Ayn Rand's Philosophy Decoded: Replies to Recent Criticisms of the Objectivist Ethics - SAVVY STREETSAVVY STREET

Ayn Rand’s Philosophy Decoded: Replies to Recent Criticisms of the Objectivist Ethics

By Roger E. Bissell

November 27, 2023

Part 1: Come, Let Us Beat Our Mountains into Molehills

“For every mountain, there is an equal and opposite molehill.”—Sir Erasmus Newton[1]

“Intellectuals thrive on disagreement…seeking lines of creativity by negating the chief tenets of their rivals…even within a single position there is only a limited amount of attention to be split up among the proponents…”—Randall Collins

“Maneuvering space is limited; there are only so many niches to occupy. There are constraints, a limited number of best solutions to problems…so species will often converge.”—Holmes Rolston, III

Douglas Rasmussen and Douglas Den Uyl have scored a trifecta this year (still 2023, as I write this), with the publication of three pieces comparing their ethical and political philosophy with the related ideas of various other philosophers, including Ayn Rand. One of the pieces appeared in Reason Papers as part of a symposium, one appeared as a book review in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, and one (written by my friend, Edward Younkins) appeared here on The Savvy Street. I have submitted a response to the Reason Papers piece, but I have no idea when (or even whether) it will appear in print. Since the other journal passed off this mortal coil earlier this year, a response to the piece in that journal will be folded into my comments on Younkins’s piece, and that will have to suffice for the time being.

Younkins has not been completely accurate in his characterization of Rand’s philosophy.

Younkins (I keep wanting to call him Edward or Ed) has highlighted a number of important issues, both in philosophy more generally and about ways that Rand’s ethics and politics may (or may not) diverge from those of Rasmussen and Den Uyl (my friends, Doug and Doug, who will be referred to as R&D from here on). Also, while Younkins has not noted any possible defects or deficiencies in R&D’s Individualist Perfectionism, he has flagged areas of concern for Rand’s Objectivism, so it ends up being more of a critique of Rand than a comparison—moreover, a critique that is invalid at least in part, which is what prompted this response. In addition, he has not been completely accurate in his characterization of Rand’s philosophy, and I will address that matter too, beginning in this part with an examination of the claim by Younkins and R&D that Rand has conflated logic and reality, and in particular that she has confused the good with the concept of the good.

1) Preliminary points on Aristotle, realism, and the objective

I agree with Younkins that both Objectivism and Individualistic Perfectionism can be viewed as neo-Aristotelian philosophies, and that Aristotle influenced both Rand and R&D, even though he was not a classical liberal per se. The most distinctive aspects of his philosophy, and what clearly carried down to Rand and R&D and other neo-Aristotelians, were his metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics.

However, not only would I not hang “classical liberal” around Aristotle’s neck, but I would also not do so for Rand or R&D either. Rand eschewed the term in favor of “laissez-faire” (preferably conjoined with “capitalism”), regarding liberalism (at least by the early 1960s) as a “rubber term” almost devoid of clear meaning and libertarianism as even worse, because of its being infested (as she saw it) with hippies and drug addicts. In contrast, R&D have spoken often in such phrases as “the libertarian and classical liberal tradition,” even of “defending liberalism” or “repositioning liberalism,” but they officially style their own doctrine as a politics of “metanorms,” by which they mean individual rights based on human nature and the social context in which humans live. If this is to be understood as a species of liberalism, I have not found anywhere in their main trilogy of books that they acknowledge it as such.

The most accurate thing to say about both Rand and R&D is that they are realists about both the world and our knowledge of it.

As another point of common ground, in terms of their metaphysics and epistemologies, the most accurate thing to say about both Rand and R&D is that they are realists about both the world and our knowledge of it. Reality exists independently of our awareness of it, and we are capable of having valid knowledge of it.[2] However, there are two caveats to this in regard to Rand.

First, Rand shunned the term “realist,” because she rejected both the so-called naïve realist view of perception (supposedly attributed to Aristotle) as well as what she took to be the radical, Platonist, and moderate, Aristotelian, views of the nature of universals. Instead, she said, both sense data and universals are “objective,” i.e., forms in which we cognitively adhere to reality and are thus aware of entities and of common characteristics in forming concepts.[3]

Second, it is not accurate to attribute the idea to Rand that “reality is objective;” not as her mature, considered opinion. Even though there is a widespread and longstanding usage, inside and outside of Objectivism, of the phrase “objective” as applied to reality, it was only frequently used in this metaphysical sense in the early part of Rand’s Objectivist movement.

