RoR: Forum

Thank you, Stephen. That feels like a milestone reached. It is the kind of article that I, and many others, tried to create in Wikipedia (can't begin to tell you how many hours were spent there). Parts of the Stanford article I skimmed while I read other sections word for word and my overall reaction is very favorable. I think they did an excellent job.

Post 1

Monday, June 28, 2010 - 8:32am

This is a very long, deep, and "meaty" article which takes its subject quite seriously. It will take quite a few readings to fully process it. Its greatest virtue is the range of topics and how they, by their depth and detail and clarity, refute the ideas that Rand was not a serious philosopher. I've noticed much that is good in the article, on a first reading. My comments are mostly on the first third of the article.

"Her views of past and contemporary Anglo-American philosophy, however, seem to have been based largely on summaries of philosophers' works and conversations with a few philosophers and with her young acolytes, themselves students of philosophy."

How can the authors know this? How can they know what original works she read long before the people in her circle, her biographers, her allies met her?

"A common source of misunderstanding is Rand's use of “selfishness” to mean rational self-interest rather than “disregard for others' legitimate interests,” and “altruism” to mean abject self-sacrifice for others rather than “other-regard”. "

"Fundamental to Rand's outlook—so fundamental that she derives the name of her philosophical system, “Objectivism,” from it—is a trichotomy among three categories: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective...on Rand's view, many of the fundamental questions of philosophy, from the existence of universals to the nature of value, involve fruitless debates over the false alternative “intrinsic or subjective?” in cases where the phenomenon in question is neither intrinsic nor subjective, but rather objective." "

The use of language quote is a good terse statement which can help thinkers avoid confusion. The second point (about the three categories) is vital to an understanding of her philosophy, and is often missed.

"If ethics is the branch of philosophy concerned with practice, then in a sense all of Rand's philosophy is ethics, for Rand stresses “the supremacy of actual living over all other considerations”

It's not 'all ethics', and that kind of loose language is confusing.

"Rand holds a “measurement-omission” theory of abstraction; that is, she regards concept-formation as a matter of grouping items together on the basis of a commensurable characteristic while omitting the specific measurements (e.g., grouping red objects together while omitting specific shades of red)."

If she originated this, she should be given credit. Not merely say she 'holds' this. If not, or if there are parallels, they should be mentioned.

"Rand says little about the metaphysical status of the “similarity” or “sameness” that we identify among such attribute-particulars."

I thought she did in the expanded edition of ITOE, the seminar section at the end, but I'd have to go back and reread it to see.

"..specific identity across numerical difference (e.g. how a specific shade of red applies to two particulars of that shade). Rand's theory of measurement-omission..has little to say about [this] "

Measurement omission itself is the principle that addresses our grasp of that.

"This may be responsible for Rand's puzzling (and offensive) view that the essence of femininity is to hero-worship (not men, but) masculinity"

Don't introduce in a scholarly an unexplained, unsupported personal opinion or reaction as in the first parenthesis.

Post 2

Monday, June 28, 2010 - 1:05pm

I like it so far ...

Monday, June 28, 2010 - 1:08pm

I appreciate your comments on this Phil. The authors’ statement that Rand named her philosophy Objectivism on account of her tripartition intrinsicist/subjectivist/objectivist is incorrect. Rand stated point blank in her 1960 introduction to For the New Intellectual why she named her philosophy Objectivism, and that was not the reason. Closer attention to the totality of Rand’s own texts—the ones she chose to publish—would make for a more accurate representation of her philosophy.

Rand’s most elementary sense of the concept objective is the sense of ordinary parlance. This is the sense she talks of when explaining why she has chosen Objectivism as the name of her philosophy. She credits Aristotle as the first to correctly define “the basic principle of a rational view of existence and of man’s consciousness: that there is only one reality, the one man perceives—that it exists as an objective absolute (which means: independently of the consciousness, the wishes, or the feelings of any perceiver)” (FNI 22). That is the concept of the objective that led to Rand name her philosophy Objectivism.

In 1965 Rand published two refinements of her concept of objectivity. Early in the year, she distinguished a metaphysical from an epistemological aspect of objectivity.

Objectivity is both a metaphysical and an epistemological concept. It pertains to the relationship of consciousness to existence. Metaphysically, it is the recognition of the fact that reality exists independent of any perceiver’s consciousness. Epistemologically, it is the recognition of the fact that a perceiver’s (man’s) consciousness must acquire knowledge of reality by certain means (reason) in accordance with certain rules (logic). (FAE 18)
Later that year, Rand refined her concept of objectivity further. She introduced her distinction of the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective. This was in application to her theory of the good and its relationship to other theories of the good.

By the following year, it was clear that Rand envisioned a broadened role for the intrinsicist-subjectivist-objectivist way of locating her philosophic theories in relation to others. She applied the tripartition to the theory of concepts and universals. Concepts, for Rand, can be objective and should be objective. Such concepts are “produced by man’s consciousness in accordance with the facts of reality, as mental integrations of factual data computed by man—as products of a cognitive method of classification whose processes must be formed by man, but whose content is dictated by reality” (ITOE 54). Rand’s conception of concepts (and definitions and essence and . . .) and her conception of the good can be rightly characterized as (i) objective with Rand’s metaphysical-epistemological faces of the objective relation and, at the same time, as (ii) objective within Rand’s intrinsicist-subjectivist-objectivist tripartition.*

Post 4

Monday, June 28, 2010 - 5:30pm

Thanks, Stephen: Your tracing of the progression of the concept objective (or two concepts) in Rand's mind (or at least publishing) is quite interesting. Starting by arriving at the metaphyical makes sense...

