Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Here we find:
rand, n. An angry tirade occasioned by mistaking philosophical disagreement for a personal attack and/or evidence of unspeakable moral corruption. "When I questioned his second premise, he flew into a rand." Also, to attack or stigmatise through a rand. "When I defended socialised medicine, I was randed as a communist."
Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., p. 299, Rand speaking:
What do you mean by "necessity"? By "necessity," we mean that things are a certain way and had to be. I would maintain that the statement "Things are," when referring to non-man-made occurrences, is the synonym of "They had to be." Because unless we start with the premise of an arbitrary God who creates nature, what is had to be. We have to drop any mystical premise and keep the full context in mind. Then, aside from human action, what things are is what they had to be.
The alternative of what "had to be" versus "what didn't have to be" doesn't apply metaphysically. It applies only to the realm of human action and human choice."
First of all, 'Things are' and 'Things had to be' cannot be synonyms since they obviously have different meanings as anyone who understands English knows. But let's be charitable. What Rand is trying to say is that every non-man-made occurrence is such that 'had to be' applies to it, and every man-made occurrence is such that 'did not have to be' applies to it. Charitably construed, she is not making a false semantic point, but two modal points. The first is that nothing non-man-made is contingent or, equivalently, that everything non-man-made is necessary. The second modal point is that the man-made is contingent. I will discuss only the first modal point. It is not obvious and is denied by many philosophers both theists and atheists. So it is legitimate to demand an argument for the thesis.
Continue reading “Ayn Rand on Necessity, Contingency, and Dispositions”
This is a follow-up to yesterday's Rand and Existence Again. The following is by Leonard Peikoff:
Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics . . . .
Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason.
Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.
In this passage we meet once again our old friend 'Existence exists.' And we note the sort of linguistic mischief that Rand/Peikoff engage in. It cannot be denied that existing things exist, and only existing things exist. This is entirely trivial. Anyone who denies it embraces a contradiction: There are existing things that do not exist. We should all agree, then, with the first sentence of the second paragraph. So far, so good.
But then Peikoff tells us that to postulate something supernatural such as God is "to postulate something beyond existence." Now it may well be that there is no God or anything beyond nature. It may well be that everything that exists is a thing of nature. But the nonexistence of God does not follow from the triviality that everything that exists exists. Does it take a genius to see that the following argument is invalid?
1. Existence exists, ergo
2. God does not exist.
One cannot derive a substantive metaphysical conclusion from a mere tautology. No doubt, whatever exists exists. But one cannot exclude God from the company of what exists by asserting that whatever exists exists. Now it is not nice to call people stupid, but anyone who cannot appreciate the simple point I have just made is, I am afraid, either stupid, or not paying attention, or willfully obtuse. Here is an example of a valid argument:
3. Nothing supernatural exists
4. God is supernatural, ergo
5. God does not exist.
For Peikoff to get the result he wants, the nonexistence of God, from the premise 'Existence exists,' he must engage in the linguistic mischief of using 'existence' to mean 'natural existence.' Instead of saying "only existence exists," he should have said 'only natural existence exists.' But then he would lose the self-evidence of "Existence exists and only existence exists."
Conflating a trivial self-evident thesis with a nontrivial controversial thesis has all the advantages of theft over honest toil as Russell said in a different connection. It would take a certain amount of honest philosophical toil to construct a really good argument for the nonexistence of any and all supernatural entities. But terminological mischief is easy. What Peikoff is doing above is smuggling the nonexistence of the supernatural into the term 'existence' Now if you cannot see that that is an intellectually dispreputable move, then I must say you are hopeless.
It is like a bad ontological argument in reverse. On one bad version of the ontological argument, one defines God into existence by smuggling the notion of existence into the concept of God and then announcing that since we have the concept of God, God must exist. Peikoff is doing the opposite: he defines God and the supernatural out of existence by importing their nonexistence into the term 'existence.' But you can no more define God into existence than you can define him out of existence.
There are other egregious blunders in the above passage. But if I were to expose every mistake of the Randians, I might attain the age of a Methuselah and still not be done. Or perhaps I should liken it unto a Sisyphean labor, one of endless and futile toil. Futile, because the Randians I have so far encountered seem quite unteachable.
One of my Rand posts has inspired some vigorous discussion at Triablogue. My nominalist sparring partner 'Ocham' over at Beyond Necessity comments here on part of the Triablogue discussion:
Tennant points out the 'Existence exists' is incoherent – existence is commonly regarded as a second-order property. Not by everyone, I should point out, but certainly Frege's view that existence is a second-order predicate is accepted by nearly all those in mainstream analytic philosophy. Nor is Donohue's restatement, "whatever exists exists" in any way useful, because it is either merely tautological and doesn't tell us anything, or it is equally incoherent (for it dubiously assumes that existence is a first-order predicate).
Let me try to sort this out. Neither Tennant nor 'Ocham' understand what Rand is saying. Donohue may understand it, but he doesn't see what is wrong with it.