Here is a bit of history and statistics for those who enjoy such:

Beginning in 1945, Rand used the phrase numerous times in her journals while working on Atlas Shrugged, and in the novel itself (1957), she used the phrase eight times. The next year, when Nathaniel Branden began lecturing on Objectivism, he used the phrase twelve times, and Barbara Branden used it five times in her 1960 “Efficient Thinking” lectures. Rand used the phrase four times in her 1961 essay “For the New Intellectual.” The next year, Rand and Branden used it in The Objectivist Newsletter a total of four times, but in 1963 it was used only once (by Branden). Rand and Branden each used it once in the newsletter in 1965 (though I have only incomplete data for 1965 and no data for 1964). Then in The Objectivist, Branden used the phrase once in 1966 and three times in 1967, The last time the phrase appeared in print during Rand’s lifetime was in her 1970 article, “The Comprachicos.” After that, the phrase disappeared from official Objectivist literature; it did not appear even once in The Ayn Rand Letter (1971–1975).

Now, here’s the twist: it’s noteworthy that Peikoff did not use the phrase “objective reality” a single time in his 1976 lectures on The Philosophy of Objectivism, which were certified by Rand as an accurate presentation of her philosophy. In those lectures, he explained that the metaphysical usage of the term “objective” is harmless but not the primary meaning, as Rand uses it, which instead is epistemological. The nature of reality, he said, is better captured by the phrase “Primacy of Existence.”[4] Looking back, we see that Rand first began using this new metaphysical phrase in 1966 in her series “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology,” the year that she virtually abandoned using the older metaphysical phrase “objective reality” in print.[5]

At any rate, the official position of Objectivism is that referring to reality as “objective,” while “harmless,” is not the preferred way to describe Objectivism’s metaphysical view.

At any rate, the official position of Objectivism is that referring to reality as “objective,” while “harmless,” is not the preferred way to describe Objectivism’s metaphysical view. Instead, the distinctive, epistemological use of the term, promoted vigorously as such from the early 1970s onward, is as a label for Objectivism’s view of the cognitive relationship between consciousness and existence. Clearly, the “old” usage and this “newer” usage are as different as the traditional Cartesian/Kantian usage and the medieval Scholastic usage, and it is somewhat fascinating and amusing to see Rand galloping back from the early modern metaphysical usage to the medieval epistemological usage, while R&D adhere (throughout their recent trilogy of books) to the early modern metaphysical usage.[6] The metaphysical usage may be “harmless” as Peikoff called it, but I personally think the continued use of it sets up a Tower of Babel situation, as certainly appears to be the case with some of Younkins’s claims about Rand confusing logic and reality (see part IV below).

2) The good—potential or actual, metaphysical or epistemological?

The reason for belaboring this point is not just to quibble over labels for reality, but to help clarify Rand’s position about the nature of the good, which I maintain has been radically misunderstood by Younkins and R&D. To them, the good is metaphysical, it is “objective” in the sense of existing independent of cognition—while for Rand, the good is epistemological, “objective” in the sense of being the form in which we are cognitively aware of the beneficial relationship of some aspect of reality to ourselves. The Tower of Babel is alive and well in this seeming impasse between Individualistic Perfectionism and Objectivism.

While the two positions do indeed seem to be at loggerheads, however, it will not do either to claim that Younkins and R&D hold an “intrinsicist” view of the good, or to claim that Rand is “confusing logic with reality.” First of all, it would simply be an unproductive short-circuit of the exploration that we all prefer and would most rationally benefit from. Secondly, it would reflect a failure on both sides to see the underlying reality of how the good can exist either as a potential or as an actuality—or both, of course. The potential and the actual are one of those pairs of concepts that range across all of the Aristotelian categories, and “the good” is no exception.