I had given myself an hour to read through the Badhwar-Long article because I had to go out, but I kept slowing down and slowing down (and not because it was unclearly written--quite the opposite). And at the end of that time I was not even close to being finished, at least if I wanted to absorb and consider and evaluate all the points. So I stopped and just wrote my above post as an initial set of reactions. I find that when I have too many things to think about and my mind is racing in too many directions, I just stop adding new items until the first set begins to sort itself out.

Am I getting senile? Do I have early Alzheimer's or a caffeine deficiency? Is it all over for me as far as reading philosophy is concerned? (Maybe I should just go out and shoot myself.)

--Slow (and Unsteady) Phil

(Edited by Philip Coates on 6/28, 5:33pm)

Post 5

Thursday, July 1, 2010 - 9:51am

This is a continuation of the topic of Post 3.

What Rand wrote in the 1960 Preface of For the New Intellectual was: “For reasons made clear in the following pages, the name I have chosen for my philosophy is Objectivism.” In Post 3, I pointed out the sense of the objective primary to the name of Rand’s philosophy by quoting from the title essay “For the New Intellectual.” I should say more about what is and is not in that essay pertaining to Rand’s concept of the objective. I want to also address pertinent passages in her earlier literature.

1. The Rand (-Branden) archetypes Attila and the Witch Doctor, in “For the New Intellectual,” are not types whose distinction coincides with Rand’s later distinction between intrinsicist and subjectivist value theories.

2. In this essay, Rand writes that capitalism demands rationality of individuals, and it rewards them accordingly. Each person’s success “depends on the objective value of his work and on the rationality of those who recognize that value” (26).

3. The criterion of reason’s validity is the objective, not the subjective (31).

4. Objectivity does not consist of collective subjectivism (34).

There is no evidence in “For the New Intellectual” essay of Rand having by then worked out her tripartite distinction between intrinsicist, subjectivist, and objectivist theories of value (or of cognition). Three years earlier, in Atlas Shrugged, Rand had distinguished two false schools of morality. She called them the mystics of spirit and the mystics of muscle. “You call the[m] spiritualists and materialists, those who believe in consciousness without existence and those who believe in existence without consciousness” (1027). This distinction, too, does not coincide with (what I argue to be) Rand’s later distinction between intrincisist and subjectivist theories of moral value. Discounts of existence or consciousness found the erroneous theories of spiritualism-materialism as well as intrinsicism-subjectivism, but the two distinctions are not the same.

Rand introduces her tripartition of theories of the good in the 1965 essay “What Is Capitalism?” When she writes therein that “capitalism is the only system based implicitly on an objective theory of values” (23), she is saying something new and supplementary to her 1960 statement that capitalism rewards in accordance with objective value. Incidentally, those two statements are made in the course of two different arguments to the conclusion that individuals should be left free to produce, trade, and consume according to their own judgment, free of force. The 1960 argument is impugning force because it prevents market sifting of the valuable, which Rand calls in 1965 socially objective value. The 1965 statement is impugning force because it ignores fundamentals of what Rand calls (in 1965) philosophically objective value (24). Intrisicism will lead to slaughter of individuals in the name of some “higher” good; subjectivism leaves only force to resolve differences of feeling for what is socially ideal (22–23).

In his essay “We the Living ’36 and ’59,” Robert Mayhew tells of a passage in which Rand struck out the word intrinsic in her 1959 editing of We the Living, for its reissue. Sasha says to Kira and Irina: “There are some outward circumstances which an autocratic power cannot control. There are some [intrinsic] values it can never reach or subjugate.”

Prof. Mayhew comments: “By 1959, Ayn Rand had identified the crucially important difference between the concepts of objective and intrinsic value. So the improper word was removed” (198). I think he is mistaken about that. He can be mistaken on this and still agree with my conclusion concerning the reason Rand named her philosophy Objectivism.

Mayhew gives no citation to support his claim that Rand had reached her distinction between intrinsic and objective conceptions of value by 1959. I think his reason is likely the circumstance that Rand struck the term intrinsic in the very passage he is considering. I think further that Rand had a different reason for striking that term in 1959. The term intrinsic also means “in itself and without further possible explication.” By 1959 Rand held there are some things not affording further explication, such as the general fact that existence exists, but by then she had found and published further explication of value and life. Rand’s 1936 text connects the human self with the essence of life. Arguing with a commissar, Kira says “We are living creatures—there’s something in each of us, something like the very heart of life condensed—and that should not be touched. It’s something very sacred and we should not even name or mention it” (quoted in Mayhew’s essay, p. 198). Rand struck out that last sentence in ’59, and this is uniform with her striking of the word intrinsic for the reason I have proposed.

Post 6

Thursday, July 1, 2010 - 11:33am