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I read 'Passion of Ayn Rand' - not even knowing there was a co


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I made a thread about this on Objectivist Living. I thought I'd get opinions here, since I've been informed they are the pro-Barbara Branden camp.

 

I thought that 'The Passion of Ayn Rand' was just a vanilla biography. I didn't know there was a rift amongst Objectivists about it. I only knew of the Peikoff-Kelley Open-Closed rift.

 

I found it at my university library and got hooked by the first page. The book itself is well written and engaging, and the first page draws you in. I found myself lost in the story. The first part about 'Alice' was very good and very interesting. It seemed well researched and objective.

 

But towards the latter half of the book, I started to feel an eery sense that something was not quite right. I started to think, 'how could Ayn be this irrational?'. It seems absurd. She was denouncing people morally for choices in music and so on? She was getting 'angry' all the time. I felt like this is not the woman of the first half of the book. Ayn didn't seem to be preaching the Objectivism that I know. And I have learned a lot of it from Peikoff, through lectures I bought, his books, and his podcast - Objectivism straight from the orthodox horses mouth.

 

I started wondering to myself, quite innocently, could this be blown out of proportion? Could this be bent truth? How would I even know?

 

Then I got to a passage about Ayn Rand's Donnahue interview. I've watched two of her Donnahue interviews many times, loving Ayn throughout. The passage claims that Ayn 'got angry' and the show was a disaster when a woman said 'now that I'm more educated, I don't agree with you.' This is when I suddenly felt that every time Barbara claimed Ayn 'got angry' was blown out of proportion. Ayn got upset, but I would not have called her 'angry'. And she was not being irrational or unreachable. I would say she was calmly offended. If you call that getting angry, then it throws into doubt every other time in the book you claim she was angry.

 

Then I thought, Ayn was willing to be friends earlier in her life with a conservative woman who believed in mystical nonsense, but towards the latter half she suddenly became unwilling to be friends with anyone who she deemed immoral for being irrational or having different tastes in music, etc? What?

 

So I did some searching and sure enough found another book that apparently gives another side to the story. (The Passion of Ayn Rand's Critics: The Case Against the Brandens.) And I read some of Diana Hsieh's writings, and she pointed out both of those things. Now if I picked them out not even knowing the book was a controversy, I have to wonder. (Edit: And I did also notice, as Hsieh points out, that there was a fair bit of psychological analysis going on.)

 

I don't know who is telling the truth or not, but the 'Passion of Ayn Rand' towards the latter half seemed mighty suspicious. I found myself really disliking the supposed Ayn Rand in the latter half of the book. I felt that she had totally lost touch with the love of life she was supposed to have, and that she had fallen into pure rationalism, not willing to consider facts, trying to deduce everything about music, psychology and so on purely from first principles in her philosophy. Emotional repression. And the part about Nathaniel not being allowed to have a life apart from her? I find it hard to believe she said it. I had a hard time believing that's what became of her. It's possible that it's all true, and that Ayn lost her marbles, but in her late interviews, she didn't seem that way.

 

Anway, I guess I got sucked into the whole drama. I realize I'm digging into some old stuff that has been flogged to death. I just thought it was interesting that I felt the last part of the book was a bit suspicious even though I had no reason to other than the book itself.

Edited by Peter Morris
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The standard quick test of seriousness for a claim is falsifiability.  If an utterance is a claim of particular fact that is either true or false, you'll be able to describe a set of circumstances in which it is false.  If it's true no matter what, it fails the test.  Falsifiability is a necessary but not sufficient condition of being true.  (Global warming, Marxism and psychoanalysis are familiar examples of unfalsifiable theories.)

 

So my question to you is: what would convince you that your claim - Rand couldn't have been what the people around her describe - is false? i.e. that the people who knew her in later years are right?

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The standard quick test of seriousness for a claim is falsifiability.  If an utterance is a claim of particular fact that is either true or false, you'll be able to describe a set of circumstances in which it is false.  If it's true no matter what, it fails the test.  Falsifiability is a necessary but not sufficient condition of being true.  (Global warming, Marxism and psychoanalysis are familiar examples of unfalsifiable theories.)

 

So my question to you is: what would convince you that your claim - Rand couldn't have been what the people around her describe - is false? i.e. that the people who knew her in later years are right?

The doctrine you expound here is Popper's falsificationism, which is rejected by Objectivism.

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Then I got to a passage about Ayn Rand's Donnahue interview. I've watched two of her Donnahue interviews many times, loving Ayn throughout. The passage claims that Ayn 'got angry' and the show was a disaster when a woman said 'now that I'm more educated, I don't agree with you.' This is when I suddenly felt that every time Barbara claimed Ayn 'got angry' was blown out of proportion. Ayn got upset, but I would not have called her 'angry'. And she was not being irrational or unreachable. I would say she was calmly offended. If you call that getting angry, then it throws into doubt every other time in the book you claim she was angry.

If you haven't already, you ought to read (or hear) Peikoff's talk from the mid to late 80's, the title is something like "My years with Ayn Rand, an intellectual memoir", I think it's printed in The Voice of Reason.  Of course it's a panegyric, but there is a point when he addresses her anger, and he goes so far as to say that sometimes it was not justified or appropriate.  My point is that if even he felt it had to be acknowledged, if minimized, there had to be enough incidents (public and/or private) that his interest in credibility required addressing it.

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