Boydstun

Hi Doug, I don’t know of any place of that essay online. Its exact title I now see is “Libertarianism: The Perversion of Liberty.” I have this essay in hardcopy in the book The Voice of Reason (1990), edited by Leonard Peikoff. The original, longer version of the essay appeared in the periodical The Intellectual Activist in 1985. I don’t have that longer version. What was chosen for its condensation for inclusion in the 1990 book, which would be widely read, is a fantastical distortion of the Libertarianism of which I was abreast and part of from the early ’70’s to mid ’80’s. Mr. Schwartz exhibited clips of views of various libertarians in a variety of Libertarian rags, most of which I never heard of, to make his case that libertarians are without philosophy, and are against having philosophy, and for that matter are against liberty. That last point was preposterous on its face, and I doubt he convinced anyone not idiot of it. The only libertarian book he noted was Murray Rothbard’s book For a New Liberty. He insinuated that Rothbard was the sole important libertarian thinker of the present scene. He silenced-over the other widely read book on that level which was written by philosopher John Hospers, the book titled Libertarianism. He silenced-over any of the libertarian philosophy books written to that point: Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia / Machan’s Human Rights and Human Liberties / Rothbard’s (amateur philosopher, but read) The Ethics of Liberty. Then too, of course, this libertarian (at the time) reader of Schwartz's smear knew perfectly well he had plenty of philosophy head-to-toe integrated with his standard libertarian proposition that the paramount political value should be individual liberty, individual rights.

Grames, it has seemed to me that the only real competition for money by people or organizations making money off of Rand philosophy is in terms of competition for significant donors, where there are such, but not fees. Kelley's pulling rank against an in-place fairly hierarchical group might have put red under the collar on some personal levels---and if so, there could well have been some fakery and pretzeling going on in all this---but scooting him out from under the group would seem to draw financial contributions away from projects of the evicting group. Philosophy personnel at ARI or at Kelley's later group, it seems to me, have interests in staying in their work on Rand and its promulgation of some greater weight than making money. But then, I got skills besides philosophy from which one could make good money (with which to buy whatever top philosophy books I want hot off the press!), so it may make me too optimistic about the greater money people could make if they weren't spending their time trying to make money off of Rand philosophy. Another source of income to philosophers who spent time in these organizations would be that it helps them build an audience for any Objectivist-related books they might write and get published. I don't know how much money there is in that, but even if money in it is not so very much, an audience of minds ready to contact with one's own is mighty fine.

