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The Book? Or the Window?
I do agree that general philosophical ideas have to be presentable in terms open to the general educated adult layman. But I think Rand is too inexact here to take as gospel. I would say that general philosophical ideas have to be comprehensible to those with general knowledge, but that detailed specific and technical problems of philosophy, such as the metaphysical nature of free will, or the specific principles of evidence in jurisprudence, should be handled by specialists with a broad range of knowledge in the appropriate areas.
 Indeed, without both a broad range of knowledge, an empirical bent, and a wide inductive scope, one gets trapped in the Scholastic/Talmudic habit of quoting the revered texts of masters, debating over niceties such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and distracted from the business of investigation because mere deduction is so much easier.
For example. I am a minimalist. I advocate the acceptance of Constitutional and common law. I do realize that an objective legal system can be had outside the terms of our Constitution - but that is a matter for study and not mere assertion. Now I hear people all the time talking about such notions as (1) competing privatized police forces and (2) the private ownership of absolutely all land. Those ideas are fine - if one realizes that (1) means gang warfare - mafia protection rackets and warlords as we have had at certain times in certain parts of Italy, Japan, Afghanistan, and China and that (2) means the advocacy of Feudalism and the inability of either private citizens or a modern police force to move freely without the express consent of every landholder whose property they would traverse. So, I have studied history in detail, have read about human societies from hunter gatherer to collective farming to pastoralism to private homesteading as was practiced under the Early Greeks and Romans to the rise of the Republic with its public fora and rights of way, back to the fall of the West and then the rise of Anglo-Saxon common law. One concept in common law is that of an easement. An easement is "an interest in land owned by another that entitles its holder to a limited right of usage such as passage or an unobstructed view." One very specific type of easement is an easement of necessity, which is implicit when a plot of land is subdivided. I cannot sell you land which you cannot access by a right of passage. Local jurisdictions regulate such easements and where such easements are common they become a part of the common right of way upon which our roads are built. So as a Constitutional minimalist who follows common law I reject out of hand the ideas of anarchocapitalists and the ideas of those who want to privatize all land. I believe that a minimal state requires the existence of a commons and that some of that commons must be developed as a right of way.
These ideas are complex. One has to study history, not just the history of the dates of Wars and the Reigns of Kings but political and social and legal history and comparative history in order to do philosophy properly without either painting oneself into a corner or trying to reinvent the wheel. This is a scholarly matter - and a fun thing to debate in a debating society. Before reading this piece, how many armchair Objectivists would have known what an easement is - from reading Rand alone - or just because they are "normal" adults? I would venture very few. Once the ideas of minimalism and common law and so forth are worked out, one can easily explain to a layman, when necessary, what an easement is, and why a minimalist system requires one. But Just being a normal adult, or being a normal adult who has read Rand, doesn't make one sufficiently expert on all philosophical concepts to hold oneself an authority.
You may see that I remain silent on most of the economic threads, except for rare brief comments. There are two reasons. I find economics tedious. And I know very little about it technically. I know enough. I know, because I have read Rand and Greenspan that a free market is best, that a hard currency is an uncorrupted and valuable currency, that so long as law is objective markets tend to self correct and that calling for more regulations because the old regulations have failed is not an improvement, but a disaster. Rand didn't come up with these ideas because she was a normal adult, or even because she was a genius, but because she had centuries of economic thought to stand on.
I expect that just as no one today (who has studied biology sufficiently) sees how it is that inanimate chemicals can be alive as a mystery, in due time the mechanisms of mind and free will will also become more clear to us. I have my own thoughts. But as someone just said - I don't need to know how my car works in order to see that it works. And the denial of free-will as self-contradictory is enough to allow my to sleep easily at night until the biomechanics of free will are worked out. I am not a mechanic, so I won't attempt to opine on how a car goes, so long as as a layman my car does go. When it doesn't, the philosopher has advised me not to pray, to kick the tires, or to steal someone else's car. At that time I go see the mechanic. If, two hundred years ago, you had asked me how life works, I couldn't have explained about the cellular structure or about genetics or about germ theory. But I would have said nothing comes from nothing, and matter and energy are conserved and that I am alive. I would have told you that someday, the mechanism will most likely be discovered - not by laymen reading Aristotle - but the mechanism will be discovered. I would have told you to read widely and do experiments if you want to be on the cutting edge. And I would have told anyone who told me that life was a myth or that I couldn't prove that I was alive to please empty his pockets, hand over his bullion, and please go jump in a lake wearing this handy pair of lead boots.
Ted Keer
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