Ayn Rand and the Intellectuals

HATING WHAT THEY DON'T UNDERSTAND Liberal intellectuals (almost a redundancy, that) hate author Ayn Rand.

They don't just dislike her, they hate her with a passion. The reason? Because she has single-handedly come up with a logical and reasonable philosophy that strips them bare and reveals all their scams and schemes so that people who know her philosophy (Objectivism) automatically spot one of their scams from a long ways away.

They don't subject her to the usual mild criticism or "shunning" to which they subject liberals who say something "slightly different" from "the norm." Their treatment of Rand and her works is visceral and vicious. There are many who merely dismiss her philosophy with the wave of a hand. But they cannot explain why they feel the way they do. If asked for a reason for their opposition to Objectivism, they can't answer and launch into a personal attack on her that amounts to a "fact-free opinion."

If you point out the fact that Objectivism is a "philosophy of reason," they deny the existence of reason. If you point to the logic of Objectivism, they say there is no logic. Then they go on to tell you that "there are no absolutes." Of course, they don't even notice the fact that their very statement is a "statement of an absolute," and negates not only their entire philosophy, but the very statement they have made as well. I love being a proponent of a philosophy that allows me to "shut down" those who disagree with it so easily and completely, and with their own words.

I hasten to say that I do not accept all of Rand's opinions and that I am not an Objectivist. I am a "student of Objectivist philosophy" and am still learning all its facets. That could change later, although I don't think I'll ever agree that abortion is a good thing and that there is no "higher power" although I may not see that "higher power" the same way other people do.

One professor said Rand was a "phony libertarian" who wanted to strip communists of their citizenship. She did not. In fact, she was one of the few people not on the Left who opposed the violation of the rights of communists and said so, in print. She said that stripping them of their rights "is an invalid means of opposing communism and that the proper way to oppose bad ideas was with good ideas."

To show you just how visceral and violent their hate is, there is a story told by Ronald Merril, in his book, The Ideas of Ayn Rand, where a woman's boyfriend was horrified when he saw her reading Atlas Shrugged and grabbed it, throwing it out the window. She watched as the gardener, upon seeing the title, threw it down and ran over it repeatedly. This is an excellent example of the violent reaction that her ideas often get from people who have never really investigated them, but have listened to what their liberal friends have said about her and her works. But again, if you ask them precisely what they don't like about her and her work, they can't answer and usually sneer some personal attack upon her.

That's one of the criticisms that is most often hurled at Objectivism and its creator, that it is a "cult" that does not allow any dissention. That people have been, in effect, "excommunicated" for disagreeing with it in the slightest way. There is a certain amount of truth to that charge, but it only applies to the personal "circle of friends" she laughingly called her "collective." Rand wasn't perfect, although her mistakes are tiny when put alongside her ideas, which are destined to change the world, and already are. She did insist on complete agreement among those people and shunned those who disagreed with her. But that does not apply to those who believe in, and use her ideas to guide their lives, as I do. That's not a "cult, nor is it a "religion."

Objectivism today has two major factions, about even in strength. One faction is run by her "philosophical and financial heir, Dr.Leonard Peikoff. Peikoff was a member of her "collective" and, in my opinion, is an "opportunist," who took advantage of Rand's fall out with her original protégé, Nathaniel Branden and took over her fortune as well as the "mantle" as "The Voice of Objectivism." This faction, running the Ayn Rand Institute, and claims to be the only source for Objectivist information and ideas. But it is this group that operates somewhat as a cult in that Peikoff's contention that Objectivism, as Ayn Rand proposed it, was, and is, complete and not subject to any changes. To be an Objectivist to him, is to accept everything Rand said, as "gospel" and not deviate from it in any way. It is this which gives rise to the "cult" accusation.

But there is a second faction, run by Objectivist philosopher David Kelley, who started and runs the Objectivist Institute, a competing organization whose view of Objectivism is that it is not complete, and can be improved. It is this group who are not, and never will be, "cult-like." If you wish to associate with this group, you will never get any static whichever way you believe.