It was around 1970, in college, that I first encountered the name Libertarian. At the university library, I had passed by display shelves for current issues of scholarly philosophy journals. One of them was an issue of The Personalist whose contents, listed on the cover, included a debate that was being printed concerning the legitimacy of government. The label libertarian came up in there, and among the presenters was one of whom I came away thinking: he’s the bright one. That is, he was the bright among brights. His name was Robert Nozick. A few years later, he issued the classic of American political philosophy Anarchy, State, and Utopia. It was due to his first part therein that I began to take the idea of individualist free-market stateless rule of law seriously. Rand had raised an important objection to that idea, libertarian anarchism, earlier in CUI, although without the name libertarian. I remained in the not-anarchist sector of libertarianism, with Nozick, Hospers, Machan, and Rand. I had been dissuaded from democratic socialism to Rand’s ideal of government when I read her novels in 1967. After absorbing ASU on top of Atlas Shrugged, I got myself some knowledge of economics by working my way through Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard. I had joined the Libertarian Party in 1972 and continued to do volunteer work therein for the next dozen years. Rand dismissed us as simply trying to draw attention to ourselves. But in truth I was using the Party as a channel to telling the public I encountered in getting ballot-access signatures that there was this idea and ideal called libertarianism and handing them a brochure on what that was. In those days, very few had ever heard of such a thing. It was during my libertarian activism and study that I began in the early 1980’s to write.* I left off libertarian activism and study in 1984 and turned to study of the non-political areas of philosophy, which had been my focus in formal course work in college. In the 1980’s Peter Schwartz was the editor and publisher of The Intellectual Activist, to which Leonard Peikoff was a contributing editor. In 1986 Mr. Schwartz penned therein the essay “Libertarianism: A Perversion of Liberty” which was reprinted two years later in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought. As I recall, Robert Nozick, the principal libertarian philosopher, and Nozick’s thought in the area is never mentioned in that representation of libertarianism by Mr. Schwartz. In 1988 it was Schwartz who started the public debate between the ARI/Peikoff set and David Kelley that would come to be the debate over open and closed Objectivism. Schwartz’s opening volley was: On Sanctioning the Sanctioners "Ayn Rand's principle of not sanctioning evil has an aspect that some TIA readers apparently do not see. It is clear why one should not, for example, sell goods to totalitarian states or provide shelter to escaping criminals or work as a PLO fund-raiser. Assisting one's philosophical enemies—i.e., those who hold values fundamentally antithetical to one's own—is ultimately harmful to one's own interests. And the corollary of this principle is: neither should one sanction the sanctioners of one's philosophical enemies . . . they deserve to be ostracized for it. ". . . Examples of philosophical enmity . . . of particular interest to TIA—and to those readers who have asked me why, in their words, "honest differences of opinion" cause me to dissociate from certain individuals who "still agree with your basic philosophy." The first example is that of Libertarianism. Libertarians are patently not allies in the ideological battle for capitalism, regardless of how many free-market positions they may claim to endorse. Nor are those who support them (i.e., those who contribute to the Libertarian Party or lend their names to Libertarian magazines or promote Libertarian bookstores or serve as after-dinner speakers at Libertarian functions [David Kelley]). They are all in fact furthering ideas and values fundamentally inimical to those of Objectivism. Consequently, TIA's editorial masthead, as well as Second Renaissance Book's catalogue of authors, categorically excludes anyone who openly preaches Libertarianism—or who supports the preachers. It is dishonest and self-defeating to treat such people as partners in the cause of reason, egoism and capitalism. They are not." To which Kelley responded in published-elsewhere writing. Peikoff rejoined. And so forth. The weight of the "me" in that Schwartz characterization and ostracism was his affiliation with Peikoff, who subsequently opened his rejoinder to Kelley by endorsing what Schwartz had written.

The essentials of Objectivism, the elements that make it the philosophy it was and is and will continue to be—leaving aside the beer-singers of philosophy—are in Galt’s Speech. Rand wrote above the speech when she reprinted it in her nonfiction book For the New Intellectual: “This is the philosophy of Objectivism.” One can dispute the correctness of anyone, including Rand, who might take that statement to mean: P - “Everything in GS is an element of the Objectivist philosophy.” One could rightly deny correctness of P because the definition of what is philosophy is not up for capricious definition, and it is rightly said that some elements in GS are not part of philosophy at all. Period. Any claims about history of philosophy or about psychology of dictators, for examples, are not part of philosophy itself. Rand has a philosophy in GS not reliant on such elements in GS. Galt’s Speech has been open to all and available to all for close critical commentary or defense since it was published. So, Grames, I wouldn’t expect expiration of copyright to affect anything on open/closed controversies. Within what is indeed philosophy, Rand gets to define what is hers. If she takes the position under some notion of “instinct” that there is no such thing in humans, then however much one might think that position false, or however inessential it is to her philosophy, it is part of her philosophy, right there in Galt’s Speech. It is a traditional philosophical issue, and her position on it has some significant natural fit with what else she says about the animal that is human and about the human setting in reality and about the nature of reality. Similarly, Descartes gets to define his philosophy as including the idea that there is a good God who makes geometry true and makes it possible for us to know it is true. Wrong as we might think that idea, it is part of the philosophy of Descartes. Innovations on Descartes’s philosophy, such as Malbranche made, do not change what was and is Descartes’s philosophy, even though Malbranche’s philosophy is only a stone’s throw away from that of Descartes. Then too, the setting out and defense of Descartes’s philosophy by Spinoza (prior to setting out his own philosophy) sensibly requires our own judgment as to whether and how far Spinoza is true to Descartes in this setting out and defense. It is sensible to be making such a judgment because we have Descartes’s texts for intelligent independent assessment. Likewise for any setting out and defense of Rand’s philosophy. Rand stated in FNI Preface that her philosophy as set out in her fiction, even as in GS, was in need of additional articulation in non-fiction compositions. These require our own independent judgment as to how consistent with the philosophy set out in GS they are or how strongly entailed by GS they are. I’d like to add something that probably has not been said before. Cultishness is typically associated with features associated with a more closed-school conception of Objectivist philosophy than with a more open-school conception of same. But I see now from the case of Nietzsche in German culture from 1890 to WWI (1914) that openness (indeed, far, far wider openness than David Kelley would countenance) can readily participate in cultishness concerning Rand. Nietzsche’s philosophy was an enormously (but not entirely) open setup—by him. Everyone could interpret it bizarrely, bending it to their own political or personal agenda. Yet the cult of Nietzsche, portraying him as the most revolutionary and holy thing since Jesus, was (like his cultural splash) to Rand cultishness as storm to moderate gale.

