Husserl.

1:00:13 Wes: Although in that case the idea wouldn't be in your mind. Right. You wouldn't talk about it as being in your mind. The object is not particular to the individual.

1:00:21 Mark: Well, for Husserl, but there's nothing inherent in the doctrine itself that dictates anything at all. Husserl is specifically trying to abstain from any decision about whether there is an external world or not. He's trying to put Descartes question on hold and just talk about how experience seems.

1:00:38 Wes: Right.

1:00:39 Mark: So that argument doesn't work. To say just because it has an apparent object means that naive realism is true. Let's just say metaphysical realism.

1:00:47 Wes: Well, yeah, but she doesn't want to be a naive realist though, right?

1:00:50 Mark: Well, when it comes to specific concepts, yes, all the talk about context applies to concept formation, but it doesn't apply to the brute existence themselves.

1:01:00 Wes: Okay, you're talking about that initial.

1:01:01 Mark: Yeah, yeah. That she thinks that even before you have explicit concepts, there's a stage between just blooming, buzzing confusion that a baby has and having a language. She seems to think in her description in those early chapters that we could. And then presumably dogs could, and other things that don't have language could look at different things and group them together in a sort of proto concepts. That's enough to say that they also recognized the existence of the things before them. They don't question that they're not skeptics and the identity of the things before them. In other words, it might not know your name, but it knows that you are you. The dog or the baby recognizes master versus other people or versus animals.

1:01:44 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, she uses those exact examples. That's how she would argue that a wolf knows to kill deer and doesn't confuse itself and start eating the bark off a tree. They're able to identify entities and say that they're the same as each other and stuff like that. It's not that they couldn't be fooled, like with a decoy or something. And that would be just pointing to the fact that they have pretty rudimentary perceptual apparati to interpret what it is they're hunting. I feel like this is a segue into getting into the ethics stuff because of her demand of overarching consistency in her work. You know, the claim that out of this epistemological stance you get a clear ethics.

1:02:30 Mark: Yes. I think this is a great time to move over. And we already pointed out the transitional piece that is established supposedly in this book, this first book, which is that man is a rational animal. That is the thing that distinguishes us from all other beings. And therefore, to live as a man, the virtue inherent in man, and this is very Aristotelian, has to rely on appropriate use of our rational faculties.

1:02:54 Dylan: Aristotle also says that we are political animals.

1:02:58 Wes: Right. This will be important.

1:02:59 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:02:59 Wes: Remember the politics. Right. For Aristotle, the good life is what happens beyond survival and necessity. Right. At the level of the village. Before you get to the city state, you're merely worried about survival. But the whole point of a city state is that more than survival, more than necessity is at stake. The good life is what is surplus to that. And as Aristotelian as Rand's ethics look at times, she's going to ground it in survival.

1:03:28 Mark: Seth, did you have anything more to say about the epistemology before we move on to the ethics?

1:03:31 Seth: Oh, I had a lot to say. The whole thing about how she could go 50 pages before addressing Wittgenstein's argument about use, and then just to dismiss it in one, like one sentence infuriated me. Yes. It's also so clearly a polemical response to certain groups, like there's a major axe to grind, and that's fine, but grind it. Don't passive aggressive it.

1:03:54 Wes: Well, to give the listeners a flavor of these polemics, what you're referring to, Seth, is where she says Wittgenstein's theory that a concept refers to a conglomeration of things vaguely tied together by a family resemblance is a perfect description of the state of a mind out of focus. And that's it. That's how she dismisses Wittgenstein.

1:04:12 Seth: I mean, she basically commits herself to the concept of essential characteristics which can be captured in definitions. And by the way, there's a whole layer on this about propositions and truth values and so forth. But she commits herself to this essential characteristic thing and then doesn't take on the number one critic of this definitional approach just is shocking.

1:04:36 Wes: She doesn't really know what linguistic analysis is or positivism is. She says things about positivism which are just absurd. She associates it variously with relativism. And everything seems to get associated with relativism. And so she doesn't really have a solid idea of what Kant is about or positivism, linguistic analysis, things she's railing against. So it's a sort of weird contemptuousness of something that. And she's talking about definitions, she just doesn't even know the definition of them. She doesn't have the vaguest idea of what these things stand for philosophically.

1:05:07 Mark: Right. For folks that are not familiar with logical positivism or whatever and want to decode or correct her, go listen to our second episode on Wittgenstein's Tractatus, also covered Carnap. And then we had a whole Carnap episode just last fall that I think give a much better idea of what that kind of position is about. And you can actually see how similar Rand's position is to that. The idea of basing everything ultimately on perception.

1:05:33 Wes: She shouldn't hate them.

1:05:34 Mark: Yeah. Yes. One of the appendices, he's considered sort of high level scientific concepts. We've talked about how the term electron might not refer to an actual thing, an electron. It might be a shorthand way of talking about a bunch of experiences. Well, she seems willing to admit that there can be theoretical language that's really of a high level like that, but still it has to just be shorthand for the specific experimental results. And she's going to say, you know, whatever these scientists, they can go and use whatever language that is convenient for them to ultimately talk about the data, but it has to come down to the data.

And I remember, Wes, your big dismissal of that kind of view was that actually it doesn't enable you to coherently formulate a principle by which you would say avoid concepts that don't stick to the data, that you can't actually make the criticism itself without Violating the prescription.

1:06:26 Wes: Yeah. A classic objection to verificationism is that the verificationist principle itself is not a verifiable principle, but that. We've discussed that in previous episodes.

1:06:35 Seth: Yeah, it seems like she has an agenda. She's very hostile to idealism or subjectivism, however you want to characterize it. And the hostility seems to stem from the possibility that having a metaphysical system that requires input from individual consciousnesses will ultimately put you in a position where you have relativism, or at least subjectivism in the ethical sense. So this whole exercise is an attempt to say, no, there are facts. Facts determine our concepts, and these facts are indisputable. And any right thinking person will come to the same set of concepts and presumably the same set of conclusions as any other right thinking individual.

And it's just so clearly what I would call nostalgic. It's this attempt to. I am very hostile to the idea that there can be ambiguity or disputes, that we need to have an absolute authority upon which we can found our conceptual system. And if she just said, hey, you know what? I'm going to go with some kind of quasi Lockean thing where I've got primary and secondary, and these facts exist for things like table and chair. But she says, yeah, table and man and justice, you know, justice is an objective fact.

1:07:56 Wes: Yeah, justice was the easiest one to define.

1:07:59 Seth: Yeah, I know. And I'm kind of. I'm just sort of like. So you realize there's no room here for. For the idea that human consciousness could carve up the world in different ways based on any kind of social or geographical. The fact that she criticized Kant didn't make any sense to me because it sounds like she's kind of like an uber Kantian in a weird way, although a misguided one, and saying, you know, what if somebody in China sees the world one way and somebody in France sees it another way and somebody sees it in America in another way, and we have different conceptual distinctions about the way we break down the natural world.

Let's say, say. So the Chinese distinguish between different species of trees, or they see trees differently than we see trees. Right. Or they have a word for a small clump of trees that we don't, or whatever. One of us is wrong and one of us is right. And you can guess on her account who's the right one.

1:08:52 Wes: Yeah. Although it's important to point out that that sort of social construction thing. I don't think Kant was thinking about that. He was thinking about cognitive construction and the way that neuroscientists think about how the brain constructs reality. But he was all about objectivity. He was trying to save the notion of objectivity. He wasn't trying to destroy it.

1:09:10 Seth: Absolutely, yes, Coherent.

1:09:12 Wes: And this is, I think especially objectivist listeners should know, is rejecting Objectivism or her account here doesn't mean you're automatically a relativist. And these associations of Kant and weirdly positivists anomalous and everyone else with relativism are just bizarre. She characterizes academic philosophy is. It's all just one big cesspool of relativism. And here she's writing in to save the day and bring back the concept of objectivity. No, all these people were worried about saving the concept of objectivity. There are relativists, but it's not a popular, widespread philosophical position. So she uses this idea of the straw man. She's accusing people of arguing against straw man, but that's the big straw man of this essay. The idea that all these things amount to relativism.

1:09:54 Seth: She should be looking for allies wherever she can find them. And she makes it sound like the entire history philosophy is an attack on some position that she holds that nobody else does. And that is clearly not the case, because she wants to fight against some kind of subjectivist, relativist position that may not actually exist, certainly doesn't exist in the caricatured way that she presents it. And I would say your greatest ally in that struggle would be caught.