It is this division in "the ranks" that caused a severe setback in the acceptance of Objectivism for years. This division was worse than that created when Nathaniel Branden left. But the Objectivist Center has had a strong influence and the acceptance of Objectivism as an excellent guide for your life is rising again, as it must, because it is the only logical philosophy there is.

You may not agree totally with the basic tenets of Objectivism, but here you will not be met with a cold silence if you dare to suggest change. In the Objectivist Institute, you will be welcomed and your ideas debated respectfully. The concepts discovered by Objectivists are not subjective, but the final word on the details of Objectivism may not have yet been discovered. You might be the force by which we can improve the philosophy, no matter what Leonard Peikoff might say.

If you're still "drifting in a sea of opposing philosophies," and you don't know why what's happening in this world is happening, this philosophy will help you to understand. Things will become clear to you as never before, and you will be able to, as my older brother Bob said many years ago, "read between the lines" and be able to figure out why people do as they do. What brought me to Objectivism is my inability to understand why people like Nelson Rockefeller, who had more money than he could spend in three lifetimes, supported collectivism even though it was intent on taking his money away (If you want to know the answer to that, e-mail me).

But this philosophy answered most of my questions and therefore, I can follow it for the most part because it's a logical philosophy and its opponents can only stupidly deny the existence of logic to oppose it. They cannot give coherent answers as to why it is bad, so they make things up. If you want to know the truth, go to the source: The Objectivist Center.

No matter what system of morality and ethics you evolve, it's ultimately going to rest on premises that must be taken as axiomatic because they are fundamentally unprovable, and objectivism is no different than any other system in that regard.

Actually, I disagree. They are not fundamentally unprovable, they are self evident and all further constructions rely upon them for their existence. Their proof is that they cannot be dispensed with. For example, morality or ethics presume the concept of choice. You can prove that choice exists but you cannot reduce any further than choice. If there is no choice, there can be no morality or ethic, since there would be no way ‘choose’ a higher value, namely life over death. Thus the error of the following:

Thank you for your taking the time to explain the subjectivity of objectivism.

Then the following:

I'd say that on the underside of what we take as "axiomatic" in any philosophy or religion are subjective decisions.

See, ‘decisions’ implies something to choose between, or there would be nothing to decide. You can reduce decisions to choice but can go no further. Even the concept of ‘value’ requires the ability to choose one thing over another that contributes to life. Rocks compared to food.

The rest of this isn’t worth (value) taking time (choice) to respond to. For example:

"Relationality" may not be in the dictionary, but from what I see, it is the most essential aspect of being, more essential than knowing, I think.

Now, how can he know there is anything other than himself to relate to, if he doesn’t know anything? Hierarchy of conceptual develop is violated here. I suppose if he rises no higher than an animal, which relate to each other. But to live as a human being, using concepts, knowing comes prior to relationship. He must know himself and know the other for there to be a relationship.

And thinking this, I think that our identity as a relational being is determined by how we relate with what and whom we relate with.

See? All this knowing, how, who, what. He’s thinking about all this, conceptual symbolism. How can one have an 'identity' to relate with without first knowing it? Behind it all is choice. Do I choose to eat a rock? Do I choose to steal her food? Do I jump off this cliff?

Somebody put this guy through a logic course please.

Thank you so very much, betty boop, for your always wonderfully insightful posts! Truly, I wish I could follow these threads and comment more, but I’m leaving town in the morning and won’t be back till next Wednesday. Sigh… But I do want to make a few remarks:

I have very much enjoyed watching general_re on this thread use the adverse party’s statements to arrive at the conclusion that Objectivism isn’t - objective, that is.

Likewise, I’ve observed exmarine on several threads over several months, use the adverse party’s statements to show that morality is either absolute, from God --- or relative, in which case mine as a Christian is just as good as yours as a “whatever.”

I’d like to take the two points and shuffle them together like a deck of cards to illustrate that any governance based on moral relativity is no better or worse than the "law of the jungle."