As good neo-Aristotelian-Thomists, I’m sure that R&D can appreciate this point, though I think their discussion of it would be better served by the simple terminology of “potential” and “actual,” rather than eye-glazing jargon like “first grade of actuality” and “second grade of actuality” which they deploy in their Reason Papers essay, and which Younkins repeats in his essay. If they simply mean to introduce terminology that helps distinguish between something that is not yet a potentiality from something that is actually a potentiality and thus a “first grade of actuality,” that seems like an unnecessarily unwieldy way of expressing a distinction that seems to serve no useful purpose.[7]

But let’s go with their explanation and see just how it differs from Rand’s position. Quoting from their Reason Papers essay, R&D state that human good comprises a complex reality that expresses a relationship of potentiality for actuality…In this regard, IP holds with Aristotle that there is a distinction between grades of actuality when it comes to living things. The first grade of actuality is the possession of a set of capacities that are also potentialities for a living thing’s second grade of actuality—that is, their actual use or deployment by a living thing. Included among the set of potentialities of a human being that comprise its first grade of actuality is the potential to exercise one’s conceptual capacity. This first grade of actuality is a cognitive-independent reality. However, when one’s conceptual capacity is exercised and used in a manner that actualizes the other potentialities that require it, then a second grade of actuality is attained. (emphases added)

How would (how could) Rand disagree with this? Would she say there is no such thing as potential good? No.

Now, the first question to ask is: how would (how could) Rand disagree with this? Would she say there is no such thing as potential good? No. She would just say—as she does in many different discussions of the potential vs. the actual—that what really counts in life and horseshoes is the actual, that you don’t get credit for your aspirations or what-might-have-been. She didn’t define “value” as that which you can or might someday or rationally should act to gain and/or keep, but as that which you (do, in fact) act to gain and/or keep.

Similarly, as regards the good, Rand saw it in its full reality—as R&D would say, in its having “attained a second grade of actuality”—and she would have shrugged at the thought that all that potential good out there in the world was anything more than…potential. Real, actual potential, certainly, but what else is new? As Peikoff much later (1989) said in his essay “Fact and Value,” the whole universe is a vast bundle of potential good: “every fact of reality which we discover has, directly or indirectly, an implication for man’s self-preservation and thus for his proper course of action.” But it’s an implication, a potential in regard to human survival and proper action. To actually support one’s survival, to actually be good for one, it must be cognized (identified and evaluated) and then acted toward.[8]

R&D are mistaken in thinking that Rand is “confusing logic with reality.”

In this light, it appears that the main difference between Rand and R&D is that Rand says that only actual, i.e., actually cognized and evaluated and pursued things are good in the fullest (and to her, the only morally relevant) sense, while R&D say that once something is even potentially good it’s at the “first grade of actualization” and therefore actually good, full stop, end of story. Thus, R&D are mistaken in thinking that Rand is “confusing logic with reality.” In fact, she is advocating an epistemological view of the good as actual good, as opposed to R&D’s metaphysical view of the good as potential good. Both views are valid in their own way, and neither conflates logic with reality.

R&D think that their view of the good is perfectly adequately covered by their potential good perspective, and to finesse the argument, they frame their view as “first grade of actualization.” However, they do not acknowledge (or realize) that their “second grade of actualization” is, in reality, Rand’s actual good view of the good, which in her view is what really counts in regard to the moral good. (Again, for Rand, you don’t get moral credit for unacted-upon aspirations.)[9]

Have the angels danced themselves to exhaustion on the head of the pin, yet? Are we perhaps going to see a meeting of the twain? Let’s press on and finish up by reconsidering some of Younkins’s comments about the good.

3) Analyzing Younkins’s claims about Rand

In his fifth paragraph, Younkins claims that “Rand seems to call for the conceptual recognition of what is valuable or good in order for it to exist in reality as something potentially valuable to, or good for, a given person” (emphasis in original). That is precisely what Rand does not, and would never, call for. She does not deny the existence of the potential good independent of cognition, and she does not condition its existence as potentially good on its being conceptually recognized as good. What she insists is that the actual good is conditional upon some potential good being conceptually recognized as good.

Thus, Rand’s view—which I assume is the same for Younkins, R&D, as well as myself—is that (1) a thing is potentially good when, in a certain range of conditions (and not in others), it is able to fulfill some survival need that we have, and that (2) we live in a universe full of such things. What Rand denies is the ethical relevance of the potential good. Further, neither a thing that is valuable or good, nor anything in the universe, exists because one has conceptually recognized it as existing or that which can be identified as good exists independently of the act of identifying it as such; but its actually being identified as good is part and parcel of the cognitive relation between itself and the organism doing the identifying.

