Boydstun

I had read the Ellis recounting of the debate within his general argument with the Objectivist philosophy in Is Objectivism a Religion? (1968) when it was new, just after having read Rand's literature and her philosophy. The title question is something one might ask of a philosophy, although one should really get on to other questions about a philosophy under the project announced and praised in the front flap of the jacket: a brilliant, smashing, no-holds-barred assessment of the objectivist [should be the proper noun Objectivist] philosophy." The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2005 – 2nd ed.) has a brief characterization of the philosophy as in the category Popular Philosophy, of the sort that, though amateur (term not used in a derogatory way), considers the standard technical problems of philosophy. Notable philosophers from Descartes to Hume were technically in the class amateur. "Amateur philosophy as a genre is really a creation of the nineteenth century with its mass literacy and self-education. . . . Carlyle was a prophet rather than any sort of philosopher, as was Ruskin." (740). In the twentieth century, the number of amateur philosophers finding their way into print declined. One who did was "Ayn Rand, strenuous exponent of objectivism and self-interest" (ibid.). Fair enough for a brief mention. By now, of course, we have Blackwell's A Companion to Ayn Rand (2016) and other works by professional scholars on Rand's works and philosophy. These are extensive expositions and examinations of the philosophy. Albert Ellis was a clinical psychologist, and his interest in that is salient in his look at "Objectivist philosophy" in this book. His aim is to make out that Objectivism "is a religious movement rather than a rational, scientific, or empirically based philosophy" (293). His chapters cover: seeming rationalities of Objectivism (he favors rationality); Objectivist views on self-esteem, economics, and politics; extremism, dogmatism, absolutism, need for certainty, tautological and definitional thinking, intolerance of opposing views, deification and hero worship, unrealism and anti-empiricism; and condemning and punitive attitudes in Objectivism. Dr. Ellis did not seem able to get a grip on conceptual dependencies and would not seem promising for pursuing philosophy professionally. He sided with the divide of logic and existence championed in logical positivism, which had lately passed into the dustbin of history (which he likely did not know). By Ellis's report, the debate with N. Branden at the New Yorker hotel had about 1100 people in attendance, maybe 800 favoring Branden's side. In his book, Ellis's best (though inadequate) indictment of the philosophy for elements of religion that he despised, mostly rightly, was by relating audience behavior during the debate and connecting those unsavory behaviors of the largely Objectivist audience to teachings of Rand and Branden, definers of the philosophy. One item I remembered across my life concerning his report on that audience was not, in my estimation, stupid, shallow, or rah-rah. It warmed my heart. I had more soul-brothers and -sisters than I had imagined in something unusual and profound: "In the course of my initial presentation during the debate, I quoted Miss Rand's statement (from "The Objectivist Ethics") that 'happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions'. Could anyone ever be happy when held to this extreme standard? I asked. And scores of voices from the audience screamed back (somewhat to my surprise): Yes!!!" (294). The most serious advancement in understanding comes in written documents, not oral exchanges. Before the entrance of writing, there could be no Babylonian astronomy, no Greek harmonics, no Aristotle, no Euclid. In the next few days, oral arguments will be held at the US Supreme Court for landmark cases. The Justices will learn from the oral arguments. Great knowledge and skill will be on display. But the really momentous debate will be in the written briefs. Greetings, Skylark1

Thank you, Monart, for that possibility that "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" could be restatements of Rand's corollary axiom from the axiom "Existence exists", her corollary axiom "that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Yes, "Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification" can be a restatement of her corollary axiom, but I'd say that in the restatement the status as corollary axiom is lost, and in this particular restatement, Rand is moving on to a further important and grand exposition of ontology and philosophy of mind. Rand's notion of such a thing as a "corollary axiom" was an innovation. The closest thing to it I've found is something we could notice when following Euclid in geometry. After reading his axioms, postulates, and definitions, one could step back and realize "I'm going to need means of drawing and a straightedge and a compass to make the labeled diagrams required to do these ensuing demonstrations." That is only an analogy with Rand's stepping back after the assertion "Existence exists." In philosophy, there is a similarity with Descartes's movement of mind as susceptible to deception to existence of human mind. Aquinas had mentioned that move, but not in a context of Descartes-like description of or excuse for pretended super-duper state of doubt by a sane mind. Descartes's move is backwards in our order of knowing: One already has to know one exists to follow (pretend along with Descartes) the exercises of the MEDITATIONS. So that is not really much similarity in fundamental moves between Rand and Descartes. That Rand has axioms is like Spinoza, but the likeness does not amount to much. Spinoza does not have something like "corollary axiom". He is using axioms from which to deduce further propositions. That was not Rand's use of axioms and not her program. She was using 'Existence exists and is Identity' as a touchstone for right thought and right inquiry and as bar to metaphysics of being that had been crafted by the Arabs and Latins to have a niche in being for existence of God of the sort in which they had faith. Also a bar against radical epistemological skepticism. She was not using 'Existence exists and is identity', and 'consciousness is fundamentally consciousness of existence and is identification' as a basis for proving further propositions. I have not included in the present presentation the axiomatic aspect that my metaphysics can take on (which is detailed in my paper "Existence, We"). Like Rand, my program is at odds with Descartes and with Spinoza. Although I don't go into the possibility in this monograph of axiomatic structure being lain on my metaphysics, my invocation of the character of examples and counterexamples per se in arguing for the necessity of my categories resonates with Rand's efforts to prove that existence requires identity (efforts along the lines of Aristotle in defending the Principle of (Non)Contradiction).