"All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. . . . they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society."* Speak for yourself, Professor. Did not apply to the millions of God-vested people all around him at the time of that writing. Does not apply to lots of atheistic, rational people I know today. Does not apply to me (and I'm not a subscriber to ethical egoism, SI, in case you'd care to avoid presumptuousness concerning audience at this site). In this, Prof. Einstein was stuck-in-a-rut, without a shred of originality or profound insight into human nature.

Follow-on Note for ~J~ A good overview of the varied German takes on Kant after the era of Hegel is given in the online article Nineteenth-Century Neo-Kantianism This is the philosophic milieu in which Paulsen was writing, and one can search his name in this article. A full account of the same period of Kant revival, bifurcations, revisions, and new embedments is given in The Rise of Neo-Kantianism – German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (1991) by Klaus Christian Köhnke, points of contact by Paulsen included. But the main thing for getting Paulsen’s own philosophy, determining whether an extract is his view or Kant's, and the plusses and minuses he gives to Kant is to read Paulsen. That is, read extracts from Paulsen at least in the context of the full book, and more ambitiously, his body of works. And to repeat: It is false that Paulsen was "a devoted Kantian", and reading his every saying as though it were Kant saying or Kant-more-honestly-than-usual is incorrect. There is only one "horse's mouth" for Kant, and that is Kant. And I can Kant.

Another indication of possible new elementary physics: more precise measurement of W boson mass. Nature report

4 April 2022 US Supreme Court in Thompson v. Clark today ruled against precedent and removed some restriction on when the private citizen can sue the police for malicious prosecution. Affirm: Kavanaugh, Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett Dissent: Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch

I had been unable to attend David Kelley’s summer seminar in 2001. Shortly after the seminar, I was sent from David’s organization The Objectivist Center a large envelope, which I happened upon today. The cover note: “Mr. Boydstun, Merlin Jetton asked me to send this to you. Enjoy!” Enclosed was an 8x10 photo reproduction of a sketch of Ayn Rand which is in the National Portrait Gallery. The sketch was made 21 November 1959 by Everett Raymond Kinstler. Mr. Kinstler died in 2019. (Merlin my friend and fellow intellectual traveler died last February; his memorial ceremony is this coming Saturday.) Around 2000 Kinstler recalled the occasion of the sketch, recalled in an interview with the organization American Renaissance for the Twenty-First Century: “I was a great admirer of hers, and it was at an evening at the National Arts Club. The occasion was to honor Eleanor Roosevelt. When Mrs. Roosevelt was given a standing ovation, Miss Rand refused to stand . . . . She was interested in the fact that I was an artist and that I was an admirer of hers. She came up to the studio afterward with her husband Frank O’Connor. I had a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and she was very impressed with my underlinings . . . . [While we] talked, I did a very modest head of her in charcoal. It is not a very significant drawing, but the evening was memorable . . . . I was just very impressed with her.”

