Since his baptism in medieval times, Aristotle has served many strange purposes. None have been odder than this sacramental alliance, so to speak, of Aristotle with Adam Smith. The extraordinary virtues Miss Rand finds in the law that A is A suggests that she is unaware that logical principles by themselves can test only consistency. They cannot establish truth . . . . Swearing fidelity to Aristotle, Miss Rand claims to deduce not only matters of fact from logic but, with as little warrant, ethical rules and economic truths as well. As she understands them, the laws of logic license her in proclaiming that “existence exists,” which is very much like saying that the law of gravitation is heavy and the formula of sugar sweet.
One of the few things that almost all professional philosophers agree on is that Ayn Rand makes mischief with the Law of Identity.
But the estimable Professor Hook makes a mistake above. It is of course true that the law of gravitation is not itself subject to the law of gravitation: it is not heavy or the opposite. This comparison would be apt, however, only if Rand thought that existence is something distinct from existents. But when she says that existence exists, she does not mean that there is something called 'existence' which is distinct from existing things and that it too exists. She is using 'existence' as a term that refers to existents collectively, similarly as when we use 'humanity' to refer collectively to human beings, as opposed to using it to refer to the being-human of human beings.
When Rand says that existence exists, what she means is that each existing thing exists and has the nature it has independently of any consciousness, including divine consciousness. She is thus an extreme metaphysical realist.
Unfortunately, Rand tries to squeeze this extreme thesis from the logical truth, A = A. And so Hook and almost all professional philosophers are right to critize her for her metaphysical chutzpah.
There is little philosophical 'meat' here, but it is useful for contextualizing the man and his thought.
I stumbled upon this while searching without success for something comparing John Anderson with Ayn Rand. They are fruitfully comparable in various respects. Both were cantankerous and dogmatic and not open to having their ideas criticized or further developed by their acolytes; both founded highly influential cults; both were atheists and naturalists; both had curious and old-fashioned notions in logic; both were controversialists; both resided on the outskirts of academic respectability.
The last point of comparison merits some exfoliation and qualification. Anderson was surely a much better philosopher than Rand: unlike Rand, he was trained in philosophy; he held academic posts, mainly at the Unversity of Sydney whose intellectual life he dominated for many years; he read and wrote for the professional journals engaging to some degree with fellow professional philosophers. But the majority of his strictly philosophical publications were confined to the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy and its successor the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Also noteworthy is that, with the exception of a few epigoni, his ideas are not discussed.
One such epigone is A. J. Baker who has written a very useful but uncritical and not very penetrating study, Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson, Cambridge UP, 1986. He rightly complains in a footnote on p. 62:
D. M. Armstrong, who in his Universals and Scientific Realism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, gives an account of many types of theories, curiously dedicates the book to Anderson and yet does not discuss or even describe Anderson's theory on the subject.
Flannery O'Connor died 50 years ago today. About Ayn Rand she has this to say:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
The Russian boys were lined up for beer; perhaps one of them couldn't wait his 'transcendental' turn and the other, forsaking duty for inclination, shot him categorically albeit phenomenally. Or maybe the shooter was attempting to demonstrate that the transcendentally ideal can also be empirically real. Or perhaps the shooter was a Randian hothead and the man shot was a Kantian.
This is what comes of ignoring 'motorist' Rodney King's rhetorical question, 'Kant we all just get along?'
For Ayn Rand and her followers, Kant is the devil incarnate. I don't dispute that Rand made some good points, but her tabloid outbursts anent the Sage of Koenigsberg aren't worth the hot air that powered them. Despite her frequent invocations of reason, her work would be a worthy target of a Critique of Poor Reason.
In January and February of 2009 I wrote a number of posts critical of Ayn Rand. The Objectivists, as they call themselves, showed up in force to defend their master. I want to revisit one of the topics today to see if what I said then still holds up. The occasion for this exercise is my having found Allan Gotthelf's On Ayn Rand (Wadsworth 2000) in a used bookstore. Gotthelf is a professional philosopher who teaches at Rutgers. So I thought that if anyone is able to disabuse me of my extremely low opinion of Ayn Rand he would be the one to do it.