Correction of * link in preceding post.

These Hours of Radiant Existence* This is the philosophy I created, my life work. This presentation is only the length of a monograph, not a book. There are here no scholarly citations and references or thick setting of my philosophy in the history of philosophy, unlike my usual compositions. It is just straight reading of the philosophy I developed and hold for true. I thank Walter my wonderful for doing all he could throughout our interval these last decades to support my study and writing of philosophy. The ten short chapters in this monograph are: I. Existence II. Other III. Divisions of Existence IV. Entities V. Passage VI. Situation VII. Character VIII. Science and Mathematics IX. Logic X. Mortal Life and Value ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I expect to return shortly to completing my compositions in progress here at Objectivism Online, including: Necessity and Form in Truth / On The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts, / Kelley's Kant / Dewey and Peikoff on Kant's Responsibility / Honesty / Sacrifice

Monart, By we in this context, I mean only the combination self and other. On day of birth one is already immersed in other humans around one. Indeed, before birth, one was already immersed in the human thing that is one's mother's voice. I reject the view, often put forward by classical empiricists, that one performs an inference to know there are other humans, things like oneself, with inner life. Although, at the beginning we have no language, so no articulation of any of that in mind (and we have only begun to develop powers of memory.) I'd have to look up when we get the idea of we. (We begin to use the personal pronouns "I, me" at age two.) But as adults or near-adults, we can examine our elementary episodes of consciousness and know there is a pronominal other in all of them, an element that is accessible if we turn to that feature in our consciousness, and by adulthood, we know the "we" in those episodes. This presence of other forming the we in all human consciousness perhaps contributes to many peoples' sense that God is with them. If so, that is just a mistake; the presence with themselves is other humans, taken in an open unspecified pronoun-type way. My viewpoint on this, I later learned, had been put forward by some existentialists last century. However, they were engaged in an archeology of subjectivity, whereas in my system, existence standing independently of apprehension and comprehension is the objective prize we are joined with by other. I'd like to mention also, concerning the Objectivist metaphysics, that it was not "Existence is Identity" that Rand posed as a corollary of "Existence exists." It was something else, something one could infer if one were making the statement "Existence exists." The thesis "Existence is Identity" can be argued to be something fundamental about Existence, and it can be shown that under Rand's various categories, looking to deny "Existence is Identity" lands in contradiction, and is therefore false. The thesis "Consciousness is identification" is also not a corollary, but a definition of what is the most fundamental sort of consciousness, with any others, such as in dreams or perceptual illusions, being derivative with respect to the fundamental consciousness. Philosophers of mind today have called success consciousness that type of consciousness Rand took for fundamental. Rand’s “corollary axiom” with “Existence exists,” you recall, runs this way: “Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (Rand 1957, 1015). The counterpart in my system: ‘Existence exists, we live’. The act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that things exist, including you and I conscious living selves, our consciousness being something alive and being the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Rand erred in omitting express, elementary knowing of aliveness of self and others in elementary knowing of consciousness. Rand did not omit altogether elementary knowing of aliveness in elementary knowing of consciousness in her mature philosophy, although that elementary nexus is not highlighted. Some sort of impossibility of mind without life is affirmed later in the speech when Rand writes of the alternative “your mind or your life” that “neither is possible to man without the other” (1957, 1022). Then too, when something she wrote in Galt’s speech “It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept ‘Value’ possible” (1013) is joined with something else in the speech “A rational process is a moral process” (1017), it could be inferred that, at least in higher, rational consciousness, its aliveness is implicit in its episodes and this fact is reflectively accessible within such consciousness. Also, in oral exchange years later, Rand remarked concerning consciousness: “It’s a concept that could not enter your mind or your language unless in the form of a faculty of a living entity. That’s what the concept means” (ITOE App. 252).

