A Few Only Slightly Connected Thoughts on Rand

1a.) This New York Times review of a new Ayn Rand biography has been getting pretty harsh treatment in the blogosphere. Most of the criticism is over this passage:

Brandon of Siris, D.A. Ridgely of Positive Liberty, Jonathan Adler of The Volokh Conspiracy, and several other conservative and libertarian bloggers have pointed out that nothing in this passage implies a contradiction. Brandon’s is the most thorough of these rebuttals.

1b.)Brian Leiter has also criticized Kirsch, the author of the review, for claiming that there is an affinity between the thought of Rand and Nietzsche. He writes:

I’ve always found the positive comparison of Rand to Nietzsche by Randians frustrating, because I’ve never seen any affinity between the two thinkers (they seem completely incompatible, in fact, as Leiter points out), but the comparison is so common that it’s not surprising to see Kirsch invoke it. Still, I’d love to see Rand-Nietzsche meme die, and articles like this in major publications do nothing to hasten that death.

2.) I last read Rand almost 12 years ago. I read The Fountainhead in high school, and found it boring, so I had no intention of reading anything else by Rand. But when I went off to college, I met a bunch of young Randians, and people were frequently suggesting, even demanding, that I read her books. My uncle, for example, upon hearing that I was majoring in philosophy, insisted that I would love Rand (I haven‘t read any of his book suggestions since!). Others thought I would love Rand because of my affinity for Nietzsche. So, I broke down and read Atlas Shrugged.

At the time, I was working as an undergraduate research assistant in a lab during the summer, and was in charge of running one of the lab’s many experiments. The experiment had to be run at the same time every day, and the cruel graduate student I was working under chose to run it at 7 am, so every morning I woke up way too early, showered, and then walked over to the lab armed only with my copy of Atlas Shrugged. I would start the experiment, and then sit and read for the 90 minutes the experiment ran. Reading for 90 minutes a day, it still took me an entire month to get through the book (Galt’s long speech was particularly slow going). That experiment and that book will forever be united in my memory as wholly unpleasant experiences.

I found the book to be worse than awful as a novel, and the philosophy it presented to be even worse than that, but thought that Rand’s obvious lack of talent as a novelist might get in the way of her presenting her philosophy, so I went to the library and checked out some of her philosophical works, The Virtue of Selfishness, i>Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, and Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. I forced myself to read through all three, and came away even less impressed with her philosophy (if that was possible). My impressions of her philosophy ranged from finding it thoroughly uninteresting to being offended by it and horrified that she was so widely read. I sometimes wonder if, now that I’m older, my impression of her would be different were I to revisit her books, but my impression was so bad then that I don’t think it’s worth my time to find out.

3.) Anyway, since I haven’t read her or even thought about her work seriously in so long, I can’t really speak intelligently about her philosophy, but the much maligned passage in Kirsch’s review got me thinking about the issue of living the philosophical life that I wrote about last week. Did Rand live a life consistent with her philosophy? Kirsch was obviously trying to imply that she didn’t, but those more familiar with Rand’s work than I have been pretty vehement in insisting that he was wrong in the particular case he chose as an example. Still, Rand’s biographers often highlight the cultish atmosphere that surrounded her close followers, and that she herself promoted. Part of this cultish atmosphere was a complete lack of tolerance for dissent. It was Rand’s way or the highway, with she and her closest followers excommunicating even mildly dissenting members of her sect, and demanding that the remaining members cut off all contact with the excommunicated (even when they were close family members, or spouses!). As a philosopher whose most popular teaching is one of radical individualism, this does seem problematic, does it not?

Or maybe not. I wonder if the perception of Rand as a promoter of individualism is a mistaken one, and that her stifling of individual thought is therefore perfectly consistent with her philosophy. If I remember correctly, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroes, Dagny Taggert, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, all thought alike, and Taggert’s affinity for Rearden was largely due to the fact that their world-views were identical. What’s more, anyone who didn’t share that world view was treated quite harshly in the novel. So maybe Rand’s individualism has less to do with thought than with action: it is about the virtue of selfishness, and acting on one’s own behalf, rather than making up one’s own mind, because for Rand, when one uses reason properly, there is only one set of conclusions that one can possibly come to. If that’s the case, to the extent that Rand’s individualism has to do with thinking for oneself, it is not thinking originally, but coming to the right conclusions independent of the destructive ideas that dominate our culture.