~J~ In 1975 Rand composed an essay she titled “From the Horse’s Mouth.” She had been reading a book by Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) titled Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrines, published in 1898 and translated from German to English in 1902. The horse Rand was referring to was Immanuel Kant. She took Paulsen to be “a devoted Kantian” giving a fair reflection of Kant in this book, a modest commentator in comparison to the stature of the originator of the system that is transcendental idealism, but a philosopher parlaying Kant’s ideas in an exceptionally honest way. She took Paulsen’s Kantian views at late nineteenth century to illustrate what she took to be the fundamental cause—philosophic influence of Kant—of twentieth-century progress being, in her estimation, second-rate in comparison to what had been accomplished in the nineteenth century. Indeed, she took the Kant influence to be the reason one could no longer go to the theater and expect to find a great new play such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), rather, productions such as Hair or Grease. In the Preface of the second edition (1899) of Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine, Paulsen lamented that belief in ideas, such belief in ideas as Kant and Lessing had exhibited and imparted to the nineteenth century at its beginning, had “gradually given way to belief in the external forces and material goods that now dominate our life. Nevertheless, as in families the grandson may resemble the grandfather, so it may perhaps happen in history; perhaps the twentieth century will be more like the eighteenth than the nineteenth.” Not that Paulsen hoped for a revival of the intuitionistic formalism in ethical theory (Kant) of the eighteenth century. Alongside being a philosopher (metaphysics, knowledge, ethics) and historian of philosophy, Paulsen was a famous conservative educator and commentator on current affairs in Germany. He saw at the turn into the new century a “general breakdown of traditional patterns of authority and respect” (Aschheim 1992, 37). That was why, according to Paulsen, the youth were so attracted to Nietzsche. Rand was correct in her essay when she described Paulsen as an admirer of Kant, but she erred in taking Paulsen to be a Kantian. Neither was he a post-Kantian, which anyway is too revisionary of Kant to pass off as genuinely Kantian. No, the correct classification of Paulsen would be post-idealist, meaning following on the entire load of German Idealism. Paulsen had been a grad student under Trendelenburg, a major late German-Idealist. A few months after Paulsen’s death, Frank Thilly, composed a review essay titled “Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence” (1907). Thilly had been the graduate student of Kuno Fischer and Friedrich Paulsen. Thilly had translated Paulsen’s most important philosophical work A System of Ethics (1889) into English in 1899. That is, Thilly translated the first three of the four books constituting that work. Those three books come to over 700 pages. Paulsen’s critique of Kant’s duty-consumed and a-prioristic-intuitionalistic ethics runs to 13 pages; it is not different than the critique Rand and others would make across the decades since then. The ethical views that Paulsen himself espouses are not Kantian. In her essay, Rand did not seem aware that in Paulsen’s view it is the effects of an act that make it right or wrong, contra Kant. Then too, Paulsen rejected hedonism. It is life, not pleasure that is the ultimate good. The proper end of the will is action, not feeling. The highest good of human life is its objective content, including perfection of psychical powers and including pleasure (Thilly 1909, 146). “The highest good for man, that upon which his will is finally directed, is a complete human life; that is, a life that leads to the full development and exercise of all capacities and endowments, particularly the highest, the mental and moral capacities of the rational personality” (quoted in Thilly 1909, 146–47). The highest good “consists in the perfect development and exercise of life” (Paulsen 1889, 251). “In the moral sphere, every excellence or virtue [positive ones, not absences of wrong] is an organ of the whole, and at the same time forms a part of life; it is therefore, like the whole, an end in itself” (Paulsen 1889, 276). This is like Rand in seeing the individual whole life as an end in itself, but differs from Rand in giving virtue (the positive ones) not only a means-value, but an end-in-itself-value on account of being not only in a relation of service to the living whole, but in a relation of part in the constitution of the living whole. Similarly, Paulsen takes the individual life as part of the sphere of civilization and nonetheless as an end in itself. Paulsen recasts certain aspects of the ethics of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer partly from variance with them on ordinary