On p. 48 of Gotthelf's book, we find:
The "first cause" (or "cosmological") argument maintains that God is needed as the creator and sustainer of the material universe. But that is to say that existence needs consciousness to create or sustain it. It makes a consciousness — God's consciousness — metaphysically prior to existence. But existence exists. It can have no beginning, no end, no cause. It just is. And consciousness is a faculty of awareness, not of creation. The first cause argument violates both the axiom of existence and the axiom of consciousness.
Now axioms are self-evident truths needing no proof. (37) So if the cosmological argument violates the two axioms mentioned, it is in bad shape indeed! But what exactly are the axioms?
According to the axiom of existence, "Existence exists." Gotthelf takes this to mean that Something exists. (37) If that is what it means, then it is indeed a self-evident truth. For example, it is self-evident (to me) that I exist, which of course entails that something exists. But it is equally self-evident (to me) that I am conscious. For if I were not conscious then I would not be able to know that I exist and that something exists. "That one exists possessing consciousness is the axiom of consciousness, the second philosophic axiom." (38)
The first axiom is logically prior to the second. This is called the primacy of existence and it too is axiomatic though not a separate axiom. "The thesis that existence comes first — that things exist independent of consciousness and that consciousness is a faculty not for the creation of its objects but for the discovery of them — Ayn Rand call the primacy of existence." (39)
Now how does the cosmological argument (CA) violate these axioms? Gotthelf tells us that the argument makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, and therefore violates the axiom of consciousness. But it does no such thing.
'Existence' just means all existing things taken collectively, as Gotthelf points out. (p. 48, n. 6) So if the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to existence, then the CA makes God's consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things. But this is just false: the CA does not make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to God's existence, nor does it make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to the existence of abstract objects. So the CA does not make the divine consciousness metaphysically prior to all existing things. What it does is make God's consciousness metaphysically prior to some existing things, to contingent beings, including all material beings.
One reason, and perhaps the main reason, why the vast majority of professional philosophers consider Ayn Rand to be a hack is that she argues in an intolerably slovenly way. She gives arguments so porous one could drive a Mack truck through them. It is surprising to me that a philosopher with Gotthelf's credentials could uncritically repeat these arguments in the same slovenly way. Surely he understands the difference between all and some. Surely he can see that the argument of his that I quoted is a bad argument trading as it does on an equivocation on 'existence' as between all existing things and some existing things.
A cosmological arguer could cheerfully grant that the following are self-evident truths: Things exist; consciousness exists; the existence of conscious beings is metaphysically prior to their being conscious. The existence of God is logically consistent with each of these truths and with the three of them taken in conjunction.
One of the problems with Rand is that she smuggles substantive, controversial content into what she calls her axioms. I grant that it is axiomatic that "existence exists" if that means that something exists. But how is it supposed to follow from this that the things that exist "have no beginning, no end, no cause"? My desk exists, but it obviously had a beginning, will have an end, and had a cause.
Or does she and Gotthelf mean that what has no beginning, end, or cause is that something or other exists? That is rather more plausible, but obviously doesn't following from the trivial truth that something exists.
Gotthelf uses retortion to show that it is undeniable that something exists. (37) For if you maintain that nothing exists, you succumb to performative inconsistency. The propositional content of the statement that nothing exists is shown to be false by the existence of the speech act of stating, the existence of the one who speaks, and the existence of the context in which he speaks. But please note that there is nothing performatively inconsistent in stating that the things that exist have a beginning, an end, and a cause.
There are similar 'smuggling' problems with respect to the axiom of consciousness. It is indeed axiomatic and self-evident that conscious beings exist. And it too can be proven retorsively. For if you maintain that no one is conscious, then your performance falsifies the content of your claim. (38) But how is it supposed to follow from conscious beings exist that every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists independently of the consciousness? For this is what Rand and Gotthelf need to show that "The very concept of 'God' violates the axioms . . . ." (49) They need to show that "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of." (49)
Rand and Gotthelf are making two rather elementary mistakes. The first is to confuse
1. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something (objective genitive)
with
2. Every consciousness is a consciousness of something that exists. (objective genitive).
(1) may well be true; (2) is obviously false. One who consciously seeks the Fountain of Youth seeks something, but not something that exists. There can be no consciousness without an object, but it does not follow that every intentional object exists.