These Hours of Resonant Existence

Too much of it. Fortunately there came to be philosophers not in that cascade. One of them made high virtue of keeping the trains running on time. By the way, the most productive theoretical work to come out of ancient Greece, I'd say, was Euclid, not Plato-Aristotle nor even the syllogistic.

Kyary, I had stated: "I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death." You replied in part: "Experiences like this have thought me that whenever a philosopher seems to not see something blatantly obvious, he in fact does, and with gusto. If the above was a reference to Mainländer [it is], he'd say that inspecting the parts of the locomotive without knowing what a locomotive does will always yield only partial knowledge. The function of the Universe is to destroy all useful energy. The thirst for life is the most effective means toward this goal." The universe does not have a function. Functions arise only with the advent of life. He is simply wrong and fudging, like so many philosophers before him, in trying to slip teleology into inanimate matter before the molecular machinery of life is on hand.* These are the facts with which our modern science works. We don't get to just speculate a reorder of things and count it as reality and yield something productive. The thirst for life by the researchers who prolonged my life did not attain some greatest effectiveness to my demise. And the end of life is not a goal of the universe. The universe has no goals. "I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death." A great many people fall into thinking that after they die they are somehow still around, in some minimal way at least, passing through time. They will not be any such thing. They will not exist. That is neither rocket science nor obvious; it is a wide consilience of inductions to something as absolutely established as the existence of the hydrogen atom.

Kyary, The context in Galt’s Speech in which Rand says “There is only one fundamental alternative in the universe: existence or non-existence—and it pertains to a single class of entities: to living organisms“ (1957, 1012) is one in which she is setting out a notion of alternatives as something presented only to living things. The fundamentality goes to location of that alternative among all the alternatives an organism might come into. (For much living process, these alternatives are not presented as choices before the organism; choice is not essential to alternatives in the conception she is trying to get into the reader’s head in this stretch.) The sentence immediately following the one you have quoted in isolation shows that Rand is contrasting inanimate matter to animate matter and that an essential to their difference is that animate matter has to pursue a specific course of action among alternatives having differential import for it’s continuation as animate matter. The emergence of the various forms of inanimate matter such as a tornado and the conditions that make such an inanimate formation possible are irrelevant in the context surrounding the sentence you quoted. To take the sentence from its context and give it a different context is to change the topic (in which, in the new context, the sentence would state an absurdity). That is cheap and is indeed beyond an absence of charitable reading. It is any-straw-for-derision-will-do. There are serious flaws in the philosophy, I’m sure, as any philosophy, waiting for serious, patient mining. Rand once remarked: “It is not fools I seek to address.” And indeed she did find not-fools who comprehended, for example, the conception of alternative she was articulating in this stretch of Galt’s Speech and who need for their suite of errors in Rand’s philosophy things genuinely in the philosophy. The point you bannered as you bannered it is not. The sentence you quoted is part of Rand’s argument to the momentous conclusion that value (and function and need and problem and so forth) arises only in the situation and process that is life. One way to topple this account of value would be to pose an alternative account and argue for the latter’s superiority in truth. One notable attempt along that line is the one of Robert Nozick in his Philosophical Explanations (1981). He points to the occasions of “organic unity” (which he as defined) in the world ranging from nature to art. He argues that the objective dimension of value is organic unity. I do not find this plausible. More plausible is that life is the basic and fullest occasion of organic unity and that all other occasions of organic unity are derivative of organic unity in life or are merely analogical. I don’t think the schemes of Empedocles, Schopenhauer, Mainländer, or Nietzsche (in his late imputation of will to power to even the inanimate world) have such plausibility (in our own era) as Nozick’s proposal. And his is wrong, Rand’s right, in my assessment. You talked of atoms wanting to become stabler, and you put want in scare quotes. That is a promising sign. A harmonic oscillator, classical or quantum, will tend to spend most of its time in its lowest energy state. That is cool, but there is nothing teleological about it and no need to understand it as teleological (and no need to take such a purported end-seeking as explanation for the teleological character of living things). Ditto, as I mentioned before, for the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of mechanics with their extremum principles. I notice that we do not spend any time at all, let alone most of our time, in a state of non-existence. The natural seeking of life is not death. The Objectivist idea of a human-benevolent universe is not a naturalized mimicry of the idea of a benevolent God. It is not a postulate. It is only the proposition, with evidence, that humans with their power of reason fit superbly in the struggle for life and for wide, flexible grasp of reality, which has enabled ever more serviceability of nature for humans. It is the suitability to living and knowing of the character John Galt as described by Rand in the opening to Part III of her 1957 novel, which has affinity with Aristotle’s opening to Metaphysics. At times Rand displayed in her novels and declared in her nonfiction a sense of optimism (though pessimism about the future culture of Russia, taking its past as prologue). Rand’s optimism was not so far as Leibniz or the poet Alexander Pope. Rand’s optimism has some basis in the power and community of human reason, but I don’t see that optimism as strictly implied by the benevolent-universe idea. And in rejecting that optimism, one need not embrace the profound pessimism argued by Schopenhauer or Mainländer.

