gurugeorge

Hi Grames, thanks for your comments.  
Yeah it's an odd thing with me and Objectivism.  I'm someone who's always had an amateur interest in philosophy (I'm 57), and I've been round the houses many times with many philosophical positions in the course of my life.  I've always thought of Objectivism as a strong, if idiosyncratic contender, and to my mind most of the criticisms of it do miss the point, e.g. often they're just arguments from authority ("that's not how we do things around here", as it were) - as if the whole point of what Rand was doing wasn't to positively challenge the received wisdom!
But lately, I've really been going through a major revulsion against the representationalism that's been so captivating for most of my philosophical life, and getting more and more into the "swing" of Objectivism and starting to think of it as an example of a thin but strong line in philosophy - starting of course with Aristotle, but going through flashes of prominence like Bacon, Thomas Reid, even Pierce (his pragmatism was quite a different beast from what eventually got called that name), etc. (Incidentally, I think of all the philosophers between Aristotle and Rand, Reid is probably the closest to Rand, if you look at what he says about Common Sense, it's sometimes uncannily close to what Rand says about the axioms.)  The more I understand Objectivism, the more I see that while Rand as a philosopher definitely didn't speak the approved "lingo", and might have benefited from more engagement with philosophers like you see at the end of ITOE, she is subtler and deeper than the received wisdom would have it.  
And actually from my observation, I think the academy's gradually swinging round to similar lines of thought.  The kinds of philosophy Rand excoriated 30 years ago (e.g. Logical Positivism) are now not very highly thought of in the academy either. The names that seemed so "big" then have faded (who remembers Donald Davidson? ).  There's renewed interest in Aristotle, particularly in ethics, there's exploration of things like Direct Realism, and I think actually that even Externalism (e.g. of Putnam's semantic kind, or Dennett's cognitive kind) are also somewhat friendly to this approach (there's a logical link between J. J. Gibson's view of perception, which is itself akin to a form of Direct Realism, and Dennett's cognitive externalism).
There's actually nowhere else to go.  An amusing side-light on this is how the later Wittgenstein once lamented the irony that he was a professional philosopher who didn't know any Aristotle.  But the double irony is perhaps that what he was doing towards the end of his life (particularly in On Certainty) was tending towards Direct Realism.  Once you step outside the representationalist problematic (as Witty did in his own way), there aren't many options other than Direct Realism, and I think the academy will eventually catch up to Rand. 
In the long view, it's really only been a tiny blip of time (relative to the millennia humans have been rational animals) since philosophy (guiding life by means of reason rather than faith) started, it's understandable that with such difficult problems we've sometimes veered off into blind alleys.  The cost has been horrendous, but there have also been huge gains.  It's still all to play for and the fat lady hasn't even gotten out of her taxi yet.

Hey folks, I'm not an Objectivist but I've always been mentally friendly towards Objectivism.  I actually hung around here some years ago, but I hadn't thought much about Objectivism since then.  I recently got into discussion with a critical philosopher where I was defending Objectivism and I ended up doing a sort of summary of how I understand some key elements of Objectivism.  I'm quite pleased with it and I think it's pretty decent, but I'd like a reality check from experienced Objectivists here, to see whether I'm along the right lines or not.  Here goes:-
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Rand rejects apriori reasoning as a source of knowledge.  For her, all knowledge is gained empirically, including conceptual knowledge, so the tabula rasa concept fits well enough. 

You have to understand that she's an Aristotelean, so she works with essences and natures, like Aristotle or Aquinas.  She doesn't agree with the idea that concepts are intrinsically detached from perceptions, like random puzzle pieces or algorithms that could happen to fit or not fit with reality.  IOW, she doesn't understand conceptual thinking as being like a set of intrinsically meaningless symbols plus rules for their manipulation, which must then be given an interpretation to connect them to reality (or not) and make them meaningful.  With that view, the only logical necessity is in the rules for pushing the symbols around.  In her view, the logical necessity is in the essence or nature of the object itself.  It's a bit of a strange way of thinking to us nowadays (essence/nature is way out of fashion, especially since the later Wittgenstein), but it makes sense in its own terms.

This is the mistake that most hostile interpreters of her make who are blind to this aspect of her philosophy because they're so steeped in post-Fregean analytical philosophy.  If you argue with Objectivists you'll always be pointed at and laughed at for not getting this fundamental point: when you perceive or conceive of an object without error, you are grasping its essence or nature, and that's where the logical necessity comes in (A=A).  A thing is what it is, its nature and behaviour is always logically consistent, and that consistent nature/behaviour is what you're getting a glimpse of of via perception, and grasping the whole of via concept (which sums up all your perceptions).

And that's also why she doesn't hold with the is/ought dichotomy.  Since our essence is to be rational animals, but rational animals whose exercise of rationality is a free choice, the LOGICAL NECESSITY to choose to survive and flourish in order to actually survive and flourish via our only means of surviving and flourishing (our perception/reason - especially with respect to the time-binding nature of conceptual reasoning, on account of our having grasped an essence that is the same in all times and places) is part of our nature, and actually making that choice is what she calls "moral", whereas the choice to not act rationally (i.e. to not grasp and act upon, and in conformity with, our own nature and the natures of things around us) in order to survive and flourish, is what she calls "immoral". 