1:10:23 Wes: Yeah, right.

1:10:24 Mark: That's what makes it so frustrating for academics. It's not that every idea in here is junk. It's just that. Couldn't you say that better? Didn't this other guy already say that much better? Why are we reading this as opposed to that?

1:10:36 Unknown speaker: Why?

1:10:37 Mark: You know, if you want Nietzschean ethics, why aren't we reading Nietzsche? Why are we reading this if we want Aristotelian or a naturalistic version of Aristotelianism? You know, there are many, many other examples, even in the ethical realm. We had an episode on Alasdair MacIntyre, who is a much more palatable option of somebody that's basically trying to do the same thing and come up with an objective ethics out of human nature.

1:11:01 Wes: Yeah. These things are all meticulous and carefully argued, and they don't have the boldness and the sweeping generalizations and the anger.

1:11:11 Seth: Can I read a quote towards the end of the essay?

1:11:14 Dylan: Yeah.

1:11:15 Seth: Man is neither infallible nor omniscient. If he were a discipline such as epistemology, the theory of knowledge would not be necessary. Nor possible. His knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total. But such is not man's nature. Man is a being of volitional consciousness beyond the level of percepts, a level inadequate to the cognitive requirements of his survival. Man has to acquire knowledge by his own effort, which he may exercise or not, and by a process of reason which he may apply correctly or not. Nature gives him no automatic guarantee of his mental efficacy.

He is capable of error, evasion, of psychological distortion. He needs a method of cognition, which he himself has to discover. He must discover how to use his rational faculty, how to validate his conclusions, how to distinguish truth from falsehood, how to set the criteria of what he may accept as knowledge. Two questions are involved in every conclusion. Conviction, decision, choice, or what do I know and how do I know it? This is the enterprise of the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which underlies the foundation and you see in it all the elements of There's a factual world that provides somehow the grist.

And it's up to you, through reason and through correct formation of concepts and development of knowledge, to go find the facts of the world. And if you don't, well, then you're just lazy or stupid or you're prone to error or whatever. So there is a standard. There's this external thing that's available to you if you just exercise your own faculties, and if you don't, it's your fault. There's this structure in place. It's just for you to fill it out. And that just strikes me as the most naive picture of how things could possibly actually work, that I can only assume that I'm terribly in error and misguided.

1:13:09 Mark: You're threatened by the text. That's why you're rejecting it.

1:13:13 Wes: You're one of the moochers, which makes it a good segue to the ethics.

1:13:18 Mark: Okay, whenever you say in any field, every clear thinking person will agree with me. That's an empirical challenge, that you can actually read other clear thinking and intelligent people. And if most of them don't agree with you, either you're wrong or you have to give some explanation of why they would be diverse. Oh, well, because they're diseased in some way. They've been corrupted by, in the case of the ethics, this monolithic culture of altruism that demands that you sacrifice your whole being for other people, that you be a sacrificial animal.

1:13:54 Dylan: It's not like there aren't other philosophers we've read that don't have contempt for fellow philosophers.

1:14:01 Wes: Well, schopenhauer comes to mind.

1:14:03 Dylan: Well, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Descartes, I mean, Descartes in one fell swoop, completely dismisses Aristotle over and over again. It's not that you can't be a philosopher and have contempt for other philosophers. In fact, a lot of them just

1:14:16 Mark: routinely show contempt and didn't read each other carefully.

1:14:19 Dylan: Yeah, but you gotta bring something else to the game. I'm sorry.

1:14:25 Wes: Yeah.

1:14:26 Mark: Well, here's the positive thing. This book, the Virtue of Selfishness, is supposed to put forward her positive contributions, that the rest was just establishing certainty. It was sweeping away the dross. It was saying you other philosophers, you have these floating abstractions that you can't possibly define and that's why you're confused about justice, about ethics.

1:14:47 Wes: What we just spent hours on, that's just foreplay.

1:14:50 Mark: And folks can listen to our episode on Alasdair MacIntyre. And there's the one right before that on the problems with historical attempts to ground ethics that MacIntyre too saw. That all these attempts to come up with an objective ethics, particularly within a naturalistic framework, where you're just looking at the facts of nature, have failed for some reason. And so there has to be some fundamental reconceptualization or in the case of MacIntyre and Rand, the reconceptualization is going back to some portions of Aristotle to connect the is and the ought in a binding way.

1:15:25 Wes: Let's start with the whole survival thing. Wants to ground ethics in survival, right?

1:15:31 Mark: And it's not like Hobbes or somebody saying if we didn't have ethics, we would all kill each other. And so we need ethics as a social thing. No, she says, in an individual level, each of us has the drive to survive and that is why we need an ethics. That animals rely on instinct, but we are sort of poisoned. And this is very Nietzschean. Because we have self consciousness, because we have this extra human thing, it's actually an affliction in the way it acts in some people, that it distracts us from our natural instincts to survival and can just turn us to all sorts of goals and values that are irrelevant from our survival.

That animals would never have wars that would completely destroy each other. Animals would never, to give a Randian example, would never have an ethics that requires that everybody sacrifice themselves for everybody else. So in a very Kantian sort of way, you ask, is this a good ethical principle? Well, if it would followed consistently lead to the destruction of that individual and the destruction of the human race, then it's not a good ethical principle. And she thinks that altruistic ethics fail that test.

1:16:42 Dylan: This is a perfect example of a straw man that she makes. Nobody advocates the kind of altruism that she's talking about.

1:16:49 Wes: Right. Sacrifice ourselves totally.

1:16:52 Dylan: It just doesn't exist. It's like she's 13 years old or something and running around. He said, you want me to give up everything in my whole life?

1:17:04 Mark: I can't, you know. Really?

1:17:07 Dylan: Really.

1:17:08 Mark: Dylan has a 13 year old.

1:17:09 Wes: Oh really?

1:17:12 Dylan: It's just so pre juvenile.

1:17:17 Mark: Let me give her cut you off and give a response which is that there's no practical difference between an ethics like utilitarianism, which says you have to take everybody's interests into account equally when you make a decision and not weight yours anymore. There are so many other people in the world, there's almost no difference between that. Yes, I will count my own interest as one among the billions and saying I won't count my own interest at all. The practical upshot would be the same. And this is an objection to certainly utilitarianism itself.

Does that make sense that if I figure out that it would bring more benefit than harm to the world for me to abandon my family and go work to save starving people in a third world country, I should just get up and do that? And that's a legitimate objection to that. But then she generalizes from that to all kinds of ethics and either her view or this strawman.

1:18:07 Dylan: Look, Mark, you just made it more interesting than she does.

1:18:10 Mark: I was quoting her in three sentences.

1:18:12 Dylan: No, you made it more interesting than she does by simple fact that you presented the possibility of you have a claim, an ethical claim, a rule, and that you come up with a counter example that explains, well, maybe. Is that quite as universal as you think? Does that work out quite the way you want to? You can have this discussion about utilitarianism, you can have this discussion about the categorical imperative, and that discussion is going to involve the ways in which it works and the ways in which it doesn't. And she just goes one fell swoop after another of not articulating and not investigating and reflecting upon these things, and builds extreme versions of every case and takes one strawman after another. It's absolutely infuriating in this respect. This is why in this kind of thing I was just utterly confirmed in every prejudice I've ever heard about her there.

1:19:08 Mark: Let me read a quote. So page three of the Objectivist ethics here, the avowed mystics held the arbitrary, unaccountable will of God as the standard of the good and as the validation of their ethics, the neo mystics replaced it with the good of society, thus collapsing into the circularity of a definition such as the standard of the good is that which is good for society. This meant in logic and today in worldwide practice, that society stands above any principles of ethics, since it is the source, standard and criterion of ethics, since the good is whatever it wills, whatever it happens to assert is its own welfare and pleasure.

This meant that society may do anything it pleases, since the good is whatever it chooses to do, because it chooses to do it. And since there is no such entity as society, since society is only a number of individual men, this meant that some men, the majority, or any gang that claims to be its spokesman, are ethically entitled to pursue any whimsical or any atrocities they desire to pursue, while other men are ethically obliged to spend their lives in the service of that gang's desires. This could hardly be called rational. Yet most philosophers have now decided to declare that reason has failed, that ethics is outside the power of reason, that no rational ethics can ever be defined, and that in the field of ethics, in the choice of his values, of his actions, of his pursuits, of his life's goal, man must be guided by something other than reason, by what?