The second mistake is to think that (2) follows from conscious beings exist. One lands in performative inconsistency if one denies that conscious beings exist. One does not if one denies (2).
It is important not to confuse the subjective and objective genitive construals of (2). (2) is plainly false if the genitive is objective. (2) is trivially true if the genitive is subjective. For it is trivially true that every consciousness is some existing thing's consciousness.
One gets the distinct impression that Rand and Gotthelf are confusing the two construals of (2). They think that because consciousness is always grounded in the existence of something, that every object of consiousness must be an existent object.
Gotthelf's claim that "to postulate a God as creator of the universe is to postulate a consciousness that could exist without anything to be conscious of" (49) is plainly false and deeply confused. For one thing, God is conscious of himself and of all necessarily existent abstract objects. And 'after' the creation of the universe, he has that to be conscious of as well.
What Rand does is simply smuggle the impossibility of a universe-creating conscious being into her axioms. Gotthelf uncritically follows her in this. But that has all the benefits of theft over honest toil, as Russell remarked in a different connection.
Here, via Reppert, who cleverly speaks of Rand's "Jack-hammering":
Ayn Rand was no fan of C.S. Lewis. She called the famous apologist an “abysmal bastard,” a “monstrosity,” a “cheap, awful, miserable, touchy, social-metaphysical mediocrity,” a “pickpocket of concepts,” and a “God-damn, beaten mystic.” (I suspect Lewis would have particularly relished the last of these.)
. . . that music was the moment at which Beethoven finally passed beyond the suffering of his life on earth and reached for the hand of God, as God reaches for the hand of Adam in Michaelangelo's vison of the creation.
Well, either the adagio movement of the 9th or the late piano sonatas, in particular, Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111. To my ear, those late compositions are unsurpassed in depth and beauty.
In these and a few other compositions of the great composers we achieve a glimpse of what music is capable of. Just as one will never appreciate the possibilities of genuine philosophy by reading hacks such as Ayn Rand or positivist philistines (philosophistines?) such as David Stove, one will never appreciate the possibilities of great music and its power of speaking to what is deepest in us if one listens only to contemporary popular music.
I have been enjoying your blog for a couple of years now, and I have to say that I like how your mind works. There are a lot of issues I am thinking about currently regarding philosophy and that didn't change after reading Angus Menuge's book Agents Under Fire. If you haven't read that, I strongly recommend you to. He has some very interesting arguments regarding reason, intentionality, agency, reductionism, materialism etc. One issue is bugging me particularly these days, and it is the ever-lasting question of free will. I hope I am not asking too much, but would you be able to tell me what your position about free will is and briefly explain why you hold that position?
My position, bluntly stated, is that we are libertarianly free. As far as I'm concerned the following argument is decisive:
1. We are morally responsible for at least some of our actions and omissions. 2. Moral responsibility entails libertarian freedom of the will. Therefore 3. We are libertarianly free.
Is this a compelling argument? By no means. (But then no argument for any substantive philosophical thesis is compelling. Nothing substantive in philosophy has ever been proven to the satisfaction of all competent practioners.) One could, with no breach of logical propriety, deny the conclusion and then deny one or both of the premises. As we say in the trade, "One man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens." Any valid argument can be thrown into 'inferential reverse,' the result being a valid argument.
I of course acccept both premises. That I am morally (as opposed to causally, and as opposed to legally) responsible for at least some of what I do and leave undone I take to be more evident than its negation. And, like Kant, I see compatibilism as a shabby evasion, "the freedom of the turnspit."
Some will say that free will and moral responsibility are illusions. I find that incoherent for reasons supplied here. Other posts in the Free Will category touch upon some of the more technical aspects of the problem.
