Episode #096 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

I hope you love the show today.

So, I bet there are at least a few thousand people out there that got a notification on their phone—Ding! “Oh, look, a new episode of Philosophize This!”—saw the title of the episode, “Ayn Rand,” and they grabbed their steering wheel, sort of screamed a little, “Ah!” leaned over into the passenger seat, and felt a moment of bliss as their car went over the freeway overpass and cascaded down into the ravine below where we like to keep our homeless population in this country. I’m sure there are many of you out there, see, because Ayn Rand is kind of a controversial figure in philosophy.

You know, I thought this episode was going to be a lot easier to put together than it ended up being. Thought I was going to finish it in four or five days—quick turnaround from the last episode. It ended up taking over two weeks because of just how hard it is to find reasonably unbiased information about this stuff. And I told myself, if I’m going to do this thing, I don’t want it to be like everything else out there. I want to try to make it the gold standard when it comes to understanding both sides of this debate of whether Ayn Rand is a philosopher or not.

Now, I’ve read a lot of commentary about Ayn Rand over the last two weeks. And what the people that do the commentary on her seem to want you to believe is that one of two realities is true. Either Ayn Rand is a philosopher, and she created an elaborate system that overthrew the ideas of many thinkers before her and ushered in a new age of philosophy, or that she’s not a philosopher and that she was just a person living in post-World War II Russia who was understandably terrified about what was going on around her in the Soviet Union, wrote a few novels to rant about some ideological positions that she held, and then, after the fact, tried to ground her ideas in an objective philosophical system that is poorly explained and has tons of gaping holes that she willfully glosses over.

What I want to do today is to give an introduction to either side of this debate. And if you’re one of the people that drove your car off the side of the freeway, well, God rest your soul. But if you managed to cling to life in the ICU and listen to this episode, understand that even if you don’t think she’s a philosopher, talking about the reasons many philosophers take issue with her is to be talking about philosophy. Not only that though, these ideas, they’re all around us in modern politics. Rand Paul is named after the woman. I saw this study where they asked a bunch of influential people “What book is the most influential on your thinking?” Atlas Shrugged is number two on the list right behind the Bible. If you’re somebody that’s engaging in modern discourse, you’re going to come across these ideas at some point. And I think all of us can benefit from learning about exactly what they are.

So, what Ayn Rand thinks she’s doing with her body of work is rescuing philosophy. And the strategy she employs to rescue philosophy is to create a complete philosophical system. Not something you see very much anymore. I mean, if you lived 2,000 years ago, it was all the rage. But, apparently, people just aren’t that ambitious anymore. But not Ayn Rand.

Real quick, just because we haven’t talked about these for a while on the show, let’s talk about how these systems are typically structured. Traditionally, philosophers will construct a system, and they’ll use one area of their thought to justify the next area of their thought, which then justifies the next area of their thought. They’ll make some sort of metaphysical or epistemological claim. Then they’ll use that as a foundation for their ethical claims, which then gives rise to their politics or their aesthetics or anything.

For example, a philosopher may start out by making a very basic metaphysical claim. They may say, you know, “We look around us in the world; we all seem like separate people. It may seem like that tree over there and that rock are distinct from me, but in reality,” a philosopher might say, “we’re actually all individual aspects of this totality that is the universe. In reality, we are all actually one thing.” So, for example, they may go from a proposition like that and use it to justify their ethics. They may say, “Well, you know, since in actuality we are all one thing, it would be wrong for you to go up to your grandpa and punch him in the neck because he changed the channel, right? Reason being, that would be an act of self-sabotage since we are, in fact, all one.”

From there, they may use that to justify their politics. They may say that the role of government should be to prevent people from punching their grandpa or that, since we are all individual aspects of this one larger thing and that no one of us in more or less important than another, we should all have an equal say in how things operate. This is a very crude example of how these different fields are structured to link these ideas together in a philosophical system.

Well, Ayn Rand is no different. Now, most people, if they’re trying to explain Ayn Rand’s work, will start with the metaphysics and epistemology, and they’ll work their way up to her politics. I want to do it the other way around for a couple reasons: one, because I think talking about her politics brings clarity to her ethics and epistemology, but also because one of the major points brought up by critics of hers is that these political, ideological messages that she lays out in her novels are really the things she wants to be talking about and that all the rest of it is just sort of hastily thrown together after the fact to justify them. Now, the people on her side would say that actually what happened is that she made a breakthrough for philosophy in the area of epistemology and that the only things that can naturally follow from that breakthrough are her political views. Whatever side of this you fall on, I want to go from the top down. I want to start with her politics and then sort of work our way back up. Hopefully we’ll have a pretty clear picture by the end of this thing.