Two paragraphs later, Younkins says: “The Dougs, however, emphasize that the good exists in reality apart from, and independent of, human cognition…[T]here is a difference between one’s knowledge of what is good and the reality that supplies the basis for that knowledge.” This needs some clarification, because as it stands, it is ambiguous and misleading. The potential good exists in reality apart from, and independent of, human cognition; but the actual good exists in reality as the object of a cognitive relation between that thing and the cognizing organism. The thing that is either potentially or actually good exists first as a potential good independent of cognition; but when it is also an actual good, it is then also the object of cognition, and as such is also a part of that cognitive relationship.

As for the second sentence, a more nuanced way to state the complex truth it tries to express is this: one’s knowledge that something is potentially good for one is not the same as the thing that one knows to be potentially good; and one’s knowledge that something is actually good for one is not the same as that thing either. However, those two items of knowledge are not the same as each other, and neither is a thing as potentially good the same as that thing as actually good. A thing in one circumstance is not the same as that thing in another circumstance—whether that circumstance is being a potential good or an actual good, a potential father or an actual father, or whatever—even though they are the same thing considered apart from those differing circumstances.

In the same paragraph, Younkins says that “The individual human good or telos exists as a potentiality that does not depend upon it being cognized to exist or to be what it is” (emphasis added). Again, true enough—a potentiality. But the individual human good, as an actuality, also does depend upon its being cognized as existing, being what it is, and (in particular) being able to fulfill some survival need. And once more, we wonder: what is the difference between R&D’s view and Rand’s view—except that Rand insists that the good only exists as an actuality as part of a person’s cognitive relationship to some such thing, and that the good as a potential is not worth focusing on, while R&D instead say that the actual good—which they variously call “potential” and “first grade of actuality”— is out there, inherent in reality, even if no one is ever aware of it. Rand’s focus may be overly restrictive for some, but in no way is she denying the independent existence of reality, including the potential good.

Still in that same paragraph, Younkins says: “The individual human good is discovered or realized, rather than constructed.” I don’t see a conflict in this. Construction is a general term that includes the cognitive processes by which our sense organs, nervous systems, and brains grasp some feature of the world by collecting and organizing the incoming energy patterns—as well as the non-cognitive processes by which our brains rearrange our cognitive contents (including memories) into conscious products that are not a direct grasp of reality.

The so-called constructivists in philosophy (whom I think of as extremely wordy metaphysical subjectivists) have conferred an unnecessary guilt by association on the constructive processes underlying cognition. This should stop. The cognitive construction that is the means of one’s cognitive grasp of reality is not invention or imagination (non-cognitive construction). Yes, a cognitive grasp of reality is not a construction per se, but it relies on an underlying constructive process, in the same sense that the nutrition of one’s tissues is not a construction but is carried out by means of constructive metabolic processes, and these metabolic processes are very real and not a figment of your imagination.

4) Does Rand confuse logic and reality?

After two paragraphs on Rand and logic, during which Younkins claims that “Rand did not always keep clear the distinction between logic and reality,” he then makes two attempts to support this claim. First, he attributes to Rand the view that “the good does not exist if no one makes an evaluation,” and he says that Rand should instead have said “the concept of the good does not exist if no one makes an evaluation.” As we have seen, however, Rand’s view more precisely is that something that really does exist and that is in fact potentially good is not also actually good unless someone evaluates it. She does not say that the potentially good thing does not exist if not evaluated, but that that really existing, potentially good thing is not actually good if not evaluated.

Secondly, Younkins says that Rand has misnamed her “the objective theory of value” and that she instead should have called it the “theory of objective value.” The ambiguities lurking in this criticism make it the most tangled yet. The most important thing to note about this is the context in which she introduces her “objective theory of value” in her essay “What Is Capitalism?” She begins by saying that there are “three schools of thought on the nature of the good: the intrinsic, the subjective, and the objective.” She then refers to her view as “the objective theory” (of the good) and shortly later refers equivalently to “an objective theory of value.”

These three thinkers are manifestly worthy defenders of reason, individualistic perfectionism, and freedom, and well deserving of one’s efforts to study and support their ideas..