There is a lot of utter rubbish being scribbled by scientists these days about philosophical questions. Typically, these individuals, prominent in their fields, don't have a clue as to the nature, history, or proper exfoliation of these questions. Recently, biologist Jerry Coyne has written a lot of crap about free will that I expose in these posts:
This stuff is crap in the same sense in which most of Ayn Rand's philosophical writings are crap. The crappiness resides not so much in the theses themselves but in the way the theses are presented and argued, and the way objections are dealt with. But if I had to choose between the scientistic crapsters (Krauss, Coyne, Hawking & Mlodinow, et al.) and Rand, I would go with Rand. At least she understands that what she is doing is philosophy and that philosophy is important and indispensable. At least she avoids the monstrous self-deception of the scientistic crapsters who do philosophy while condemning it.
I received an e-mail message this morning from David Gordon of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He tells me that he will be teaching an online course entitled Ayn Rand and Objectivism. He also informs me that the Rand crowd, having got wind of the fact, have begun attacking him. They focus on Gordon's 1994 Journal of Libertarian Studies review of Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. A bit of the review is reproduced below. I have added some comments in blue and have marked some passages I consider important in red.
Whether one calls it a renaissance or a recrudescence, Rand is on a roll. The Randian resurgence doesn't please David Bentley Hart whose First Thingsattack piece contains the following:
And, really, what can one say about Objectivism? It isn’t so much a philosophy as what someone who has never actually encountered philosophy imagines a philosophy might look like: good hard axiomatic absolutes, a bluff attitude of intellectual superiority, lots of simple atomic premises supposedly immune to doubt, immense and inflexible conclusions, and plenty of assertions about what is “rational” or “objective” or “real.” Oh, and of course an imposing brand name ending with an “-ism.” Rand was so eerily ignorant of all the interesting problems of ontology, epistemology, or logic that she believed she could construct an irrefutable system around a collection of simple maxims like “existence is identity” and “consciousness is identification,” all gathered from the damp fenlands between vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error.
Pleonasm and bombast aside, "Maxims . . . gathered from the damp fenlands of vacuous tautology and catastrophic category error" is on the mark. I will illustrate with the famous Randianism, "Existence exists."
1. There are at least two sensible ways of construing 'Existence exists.' (a) That in virtue of which existing things exist itself exists. For example, if one thought of existence as a property of existing things, and one were a realist about properties, then it would make sense for that person to say that existence exists. He would mean by it that the property of existence exists. (b) Existing things exist. Instead of taking 'existence' as denoting that in virtue of which existing things exist, one could take it as a term that applies to whatever exists. Accordingly, existence is whatever exists. To say that existence exists would then mean that existing things exist, or whatever exists exists. But then the dictum would be a tautology. Of course existing things exist, what else would they be 'doing'? Breathing things breath. Running things run. Whatever is in orbit is in orbit.
2. From Rand's texts it is clear that she intends neither the (a) nor the (b) construal. What she is trying to say is something non-tautological: that the things that exist exist and have the attributes they have independently of us. Here we read, "The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity." Rand is advancing a version of metaphysical realism. Existence EXISTS! (Pound the lectern, stamp the foot, flare the nostrils.) In other words, the things that exist — yonder mountain, the setting sun — EXIST! where that means that they are real in sublime independence of our thinking and doing and talking, and indeed of any being's thinking and doing. The problem, of course, is that Rand chooses to express herself in an inept and idiosyncratic way using the ambiguous sentence, 'Existence exists.' A careful writer does not package non-tautological claims in sentences the form of which is tautological.
That whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness, including a divine consciousness if there is one, is a substantive metaphysical claim, as can be seen from the fact that it rules out every form of idealism. 'Existing things exist,' however, is a barefaced tautology that rules out nothing.