So, I guess, Ayn Rand would probably ask us all the question, what happened to you, America? What happened to you? You used to be great. Now, you’re just good or, even worse, fair. We need to make America great again, but how do we do that? Well, what’s wrong with it? Maybe a good strategy for finding out what’s wrong with it is, go all the way back to the very beginning and sort of work our way forward to find out where things went wrong.

The year is 1776 in America. What is the most iconic line you can think of that sort of embodies what America was all about back then? What’s the line from 1776 that describes America at that time? Many of you are probably thinking, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, these unalienable rights.” To be a citizen was an individual pursuit. We didn’t want much, us Americans. We’re simple people. All we wanted was to be able to live free and trade a beaver skin for a brand-new pilgrim hat. We were commerce-minded immigrants that just wanted to work hard, pursue our own interests, and make mutually beneficial exchanges with each other.

Ayn Rand thinks that it’s this guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that’s a big reason why things went so well for the United States in the coming years. But something happened between the year 1776 and the 1930s and 40s as Rand’s writing her political work. America began deteriorating. What happened, she thinks, was the thought of Rousseau, Marx, Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Comte, Broad, and many others all came together and created this monolith that has embedded itself into the academic realm and the governments all over the world. Its name is altruism.

Ayn Rand would probably say, close your eyes for a minute and try to picture the most virtuous person you know. Picture the most virtuous person you can conceive of—way better person than you are. What do they look like? What are they doing in your mind’s eye? Rand would say that she’s going to venture to guess that you’re probably not picturing somebody like a Mark Cuban or a Donald Trump. Most of us are probably picturing somebody like, you know, the guy that runs into the burning building and saves the mother and her baby, and he has third-degree burns for the rest of his life. He’s a hero. Most of us are probably picturing, you know, the gal down at the hospital, volunteers most of her time to helping kids with low self-esteem, trying to build their confidence back up.

We picture people that are sacrificing their time, resources, sometimes even their life for others. Ayn Rand would ask, why is this the case? Why is it that sacrificing yourself to others is the pinnacle of being a virtuous person? What happened to 1776? What happened to life, liberty—what happened to your pilgrim hat? Why do you have to sacrifice yourself? Why not pursue your own happiness?

Now, some of you may be asking, “Well, what if going to the hospital and helping those kids is me pursuing my own happiness? It brings me tons of gratification.” Ayn Rand would say, that’s fine. What she’s worried about are the political ramifications of this virtue of self-sacrifice. I mean, think about it, if you were a government and you’re in charge of managing 100 people, which would you rather have, 100 people that are all acting out of their own self-interest or 100 people that are all committed to the task of sacrificing themselves on behalf of the other 99? I mean, if you can convince somebody to go over there and kill that baby as a service to the state and the rest of the population, not only can you get them to do it, but they do it and they feel like they’re morally justified in doing so. That’s a scary prospect to Ayn Rand, especially when she’s looking around her in post-World War II Russia and she’s seeing it happen right in front of her.

This altruism when applied at the level of the government turns a person into a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. Now, up until this point you might be thinking, “Why is everyone bagging on Ayn Rand? What’s she saying that’s so controversial here? I mean, certainly you may disagree with her. You may want to have a conversation with her about some stuff, but so far this really is just somebody giving their views on the political climate of her time. We’ve all done that before. What’s the matter with what she’s saying?”

Well, it’s right here that many of her critics think she should have stopped with the whole being-Ayn Rand thing. Most people that talk about her really don’t have a problem with any of this stuff. It’s what she does next that starts to get people a little upset with her. She says, you know why America has sunk to such a new low? It’s because nothing is forcing people to live by this virtue of rational self-interest and life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. There’s no objective moral foundation that points us in that direction. Sure, people back during the founding of the country embodied this spirit. I mean, they had a very unique perspective. They were running from an oppressive government themselves. But generation after generation passed, and that spirit of rational self-interest just sort of diminished in tandem with the rise of this thing called “altruism.”