That is why I aver that whether it is Marxism or Objectivism or some other "ism" – any time the scope of a governing philosophy has been narrowed to metaphysical naturalism – the result will be a disaster of tyranny or self-gratification, or both (depending on who is the "alpha male" in the structure.) Very "law of the jungle" in my view.

I agree with you absolutely that Marx’s theoretical mistake was a ”flight from Reality.”

My argument here can be summarized as follows: 1. Mankind has a source.

Only possible sources are God or the primordial ooze - take your pick.

If I may, those are not the only possible sources. There have been several threads on offered on Free Republic discussing the concept of Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution, or primordial ooze, if you prefer. As far as I can discern, they do not posit that God must be that intelligence. So, we have the possibility of another intelligence as a source of humanity. Might that other intelligence have absolutes? I'll say, yes, it might.

Might another intelligence have begun the creation process, gotten so far, and a second intelligence entered the process and finished it? It's possible. Might the second intelligence have had absolutes? Sure, it's possible. Do I believe that is what happened? No, I don't. I'm just pointing out that the God-man dichotomy you assert is incomplete. There are other possible sources of humanity and each may have absolutes.

Atheists must be moral relativists if there is no god because the only remaining source for morals is "man"

Your statement is simply untrue. If there is no God, there must be another source, or sources for man, as man did not create himself. That source may have absolutes and they may be categorized as moral.

"Thou shalt not kill." It is not thou cannot kill. We clearly can. So why shouldn't we kill? Well, because it will lead to dire consequences if we do. What dire consequences? In the Christian model, loss of eternal life, fellowship with God, those sorts of dire consequenses. In the Hindu model, having another crappy life in your next incarnation, kind of like repeating second grade.

What other dire consequences might be associated with choices that would make them moral choices? I'd say the destruction of all of humanity would be one. If we are here as the result of some intelligent designers that were/are not God, the process of creating us may have included some steps that humans, acting on our free will, could undo. What if that undoing resulted in the destruction of us all. Is that a really, really dire consequence? Yes. Could we do it? In the scenario I presented, yes. Should we do it? I'd say no. It's pretty much a moral absolute to me.

Let's just stick to reality shall we? If you think morals can come from something else, then name it. From what specifically? If you can't name it, it doesn't exist.

I've already given you my moral absolute: Liberty. Its source is the process that created us. In other words, we were created in such a way that liberty is a moral absolute. It is moral because we have the choice of denying liberty. But, if we deny liberty, dire consequences will ensue. Dire consequences always have and always will result from enslavements.

That is what I believe. Don't bother asking me to prove it, it a belief, just as you believe in God but cannot prove His existence.

Your are free, however, to disabuse me of my belief by presenting valid possible situations where enslavement augurs well for humanity.

LW dude! What is! Been missing ya man. Just a moment... o-k, I see no one else has replied to you up to the moment.

g_r: No matter what system of morality and ethics you evolve, it's ultimately going to rest on premises that must be taken as axiomatic because they are fundamentally unprovable, and objectivism is no different than any other system in that regard.

BTW, for purposes of this argument I'm ignoring/allowing a scientist's/logicians's usage of the concept of "proof" here, though it is stricter than common sense tells people to use.

Let's see what you've done here, LW:

They are not fundamentally unprovable, they are self evident and all further constructions rely upon them for their existence. Their proof is that they cannot be dispensed with.

1. By implication, you assume that you and I are persons and not only apparently autnonmous creatures of the imagination of some god in the Dharma, the Kaaba, etc. or perhaps a god who hasn't let on about him-her-itself (and that we aren't merely power cells The Matrix and so on). Thank you.
2. You assume you are a person who understands logic (and I wouldn't say otherwise, of course).
3. More germane, you assume that one can't (shouldn't? mustn't? would-be-crossing-me-if-they-are-disagreeable-enough-with-me-so-as-to?) determine that: there may be truths that one can depend on, even if positivist-limited logic will not show them to be incontrovertible.