Rural Post

I love this image from Old Picture of the Day (click for a larger view):

I'm not sure why I love it so much. It could be the details: the mud splatter on the coach, the fact that the coach has a front window (presumably because of the mud spatter; I can't imagine he drives fast enough to get bugs in his teeth), the curious look on the children, the leafless trees, etc. Or it could be that the whole scene reminds me a lot of what my hometown looked like when I was a young child, when many of the roads were still unpaved, and trees like the ones in the picture still dominated the landscape. Granted, the mail man wasn't driving around in a horse and buggy, but the picture still induces a distinct feeling of nostalgia in me, particularly since my hometown doesn't look anything like this picture anymore. You'd be hard pressed to find a dirt road, and the city has become incredibly overdeveloped, so that you have to go out of the city limits to find that many trees of that age in the same place (I'd guess those trees are 50-70 years old; they don't look like old growth).

Leiter on Romano on Heidegger; And the Philosopher Who Lives Philosophy

Leiter weighs in, in his usual acerbic fashion. He adds little to the discussion, but as usual, his vitriol makes his efforts amusing.

The discussion that has resulted from Romano's article reminded me of something Nietzsche once wrote in "Schopenhauer as Educator" (Dan Brezeale's translation; emphasis mine):

I profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example. That he is capable of drawing whole nations after him through his example is beyond doubt; the history of Indian, which is almost the history of Indian philosophy, proves it. But this example must be supplied by his outward life and not merely in his books--in the way, that is, in which the philosophers of Greece taught, through their bearing, what they wore and ate, and their morals, rather than by what they said, let alone what they wrote. how completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany!

Writing this in an essay on Schopenhauer seems appropriate, since, as a rabid misogynist, he had no problem throwing his landlady down the stairs. When she died, and he no longer had to pay her restitution, he famously wrote in his account book, "Obit anus, abit onus," the pretentious 19th century equivalent of saying, "The bitch is dead, the I don't have to pay anymore" (literally more like, "The asshole is dead, the burden departed"). So he was certainly living that aspect of his philosophy.

More to the point, this sentiment seems somewhat strange in 2009, when the vast majority of professional philosophers are working on issues that would be difficult to reflect in their outward lives--in the way that they carry themselves, in what they wear, eat, etc. How, for example, might one wear clothes reflective of one's position on whether the denotation of a predicate is its extension or its intension? What should predicate dualists or eliminative materialists eat? In a time when philosophy has become an increasingly specialized discipline, and increasingly removed from life, it has become increasingly difficult to know what living a philosophy would entail, to say nothing of actually doing so.

Still, I think there's something important in the sentiment that a philosopher should live his or her philosophy, to the extent that a philosopher's philosophy is relevant to living. If nothing else, a philosopher living in a way that is not only consistent with, but actually reflects his or her philosophy shows that he or she takes it quite seriously, and suggests that we, as their readers, should take it seriously as well.

One can apply this maxim to much of systematic philosophy, and to much of the generally asystematic Continental tradition. Heidegger's philosophy, which both systematic and as part of that tradition, is certainly is relevant to living, and thus it's not inappropriate to ask whether he lived in a way that reflected it. We might, for example, explore how well Heidegger's life reflected one of the central ideas in his philosophy, the concept of authenticity (eigentlich), and one of its primary components, "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), in his siding with the Nazi's largely for reasons of personal and professional gain, his efforts to get us to ignore this episode in his life while refusing to apologize for it, his treatment of his friends Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuese, and Karl Jaspers (during the Nazi years, treating them rather poorly, even insulting them, but afterward, when his reputation was in need of repair, calling on them to come to his aid), etc.

Heidegger wrote in Being and Time that resoluteness, again part of authenticity, is "letting oneself be called forth to one’s ownmost Being-guilty." He had in mind a sort of existential guilt (not unlike original sin, I suppose), in this part of Being and Time, but sees this existential guilt as the ground for all feelings of responsibility and guilt. Yet Heidegger refused to admit responsibility, or show any form of guilt, when it came to his Nazism and other blatantly immoral personal and professional behavior. His refusal to apologize to the very people he'd most directly harmed, his friends and students like Arendt, Jaspers, and Marcuse, shows this quite clearly. Is this Heidegger failing to live his philosophy, or at least an important aspect of it? It's difficult to draw any other conclusion.