That’s a problem to Ayn Rand. You know what all these philosophers have really been procrastinating on? Coming up with some sort of objective way of looking at reality and everything within it. I think I’ll make one. I’ll call it “objectivism.” Objectivism is the name of her philosophical system. All these philosophers, they like to sit up there in their ivory towers and in their universities—like to sit around, “Ooh, how do we know anything?” They like to revel in their unbridled subjectivity and relativism. You know what? If you guys aren’t going to do it. I will. I’m going to get this ship back on course. I’m going to make it so we can finally talk about things objectively.

This is one of the main tasks that Ayn Rand sets out to accomplish in her work. Now, again, this is a point that people who are critics of Ayn Rand start to get a little annoyed. They’ll say something like, “You’re going to try to make things objective. Uh, okay. Where have you been the last 2,500 years? All these philosophers that you’re talking about—like to sit around and stare at each other and talk about how they don’t know anything like it’s some weird fetish,” these people would say, “it’s not like they just love sitting around in a circle together. Most of them spent their entire lives trying to preserve the idea of objectivity. It’s just, the rigors of philosophical scrutiny are kind of brutal. You know what, Ayn Rand? I’m going to go out on a limb and say that if you think you’ve arrived at some objective way of looking at reality, that maybe you’re just trying to avoid philosophical scrutiny.”

“No! No, no, no, don’t you be mean. Just because no one’s ever done it before doesn’t mean no one’s ever going to do it! Come on, Ayn Rand, what was your idea? Tell us.”

Ayn Rand would begin by talking about what she sees as one of the most fundamental and important activities that all human beings can engage in. It’s the process of concept creation. Although, she doesn’t believe that we create concepts. We’ll get to that in a bit. But we have to talk generally about the topic of concept creation to understand where her distinction lies.

So, think of what the world would look like if you never experienced anything before in your life, like, literally nothing. What would trees look like? What would shadows look like? What would moving water look like? It would probably be pretty crazy, right? I mean, you wouldn’t know what any of these things were and you wouldn’t have any frame of reference to be able to link them to past experiences.

Now, philosophers, in their pursuit of trying to understand things, really like to take a close look at trying to understand how we understand things. What does that process look like? Most of us probably don’t really think about it that much. But, you know, when we were babies, there was a point in your life when you had never seen a tree before. And we go through all these different stages of development and smooth transitions, events, sequences. But, eventually, we come out on the other side of that and, magically, we know what a tree is, and we have a sense of how to identify one. How did that happen?

When philosophers talk about our experience of the world, they refer to these kinds of things as concepts—things like trees or clouds or chairs or any of these ways that we try to classify a particular type of thing. And we do it as kind of a form of mental shorthand to be able to make sense of the world better. We see something like a thousand trees, and on the other side of that, we have this concept of what a tree is up in our head that we can reference.

But philosophers like to ask the question, what exactly went on there? How did that whole process go? Did we create the concept of a tree because it was pragmatic? Were these concepts imbued into me when I was born, passed down through some sort of genetics? How much does the culture you live in affect the way that you classify things? For example, there are philosophers out there that think that whatever concepts you use to be able to understand the world, they really just fell into your lap. That the way you break up things in your experience is dictated by whatever culture you were born into. Like, I’m sure you can imagine, if for some reason you were born into a culture that just didn’t differentiate between individual bananas—they think of the bunch as being a concept, but they don’t break it down into individual bananas—these philosophers would say that a person born into this culture would just see the bunch of bananas as the thing, and these yellow things are just pieces of this thing.

Now, what’s interesting to think about it is, we can go the other way with that too. We can break the banana down into other concepts if we want: banana peel, banana fruit, banana seeds. And we can break all these down into further concepts. And what I’m saying is that what begins to emerge when you look at this stuff is just how arbitrarily most of us break up the world and put parameters on things to be able to understand them better.

What also starts to immerge is just how important this process is if we’re going to be thinking clearly and distinctly about things. Ayn Rand thinks this process of concept formation is one of the most fundamental and crucial things we do as human beings. She thinks that, if you had to name one, it is the thing that separates us from the apes. Not only that, it’s the thing that separates the most ape-like man from the most non-ape-like man. I don’t know what the antithesis to ape is, but it’s what separates dumb people from smart people to her—this process of refining our views about how to break up things in our human experience of the world.

Now, I’m sure you can imagine—as people are learning this skill of how to properly formulate concepts—I’m sure you can imagine certain traps you might fall into. For example, I may be talking to you, and I may be telling you a story about something that happened in my kitchen the other day. And just within the confines of normal, everyday conversation, calling it my kitchen is not something I put much thought into. It’s just this pragmatic form of shorthand we’ve come up with that allows me to tell you a story about my kitchen and not have to say, you know, “Oh, you know what happened the other day in that room where I keep my dishwasher, my toaster, my refrigerator, my cabinets, my spatulas?” You know, it’s this word so that I don’t have to spell out all the concepts that make it up. It’s there for convenience.