. . . I should point out that there are professional philosophers who take Rand's work seriously. See The Ayn Rand Society. Some years ago I read something by Douglas Rasmussen, one of the members of the society, and I found it quite good.
I suppose one could compare Rand with Nietzsche on the score of professional respectability. There are philosophers who have utter contempt for Nietzsche and deny that he is a philosopher at all. In the early '90s I had a conversation with the late Gregory Fitch, then chairman of the Arizona State University Philosophy Department. I asked him if anyone in his department had an interest in Nietzsche. He snorted that that no one there was interested in "that junk." But not all analytic philosophers are narrow Fitch-style bigots. There are other analytic philosophers who find Nietzsche's ideas worthy of study and reconstruction.
Like Nietzsche, Rand is untrained in philosophy, rants and raves, argues in an abominably slovenly fashion when she argues at all, is supremely confident of her own towering significance, is muddled and idiosyncratic — Existence exists! — , expresses contempt for her opponents, all the while psychologizing them and making little attempt to understand their actual positions. And like Nietzsche, she is immensely attractive to adolescents of all ages. Still, there are ideas there worth discussing, if only to show how one can go wrong. Same with Nietzsche: he goes wrong in very interesting ways.
Recall what got me started on this current Rand jag. It was 'Ocham's' question whether Rand counts as a professional or an amateur. I have been making a case that she and Peikoff are amateurs. (This is consistent with their ideas being worth discussing.) But it is no surprise to me that amateurs fail to appreciate the merits of my case. More to come.
A tip of the hat to Paul Manata of Triablogue for a clever link entitled A = A: Rand = Hack Philosopher. One might pedantically raise a quibble over an identity sentence sporting a proper name on one side and a general term on the other. But you catch the drift, which is similar to 'CNN = News.' Other examples that might be fun to analyze: the loony Left's 'Bush = Hitler' and Chrysler's 'Drive = Love.'
Comments are on. If you have something intelligent and civil to contribute, please do. But I have zero tolerance for cyberpunks. If you fail to address what I actually say, or thoughtlessly spout the Rand party line, or show the least bit of disrespect to me or my commenters, then I will delete your comment.
Ayn Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology includes an essay by Leonard Peikoff entitled "The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy." The section "Necessity and Contingency" concludes with the following paragraph:
Truth is the identification of a fact with reality. Whether the fact in question is metaphysical or man-made, the fact determines the truth: if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true. For instance, the fact that the U.S. has 50 states was not metaphysically necessary – but as long as this is men's choice, the proposition that "The U.S. has 50 states" is necessarily true. A true proposition must describe the facts as they are. In this sense, a "necessary truth" is a redundancy, and a "contingent truth" a self-contradiction. (Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, 2nd ed., eds. Binswanger and Peikoff, NAL Books, 1990, p. 111, emphasis in original.)
I have no objection to part of what is being said in this passage, in fact I heartily agree with it, namely, that facts determine truths. The non-man-made fact of the moon's having craters makes-true the proposition expressed by 'The moon has craters.' And similarly for the man-made fact regarding the 50 states cited by Peikoff. So I cheerfully agree that "if the fact exists, there is no alternative in regard to what is true." We can put the point as follows given that there is a fact F and a proposition p that records F:
I thank our old friend Ockham for adding links to two of my Rand posts to the Wikipedia Ayn Rand entry. (See note 4.) I am about to repost a slightly emended version of the more technical of the two posts, the one on existence. This is from my first weblog and was originally posted May 28, 2004. But first I refer you to Ockham's post Ayn Rand and Wikipedia in which he reports a disagreement at Wikipedia ". . . about whether the article about her should qualify her as a 'popular' or 'commercially successful' philosopher, or an 'amateur philosopher' (as Anthony Quinton did in his article on popular philosophy in the Oxford Companion to philosophy), or whether she is a philosopher without qualification."
Is Rand a philosopher? Yes. But she is not very good if among the criteria of goodness you include rigor of thought and objectivity of expression. No reputable professional journal or press would publish her work. So in one sense of the term she is not a professional, which makes her an amateur philosopher. But then so is Nietzsche. Both are well worth reading by amateurs and professionals alike. Both are passionate partisans of interesting and challenging ideas. If nothing else, they show pitfalls to avoid. If you seek respite from the buttoned-down prose of dessicated academicians, they provide it.
Since I am about to lay into Rand, let me begin with something nice about her. In the 20th century, she brought more people to philosophy than Immanuel Kant, let alone John Rawls. That can't be bad. She came to our shores, mastered our difficult language, and made it her own way by her own efforts. She understood the promise and greatness of America, and did it her way, celebrating the traditional American values of self-reliance and rugged individualism. She gave leftists hell.
So what's my beef?
Continue reading “Is Ayn Rand a Good Philosopher? Rand on the Primacy of Existence”