3. But the problem is not merely infelicity of expression. Even though Rand wants to advance a substantive non-tautological thesis, a thesis of metaphysical realism, she thinks she can accomplish this by either inferring it from or conflating it with the Law of Identity. The law states that for any x, x = x. As Rand puts it, "A =A." Well of course. There is nothing controversial here. But Rand thinks that one can straightaway move to a substantive thesis that is controversial, namely, metaphysical realism according to which things exist and have the natures they have independently of any consciousness. My point is not that metaphysical realism is false; my point is that denying it is not equivalent to denying the Law of Identity. The problem is that Rand packs a hell of a lot into the the law in question, a lot of stuff that doesn't belong there. She puts the following in the mouth of Galt:
To exist is to be something, as distinguished from the nothing of nonexistence, it is to be an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes. Centuries ago, the man who was—no matter what his errors —the greatest of your philosophers, has stated the formula defining the concept of existence and the rule of all knowledge: A is A. A thing is itself. You have never grasped the meaning of his statement. I am here to complete it: Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.
[. . .]
Are you seeking to know what is wrong with the world? All the disasters that have wrecked your world, came from your leaders’ attempt to evade the fact that A is A. All the secret evil you dread to face within you and all the pain you have ever endured, came from your own attempt to evade the fact that A is A. The purpose of those who taught you to evade it, was to make you forget that Man is Man.
So the disasters of the 20th century originated in the evasion by people like Hitler and Stalin of the fact that A is A! This is just silly. How can the disasters of the 2oth century be laid at the door step of a miserable tautology? Suppose we grant that everything that exists is self-identical and that everything that is self-identical exists. (The first half of the assertion is uncontroversial, but the second half is not and will be contested by followers of Alexius von Meionong.) But suppose we grant it. I myself believe it is true. By what process of reasoning does one arrive at such substantive Randian claims as that (1) Whatever exists exists independently of any consciousness and (2) There is nothing antecedent to existence, nothing apart from it—and no alternative to it?
The denials of these two propositions are consistent with the Law of Identity and Rand's explication of existence in terms of this law. So the propositions cannot be validly inferred from the law.
Note finally that if there is no alternative to existence, then it is necessarily the case that something exists. For to say that there is no alternative to existence is to say that it is impossible that there be nothing at all. But 'to exist = to be self-identical' is consistent with each thing's existence being contingent, and the whole lot of them being contingent. Therefore, one cannot validly infer 'There is no alternative to existence' from 'To exist = to be self-identical.'
From this we see how slovenly the Randian/Peikoffian 'reasoning' is. The game they play is the following. They advance substantive metaphysical claims in the guise of tautologies. The self-evidence of the latter they illicitly ascribe to the former. This allows them to pass off their sayings as axioms that every rational person must accept. If you patiently expose their confusions as I just did, they resort to invective and name-calling.
Your blog is just about my favorite philosophy blog on the web — not because I often agree with your political opinions (I don't) but because you write with clarity, humor and just the right amount of personal touch. Salut! I also write about philosophy on my blog Literary Kicks, and you may remember a cross-blog interchange between Litkicks and the Maverick Philosopher over the meaning of Buddhism late last year.
I'm writing you now to ask if I could send you a PDF or Kindle copy of my new book Why Ayn Rand Is Wrong (and Why It Matters), which is currently #21 on the Amazon Politics/Ideologies Kindle bestsellers list. This book offers an unusual and original approach to Ayn Rand's ethical philosophy, and aims to present an alternative conception of practical ethics that cherishes individual freedom while allowing a greater regard for the important place of the collective soul in all our lives. Since you haven't paid much attention to Ayn Rand on your blog, I gather that she is not very present on your philosophical radar, but I hope you'll consider spending a few minutes checking out my short book regardless, because I think this book has wider value as an original approach to popular ethical philosophy.
Here is a brief explanation of why I wrote it. Thanks for your time, and please let me know if I can send a PDF or Kindle version of "Why Ayn Rand is Wrong" for your consideration and/or review. Have a great day!
Thanks for the kind words, Levi, and do send me the PDF file. Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion of Ayn Rand on this blog. It is collected in the Ayn Rand category. In early 2009 there was a heated debate here about Rand. The posts with open comboxes drew over 200 comments. There were numerous other comments that I deleted. Rand attracts adolescents of all ages and they tend to be uncivilized. I was doing a lot of deleting and blocking in early aught-nine.