Faith, instinct, intuition, revelation, feeling, taste, urge, wish, whim. Today, as in the past, most philosophers agree that the ultimate standard of ethics is whim.

1:20:29 Wes: Wrong, wrong, wrong.

1:20:31 Mark: And the battle is only over the question of whose whims one's own, or the societies or the dictators or gods, Whatever else they may disagree about. Today's moralists agree that ethics is a subjective issue and that the three things barred from this field are reason, mind and reality. Have you ever wondered why the world is now collapsing into a lower rung of hell? This is the reason if you want to save civilization. It is this premise of modern ethics and of all ethical history that you must challenge.

1:20:57 Dylan: I'm glad Mark read that much of it, because we read some quotes from the Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and you don't really get her ranting.

1:21:10 Wes: Not ranting, randing.

1:21:12 Dylan: Yes, you could imagine her being persuasive in a kind of Mussolini type way, or standing at the podium in the den of iniquity at some university banging at it about how this is where the world has failed because all those philosophers fucked it up, Right?

1:21:34 Wes: What's ironic is it's her philosophy should be called sentimentalism, not objectivism.

1:21:39 Dylan: Yes, because that's exactly right.

1:21:41 Wes: Really, it's the fundamental ground of it is sentimentality, and that's the way her novels are. And it's this sort of need for simplicity and certainty. That said, I'm not sure we've given much of a characterization of her ethics so far. So her theory is that she's rejecting this idea that there's a distinction between odd and is the classic Humean division between odd and is where you can't derive a normative conclusion from a set of premises that are simply descriptive and not normative. Listen to her Hume episode for that. So she thinks she does that by grounding the concept of morality in that of an organism's life, which is to say what's moral is just what's required for survival.

What furthers life is good and what threatens it is evil. So the fact of a living entity's existence and its function make its own life its quote unquote ultimate value. For lower organisms, this is kind of. So their values are sort of automatically determined, right? They just, it's stimulus and response. But that becomes less automatic in higher organisms and ultimately in human beings. Our values aren't simply obvious. They have to come about through thinking and choice. And this is where Rand gets into deriving specific values. And here she shifts and talks no longer about simply survival, but she grounds the ethical and quote unquote method of survival proper to a rational being to man qua man.

And the two most important values that she derives from the fact of the survival qua rational being is thinking and productive work. These are the sort of of values that fall out of this that she thinks she's deriving from survival qua rational. And then so if you come along and you said, well why not use force or persuasion basically to get what you want from the people who are doing the producing and the thinking, why not simply might makes right at its lowest level or by simply being a follower, let's say imitating others. And so this is where the survival qua rational is important because it's not enough simply to survive by any means possible and in that case live as an animal might live, you have to maintain your status as a rational human being.

So to lose that is sort of to be destroyed anyway, even if you're technically alive. So that's what she'll use to say that this use of force is not allowable. Her other argument here is that that tactic is simply ineffective, at least to self destruction. Because for a little while you may be able to get along by using force or imitation or persuasion, but you ultimately you're just following blind chance so if you end up, for instance, following the wrong leader, you're screwed. It's not really effective for survival in the end. After that, she gets into more specific virtues and also discusses happiness and her antipathy towards altruism.

But that's the basic sketch of how she thinks she gets from survival to something normative.

1:24:49 Mark: Right. This has the initial appeal that it's at least based in human motivation. That with Kant's ethics or some other ethics, you might say, okay, I figured out what, according to the standard, is moral, but why should I do that? And that question doesn't come up for Rand because it's built in the human motivation. It's entirely built out of human motivation. It's not an external standard that is imposed upon our motivation. It is our motivation as individuals. She thinks if we think about it carefully and reflect.

1:25:20 Wes: I don't think so. I think that's a subjectivist position because. Right. She rejects desire. Desire is not a moral standard of any kind. And so it's not that we desire to survive, it's just that that's what we do. The fact that organisms are geared that way towards survival, independent of their individual subjective destruction, desires is what grounds it.

1:25:40 Mark: Well, it's complicated. The relation between desire and survival is similar to the relation between pleasure and pain and survival. In one point, she wants to sort of equate these two or say, really, pleasure and pain are, of course, evolutionarily things that are in the service of survival. And she says the physical sensation of pleasure is a signal indicating that the organism is pursuing the right course of action.

1:26:00 Wes: Right. That's for lower organisms, what she calls lower organisms.

1:26:03 Mark: Yeah. Okay, but this is sort of where it comes from genetically. It's the fact that we are complicated and reflective.

1:26:09 Dylan: We're rational animals.

1:26:11 Mark: Yes. Well, what constitutes our mental health, our good, our flourishing, is not only going to be more complicated, but the fact that we have reflection means that we are able to screw it up in a way that animals can't. That if they follow pleasure, that is really all the good that there is for them. And you might want to dispute that and say, you know, you could overfeed your pet like crazy and it will eat enough that it will die because of its poor health.

1:26:36 Wes: Yeah, but she doesn't relativize anything to a good. I mean, you can read her as a teleologist and put all that in there. But I see her more as a Sam Harris, where she thinks she's deriving the normative from purely descriptive facts. If you read her as A teleologist. You're no longer performing that derivation, right? Because you're just building the normative into the fabric of the world. And you're saying, when I give an empirical description of an organism and its function, the good is part of that description. So I don't move in that case from a non normative description and to normative conclusions and screw up.

Hume. Hume just assumed that teleology was out the window for Aristotle, right? You want to say there are these ultimate ends. What's good for the organism? Well, being or happiness, or however you want to describe it. And then that's the goal. But she doesn't do that. And she explicitly rejects happiness as the ultimate end and explicitly rejects this.

1:27:30 Mark: It is the ultimate end, but it is not the standard. She wants to distinguish those.

1:27:35 Dylan: It's an end for which the pursuit

1:27:37 Wes: of happiness says it's the purpose, not the end. Yeah, the purpose of ethics, but not the standard.

1:27:42 Dylan: It's what falls out.

1:27:43 Seth: Right?

1:27:43 Wes: I mean, it's definitely not an end in the teleological sense. It's a fallout. It's a byproduct.

1:27:48 Dylan: Yeah, this. I'm gonna have to have you guys fill it out a little bit for me because I can say the words, but I don't get how exactly supposed to work. That reason is its own guide and involves choice, but it's somehow forming its own standard in itself, the standard of reason. It's not that you judge things and make choices so as to optimize happiness. It's not like there's a theory for how to maximize your flourishing. It's that if you do everything by way of reason, you will do that.

1:28:18 Wes: She makes that shift from saying survival right is the ground to survival qua rational. Which then means to me that she's sort of smuggling in some concept of the good. And that's an obvious question. Why is survival? What about quality of life? You know, what about happiness? Those are the first questions that come to mind. And when she says survival qua rational, it sort of tends towards an Aristotelian position. Because, of course, rationality for Aristotle will turn out to be intimately connected to flourishing. There's got to be a reason. You say, why not survival qua base animal? Why not say, yeah, I have a reasonable part, but screw the reasonable part, I just want to live like an animal.

1:28:58 Dylan: She uses this language of if you don't do this, you will cease to be a human being. You'll become an animal. But by that rhetoric, she means you will be only a shadow of what your true self is.

1:29:11 Wes: She's implying being an animal is bad and being rational is good. So she smuggles that in. Yeah, for us at least.

1:29:16 Dylan: Yeah. But what's not clear is in the end, what it means. You do so in Aristotle, you might have, well, man is a rational animal. And then you go along and you talk about what the virtues are that lead to excellence. And many of them are a consequence of our rationality. They are ways in which we maximize our flourishing because we are directed towards the ends that we are and we use all of our potentials, one of which is our rationality. She considers rationality itself. She says rationality is man's basic virtue and the source of all of the other virtues and the man's basic vice, the source of all his evils is the act of unfocusing his mind, the suspension of the consciousness, which is not blindness, but refusal to see, not ignorance, but the refusal to know.

I guess I found myself just regularly distracted by the rhetoric in this case because I could get as far as what Wes was talking about, that it's survival qua man. So you avoid the will of the stronger. And she is certainly smuggling in some kind of standard. But she resolutely refuses to talk about it. Exactly. Until she makes the jump to saying things like the political philosophy that supports this, of laissez faire capitalism and stuff like that, which just seems to be a jump to me.

1:30:37 Wes: Another way of saying this is just to say the only way to make sense of this is if we read her as a teleologist.