Chambered J – I’ve blazed up the fire in the fireplace. Come sit by me, Izzy. Yes, here. Speak again the science of the living chambers. I’ll play my part. I – Typically, each macromolecule, such as a protein or a nucleic acid, inside a living cell tends to carry many excess negative charges. These charges get balanced by positive ions, especially potassium, dissolved in the water within the cell. But the presence of these ions means that water tends to be drawn into the cell by osmosis. This osmosis is not on account of electrical charge on the potassium ions, but merely because potassium is not water and nature abhors concentration gradients among species of chemicals. J – What keeps the cell from swelling and finally bursting as more and more water is taken in? I – The walls of plant cells are made pretty strong. The pressure inside the cells can therefore be higher than outside, and this higher pressure inside opposes the osmotic flow of water into the plant’s cells. Notice the passivity of this solution for the problem. That is one stable solution to the problem that began with the fact that the molecules of life have excess negative charge. It is a rather simple-minded solution, however, and this is why to this day plants do so poorly on IQ tests (J. Enright, personal communication). The membrane forming the boundary of an animal cell is hardly a wall. It is usually not called a wall, but a membrane. The membrane is so thin it cannot withstand any pressure difference across it. Such a cell must live a bit more dynamically with its surround. It will be surrounded by water molecules just teeming to get inside and dilute the concentrations of dissolved chemical species (especially ions of potassium, but also sodium and chlorine). J – What to do? I – First, take stock: the cell membrane is permeable to water, to potassium, to sodium, . . . and not permeable to chlorine. The membrane is more permeable to the potassium than to the sodium. J – Hummm. I – Try this: pump sodium ions out. As it happens, doing that will simultaneously pump more potassium ions in from the outside. Then the pump—if it reaches a steady state before burning up—will be able to maintain a higher concentration of sodium ions outside than inside. Then the sodium ions outside will be diffusing across the membrane, trying to sneak back in, and the potassium ions on the inside will be diffusing across the membrane, trying to get out to the suburbs. Voila! Since the membrane allows potassium to get out more freely than it allows sodium to get in, the net effect of the pump will be to increase the concentration of particles that are not water on the outside, thereby making the water molecules content to just stay out there. J – Don’t start the pump! Check all angles, engineer Izzy! I – Consider the electrical situation. Both the potassium ions and the sodium ions carry an excess positive charge. Since the pump will be decreasing the overall concentration of these on the inside of the cell, the excess negative charge on the inside (macromolecules and chlorine) will not be entirely cancelled out by the dissolved positive ions inside. Then the cell membrane will have an electrical potential difference across it. The cell can live with that provided the pump speed is restricted to a certain range implicated by the membrane’s electrical conductance with respect to sodium ions relative to its electrical conductance with respect to potassium ions. J – Glory be. Start the pump. I – The momentous spin-off in evolutionary history was that this membrane potential, in some animal cells, could be briefly changed by adjustments in the membrane conductances with respect to sodium ions and with respect to potassium ions. Thus the animal-cell solution to the problem that the molecules of life (the macros inside the cell) carry excess electrical charge made possible the essential signaling mechanism (brief change in membrane potential) for muscle cells and for nerve cells (neurons). And that is how it came about that some animals today can talk and write and study, say, science and philosophy. (1994, 121–23) J – Amen. I – Want to pump, Joey? J – Let us now Hobbes-farewell our companions. I – But whatever shall be the method you will like, I would very fain commend philosophy to you, that is to say, the study of wisdom, for want of which we have all suffered much damage lately. For even they, that study wealth, do it out of love of wisdom; for their treasures serve them but for a looking-glass, wherein to behold and contemplate their own wisdom. Nor do they, that love to be employed in public business, aim at anything but place wherein to show their wisdom. Neither do voluptuous men neglect philosophy, but only because they know not how great a pleasure it is to the mind of man to be ravished in the vigorous and perpetual embraces of the most beauteous world. Lastly, though for nothing else, yet because the mind of man is no less impatient of empty time than nature is of empty place, to the end you be not forced for want of what to do, to be troublesome to men that have business, or take hurt by falling into idle company, but have somewhat of your own wherewith to fill up your time, I recommend unto you to study philosophy. Farewell.