manifest human nature, but also by explaining those aspects in terms of the modern theory of evolution, which was not available for assimilation into those systems of metaphysics or ethics. The metaphysics on which Paulsen rests his ethical theory contains a teleological element, expansive in the way of Aristotle, not rightly confined to the realm of life, which was the confinement Rand gave to teleology in her golden insight. The take of Paulsen and many other intellectuals in the late nineteenth century was that the process of evolutions was teleological, rather than rightly understanding that novel generation and natural selection explained the appearance of teleology at work in biological nature—apart from intentionality in we higher animals. In his book on Kant, the book about which Rand wrote, Paulsen devotes pages 324–33 to criticism of Kant’s ethics. The portions of this book of about 400 pages that Rand made use of in her essay were pages 1–6. Rand’s marginalia in Paulsen’s book, the marginalia published in Mayhew 1995 (40–46), span the first 143 pages of Paulsen’s book. It is only after that point of the book that Paulsen digs into the Critique of Pure Reason; the Prolegomena; Kant on traditional issues in metaphysics; Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science; Kant’s moral philosophy; and Kant’s theory of the law, the state, and religion. Rand used only those first few pages of Paulsen’s Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine. She was struck by his opening picture in which religion, philosophy, and science all bear truths of reality, that “the history of philosophy shows that its task consists simply in mediating between science and religion,” and that Kant had created a peace pact between science and religion. She was rightly appalled that science and religion or reason and feeling should be regarded as each having rightful claims to truth. She took Paulsen to be claiming, at the end of the nineteenth century, that philosophy is the handmaiden of theology. Well, as a matter of fact, that was what I was learning from my Thomist philosophy professor in my first course in philosophy in 1967. It is nothing foreign to America or Europe to this day, pretty sure. Paulsen was certainly wrong in saying that the task of philosophy is “simply” mediating between science and religion, in his day, Kant’s, or ours, if the translation “simply” is intended to imply that that is the only function served by philosophy. Rand paints a picture in this essay (and in FNI) in which men were getting over the ancient split between mind and body and between morality and the physical world until Kant “revived” and steadied the split. Rand overcame the latter split by her theory of value in general and moral value in particular. She overcame, or anyway attempted to overcome, the former split by her metaphysics. The Kantian division of reason and faith, she alleges, “allows man’s reason to conquer the material world, but eliminates reason from the choice of the goals for which material achievement are used. Man’s goals, actions, choices and values—according to Kant—are to be determined irrationally, i.e., by faith” (79). Well, no, that is not Kant, and differently, not Paulsen either. Rand thought that the Kantian picture painted by Paulsen at the outset of this book, if typical of intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, surely would doom the twentieth century (to 1975) to what she saw as its declining achievements and to the century’s totalitarian states and the Holocaust. The outset-picture of Paulsen was not untypical among philosophers of Idealist stripe, though we should keep in mind that German Idealism (and its posts) was not the only major philosophy on the scene and the season of German Idealism was coming to an end. The conflict of faith and reason tearing apart integrated life and the award to faith the province of values continues to this day, as it did in the age of Copernicus. It did not and does not require the thoughts of Kant on it for its continuation. The Baptist University across town does not require Kant for continuing their faith-based rejection of the scientific account of the formation of the earth or of the biological evolution of our kind or of the separability of body and soul or of the other-worldly source of morals and home of the righteous. References Aschheim, S. E. 1992. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990. California. Mayhew, R., editor, 1995. Ayn Rand’s Marginalia. Ayn Rand Institute Press. Paulsen, F. 1889. A System of Ethics. F. Thilly, translator. 1899. Charles Scribner’s Sons. ——. 1898. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Doctrine. J. E. Creighton and A. Lefevre, translators. 1902. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Rand, A. 1975. From the Horse’s Mouth. In Philosophy: Who Needs It. 1982. Signet. Thilly, F. 1909. Friedrich Paulsen’s Ethical Work and Influence. The International Journal of Ethics V19N2:10–55.