1:30:43 Mark: Right.

1:30:44 Wes: And she's saying this is the good, this is what's good for us.

1:30:47 Dylan: But she's not doing that herself.

1:30:49 Wes: What she thinks she's doing is moving from non normative facts about the world, these things, you know, are trying to survive, to the normative. And that's why I think she avoids the teleological language, because the teleologist just flat out admits that they're going to introduce the normative at the ground level. Here's what the good is. It's part of the initial description and then we go on from there. She wants to get it from quasi scientific observations.

1:31:14 Mark: I see. When she's talking about life here, this is on page seven of the paper copy. Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself, a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. The way she's talking about life, it sounds like Nietzsche to me, and it's an equivocation. Maybe Nietzsche does the same thing that it's not just fighting for survival, it's fighting for flourishing. Like that's what the urge toward life is that we all have. And it's not a choice. We can't decide that we don't have this. Like if we do decide that, that just means we're sick.

1:31:47 Wes: Yeah, but life and flourishing are two different things.

1:31:50 Mark: Not the way she's using it.

1:31:52 Wes: No, but she's going to abandon mere life, Right? Not any kind of life is good because she's going to say it has to be rational for us. Okay, if we survive merely as animals, then that's the moocher and the person using forest, the non producer. That's still survival.

1:32:07 Dylan: The thug.

1:32:08 Wes: Yeah, the thug.

1:32:09 Mark: But still life is supposed to be what makes the concept of value possible. It's starting. Remember, we're rational animals. We're still animals. So in common with animals, values, teleology are rooted in whatever this thing is, life. And then you're right, she makes it very clear that it can't just be survival because she does talk about happiness as being the ultimate purpose of doing ethics. So that's just a way of saying life is, as far as she's concerned, flourishing. Those are equivalent concepts. The way she's going to use it just for an animal. What flourishing is is just really bare survival and getting as much food in reproductive advantage as you can. And for humans, it's something else.

1:32:50 Dylan: She says that the Objectivist ethics holds man's life as the standard of value and his own life as the ethical purpose of every man. Man must choose his actions, values and goals by the standard of that which is proper to man in order to achieve, maintain, fulfill and enjoy that ultimate value that end in itself, which is his own life.

1:33:10 Wes: Right, yeah, happiness. She's going to identify with a successful state of life, but then she's going to warn against putting happiness first. Right, Right.

1:33:19 Mark: For the complexities in here, I will refer listeners back to our Owen Flanagan interview on Buddhism where we talked about these eudaimonic theories and the problems of defining happiness. When you want to say only virtuous happiness is really happiness. Because she's having all the same problems that Aristotle and the Buddhists and all the rest of them are having.

1:33:38 Wes: Right. But she's going to warn against saying the way I approach ethics is to say what makes me happy and then derive my ethics from that. Her point is that you can derive your ethical principles completely from the concept of survival. And then happiness is a byproduct, which again, all of this comes up in Flanagan as well, on her account, if

1:33:58 Mark: you are truly rational, then you could say, what makes me happy? That's exactly what I should do. So to the extent that you are rational, which means really that reading this what it is to live as a human being, somehow reading it off of existence.

1:34:13 Wes: Here's a quote from page 25 on earthing with happiness. But the relationship of cause to effect cannot be reversed. It is only by accepting man's life as one's primary and by pursuing the rational values it requires that one can achieve happiness. Not by taking happiness as some undefined, irreducible primary and then attempting to live by its guidance. If you achieve that which is good by a rational standard of value, it will necessarily make you happy. But that which makes you happy by some undefined emotional standard is not necessarily the good.

And it's important because she's accusing. She wants to reject these other forms of ethics which she thinks are based on whims. And so she wants to reject the idea that you think about what would make you happy or what would make human beings happy as a guide to ethics. Maybe that's common to virtue ethics and it just depends on how you define happiness. Right.

1:35:07 Dylan: Not to make this more confusing, but she says the basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others. And therefore that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man's highest moral purpose.

1:35:37 Wes: Right?

1:35:38 Unknown speaker: Right.

1:35:38 Mark: In the Fountainhead, she characterizes virtue as living in a way that does not rely, that does not ultimately refer to other people. So it's neither primarily getting satisfaction because other people are around like you really psychologically need them. That's bad. No, you're supposed to be more independent than that. But it's also not getting off from having power over other people and influence over other people that is also being a leech in some way. That ultimately it's finding your value in yourself without reference to other people. I guess that's supposed to follow from what you said about your own life being your purpose.

1:36:13 Dylan: Help me understand how you get through this to not being a tyrant that requires other people.

1:36:20 Mark: You're being a leech if you're a tyrant.

1:36:22 Dylan: How are you being a leech if you're being a tyrant? I don't get that.

1:36:25 Mark: Who Would you be a tyrant over.

1:36:27 Wes: Well, no. Her argument against being a tyrant is that first of all you're ceasing to be rational. There are hints of this, of the kind of Platonic idea that to do injustice is worse than to be a victim of injustice. Right. But this is the version where instead of your soul being deformed by it, you become irrational. So that's one claim. But the other claim is that it just doesn't work. It's self destructive because maybe you'll have power for a time, but it's fleeting. And one of the arguments is that there are these producers in the world. They're the people who are productive.

And that to the extent that you use them and rely on them, whether you're doing that, say as someone who's benefiting from a welfare state or from above, as a tyrant, you sort of milk them for what they're worth and destroy them. And so you destroy yourself in the same way that a parasite would destroy itself by destroying its host. I think those are some of the different arguments. They essentially amount to either you're being self destructive without knowing it in the physical sense, or in the sense of abdicating one's rationality, which is the type of self destructiveness she's most concerned about.

1:37:29 Mark: It's also a matter of personal integrity. And what I mean by that is very much like what torture might say, having a unified self. Certainly if you are bending yourself to other people's will, agreeing with people, if you're being pretentious, you're saying things you don't really mean. Pretty much any form of self dishonesty is a loss of integrity. And the desire for power over other people is one of those ways in which you are losing yourself in other people. You are losing your integrity, according to her.

1:38:00 Dylan: Well, why would you have to desire that power as opposed to just using it? Maybe I've been reading too much Blood Meridian lately.

1:38:07 Mark: I think it's just, how would you go about gaining such power unless you are trying to, Unless you are craving it and doing things that compromise you to do it now, if you are just so awesome that everybody just looks up to you and you have power just because you are influential, because you're so cool, that seems like it would be okay. But if you are consciously trying to manipulate them and get them under your influence and show them how awesome you are, well, that just displays your own insecurity, that is your lack of integrity.

1:38:39 Wes: These are arguments so that she doesn't really make in this, pulling some of

1:38:42 Mark: this out of the fountainhead. But yeah, I'm trying to use that to make the sense.

1:38:45 Wes: But I think the rationality thing works well because we get a lot about someone who's rational, doesn't want what they don't deserve, for instance. So again, this is all about survival qua rational being. And when you become a tyrant, you've destroyed yourself qua rational being. You're in an irrational state because you want and take what you don't deserve. And you're not being productive, which is the primary central purpose of life. And the primary virtue that falls out of rationality.

1:39:16 Dylan: And what you deserve is determined by this idea of trading.

1:39:20 Mark: Yeah, she doesn't really get into that. I don't know that we really can get too far into her economics, partially because the kind of view she espouses is better defended elsewhere. And it's supposed to just naturally fall out from the stuff that we are focusing on. If you believe her basic picture of psychological health, then that leads to the only kind of just state is the one that doesn't interfere with that. That is a minimal state, but that yet protects us from each other's crime. Other people's trying to illicitly influence us, to intimidate us or force us or however.

1:39:56 Wes: Well, first she thinks she derives these values and virtues, right? Reason, purpose, self esteem, rationality, productiveness, pride. And then there's the statement about productive work being central purpose of life. And so I think it's that whole concept of trade is related to producing things. And then in human relationships you're. Well, she says the principle of trade is the only rational ethical principle for human relationships. So it's about only getting what you've earned with your work. That's what reason demands somehow. Granted, all these connections are very loose. She doesn't spell any of this out. It's not really clear how these particular values and virtues fall out of rationality and so on and so forth. But that I think is the idea, right?