How much, then, can we profit from him as a philosopher? How seriously should we take his philosophy in light of the fact that he so blatantly failed to live in accordance with it? I assume we could forgive small indiscretions. Philosophers are no more perfect than any other human beings. But Heidegger's indiscretions were anything but small. At this point, the fact that Heidegger's thought has been so influential probably renders his living of it irrelevant from a historical perspective. We can profit greatly from it in understanding the work of those who came after him. But I am interested in philosophy first and foremost from an individual perspective: what does it tell me about the world, myself, and life in general that I can use in my own life? There is no doubt in my mind that I can take bits and pieces from Heidegger to inform my own thinking (I frequently use his lectures on the Principle of Sufficient Reason in my own thinking on science and ontology, e.g.), but Heidegger's own failure to live his philosophy makes me skeptical of his project as a whole. I don't think his personal failures constitute sufficient grounds for rejecting his philosophy, of course, but it is certainly one rather large quarrel in the critic's quiver.

What do you think?

Added (Slightly) Later: The example I gave is not meant to be the only one in which Heidegger's life is relevant to his philosophy. Nor is "seriousness" meant to be the only reason why living a philosophy is relevant to what we take away from it. Nietzsche himself gives us more reasons in Beyond Good and Evil when he talks of the prejudices of philosophers. A philosophers personality will inevitably be reflected in his or her philosophy, but sometimes indirectly: a philosophy, for example, may be designed to make a philosopher seem like an extremely moral, erudite, or principled person, when in fact he or she is an unprincipled, immoral jerk. In Heidegger's case, his borrowing of terminology from the Nazis (mentioned in the Romano comment thread) show quite clearly how his life affected his books, and therefore how his life is relevant to how we read them, and how much we will profit from them.

A Little Rant About Racism in Austin

I grew up in a small town in the Old South in the late 70s, 80s, and early 90s. During my early, formative years, open, public racism abounded. It was not uncommon to hear the n-word spoken in public, or to hear horribly racist jokes told loudly in a restaurant. Many of the white people in town (about 60% of the town's population) genuinely considered black people (most of the other 40%) to be inferior, and would tell this to anyone who'd listen. Their children sopped up their racism, of course, and when I was in elementary school it was not uncommon for their to be fights caused by racism. The Confederate battle flag was everywhere, and I mean everywhere. My schools mascot, from middle school on, was a Rebel, and in both my junior high and high school gyms (where I played on the basketball teams), rebel flags were painted on the walls. By the time I got to high school, though, things had changed dramatically. GM's Saturn plant had opened nearby, resulting in an influx of new residents mostly from northern states, who were less tolerant of explicit racism. Even before that, a change in attitude had been slowly occurring, and by 11th grade in high school, a petition circulated, and was ultimately signed by about 2/3s of the students, the change the mascot (the school's administration, and then the school board, ultimately rejected the change, and the school's mascot is still a Rebel). There was a bit of a countermovement -- my senior year, a group of white students produced "senior" shirts that displayed the rebel flag with a message about being proud of our southern heritage -- but for the most part, by the mid-90s, explicit racism was no longer tolerated. It has been years since I heard the sorts of things I used to hear regularly in the 80s.

Now I live in Austin, TX, an ostensibly liberal city that certainly isn't known for its racism. It should be, because institutional racism is a big problem here, but it isn't. To see this one need only look at the police shootings of the last several years, Austin's nearly complete racial segregation, or the fact that the police presence is fairly small at the mostly white SxSW music and film festival, while the police presence is mind-bogglingly large during the mostly black Texas Relays, which is considerably smaller than SxSW, that takes place a week or two after SxSW. This year, several businesses even chose to close their doors during the Relays, including a reggae club (saying that, in essence, black people don't like reggae) and an entire friggin' mall, citing security concerns, despite the fact that statistically the SxSW crowd produces much more crime than the Relays crowd. But Austin's racism is 21st century racism: it's acted on, often very subtly, but it's rarely if ever openly voiced, and therefore if you're not paying attention, you might miss it.