But imagine if the context changed. Imagine if I’m not just talking to you about something that happened in my kitchen. Now I’m talking to a contractor that’s going to remodel my kitchen for me. I can’t just say, “Build me a kitchen.” No, he’s going to want to know what I want in this kitchen, where I want it, what color I want it to be. Further distinctions are going to need to be made.

Now, this kitchen example may be a little bit ridiculous and ultimately harmless, but Ayn Rand would say that most of us do this all the time with any number of different things that aren’t as harmless—our thoughts on politics, economics, what the meaning of your life is. We’re guilty of not really looking at these concepts closely enough and trying to decipher what the essential properties of them are. If you remember our existentialism episode, the essential property of something is what makes the thing what it is—the thing that if you took it away it would cease to be whatever it is. If you’re trying to arrive at clarity about what things are, essential properties might be a good thing to know. In the same way most of us neglect doing this when it comes to something like a kitchen, we neglect to do it when it comes to things like our political viewpoints. And Ayn Rand would say, eventually, if you practice long enough thinking about kitchens, eventually you’d arrive at a perfect definition of the word “kitchen,” and everything for that matter.

Now, this is a place many of her critics consider her to be kind of naïve. They say that the definitions of words aren’t like that. Words have no inherent meaning. I think I’m going to save the criticisms for next time because I’m almost done, so close, to being done with an episode on Wittgenstein, and this is sort of his territory. But the reason Ayn Rand’s making this point about us refining our concepts and arriving at the true definition of things is because she thinks that if you undergo this process and you look at what it means to be a human being—what is the essential property—what you’ll realize is that to be a human being is to be a rational animal. That’s what being a human being is to Ayn Rand.

Again, this is another thing her critics tend to take issue with. Is “rational animal” the best definition for what it means to be a human being? They say, maybe there’s more to talk about there. Maybe it’s not that simple. I mean, you certainly can imagine another kind of rational animal coming down on a spaceship, shaking hands with Oprah, right? Ayn Rand wouldn’t want to talk about that. She wouldn’t think that’s something that’s worth considering. She thinks to talk about another type of rational animal coming down on a spaceship is tantamount to talking about, you know, where we go when we die is this heavenly realm with rivers of chocolate. We have no experience of it so, therefore, it’s a waste of time. She’s not really a huge fan of religion, as you can probably guess.

But, again, to be a human being, to Ayn Rand, is to be a rational animal. She’d say, think of how important our faculty of reason is. It’s the only way that you have to perceive reality. It’s your only source of knowledge. It’s the only thing you can use to decide what to do. And it’s your basic means of survival. It is your only line of defense that stops you from jumping off a cliff. Now, the negative effects of jumping off a cliff are very obvious. But it’s also your only line of defense against many other acts of self-sabotage, ones that aren’t as pronounced as that.

Now, again, you may be listening to that and thinking, “Yeah, that’s a good point. I’m down with that. I’m all about using my ability to reason more effectively so I can understand the world better.” But, again, many of her critics think this is where she should have stopped it. It's what she does next that earns her a lot of the criticism she gets. Ayn Rand thinks that the function of morality is to ensure that you don’t jump off a cliff or do any of these things that are self-sabotaging. In other words, the function of morality is to ensure your long-term survival.

But it’s not enough just to survive. You have to survive while also being rational. Because if you weren’t rational anymore, you wouldn’t be a rational animal anymore. You’d just kind of be an animal. You wouldn’t preserve the essence of what it is to be a human being to Ayn Rand. She thinks the universe is typically looked at in terms of a dichotomy—Kant’s famous distinction. Check out the Kant episodes if you need further clarification on this. But it’s a dichotomy between the world of things in themselves and the world of human experience.

Well, Ayn Rand doesn’t think it’s a dichotomy; she thinks it’s a trichotomy between the intrinsic—that’s the world of things in themselves—the subjective—that’s the world of human experience—and what she calls the objective. Or in other words, if you’re rational enough and you subtract all these cultural whims, as she calls it, you subtract all these intuitive prejudices we all carry around, there is a default way that the human mind interacts with the world. She says, “Reality is an objective absolute,” and that despite the fact we often get misled by these whims, if only we were thinking rationally enough, we would all arrive at the same conclusions about the way that things are in the world.