1:40:43 Mark: And the argument for rationality, which takes up a lot of this essay, doesn't really work. It really does start with this. Animals have this built in instinct, pleasure and pain for survival. Humans don't have that. What they have is rationality. If you unfocus your mind consistently, you would not be able to survive. The way that we have to survive is by focusing our mind using our reason. And that gives us the one tool, since we don't have claws or anything like that, that we have to stay alive. So that by itself is the whole argument for why we should live rationally rather than just do whatever we can to live. That argument is clearly not sufficient to then give living as a rational being in the whole way that you're describing it.

1:41:25 Wes: Right? If she is making that argument, yeah, that doesn't work, because rationality can't be for the sake of survival, because survival qua rational human being has to be the ultimate end. If rationality were simply a means to that end of survival, then all you'd have to do is show that you could survive in some other way. And people do survive, survive all the time. Tyrants do live long lives. Stalin. It can work. And so in that case, as a particular individual, I don't have to ask what's most effective for men in general. If I think I'm a badass and I can get away with using force, then that's what I do.

That's my survival mechanism. And if I know enough to know that it's going to work really well for me, then I'd be warranted in doing that. The only way to get around that argument is to say no. Even if I'm successful as a tyrant, even if I live a long life and I survived, I didn't survive qua rational being. My rationality went out the window and I lived like an animal. So it was all for naught.

1:42:26 Mark: Even though she says that living as a human is synonymous with living as a rational animal, clearly she's using the notion of rationality in a broader way than mere reasonableness or mere using your mind as opposed to not using your mind. Once you start using your mind and being reflective, then that leads to an art of living. She's actually going to characterize it as figuring out what makes you happy in terms of like measuring your pleasure levels when you engage in various activities. But it's just that she thinks that if we all work to figure out what would be the ideal happiness for us, she still wouldn't want to characterize that as subjective.

It might be particular to me that I have a particular talent and a particular potential. And so I figure out that what I should be aiming for is different than what you end up through. A similar process of introspection should be gaining at. We can do that. But still she wants to avoid saying that it's subjective. It is objective in the sense that it is a fact that if we are given your particular nature, if you are doing that examination with the proper method, then you will come up with the right answer.

1:43:35 Wes: No, what you do for a living is you don't say what's going to make me the most happy? You say, what am I good at doing? What can I survive with? And happiness will come out of that. Because if you said, well, I want to be a doctor, that's really what I want in life. But I didn't have all the skills to evaluate myself and say, no, I don't have what it takes, that would

1:43:57 Seth: be a bad thing.

1:43:57 Wes: And this goes back again. She asked the question, when she's deriving these virtues and values, she says the way you do, the derivation is you ask yourself, what are the essential methods of survival proper to a rational being? This is on page 19. The essential methods of survival proper to a rational being. And those turn out to be thinking and productive work. And then you move on from there.

1:44:18 Mark: Right. So when you're getting more specific within that, what kind of productive work? She doesn't have a doctrine where you have to pick whatever it is that is going to make you the most money. It's that each of us individually has to come up with a hierarchy of things that we want. And then it is an objective fact for her that if you choose to pursue a lower value and sacrifice a higher value according to your own standard, then you are, you're evil, you're doing

1:44:44 Dylan: something wrong, you're living irrationally.

1:44:47 Mark: Yes, exactly. And there's nothing in that that necessitates. I mean, she calls it selfishness. Right. It's the virtue of selfishness. And she does that like Nietzsche. She uses language to be offensive on purpose that to be shocking, to get you to think of something in a different way. Because she thinks she's trying to push you. She thinks the culture is so warped in terms of self abnegation. Right. This is right out of Nietzsche. Nietzsche thought the same thing, was looking at Christian morality, in particular Judeo Christian morality, and saying we have these people preaching that the ideal.

If you are the perfect person and it's like Mother Teresa is our idea or Jesus is the perfect person. Jesus actually dying, he died for all of us. Isn't that setting up a standard that nobody actually would want to follow if they looked within themselves? That's a standard that is unattainable because none of us really want that. And even if we try to do that, we can't. Or we end up miserable or we end up internally incoherent.

1:45:43 Wes: She rejects Nietzsche as well.

1:45:45 Dylan: Yeah, very strongly. Whims.

1:45:47 Wes: This is on page 26. Yeah, right.

1:45:50 Mark: Well that's because she doesn't understand Nietzsche.

1:45:52 Wes: No. Also, but the point is that she's rejecting selfish in the Nietzschean sense. So she says philosophers who attempted to devise an allegedly rational code of ethics gave mankind nothing but a choice of whims. The quote unquote, selfish pursuit of one's own whims, such as the ethics of Nietzsche or selfless service to the whims of others. Utilitarianism. To be fair, her version of selfishness, you know, she's going to call it rational self interest and is not selfishness in the typical sense of just pursuing what I want. It's selfishness in the sense of pursuing my own survival qua rational being. And out of that comes, well, who knows if selflessness can emerge from that. But that's, you know, that's another question.

1:46:34 Mark: Not selflessness, but compassion in the sense of compassion and overflowing. Yeah, we had the same discussion in the Nietzsche episode. If you just go around being polite to everyone because you're supposed to and being nice because you're supposed to, that is going to lead you to be a resentful bastard. Actually, the only people that are authentically cheerful and compassionate are ones that are overflowing really with their own energy, with their own lust for life. And those people have the ability, the capacity, the right to be compassionate to others. And so she does think that the virtuous person is going to have a general goodwill toward humanity. It's just when humanity is being a dick, you don't continue that goodwill. It's not an unconditional love.

1:47:19 Dylan: There's something about this aspect of it that reminds me of individuality, properly understood. Self interest, properly understood from Tocqueville. In Tocqueville, you get some important notion of community that comes out of the proper understanding of one's own self interest. That just tells me that. But behind a lot of this is a kind of mud of traditional American founding politics.

1:47:44 Mark: Locke, Tocqueville, the connection between rational self interest and the economics is all straight out of lock.

1:47:52 Wes: And then also of course, the invisible hand in Adam Smith's wealth of Nations. The idea that out of self interest there's an emergent property of it's good for everyone.

1:48:02 Mark: It's just funny that in the Locke discussion we kind of concluded that the only way that Locke's argument basically justifying private property made sense is if you take him at his word, that there's a God dictating natural laws. So Rand can't rely on that. That's symptomatic of another aspect that is part of the rational selfishness, which is she has a very Traditional American notion of individual rights, which isn't something that would come out of an Nietzschean view at all, just from the fact that a code of ethics comes from each of our reflection as rational beings on ourselves and trying to live in a way that is internally coherent, which necessitates recognizing some reasonable ways of dealing with each other.

So right out of that is supposed to come the idea that everybody has individual rights, which all amount to things that the government is not allowed to do, or not even just the government, but nobody is allowed to infringe upon you in certain ways. Natural rights is a notion that was invented by theists. We have these natural rights because they are God given natural rights. God has said that we should not be interfered with in this way, but instead it's going to be just, no, no, rational nature. Man's rational nature itself says that we should not be interfered with in these ways.

1:49:22 Wes: It's also, I was reminded of Kant here to the extent that you try and ground morality in mere rationality. So for Kant, the moral must come from the autonomy of the will. And that means that you can't will something that's going to set up conditions that undermine what you've willed. Right. It has to be internally consistent. And ethics is supposed to fall out of that consistency. It's really an ingenious way to do that. And so you see that here. So for Kant, it's the survival of the specific maxim, right? That's what's at stake. It's a kind of survival. The maxim perishes when it becomes inconsistent. And so that's what made me think of that. And reading the survival of the rational here with Rand, right.

1:50:05 Mark: She's trying to make it more literal that really just imagine if humanity pursued this. If you want to say, is it okay to be a moocher? Well, what if everyone was a moocher? Then we would all die because there'd be no producers.

1:50:17 Wes: Exactly, exactly.

1:50:18 Mark: A Kantian example, but taken very literally, exactly where we had said in analyzing Kant and trying to figure out how to make sense of the categorical imperative that you couldn't be literal like that, that doesn't properly make sense of what it is to universalize a maxim. Because there are plenty of things that you could universalize literally. Like what if everybody is a moocher one tenth the time? Well, okay, we would all survive just fine if we were all moochers 1/10 of the time. You know, as long as we weren't all moochers about the getting food part.

And that was the 10, you know, as long as we were inconsistent about which parts we're moochers about. Yeah, if you're going to do any kind of universalization thing, it can't be that literal. It can't be the way she's describing it. Anyway, we all want to, just because of the society that we're in and the intellectual climate that we grew up in. Think. But yeah, it's reasonable for people to have the kind of civil rights that we think people are entitled to. That's reasonable. Right. But reasonable in that sense. It doesn't mean justified, that just means it.