Today, however, I ran into one man who proudly wears his racism, on his jacket. He was riding the 1L bus from South Park Meadows (in the far south of Austin) wearing a jacket on which he and, if I were guessing, his friends had penned several symbols and phrases, including "White Warriors," "Aryan Knight," and the SS lightning bolt symbol (in several places), along with several anarchy symbols (because nothing is more compatible with the most fervently loyal military wing, the SS, of one of history's worst authoritarian regimes, the Nazis, than anarchy!). I honestly hadn't seen anything like this in years. I had seen KKK and skinheads at rallies, but not just walking around in public, proudly displaying their racism. I found it both disturbing and incredibly offensive. It's upsetting that in 2009, more than 50 years after the Montgomery Bus Boycott. It's just mind-boggling.


The picture was taken without his permission, but fuck the racist bastard, I don't care. I know it's kind of hard to read, because my camera phone sucks, but the word after "White" is "Warriors," and underneath that it says, "King of Kings," and then, "Aryan Knight." The "A" in "Aryan" has been turned into the anarchy symbol. Just above the word "knight" is one of several SS lightning bolt symbols. If you're in Austin, and ride the 1L, be sure to let this guy know what you think of his white supremacist views if you see him.

A friend of mine told me that she prefers that racists be open, because at least then you know what you're getting. But I had always thought the fact that racism had become so shameful that the vast majority of racists were afraid to show their, shall we say, true colors in public, was a good thing. But this guy shows that not everyone has gotten that message, and thus reminds me of just how far we have to go in this country before we can say we're living in a "post-racial" society. Ugh. And I'm afraid that this is the sort of thing that Austin's city government, police force, and many of its businesses, encourage when they tacitly approve of racism through their actions and inaction.

Interesting Comment From a Mormon Opponent of Intelligent Design

From a post (via) on Michael Behe's talk at BYU:

So called, Intelligent Design is not just the idea that there is a Creator. I think Mormons look at the label “Intelligent Design” created by the evangelical Discovery Institute and think, “Hey we think God was Intelligent! We must believe in Intelligent Design too!!” No. Their intelligent designer has nothing to do with the glory and beauty of our conception of God. Thiers is a bit of a hack who couldn’t get creation right the first time and has to keep dabbling with the process to get it right.

I've never heard that take on Intelligent Design before. Definitely an interesting way to look at it.

Two Kinds of Books on Nietzsche

Do you seek warmth of me? Come not too close, I counsel, or your hands may burn. For look! My ardor exceeds the limit, and I barely restrain the flames from leaping from my body!

I've spent a lot of time reading the secondary literature on Nietzsche, and I keep coming away with the impression that there are two types of books on Nietzsche. I write that sentence with trepidation, because when someone begins a statement with, "There are two types of..." you can be fairly certain that whatever follows is false. So I don't really mean that there are only two types of books on Nietzsche, just that I tend to classify books on his work into two types.

OK, even that's not true. There are at least three types: really, really bad books on Nietzsche, and OK to good books on Nietzsche that can be classified into two types. The really, really bad books on Nietzsche are the most common type. For example, I just finished reading Prophets of Extremity by Allan Megill. It's an interesting book in its own way, I suppose, but as a book on Nietzsche (or a book with chapters on Nietzsche), it's awful. It's one of those frequent attempts to "postmodernize" Nietzsche, by focusing entirely on his immature aestheticism, and to make that aestheticism into some strange ontology that seems wholly alien both to Nietzsche and to anyone else writing before 1970. For anyone who's actually read Nietzsche, this sort of book is frustratingly bad. Then there's Heidegger's multi-volume series on Nietzsche, which again tries to turn him into a metaphysician, but this time relying almost exclusively on a book that Nietzsche didn't even publish (or write, even) himself: The Will to Power. For Heidegger, this Will to Power is the core of Nietzsche's metaphysics (volume III of the series is even titled "The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics"). When you make a concept that appears only rarely in a thinker's published writings the central component of his or her philosophy, you've If you read all four volumes, you will come away asking yourself, "Did Heidegger and I read the same Nietzsche, or was he reading some Bizarro Nietzsche who'd never written The Gay Science or Beyond Good and Evil?"