Concepts are not created by people. If you think rationally enough, you start to discover concepts or excavate these concepts that are an objective thing written into reality. She says things like, facts are facts, regardless of what you want them to be. So, again, once you’re thinking rationally, there is an objective destination that she thinks you arrive at. A truly rational being would never treat other people as a means to an end. And they certainly wouldn’t go all altruist on you and sacrifice themselves on behalf of other people. It’s a form of self-sabotage.

Now, politically what follows from this, if you’re Ayn Rand, is that we need to have the only form of economics that doesn’t have this sort of ruling-class-versus-exploited-class dynamic. We need laissez-faire capitalism. We need free markets. We need the only system that allows for people acting in their own rational self-interest to make mutually beneficial exchanges with each other. When you’re thinking rationally, life shouldn’t be about sacrificing yourself on behalf of the state or on behalf of miserably serving other people. It should be about pursuing your own rational self-interest.

Now, there’s a lot to unpack there. Her critics will say, okay, so if a person’s thinking rationally, they’ll never use another person as a means to an end. That’s cool. But what if everyone doesn’t accept your proposition there? What if they do use people as a means to an end? Doesn’t laissez-faire capitalism give them an environment to do that in that’s uniquely supportive of treating people as a means to an end? And if we’re living in a world where everyone’s accepting your ethics—no one’s treating anyone as a means to an end—in that world, wouldn’t any economic system work well?

Her supporters will say back, well, laissez-faire capitalism would just be the best one. And as far as people using others as a means to an end, that’s what the government’s there for, to protect us rational animals from the people that have sacrificed the essence of their humanity and used other people as a means to an end. They’re just animals.

You know, her critics will say that when Ayn Rand is explaining her philosophical system, she’s essentially playing tennis without the net. That she smuggled in this virtue of rationality, and the only way she was able to do that is because she wrote the definition of what it means to be a human. And then she goes on to say that, well, if only you people were thinking rationally enough, then we’d all arrive at the exact same set of conclusions about the world. What are those conclusions? Exactly what I believe.

You know, she’ll dismiss some of the greatest philosophers to ever live in a single sentence, saying that they’re confused or lost in an abyss of subjectivism. But she never really spends much time methodically refuting any of the stuff they said. I think, if you look at the critics of Ayn Rand, you can start to see a pattern emerge. They say that she’s making these grandiose claims about all kinds of stuff—our political system, how you should live your life, epistemology—she’s making all these claims but never really spends much time explaining why these things need to be the case. And I think that opens her up to criticism because there’s a lot of questions left unanswered.

I mean, in philosophy, it’s typically the other way around, right? Somebody will make a claim, and they’ll spend the majority of their time trying to explain why it has to be the case. And it’s this difference that is probably one of the main reasons people don’t like to put her in the category of “philosopher.” I think some people think of the title of “philosopher” as sort of like a badge of honor. That if you’re a respected thinker and commentator, you’re a philosopher. To not have that title of “philosopher” is to be not respected. But I think other people think of it as a title that goes along with people that are conducting a very specific kind of discourse. And it’s not that they want Ayn Rand to not feel bad about not being a philosopher; it’s just that it’s not an accurate word to describe her because she’s doing something very different than what philosophers do.

This actually has accidentally become a perfect segue into the next episode because we’re going to be talking a lot about the definitions of words next time with Wittgenstein. But I guess I just want to close by saying that it is entirely possible for someone to have a definition of philosophy that is really Pythagorean: philosophy is tantamount to a love of wisdom or a love of thinking about stuff. And they may very well use that definition and say that people like Ayn Rand and J.K. Rowling and Lance Armstrong—all these people are philosophers. Just keep in mind that if philosophy is just a love of thinking, then that dude down there at the mental institution that loves to spend his days thinking about how the guards are plotting to steal his jellybeans from him—that guy’s a philosopher too under that definition. And that, ultimately, when most people are talking about philosophy, they’re talking about a very specific type of discourse.

Some people have a definition of philosophy where they say that religion is part of philosophy; religion is a type of philosophy. But if somebody said to me, “Look, I’m really interested in learning about philosophy. What books should I read?” I wouldn’t tell them to read the Bible, not because I’m making some value judgment about the Bible, but because what they do in the Bible is extremely different from what Hume or Descartes or Plato did.

Anyway, we’ll talk more about it next time. It’s going to be out soon. Keep your eyes open.

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.