It's what we're used to and it seems reasonable to us given the climate that we're in. But the concept of a natural right is just notoriously hard to give a foundationalist argument for, unless you draw on God. And it doesn't seem successful here any more than it is in some other version of Locke.

1:51:37 Wes: Right. She's trying to figure out how to protect the producers and make sure that if the producers play by the rules of a certain capital game, they don't get screwed. So that's why she's against might makes right unless it's within this very narrow set of rules. You need the concept of rights and you need something that looks like altruism towards the producer. Right. If I'm big and strong and I can just take your property and I don't do it on one level, that looks like altruism. And that seems to be what she's advocating. So she doesn't lose the might makes right, she just restricts it to a certain domain.

And this is one of the criticisms of we embrace the idea of meritocracy, but a meritocracy is just another sort of might makes right system. No, it's not because I was bigger or stronger, but I was smarter or I was better looking or something like that. And yet we seem to think that we deserve what we get. In that case, we wouldn't deserve it if we stole it or if we had the skill to take it violently. But somehow, if we have the skill to take it by being what we see as productive, then that's okay. But on one level, that's still a kind of might mix.

Right? Right.

1:52:43 Mark: Well, it comes down to consent that you're not exploiting someone else according to this view, if they're consenting to it. And it doesn't mean that they have to have attractive choices apart from consenting. So if you're rich and you're offering a very Low paying job, but that's all that's available, or that the other producers are offering similar low paying jobs. Well, if you really as a worker felt like that is going to be against your fulfillment, you always have the choice to I will not be employed by anyone else. I will make it on my own somehow. I will use my talent to start my, you know, pull myself up by my bootstraps. Something like that. Well, we shouldn't go too far down this road because this is just getting into the ripping on, laissez faire capitalist stuff that is not even in the readings we looked at. It's just that we know this is part of her motivation.

1:53:34 Wes: At the end she does mention laissez faire capitalism, actually.

1:53:37 Mark: Right, right at the end of the article. Yep.

1:53:39 Dylan: But it's in the context of the whole article, which is sort of one concatenation after another of claims which we've been spending time showing how one might sort of make sense of them individually and fleshing them out. It bears repeating that none of this is done in her article.

1:53:57 Wes: Yeah, she has this idea that philosophical ethics traditionally is not tried to ground morality, that it's subjectivist. And she associates, for instance, she talks about intuitionism as if it's one of these things. But you know, clearly she doesn't even know what intuitionism means because that's actually an attempt to objectively ground morality. Right. And say there are non natural properties. Yeah, exactly. Non natural properties in the world and we intuit them and it's a moral realist type of theory.

1:54:28 Mark: She just doesn't like the word intuition because that's been used by touchy feely people. Yeah, in the Stanford article, actually the first sentence of the aesthetics section in here, Stanford Encyclopedia article, it says Rand holds that our actions need guidance by a vision of the fundamental nature of the universe and of the efficacy of human thought and activity. A vision that can be grasped directly rather than requiring the conscious repetition of long chains of abstract reasoning. Which I was very quite surprised. I have to assume that the authors who are very sympathetic toward Rand, are getting that out of one of Rand's texts.

And it does jive with some of the things I heard on the Peikoff podcast that he recommends every time that people start with Rand by reading the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, by reading the novels, not by reading things that we read. This time you could have people that read the philosophy and that agree with the rational principles as they are stated, but still don't end up having the objectivist mindset that what you're really if you approach the novels first, then you see who it is that's inspired by her vision. So pretty much it's all. But, you know.

Well, he's not going to admit that the philosophy is an ad hoc rationalization. I mean, that is the way that it works in practice. And why Rand has had a foothold is not because of the quality of the arguments in these works we've been discussing. It's because of her, I'm saying, very Nietzschean vision of greatness. Nietzsche thought that the creation of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony justifies the suffering of all the poor people in the society. He grew in the creations of greatness of the producers. That that's really what it's all about. That's what gives the world meaning is individual giant souls.

And if you're not inspired by that, then you're not going to be inspired by the system.

1:56:15 Dylan: The idea of having that the best life is a life of creative engagement, where I understand creative very broadly. Sounds just like what almost every philosopher ever said, right?

1:56:29 Wes: And psychoanalyst. Yeah, right.

1:56:32 Dylan: In that way.

1:56:33 Mark: Okay, great.

1:56:35 Wes: This is why, Dylan, you're a taker, not a maker.

1:56:39 Dylan: I understand. I know.

1:56:41 Mark: Here we are trying to put forth the productive things, the bright side of the readings, and you're just trying to pull her back down.

1:56:54 Dylan: Okay. I just want to know, Mark, since you chose the readings, why we didn't read the Playboy interview?

1:57:01 Mark: I haven't read the Playboy interview.

1:57:02 Wes: I didn't know there was a Playboy interview.

1:57:04 Seth: Did you look?

1:57:05 Mark: Just looking in the bibliography.

1:57:06 Dylan: Yes. 1964, March.

1:57:09 Wes: You just happened to be reading a 1964 Playboy?

1:57:12 Dylan: No.

1:57:14 Mark: the bottom of the Stanford article. It's one of works, works by Rand.

1:57:18 Wes: I just read it for the. I just read it for the Ayn Rand.

1:57:25 Mark: You can find interviews with her, you know, with Mike Wallace. There's a view on YouTube, and it. It does not give you a positive picture. It's one of those ways that it makes it very easy to say what an unpleasant person.

1:57:35 Wes: Yeah, she comes across as really unpleasant in her writing. Angry. And I think you were just getting at is this. It's someone you know. I called it sentimentalism. It should be called sentimentalism instead of objectivism, because ultimately it's someone who. They want to make these bold, grand, simple statements. And she doesn't have patience for fine distinctions. And yet she wants to be a champion of rationality. So she's really just fetishizing rationality, but she doesn't have the patience to actually be rational. And so you get this kind of sloppy pseudo philosophizing. If you just don't have the patience for it, why do it? You're not going to do it very well. If you want to be emotional and grand and elitist and triumphant, why try and combine that in a weird way with rationality? It's an interesting juxtaposition.

1:58:24 Mark: Yeah. It's interesting that she saw academic philosophy as much of a threat, that it needed to be countered.

1:58:30 Wes: Yeah.

1:58:31 Mark: She's got this essay, philosophy, who needs it? And the answer is you need it. I think it was a speech to West Point graduates or something like that. The point is that society is under attack by leftists that are trying to undermine your confidence in yourself, to make you feel guilty about being an American and being a capitalist and all this and make you doubt yourself. And it's important for your self esteem, for your excellence, for you to know enough philosophy, not waste all your time reading Kant, but to read a little summary so you can refute Kant. You know, it's like those Christian pamphlets of, you know, how to respond to objectors. That's how basically all these essays published in this Objectivist newsletter that both of the books that we're reading came from are.

1:59:13 Wes: Yeah, reading. It's kind of embarrassing on a philosophical level because it's someone who's so ignorant of the subject that they're making very basic mistakes left and right and they're not interested in thinking carefully. And it's obvious.

1:59:26 Mark: So what would be a justification? I think that her justification for why not that she's going to say this is why I'm not thinking carefully, but why not to spend more time in it and get sucked into the particular debates and actually try to engage the literature is because she thinks it's a waste of time. It's a rabbit hole.

1:59:41 Wes: It will turn you into a pussy.

1:59:43 Mark: Yes, it's a rabbit hole that you will disappear down into that this endless navel gazing and never making a decision about things. It's all the objections that people generally have against philosophy itself.

1:59:53 Unknown speaker: Yeah.

1:59:54 Mark: That, you know, human flourishing here is going to require action. It's going to require decision. And you can't just make it blindly. It has to be conscious and thought out. Practical decision. But there's a certain level of thinking that is required for that and no more.

2:00:07 Wes: Right. So it's kind of means end thinking. Right. It's more like cleverness and more like figuring out how to succeed and going to real estate seminars. I mean, there's a lot of rationality in a way or thinking involved in figuring out how to achieve certain goals and so on.