Because that choice is part of our nature, then both the moral AND the immoral options are inherent in our nature.  The only problem is that the less we exercise our rational faculties, the more they atrophy.  We become something else, something less than human, with a stunted, slightly different nature.  Eventually we lose even the capacity to choose and we become subhuman, living at an animal, perceptual level only.  We become a thing whose nature is more or less simply animal and reflexive, and we are at the mercy of reality, no longer its master, aware only of present perceptions (having lost our ability to grasp essences, time-bind and predict, etc.) and subject to random whims, pursuing momentary pleasures.

But note that we only come to understand what our nature is through the perceptual/conceptual knowledge-gathering process itself: at some point we come to maturity, reflect on and realize what sort of thing we are, then we have the choice to act in conformity with our nature or sabotage ourselves.  The prior choice to be and act rationally that enabled us to discover our true nature, supposing we did in fact make it, is then retrospectively understood to have been a moral choice, and we understand that we're perpetually on the hook for that same moral choice now that we've woken up to our true nature.

For her, education is supposed to give us a "helping hand" to get to the stage of self-realization, to nudge us in the direction of (effectively) choosing to understand our nature and live full lives.  That's why she was incredibly angry at the state of education, which she saw as a form of child abuse and mental torture, because it doesn't encourage us to come to our natural inheritance, it doesn't draw out (educare, root of "educate") what's innate and natural to us.

It prevents children who aren't strong enough in intellect and courage to go through this process themselves from becoming fully human (analogous with foot binding - she uses a Chinese "making a man in the shape of a jar by keeping a child in a jar until they've grown into that shape" example from Victor Hugo). 

Incidentally, this is an example of the fact that while she isn't altruistic, she is fundamentally compassionate - although she is on the whole more concerned about the right conditions for the best of us to fulfill our natures, that's partly because movers and shakers' doing well is a precondition for everyone to be able to fulfill their natures, and while the main benefit of that, in her view, is that it reflects benefit back to the movers and shakers themselves (because of human co-operation and interdependence), there are lots of examples in her work where she vividly paints the horror of how the failure of intellectuals to take responsibility for their specialty inexorably results in tremendous suffering for ordinary/weak people who don't have the intellectual's gifts.  She wishes everyone well on their own trajectory, so to speak - to the degree that they are able and willing, and to the degree their capacities allow.
 

Hi Grames, thanks for your comments.  
Yeah it's an odd thing with me and Objectivism.  I'm someone who's always had an amateur interest in philosophy (I'm 57), and I've been round the houses many times with many philosophical positions in the course of my life.  I've always thought of Objectivism as a strong, if idiosyncratic contender, and to my mind most of the criticisms of it do miss the point, e.g. often they're just arguments from authority ("that's not how we do things around here", as it were) - as if the whole point of what Rand was doing wasn't to positively challenge the received wisdom!
But lately, I've really been going through a major revulsion against the representationalism that's been so captivating for most of my philosophical life, and getting more and more into the "swing" of Objectivism and starting to think of it as an example of a thin but strong line in philosophy - starting of course with Aristotle, but going through flashes of prominence like Bacon, Thomas Reid, even Pierce (his pragmatism was quite a different beast from what eventually got called that name), etc. (Incidentally, I think of all the philosophers between Aristotle and Rand, Reid is probably the closest to Rand, if you look at what he says about Common Sense, it's sometimes uncannily close to what Rand says about the axioms.)  The more I understand Objectivism, the more I see that while Rand as a philosopher definitely didn't speak the approved "lingo", and might have benefited from more engagement with philosophers like you see at the end of ITOE, she is subtler and deeper than the received wisdom would have it.  
And actually from my observation, I think the academy's gradually swinging round to similar lines of thought.  The kinds of philosophy Rand excoriated 30 years ago (e.g. Logical Positivism) are now not very highly thought of in the academy either. The names that seemed so "big" then have faded (who remembers Donald Davidson? ).  There's renewed interest in Aristotle, particularly in ethics, there's exploration of things like Direct Realism, and I think actually that even Externalism (e.g. of Putnam's semantic kind, or Dennett's cognitive kind) are also somewhat friendly to this approach (there's a logical link between J. J. Gibson's view of perception, which is itself akin to a form of Direct Realism, and Dennett's cognitive externalism).
There's actually nowhere else to go.  An amusing side-light on this is how the later Wittgenstein once lamented the irony that he was a professional philosopher who didn't know any Aristotle.  But the double irony is perhaps that what he was doing towards the end of his life (particularly in On Certainty) was tending towards Direct Realism.  Once you step outside the representationalist problematic (as Witty did in his own way), there aren't many options other than Direct Realism, and I think the academy will eventually catch up to Rand. 
In the long view, it's really only been a tiny blip of time (relative to the millennia humans have been rational animals) since philosophy (guiding life by means of reason rather than faith) started, it's understandable that with such difficult problems we've sometimes veered off into blind alleys.  The cost has been horrendous, but there have also been huge gains.  It's still all to play for and the fat lady hasn't even gotten out of her taxi yet.