Now, Rand does not mean that the theories or schools of thought have been formed objectively or subjectively or intrinsically (whatever that last might mean)—nor “…by an Objectivist” or “…by a subjectivist” or “…by an intrinsicist.” Instead, it is very clear from the context that she means “the theory of value as intrinsic” or “…as subjective” or “…as objective.” In other words, Younkins’s attempt to correct Rand’s verbiage ends in an unnecessary distinction and one, moreover, without a difference.

5) Conclusion

Despite my objections and clarifications to some of Younkins’s remarks about Rand and R&D, I certainly want to endorse and amplify his own conclusion. Whatever their differences—whether actual and crucial or merely illusory or minor—and whatever shortcomings there are in either of their philosophies, these three thinkers are manifestly worthy defenders of reason, individualistic perfectionism, and freedom, and well deserving of one’s efforts to study and support their ideas. That conclusion will apply to subsequent parts of this reply as well.

Part II of this is essay is here.

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Notes

[1] Erasmus Newton is, of course, a fiction. Erasmus, aka Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, the Dutch Renaissance humanist, included a phrase in a compilation that was later translated as the now well-known expression “mountains out of molehills,” and Sir Isaac Newton, one of the greatest physicists of all time, formulated the law of motion that I paraphrased á la Erasmus.

[2] I also think that “realism” applies throughout both the philosophies of Rand and R&D, including their ethics and politics, as well as Rand’s preferred aesthetic of Romantic Realism—and thus, that they both should be considered realist philosophies in their entirety. But that’s an argument for another time.

[3] Rand later reneged on this view of perception and convinced Peikoff to revise his original discussion of it in his history of philosophy lectures, thus painting Objectivism into a corner as to our cognition of physical objects. As a result, since about 1972, perception has been neither objective nor realist, in official Objectivist doctrine. (I think that it is both, but I’m only authorized to express my opinions about Objectivism, not to make revisions.) More troublingly, since about 2015 or so, even first-level concepts have fallen into this zone of irrealism and non-objectivity, thanks to Harry Binswanger.

[4] Peikoff also said that facts aren’t objective, they “just are.” Fifteen years later in OPAR, he modified that to: existents aren’t objective, they just are.

[5] Some pivotal decision to move from the “objective reality” phrase to “Primacy of Existence” appears to have been made by Rand around 1965-66, perhaps in concert with Peikoff, but apparently not Branden. As for the anomaly of the 1970 “Comprachico” article, I would speculate that Rand had written part or all of it several years earlier and either overlooked the phrase “objective reality” or chose not to replace it with something like “real world.”

[6] In this respect, ironically, R&D are more (early) Randian and old-school “objective” (= independent of cognition) than Rand herself ended up being from about 1970 onward!

[7] However, I am but a lowly neo-Aristotelian Objectivist, so perhaps I’m missing something.

[8] And even this is incomplete. It also needs to take into account the issue of context. A gallon of water to a dehydrated person in the desert might be life-saving, but a gallon of water poured into one’s nostrils during a CIA interrogation would not. Or, to quote Peikoff’s somewhat less gruesome example: “the sun is a good thing (an essential of life as we know it); i.e., within the appropriate limits, its light and heat are good, good for us; other things being equal, therefore, we ought to plant our crops in certain locations, build our homes in a certain way (with windows), and so forth; beyond the appropriate limits, however, sunlight is not [always] good (it causes burns or skin cancer).”

[9] I am reminded of the apocryphal beauty pageant during which the director admonished the participants, “Girls, please, you’re all beautiful.” However, if I were he, I confess to having a soft spot in my heart for Miss St. Petersburg.

About the Author: Roger E. Bissell

Roger E. Bissell is an independent scholar living in Dickson, Tennessee. A research associate with the Molinari Institute and Associate Editor of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, he has written numerous scholarly essays in philosophy and psychology as well as four books, including How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics (2014) and What’s in Your File Folder? Essays on the Nature and Logic of Propositions (2019). A lifelong professional musician, Roger has an M.A. in music performance and literature (University of Iowa, 1971) and a B.S. in music theory and composition (Iowa State University, 1970) and most recently authored an essay on the Great American Songbook for The Dialectics of Liberty: Exploring the Context of Human Freedom, which he co-edited with Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Edward W. Younkins (2019).

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