But I agree with you: Rand's ideas ought to be discussed, not dismissed.
It is hard to believe that Bobby Fischer has been dead for over three years now. The king of the 64 squares died at age 64 on 17 January 2008. Fischer's sad story well illustrates the perils of monomania. Ayn Rand did not realize how right she was in her 1974 "An Open Letter to Boris Spassky" (Philosophy: Who Needs It, p. 56):
Bobby Fischer's behavior . . . is a clear example of the clash between a chess expert's mind, and reality. The confident, disciplined, obviously brilliant player falls to pieces when he has to deal with the real world. He throws tantrums like a child, breaks agreements, makes arbitrary demands, and indulges in the kind of whim worship one touch of which in the playing of chess would disqualify him from a high school tournament. Thus he brings to the real world the very evil that made him escape it: irrationality.
The following quotations from Rand can be found here, together with references.
An embryo has no rights. Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. A child cannot acquire any rights until it is born. The living take precedence over the not-yet-living (or the unborn).
Abortion is a moral right—which should be left to the sole discretion of the woman involved; morally, nothing other than her wish in the matter is to be considered. Who can conceivably have the right to dictate to her what disposition she is to make of the functions of her own body?
If Ayn Rand weren't so popular among adolescents of all ages, if she were an unknown as opposed to a well-known hack, I wouldn't be wasting time refuting this nonsense. But she is very influential, so it is worthwhile exposing her incoherence. If you complain that my tone is harsh and disrespectful, my reply will be that it is no more harsh and disrespectful than hers is: read the quotations on the page to which I have linked. He who is strident and polemical will receive stridency and polemic in return. You reap what you sow.
In the first paragraph above Rand equates the unborn with the not-yet living. This implies that a third trimester fetus is not living. What is it then? Dead? Or is it perhaps neither living nor dead like an inanimate artifact? Obviously, a human fetus is a living biologically human individual. Obviously, one cannot arbitrarily exclude the pre-natal from the class of the living — unless one is a hack or an ideologue.
Let me expand on this just a bit. One cannot answer philosophical questions by terminological fiat, by arbitrarily rigging your terminology in such a way that the answer you want falls out of the rigging. Would that Rand and her followers understood this. My post Peikoff on the Supernatural carefully exposes another egregious example of the shabby trick of answering philosophical questions by terminological fiat.
Now consider the enthymematic argument of the first two sentences of the first paragraph above. Made explicit, it goes like this. (1) Rights do not pertain to a potential, only to an actual being. (2) An embryo is a potential being. Therefore, (3) An embryo has no rights.
A being is anything that is or exists. So if x is a merely potential being, then of course it cannot have any rights. A merely potential being is either nothing or next-to-nothing. But a human embryo is not a merely potential being; it is an actual human (not canine, not lupine, not bovine, . . .) embryo. Indeed it is an actual biologically human member of the species homo sapiens. That is a plain fact of biology. So the second premise is spectacularly false.
If Rand were to say something intelligent, she would have to argue like this:
(1*) Rights do not pertain to potential persons, only to actual persons. (2*) An embryo is a potential person. Therefore, (3) An embyo has no rights. Unlike Rand's argument, this argument is worth discussing. But it is not the argument Rand gives. I have countered it elsewhere. See Abortion category.
The second paragraph quoted above is as sophomoric as the first — if that's not an insult to sophomores. It is a clumsy gesture in the direction of what is often called the Woman's Body Argument. Follow the link for the refutation.
Cathy Young's A Rand Revival offers a balanced appraisal. Excerpts:
Politically, Rand wanted to provide liberal capitalism with a moral foundation, challenging the notion that communism was a noble but unrealistic ideal while the free market was a necessary evil best suited to humanity's flawed nature.
[. . .]
But Rand's work also has a darker, more disturbing aspect–one that, unfortunately, is all too good a fit for this moment in America's political life. That is her intellectual intolerance and her tendency to demonize her opponents. Speaking through her hero John Galt, Rand declared, There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil.
