Ayn Rand was an amazing thinker, and I am glad to have read this book! Awesome!

I haven't read the whole book as Goodread's entry for this work suggests. What I have read is a 12 page pamphlet from the Ayn Rand Institute of the same title. I found it one rainy day while I was working a shift at a bookstore. It was one of those days that makes stepping out of the door a strain on your will, but upon finding this talk, I was glad I did. In the talk, which Ayn Rand gave to West Point's graduating class of '74, she clarifies the need for people to have a personal philosophy, lest the be torn aside by the world. That much I can agree with. When she begins her diatribe against Kant I being to lose her. It seems like Ayn is upset with the current state of the world in '74 and has given Kant the role of whipping-boy for all the failures that she's attributed to the baby-boomers. That much aside, I can agree with her on the point that to evade any personal philosophy is to let yourself run emotionally naked through a world that only seeks to satisfy our most base needs and urges.

Part VI of a multi-part review series.

Rand’s last work, but it’s just more of the same.

Peikoff’s introduction indicates that Rand showed, in Atlas Shrugged, that bad epistemology leads to “train wrecks, furnace breakouts, and sexual impotence” (vii). Good to know! Same introduction dismisses non-randian philosophy as “a senseless parade of abstractions to fill out the ritual at cocktail parties” and “a ponderous Continental wail of futility resonating with Oriental overtones” (viii).

Philosophy is broken down in the first chapter into five sub-areas: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics (3-4). Logic as a sub-area is conspicuously absent, which is of course completely indicative of the whole. There follows a schematic parade of horrible, wherein we are treated to the normal intentional straw person accounts of prior writers: Hume is boiled down as “nobody can be certain of anything”; Plato is “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice”; St. Augustine is “nobody is perfect in this world”; “nobody can help anything he does” is Hegel; and so on (4). This method is entirely consistent with her other writings: dishonest presentations of other thinkers without citation to any particular text and without quotation and rigorous analysis of anything actually written.

Other defects appear quickly: “your subconscious is like a computer […] and its main function is the integration of ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind” (5-6). None of that makes any internal sense, when compared to her writings otherwise about the integration of perceptions to form concepts, nor does it make any sense regarding her bizarre theory of volition. It’s all vague and unfalsifiable and illogical. Why, after all, would the conscious mind be the programmer of the unconscious mind, rather than vice versa? Who intentionally, consciously decides I decide to repress these unapproved sexual desires?

Kant is the great enemy of the collection, as he began the “dominant trend of philosophy” for two centuries: “directed to a single goal: the destruction of man’s mind” (6-7) (NB: the oddball “collectivist” singular mind in the formulation). Overall, there’s plenty of misguided broadsides against Kant in this volume, though she has venom for most other writers: Russell, Skinner (for an entire chapter!), Marx of course--but none of it is rigorous or thorough. Rawls is “obscenely evil” (33)--moral and aesthetic condemnation, two for price of one! Though she has an entire chapter on Rawls’ Theory of Justice (102-19), “I have not read and do not intend to read that book” (109). So, there it is.

All of this upsidedown & backward should-be-satire-but-sadly-it’s-not is mixed in with the irritating jingoism of a recent convert: “you are accused of being a tool of imperialism--and ‘imperialism’ is the name given to the foreign policy of this country, which has never engaged in military conquest and has never profited from the two world wars, which she did not initiate, but entered and won” (8-9). (We are given a by-the-bye regarding “the military-industrial complex--which is a myth” (9).) Startling, of course, that the US did not benefit from the world wars, but we’re definitely in an alternate reality with the objection that the US never engaged in military conquest.

We are told that “America is the living refutation of a Kantian universe” (9), which is why people hate it (as opposed to “love for communism.”) Cute, no? I wish the world were that cool: Let’s burn a US flag for the sake of Kant!

It’s not obvious that Kant has been read or understood. For instance, she summarizes that Kant is “a systematic rationalization of every major philosophical vice” (a surreal phrasing, making philosophy itself a matter of moral vice): “the metaphysical inferiority of this world (as a ‘phenomenal’ world of mere ‘appearances’), is a rationalization for the hatred of reality” (19). Huh? That’s not what the noumenal/phenomenal distinction does, at all. She continues: “the notion that reason is unable to perceive reality and deals only with ‘appearances’ is a rationalization for the hatred of reason” (id.). Of course, one reading of Kant’s position was that noumenal reality is not knowable by the senses (that’s phenomenal reality)--but can be apprehended indirectly by reason. I don’t think that Rand’s summary of Kant’s position bears even featherweight scrutiny. Reason, after all, is not said to “perceive” anything--the senses perceive.

Kant is ultimately dismissed as “the moral imperative of the duty to sacrifice oneself to duty [huh?], a sacrifice without beneficiaries [huh?], is a gross rationalization for the image (and soul [huh?]) of an austere, ascetic monk who winks at you with an obscenely sadistic pleasure [WTF?]” (19). Otherwise, “the ultimate monument to Kant and the whole altruist morality is Soviet Russia” (65).