Garden Light J – Welcome to my after-garden, Izzy! I’ve gotten daffodil bulbs to add, but I’m savoring summer a few minutes more. Admiring the brown of my feet, before boots. I – How can I help? J – Use the digger to make fifty holes in this part, six inches deep and about eight inches apart. Do not tumble down the hill. I – What are you going to do? J – Attend to your every position. Then issue your next instruction. I – There are other wonders of the world. Why do your bare feet on a step-stone today feel cooler than your feet on the soil? After all, we know perfectly well the stone and soil are in thermal equilibrium. They have the same temperature. J – You are very educational. And when you speak of such things, I imagine all the more positions, bed and floor. I – Spring eternal? J – Whichever comes first: either as long as it takes or as long as it takes. By the way, I do know how the stone and soil heat-thing works. Awaken to me. I – Speak the science of the stone and soil paradox. J – We have skin receptors responsive to rate of heat flow into or out of the body when contacting materials with a different temperature than body temperature. Flow rate is slower into or from insulators such as air. And the dry soil is more insulating than the stone. So heat from my feet flows at a higher rate into stone than into the dry soil. Useful in philosophy? Stone floor? With rug? I – I raise an eyelid. Let’s do the bulbs, Joey. J – Tomorrow is another day.

Daybreak J – Grüß Gott, Izzy! I – Good Morning, Joey! J – Kaffee? I – Danke! The garden in this light is something else. J – You in that easy satin robe are something else. I – But that our reach exceed our grasp, or what’s a heaven for?* J – Annie said the sun comes up tomorrow. That was only a metaphor for the human lot, of course. But literally, how would she know the sun would come up again? I – An invariant run. But Melancholia, you know. J – And you? I – Spin of the earth is long as earth, but for arrival of external torque. Radiation out sun is long as its fusion. Shade of earth by a celestial body is not in prospect tomorrow. J – May I kiss you? I – So many days have not yet broken.* *R. Browning, Rig Veda

Inference to the existence of atoms is a case of induction in the genre of what William Whewell termed consilience. By 1900 atoms and molecules were evidenced by Dalton’s law of multiple proportions, Gay-Lussac’s law pertaining to the volume of gases, Avagadro’s law (which made possible the determination of molecular weights), and the kinetic theory of gases (which could approximately predict molar heat capacities). After 1908, when Jean Baptiste Perrin published his results on the sedimentation distribution of (visible) particles suspended in a still liquid and his measurement of Avogadro’s constant, the existence of atoms could not be reasonably doubted. These lines of induction, and many others, converged steel-strong in favor of the atomic hypothesis, by consilience. The evidence was and is several (many-kind) and joint. What did all those centuries of armchair from Democritus and Aristotle to Leibniz contribute to our knowledge of atoms and molecules? Exactly nothing. There is nothing of merit in an armchair “law of weakening force,” whatever similarities there might be with some scientifically established law. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Kyary, in what other emergent property of chemical elements, besides life, do you see entities striving to remain in existence and going out of existence by spoilage of that teleological organization in its existence? Not the earth, its minerals, or mountains. Not the atmosphere or its tornados. Not the rivers or oceans. Not a virus. The only places I’ve seen clearly such a thing is in living cells and multicellular organisms. Fairly plain Jane, not bold. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Writing “Galt’s claim” induces a distracting circuity of thought. Galt is nothing but a perfectly passive creature of Ayn Rand. Any “Galt’s claim” is better simply “Rand’s claim” in a philosophical discussion.

I still expect to accomplish that. Not yet. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Because of my own long years of work underground, often before sunrise, my favorite line of Anthem has long been: "We alone, of the thousands who walk this earth, we alone in this hour are doing a work which has no purpose save that we wish to do it."