For example, morality or ethics presume the concept of choice. You can prove that choice exists but you cannot reduce any further than choice. If there is no choice, there can be no morality or ethic, since there would be no way ‘choose’ a higher value, namely life over death. Thus the error of the following:

Thank you for your taking the time to explain the subjectivity of objectivism.

4. Here's a big one: you assume that there are "higher" values, but you furnish skimpy proof here. My concepts of what are higher values are different than yours. I value the life of God over mine (when I'm being fully sane) and the life of others so much that I may sacrifice my preferences for my life for their benefit. Therefore you assume that my values are incorrect for me, but without a higher source from which to derive your concept of "higher."

So you tell me where in the above you have not depended upon axioms (and I'll do my best to be educable).

Let's see... what else...?

"Relationality" may not be in the dictionary, but from what I see, it is the most essential aspect of being, more essential than knowing, I think.

You seem to have picked another axiom and apparently it is that knowledge (conceptual knowledge as defined in late Western thought) is more important than life. Think back to when you were in the womb. Well, you may not be able to remember, but think of it anyway. What did you know? But then, what and who were you related with? I suggest the facts of the answer to the latter question were more important to you than the answer to the first. E.i., what we are related to and what we relate with, whether we know it or not (by any of the various definitions and standards of "knowing") is more important to us than what we know. This common sense fact has big implications, so objectivists/positivists/naturalists and relativists and everybody make sure you have your seatbelts on and I suggest we meditate upon it.

What else now?

And thinking this, I think that our identity as a relational being is determined by how we relate with what and whom we relate with.

And how about this choice?: What do I permit myself to regard as something I know with certainty (however anyone else defines the word "know," limiting its use like the "knowing police," despite the definitions people have been pleased with over previous millennia... whatever anyone else says about what I may know and how I may know it)? For example, when God tells me that after accepting Eve, Adam "knew" her by a relational choice and set of conditions, what if I choose to believe Him? And if God tells me that He knows me relationally and I sense it in my "inner self" and there is perfect logic based upon it, who says that I may not know what God has told me I know?

Now, I realize that in classic and modern thought, knowledge requires proof, while belief may not, but how do we decide which standard of proof to use, and for what? If I have a mustard seed's worth of faith/belief in something which is not necessarily incontrovertible by standards of logic and by someone else's limited naturalistic evidences, but there is something (which logic cannot disprove) that is most me that can not deny it and its truth relationally, who can say I don't know it? I sure wouldn't.

So here again, all knowing is subject to what actually is (betty boop's Reality) and what actually is, is more important to me than what I may be able to demonstrate conceptually that I know (whether or not I am capable intellectually of doing so) and I may know it when it is True and I relate in complete confidence with it, knowing it for what it is. I think that's how I know "I AM THAT I AM" for who He is.

Somebody put this guy through a logic course please.

As I recall, I took a course by Dr. Besancon in Judson College called something like "Logic and Critical Thought," or "Logic and Semantics." Dr. Besancon was a good professor and the subject material was fun. I got to learn even more about finding fallacies than my life's education had taught me. I may just find another good book on the subject and look into it again. I'm having fun with it again.

But more important than standards of how we might prove and disprove, is how we are related with what, whom, and Whom, in Reality. Rest assured, we will all demonstrate that (whether we or not we know what we are doing).

Since I was the one who originally said that, I suppose I ought to take up the banner of defending it ;)

Actually, I disagree. They are not fundamentally unprovable, they are self evident and all further constructions rely upon them for their existence.

However, the question is, how do such propositions relate to objectivism? And the problem is that, according to objectivism...well, let them speak:

“Man’s reason is fully competent to know the facts of reality. Reason, the conceptual faculty, is the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses. Reason is man’s only means of acquiring knowledge.” Thus Objectivism rejects mysticism (any acceptance of faith or feeling as a means of knowledge), and it rejects skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible).

The problem is that if "reason is man's only means of acquiring knowledge", self-evidence is no longer an appropriate standard of knowledge. After all, axioms cannot be rationally derived from other principles - if they could be, they wouldn't be axioms. We treat axioms as real because of their apparent self-evidence, or because they are useful in constructing our preferred system of morality, or whatever, but ultimately the question of whether they are real is not answerable in any reasonable way - you simply must take them as given.