She intones, regarding “altruism” (yes, still on about this): “when a theory achieves nothing but the opposite of its alleged goals, yet it advocates remain undeterred, you may be certain that it is not a conviction, or an ‘ideal,’ but a rationalization” (20). Invisible hand, anyone?

Same Dunning-Kruger effect as in other volumes: “stagnant barbarism” in reference to the humanities in general (26).

She has a serious problem in setting up straw-persons to knock down, as when she discusses a hypothetical professor who insists on the insufficiency of proving “that something is” but rather “one must also prove that it had to be--and since nothing had to be, nothing is certain and anything goes” (28). Who said that? Oh, no one actually said that? Well, why then are we arguing against a position no one ever held? That’s Rand in a nutshell.

Some bad conceptualization (no surprise!) in an untheorized distinction between “metaphysically given facts” and “man-made facts” (31): “a skyscraper is a man-made fact, a mountain is a metaphysically given fact.” Alrighty then!

Defective self-awareness: “The anti-conceptual mentality takes most things as irreducible primaries and regards them as ‘self-evident’” (38). Kinda like objectivism, no? This text is really a string of dogmatic pronouncements and non-sequiturs built on same--typical of the other writings. Instead of rigor, we get citations to Atlas Shrugged.

Similarly, we see a repeated default in her selective historicism: “Never mind the low wages and the harsh living conditions of the early years of capitalism. They were all that the national economies of the time could afford. Capitalism did not create poverty--it inherited it” (66). This is not an objection that she would allow regarding economic systems that she does not like. Can it seriously be contended that she would allow the objection that the Soviet Union was dicked up in its initial years because the Leninists inherited a raw deal from tsarism, or that the Maoists inherited a bad situation in post-WW2 China?

Neo-spenglerian pronouncements: “Staleness is the dominant characteristic of today’s culture” (162), an essay written in 1972, the year of The Godfather, Deliverance, Pink Flamingos, and Deep Throat, as well as books of 1972, and whatever music and art and whatnot. It really is ludicrous.

But: ��the symptoms of today’s cultural disease are: conformity […], timidity […], and a pall of fear” (162). “Psychologically, this is the cultural atmosphere of a society living under censorship. But there is not censorship in the United States” (id.). She is of course complaining about market censorship, but she wouldn’t refer to it that way. It is all rather a symptom of altruist-collectivist-mystical conspiracy. And how does the conspiracy function? “As a mixed economy, we are chained by an enormous tangle of governmental controls” (163). Okay! And who is at the head of the conspiracy of non-censorship that nonetheless through market mechanisms causes conformism? University researchers, of course, who are enemies of the system, but take public funds. Private funding is fine, of course, as a foolish venturer allegedly “harms no one but himself” and “the money he spends is his own” (168-69). We will just brush under the rug the fact that the money that is “his own” may not have the most clear title or may have been derived from sweatshoppe labor or whatever; and we will just ignore the anti-democratic nature of private charity--significant decisions will be made by the property owner without any democratic decision-making. When that venture fails, it is likely to harm more than the capitalist. But Rand doesn’t care to think through anything--it’s all heroic individualism, &c.

Lengthy chapter on Supreme Court rulings on obscenity is comical: “what is called ‘hard-core’ pornography” she regards as “unspeakably disgusting”--even though “I have not read any of the books or seen any of the current movies belonging to that category” (173). This is the constant refrain: I do not have any experience with X, but I know that I hate X. It’s childish beyond measure. I don’t want to eat broccoli! I don’t like it even though I haven’t tried it! Like any four-year-old, before she’s permitted to be heard, Rand should be made to sit at the dinner table until she finishes her hard-core pornography (or broccoli).

Her readings of the obscenity cases are surprisingly not horrible (for a non-attorney). She attempts to raise questions that she apparently regards as dispositive: “The intellectual standard which is here set up to rule an individual’s mind […] is the judgment of an average person applying community standards” (174), which is language of First Amendment case law for obscenity--except it is specifically not to rule the mind, but to rule publication. She picks at “community standards” as undefined, and at “community” as unidentified. This is the problem with non-attorneys (not to be a dick or anything): that’s all a cipher for the jury drawn from the jurisdiction in which the dispute will have arisen. Same with average person, reasonableness, prurience, seriousness, and so on. She wants some a priori definition to all this, and I don’t necessarily disagree with her--but the objections she raises are worked out by the jury system. Then she twists any good points she has about obscenity law into a rant about “the living hell of antitrust” (184). It’s a joke--and it only gets worse because “the clause giving Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce is one of the major errors in the Constitution” (id.). By contrast, NB she never raises criticism of the US constitution for its approval of chattel slavery.

Recommended only for bloody socialists, those who want to enter the Augean Stables, and readers with so profound a hatred of mankind.

I've finally got the sense of Ayn Rand. Wonderful book