2:00:26 Mark: But you can see how it works socially against so many of the old timey social ills. I always had this reaction when I was reading classic literature as a kid. They would assign me some story to read in fifth grade, and it was about like two families fighting each other. And like, can't these people just be reasonable and stop all this? Or people bound by tradition and the tradition is destroying them. Or the adults are not listening to the children because the children in this story, they know what's really going on. Oh, can't everybody just be reasonable? Like all these things that you grapple with at age 10, this simple command to be reasonable, it works pretty well on them, and that's all you need. If you're not disappearing into the intellectual abyss, you're not becoming one of the intelligentsia, which is a dirty word in the Fountainhead.

2:01:16 Wes: Yeah. And this is where, in the Conflicts of Men's Interests article, where she sort of unpacks this whole. There's no conflicts of rational interests among men. There's almost a stoicism to it where you just don't desire what you know you can't have. Right. And it's almost like you can will your way out of any. So that there's no accounting for human psychology and the way people actually work. And the fact that you really can't talk yourself or reason your way out of psychological conflicts or the fact that you have certain desires. It doesn't really work.

It's like the whole Serenity now thing in Seinfeld where you just end up up driving yourself crazy. Serenity now, insanity later. You can say to yourself over and over again, yes, I don't want that because I can't have it. But that's just unrealistic. It's not the way human beings work. There's no respect for, let's say, the softer side of human beings. We're simply supposed to be able to, as rational, responsible beings, overcome any of that stuff.

2:02:15 Unknown speaker: Right.

2:02:15 Mark: She seems to go back and forth. I guess it depends how advanced you are, how awesome a person you are, that she says in some place, desires or feelings or emotions or wishes or whims are not tools of cognition. They are not a valid standard of value, nor a valid criterion of man's interests. So in other words, fuck your emotions, fuck what you feel. You need to just think your way out of this. But then in other places, it sounds like the rational man just channels his feelings in a rational way. That you can just do that. If you're awesome enough, then you have control of yourself.

2:02:45 Wes: Yeah. So if you fall in love with a woman, you or a man that you can have, then if you're a rational being, you would just abdicate that and you wouldn't suffer. And you could give countless examples like that which reveal the unrealisticness of all.

2:02:59 Mark: Well, yes, it's. Speaking of. Her objection to altruism is that it commands the psychologically untenable. And here she is commanding the psychologically untenable. You can't do it.

2:03:09 Dylan: I think it just reveals her deep lack of perception regarding human souls and human beings. There's lots of places you can point, but one place you can point, regardless of whether at the end you completely agree with the solutions, is someone like Plato, where you get a rationalist end. But it's developed as a constant battle between the parts of your soul. And it's a kind of plea for having the rational part of your soul guide the desirous part of your soul. But it's an understanding of what full human beings are like and the kinds of balances and battles that are waged there, and a plea for rationality to act as the guide towards that.

And she is this just say no kind of bizarre mentality, that it's not even as sophisticated as if you understood what the good was, then you would do it. Because having genuine knowledge of the good is its own fulfillment. It's that there's no challenge involved in it.

2:04:14 Wes: Yeah.

2:04:15 Mark: We had this discussion in the context of our last Plato episode. That understanding might not just mean I can assent to and know what all the words mean. It's like understanding deep in your gut.

2:04:26 Wes: Yeah. I mean, in Plato, he gives the desiring part of the soul its due, and you can't simply ignore it or suppress it tyrannically. You have to negotiate with it or get some sort of compromise in the same way that a parent might say, no, you can't have the candy bar now, but maybe ice cream after dinner if you eat your green beans or something like that. So that's a completely different approach.

2:04:47 Mark: Yeah. To read her charitably, you have to put in rationality, not just the idea of cold logic, even though that's what she says, it's not a Mr. Spock doctrine. You also have to impose on it the sort of Nietzschean hero worship that is clearest in her novels, that it's not just knowing the good that makes you pursue the good. It is knowing it all the way down. It is embodying the virtue, being completely at peace with yourself, which sounds very much like a Platonic balance. When you are most at peace with yourself, that's when, yeah, okay, desire is there, and desire and spirit are the fuel that make you enjoy life and that make you motivated to do things at all.

It's not just pure rationality. She says, you know, a computer that couldn't be harmed wouldn't have any interests or values at all. Values ultimately come from our animal nature. The fact that we have to do things to survive, but in a state of human harmony, the rational side of us is completely dominant. Uses the other parts for not negotiating with them, like sacrificing or letting the irrational parts run rampant sometime, but completely harnessing them for the rational side's good, for the good of the whole person. So in other words, we said at the beginning of this that objectivism doesn't mean what you think it is.

Objective doesn't mean having to do only with things that are apart from man's mind. Objective has to do with man's mind interacting in an undeniable, let's say, unavoidable way with the environment. And so here, rationality also doesn't mean what you think it is or what she often says it is. It's not just assenting to true propositions that are rooted through this epistemologically verified process.

2:06:31 Wes: What are you saying it is other than that?

2:06:33 Mark: I'm saying it's like that quote that I gave from the Stanford Our actions

2:06:38 Wes: need guidance by a vision of the fundamental nature of the universe.

2:06:41 Mark: Yes.

2:06:42 Wes: And of the efficacy of human thought and activity. Okay, yeah. A vision that can be grasped directly rather than requiring the conscious repetition of long chains of abstract reasons, reasoning.

2:06:51 Mark: So maybe you're supposed to be convinced of this in the first place through some act of reasoning, But I'm not even sure of that at least. Like, once you get convinced of it, then you should hold it in your mind and internalize it and live it. I think it's more likely she thinks that some people just really naturally act this way because they're the properly functioning human beings.

2:07:12 Dylan: I didn't see any of that level of sophistication in what we read, like

2:07:15 Mark: in the epistemology book. She says the right way, remember, of learning what a concept is, is that you observe all these things in your experience, and then you gather them under concepts, blah, blah, blah, and then you gather those concepts under higher concepts. Pretty much something that theoretically you could do entirely by yourself. You don't need a society or an external language telling you these things. She says a certain small number of children actually will continue to learn concepts that way. And those are the ones that all their knowledge is grounded, and they're the ones that are truly rational and not fucked up.

2:07:45 Wes: Up.

2:07:46 Mark: What most of us do is that even though we may start that way, then we get concepts because we just pretty much repeat what our parents say, we repeat what other people say. And if people ask us to define it, like, well, we don't really know the definitions. We can kind of give the context in which we heard it, but we don't really know what we're talking about. And that is the source of all confusion for her. So, yes, I think she does think that there are these natural people, she being one of them, that just get this on all levels, and that the best that they can do is then to elaborate the tight chain of reasoning between all the levels and then convey it to everyone else and start a school.

2:08:25 Dylan: Okay, well, I didn't get how that related to the way Stanford summarized her claim about aesthetics. I keep coming back to there are interesting points to be made, but I just feel like it's constantly an effort of a kind of apologism about what it is that's valuable, or you could tease out or glean out of this. And it's not that there aren't interesting things to think about, it's that this is hardly the vehicle for doing it. If you want to go and read a sophomoric paper by someone who has interesting things to say that you might want to have a conversation with them about, then go ahead and read this.

But if you want to actually learn something and have someone go through an argument or discuss something with any enlightened or lively thoughtfulness, then go read something else. Go read almost anything else. Maybe go read her novels, maybe that's the thing to do. But don't do that. I didn't read them. I'm just saying that to me, this is an example of somehow she's like a celebrity of some sort who managed to get a certain kind of grip in popular culture and called herself a philosopher and had philosophical aspirations. But you spend more time trying to figure out what she should have meant, if it was actually consistent or thoughtful, than you would spend trying to sort out something that was genuinely difficult.

2:09:55 Wes: Dylan, you said you wanted to have a conversation with her about this. I have Ayn Rand right here, actually.

2:10:02 Mark: I gotta tell you, a week before we were gonna record this, we had started reading it, and we Were emailing each other like, oh, God, I don't think this is gonna be very interesting. I don't know. I actually made some inquiries to try to find an Ayn Rand impersonator to come on here as a surprise for you guys to just show up here with us. I didn't pursue it that far and

2:10:21 Wes: I didn't find anybody. That's one of your linear ideas, an Ayn Rand impersonator.

2:10:32 Mark: There are some out there, are there really?

2:10:35 Wes: There's some comedians in drag.

2:10:37 Mark: I don't know if they're good at. Ayn Rand impersonators. It seems like anybody could do a moose and squirrel must die. You know, just get any woman to do that accent. And that would be a passable Ayn Rand. As far as the comedy world would be concerned. She's dead. People don't know what she sounds like. So Seth just blew off the last hour, didn't I?