And that's hardly the end of the problems with that standard of knowledge - by that standard, that says that the notion of certainty being impossible is false, inductive reasoning is rendered illegitimate, since it produces probibilistic arguments, and not certainties. So you're limited to deductively reasoning out truths, but with deductive reasoning, the only way you can be certain that your conclusion is, in fact, true, is if the argument is logically valid and the premises are true - if the premises are false or the logic is invalid, then the conclusion may still be true, but you can't know as a matter of certainty that it is true unless the premises are known to be true and the logic is known to be valid. But in the case of axioms, you may inductively reason that they are true, or you may find it useful to treat them as true, or you may consider them self-evident, but unless you can deductively prove them to be true - as objectivism says you can and must before accepting them to be true - you cannot be certain that your conclusions are true. The objectivist's proposition that certainty is possible in all places and times is thus rendered false. QED.

Their proof is that they cannot be dispensed with. For example, morality or ethics presume the concept of choice. You can prove that choice exists but you cannot reduce any further than choice.

Certainly you can, and in fact, people of a deterministic bent do it all the time by arguing that choice and free will are illusions. Now, for most of us, free will certainly appears to be real, and we generally behave as though it were real, but that hardly makes it actually real - "seems" is not the same as "is", and ultimately there's no way to know if free will really exists if you're even moderately clever about how you construct your argument for determinism.

But then he seems to make the mistake of assuming that because we can't prove truth to complete conceptual satisfaction within the human box, the matter of whether or not someone is outside the box doesn't matter to him.

Well, it doesn't matter to me, because the question of whether someone is outside the box is ultimately a question of where we should start understanding what morality is or should be. I'm a results-oriented kind of person, and so it seems to me that the ultimate goal of morality is to make us better people and to make the world a better place - the question of whether moral propositions are true or not is ultimately less interesting than the question of whether they are useful or not, in no small part because the question of truth does not appear to be amenable to investigation. I could be wrong, but I think I'm pretty well insulated against being proven wrong any time soon ;)

Now, at this point, having laid out my cards, I've probably managed to create a platform that very few people are actually interested in occupying - objectivists will pretty clearly object to my dismissal of objectivism, and if you look at it, you'll probably see that this position is rather dismissive of theistic brands of morality for pretty much the same reasons. Everybody tends to ask themselves "is X true?", and the answer to that question will determine your starting point for what morality is based on and what it ultimately is. But the question of "is X true?" does not seem to me to be fruitful, and so I ask myself "is X useful?"

So really, the question you're asking me is "why is ultimate truth so important to other people?" And for that, I have several answers. One is that the ultimate truth about morality really exists and really is discoverable, and sooner or later someone will hit on it, and that humans have an instinctive sense that this goal is attainable. I tend to doubt that one myself, but I can't really honestly dismiss it either, so I at least consider it a possibility, albeit a rather remote one. The second answer is that people concern themselves with ultimate truth not because it is necessarily discoverable, but because the act of investigating it is itself inherently worthwhile in some objective sense - the act of investigating ultimate truth serves to improve us in some objective fashion, even if we never actually attain it. And further, that we know this to be true and act upon this true belief. I suspect that this will prove to be a rather popular option, particularly since I've seen it expressed nearly verbatim in places.

The third answer is somewhat more cynical, in that humans are concerned with the question of ultimate truth because of what it brings about within them in a somewhat more selfish sense than the second answer. People investigate ultimate truth, whether it is or is not really knowable, because they like the subjective feeling of security and knowledge that it engenders in them - whether consciously or unconsciously, they do it because they like the warm and fuzzy feeling that insider information usually brings. And the fourth possibility that I see is the most cynical of all - people are interested in ultimate truth simply as a means to a preferred end. Consciously or unconsciously, ultimate truth is treated as a stick to beat people with. That's a rather ugly thought, but people can be rather ugly sometimes, notions of morality notwithstanding ;)

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