So when I say that there are two types of books on Nietzsche, I mean there are two types of books on Nietzsche that have some redeeming value as Nietzsche scholarship or independent philosophy. The first type is exemplified by Walter Kauffmann's dry, plodding, and conservative, but excellent and indespensible Nietzsche: Philosophy, Psychologist, Antichrist. This was the first book on Nietzsche that I read, and I've gone back to it repeatedly over the years. It is thorough, it is accurate if at times controversial, and it provides an excellent companion to Nietzsche's own writings, as well as providing excellent pieces of biographical information. This category thus includes books that are fairly straightforward attempts to interpret and situate Nietzsche as a philosopher (or a psychologist, or an Antichrist). They can be relatively dull, particularly when compared to Nietzsche's writings, but they're informative, and reading them can help you a great deal in making your way through an incredibly complex thinker's writings. In this category I would also include most of the more recent books by English-speaking philosophers, like Brian Leiter's book on Nietzsche and morality, the Richardson and Leiter edited volume on Nietzsche, Rudiger Safranski's "philosophical biography," and Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (I'd include Nehemas' book, but it's a sort of tweener).

The second category has fewer members, but I tend to enjoy them much, much more. These books generally don't get all, or even most of the details about Nietzsche right, or they focus exclusively on one aspect of his writing and therefore provide a highly incomplete picture. So they shouldn't be read in order to understand the content of Nietzsche's thought. What these books do, instead, is capture the spirit of Nietzsche, the spirit of the "gay science," of the eternal return, Nietzsche as Antichrist, of giving birth to a dancing star. The book I place most firmly in this category is Georges Bataille's On Nietzsche (which begins with the quote above, from Nietzsche's unpublished notes). In the preface, Bataille openly admits that his book is not an attempt at formal exegesis, but an attempt "to draw out consequences of a lucid doctrine impelling and attracting me to it as if to the light." It is written in his own blood, he says, as Nietzsche's works were. It is not merely a critical reading of Nietzsche, but an "experiencing" of Nietzsche, in an effort to work out what Nietzsche has wrought inside Bataille, and which is driving him to insanity. And it is absolutely wonderful to read. I discovered it in a library, years ago. I started reading it early in the afternoon, and became so engrossed that I read it from start to finish, leaving late in the evening. The next day, I went out and bought a copy of my own, which I go back to as often as I go back to Kauffmann.

Another book that I would place firmly in this category is Graham Parkes' Composing the Soul which, while fairly accurate in its description of Nietzsche's writings, is also extremely limited in that description. It focuses entirely on the psychological dimension in Nietzsche, arguing, to some extent accurately and to some extent futilely, that this is the fundamental dimension of his work. But more than an attempt at exegesis, it is a wonderful exploration of both Nietzsche's mind and the mind in general, and a joy to read. It is even moving, at times, as when it discusses Nietzsche's post-insanity letters. You wouldn't recommend this book to anyone starting out with Nietzsche, because it would certainly steer them in the wrong direction, but for those who like to read, and who are very familiar with Nietzsche, it's a must read. Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy is another example of this type of book, though Deleuze is hardly the writer that Battaile was or Parkes is. Reading Deleuze is a usually struggle (Difference and Repetition has to be the most frustrating book I've ever read), and this book is no exception, but it's still inspiring, if not entirely accurate.

Object-Oriented Philosophy

I have been trying to write a post about object-oriented philosophy (OOP) and speculative realism (SR), but have found it difficult to do so, in part because I keep coming off somewhat mean, and in part because I keep writing way, way too much for a blog post. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of OOP and SR, if only because I'm very sympathetic to speculative philosophy, and I have a soft spot for new ideas (even if they aren't yet so radically new). Plus, I consider myself a realist, though of an somewhat different sort, I think I (I'm a direct realist). But I'm firmly wedded to my anthropocentrism, and I'm not totally averse to what speculative realists call "correlationalism" (see the link above for their definition of this term), so my sympathy only goes so far. Whatever my level of sympathy, I did really enjoy at least the first part^* of Graham Harman's essay on Husserl and Lovecraft (scroll down to page 332), which I definitely recommend reading. Like I said, I dig speculative philosophy.

But what I find truly fascinating of OOP, regardless of what I think of it as a philosophy, is the role that the internet has played in its development. So before I say anything about OOP as a philosophy, I point you to this summary of that role. Definitely worth reading if you're interested in the possibilities that the blogosphere has to offer to serious scholarship.

*Towards the end, he starts criticizing Husserl for not being enough of a realist, which is where my interest started to wane. I recall Camus saying just the opposite: that Husserl was too much of a realist. Damned if he did, damned if he didn't, eh?