2:10:56 Seth: Listened.

2:10:57 Mark: Oh, you're there.

2:10:58 Seth: Yeah.

2:10:59 Mark: See a closing.

2:11:01 Seth: If we substitute the name Aristotle or maybe Anselm for Ayn Rand and you hear the way people talk about Objectivism and about her. If they talk the same way about those figures, you would think they were lunatics. Anybody who calls themselves an Aristotelian or a Kantian doesn't turn it into a monolithic system that drives their ethical and political views. It means they're a scholar of some sort who's sympathetic to some aspect of that thinkers. And it's the fact that there's a fanaticism around her that is a red flag. I think her project was nostalgic and an attempt to find some kind of simplified ground for things because there's a lot of fear and anger.

She says a tremendous number of hostile things about contemporary thought, and it's just very reactionary and seems to me fear driven and naive. I really wanted to come into this and find something systemic and thoughtful, but maybe ultimately feeling like it was flawed for a reason X or for a reason why. And I feel bad because I know anybody who listens to this who's sympathetic is just going to go off on. You didn't read this and you don't understand that. And you know, we try to let the texts speak for themselves. And we were pretty hard on Buber.

We've been pretty hard on a few people. But I hope this is a nail in the coffin on this one. There will never be another PEL Ayn

2:12:43 Wes: Rand episode, Raise, Load, or any cult leader.

2:12:50 Seth: Yes. Next time on the Partially Examined Life, we'll be studying the hand scribbled paper towel leavings of David Koresh.

2:13:02 Wes: And then after that, Charles Manson. Well, for my closing, the initial reading, I felt angry because it's someone who's so ignorant and simple minded and yet they're so angry and confident in their position at the same time. So that's always infuriating. But that said, I think it's remarkable how even this sort of sophomoric attempted philosophy, it can be enjoyable to try and be an apologist for it, to try and relate it to other philosophical theories if it is as consistent and charitable reading as possible. So in that sense, I had fun with it.

I had fun trying to think about, for instance, the use of the concept of survival to ground morality. That in and of itself is an interesting tactic if you can separate it from thoughts of her as an angry, unsavory person. And if you can forget about the fact that she makes no arguments for it. And it's interesting to be brought back to because obviously Aristotle has influenced her heavily. So it's a way of thinking once again about Aristotle and other philosophers and eudaimonistic ethics. In that sense, it was surprisingly not as bad as I thought it would be.

2:14:11 Dylan: I would say that if reading her for people served as a gateway drug into actually reading philosophy, that would be okay.

2:14:19 Mark: All right, for my closing, I have a quote. The history of philosophy is the only philosophy that should be taught in a university. Systems of philosophy are taught only by sects or by individuals setting out to be prophets and to found a sect. I now have a system of philosophy which I hadn't dreamt of then, although the reasons for it lay all in me. But this system is not intended to found a sect and will never do so. It aspires to be only a contribution to the humanities, the expression of a reflective, selective and free mind. George fucking Santayana from Persons and Places. Isn't that a better model?

2:14:53 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting because I thought you were going to say, well, ironically, Ayn Rand wrote that. Yes.

2:14:59 Mark: Didn't you think that?

2:15:00 Wes: Yeah, that would be ironic.

2:15:03 Mark: All right, thanks guys for toughing this out. I know I was sort of insistent that we do this with all four of us on this. And I'm glad that we suffered together. I feel so close to you now. Somebody on the board said that we always end with a unchallenging self affirmation. I wasn't sure exactly what that meant, but it makes you think like Rand.

2:15:25 Wes: They're talking about our closings.

2:15:27 Mark: It was because I posted something about Rand and the guy was saying, wow, it seems like the Partially Examined Life is about just always ending up where you started. Because don't you use everything as an opportunity to rip on Ayn Rand? And can't you just move on to something else?

2:15:40 Seth: Yeah. I think if you go back through our catalog, the first 50 episodes or so are really just our attempts to leverage the history of philosophy and make fun of Ayn Random.

2:15:51 Wes: Yes.

2:15:52 Seth: God. You know, this is this thing where people come to us and they hear one thing and then they generalize. I just listened to that episode number 67, and you guys always do this. You're right. We always do.

2:16:07 Mark: We always have Dylan fly out to Maryland and interview a guest in person and have the rest of us on Skype with this person because the person is 80 years old and probably would have trouble. And that's what we're doing again, apparently, for next episode with our guest, Ava Brann, who is a colleague of yours, Dylan.

2:16:27 Seth: Right.

2:16:27 Mark: Who wrote a book called the Logos of Heraclitus. So we're going to be talking to her about that book, which is going to be our Heraclitus episode, because Heraclitus doesn't have any whole books. He has fragments. And if you just read the fragments, you're not going to have any idea what that even means. But Ava just really takes a whole lot of the fragments and just lovingly pets them and looks at all the possible translations lovingly and tries to figure out who all of his influences were based on what little we know of the historical chronology and really tells a compelling and coherent story out of these things about the Logos of Heraclitus.

2:17:03 Dylan: He was awesome.

2:17:05 Mark: Oh, so already I know it's Eva and not Eva. And I won't call her Ava Braun, please. I won't make that mistake again as the way I always do.

2:17:14 Wes: Oh, it's Eva as well. There are two differences. Okay. Eva Brann.

2:17:17 Mark: Eva Brann.

2:17:19 Wes: I definitely won't think of Hitler's girlfriend when someone says her name.

2:17:24 Mark: I don't know. She's the right age.

2:17:26 Seth: She's not the right age.

2:17:27 Dylan: She is not the right age.

2:17:29 Mark: People, we are supported by your donations. Please go to partiallyexaminedlife.com make a contribution. Big donors since our last recording have included Lucille Lawless, Robert Henderson, Amir Zaki, Amy Hamilton, Jason Stabil, Patricia Cook, Ken Daly, David Whittinghil, Paul Maynard, Michael Langley, Michael Ward, Evan Landlaw and Suzanne Arthur. They gave jointly Adam Balch, Carmel Sutcliffe, Mark Hoefling and Sean o'. Brien. Thank you to all of you. And to those smaller donors, many of whom signed up to be $5 a month members of the Pel Citizen site, the Pel Sect. Other folks who are cheaper like to just go on our Facebook group. Why don't you do that? Go follow us on Twitter, go read partiallyexaminedlife.com our blog where we give you things nearly every day that you will just fucking love. Maybe that's the self affirmation he's talking

2:18:21 Wes: about is the plugs, the profane plugs.

2:18:26 Mark: Speaking of Lucy Lawless, I want to thank her and some other musicians, Eric Schuman, Steve Petrinko and David Roof for help with the song that you're about to hear written in light of my preparation for this episode. Check out the blog if you want the story. But in short, I did get the impression for Rand's whole project, and her hostility towards spending too much time reading philosophers she didn't like had to do with her chronologically being of the existentialist moment. You might say she saw that we all have a limited time on earth, and in light of that, every decision we make about what to do with our time should be made economically and rationally. Good night everybody.

2:18:56 Seth: Thanks guys.

2:18:57 Unknown speaker: Good night. Good night. Don't have a bucket list. What the hell does that mean anyway? You can't collect experience, it just flows on through. But yes, I'd like to travel and sure, I'd take a class with you. I think I've got a life's worth of time saved up. Let's do it, do it. Are there some things we should do before we die? Things we should say and show? At least try. I don't wanna think about it I don't like to talk about it I don't like to measure out my life because it's overflowing don't wanna live without you, don't wanna die at all. You know I hate cliches and love and death are the biggest ones but there are things we should do before before we die.

Things we should get around to before we die. Of course you know I love you Although there's always some regret that language always fails us but it's enough I guess Can I ever really show you that you own me heart and soul? You are my inspiration you got me through and through Things we should say and do before we die. Things that we got to dream for at least try, try, try

2:20:51 Dylan: Part of

2:20:52 Unknown speaker: being wide awake is dealing with God's

2:20:55 Mark: big mistake and trying to take in

2:20:57 Unknown speaker: everything we can together but it's never never near enough Whatever we may do however hard we chew on life I know why we lose you keep Let the things we should do before we die My Even if dwelling on continent makes you cry my mind these are some things we should do before we die what? What things we should say and show at least try try thank you dear for listening and being all my bl. We'll deal with the inevitable Try to be okay with these are the things we should do before we die My my these are some things we should do to behold My these are some things we should do before we die. These are some things we should do before we die.