Minor Note to the Side In The Ominous Parallels, Peikoff mentioned Arthur Moeller van den Bruck as the one who had coined the name Third Reich (36). That attribution had been regular in the literature.[1] It is erroneous. Moeller’s usage of the name is in his 1923 book by that title: Das Dritte Reich. In this work were a number of reflections about Germany and its future constitution and potential along the lines that Hitler would later join and enact in the German state. Third Reich was the name of a somewhat dreamy notion of a future great Germany in the mind of Moeller, but of predecessors as well.[2] It is said by now not that Moeller coined the name, but that he popularized the name, which had already become common currency on the Right.[3] Spengler used it in his Decline of the West, volume 1 (1918). [1] Gerhard Krebs’s “Moeller van den Bruck: Inventor of the ‘Third Reich’” in The American Political Science Review V35N6 (Dec. 1941). [2] Agnes Stansfield’s “Das Dritte Reich: A Contribution to the Study of the Idea of the ‘Third Kingdom’ in German Literature from Herder to Hegel” in The Modern Language Review V29N2 (Apr. 1934). [3] Eric Weitz’s Weimar Germany – Promise and Tragedy (2007).

Theodor Lundberg "The Wave and the Beach" (1897)

Very often what is rated a sacrifice under the dictionary definition 2 really is what Rand specially termed a sacrifice: the forfeit of a higher value for a lower value. That is, the alleged higher value in 2 is a fraud. She correctly had it that wherever value is talked of, sensibleness requires ability to specify “of value to whom and for what purpose.” Once those specifications are filled out, it is seen, I say, that many a sacrifice said to be a forfeit of a lower value for a higher value are the exact opposite of that. Then too, to forfeit something of significant value to you only to gain the value of eternal blissful life in heaven is to forfeit a value to nothing of value to rational valuers, which you and your loved ones and your community could see if they could drop enough of their irrationality. This is another reason for Rand to reject the notion of and talk of sacrifice tout court from genuine virtue. Rand is correct, in my view, to address in Atlas Shrugged not only sacrifice in the sense of the pervasively fraudulent 2, but in the sense of 1 as well. Sacrifice in the sense of offering something in propitiation or homage; especially, the ritual slaughter of an animal or person for this purpose. In Moshe Halbertal’s book On Sacrifice (2012), he observes that 1 is much older than 2 as meaning of sacrifice. Furthermore, 2 is a natural extension from 1. giving up individual interests for others or a country, the verb “to sacrifice for” can be construed indirectly as a giving of a gift by the individual to the nation or for the good of others” (2). I want to follow some of Halberta’s fleshing out of this connection between 2 and 1, for it opens further reasons why the notion of sacrifice under 1 or 2 is properly not a suitable notion to be allowed into Rand’s mature ethical theory as something praiseworthy.

Greg, in common parlance, we very well could hear in a praise of Rearden for those years “what personal sacrifices he had to make.” Or suppose someone never bought anything on credit and saved money and thereby accomplished a comfortable retirement. We might well hear praise for what she had had to sacrifice in order to accomplish that result. Often in the preface of a scholarly book that took years to complete, the author will acknowledge there was much hardship for his family during those years due to this project. Even though the family was all on board with value of the accomplishment as higher than what was forfeited of family life, we might hear talk of the author and his family making a sacrifice. In such ordinary talk, I don’t think the “sacrifice” made by Rearden rules out the notion that he was also making an investment. One nice thing I notice about such talk of sacrifice, when you begin to come up with enough specifics, such as in this paragraph, is that people using such sacrifice-talk in these contexts would not be maintaining or insinuating that the reason the accomplishment should be applauded was only because of the sacrifice or self-discipline required.

Sacrifice “This moment is a warning and an omen. This moment is a sacrament which calls us and dedicates our body to the service of some unknown duty we shall know. . . . / We beg our head, we beg our soul for guidance in answering this call no voice has spoken, yet we have heard.” —Anthem (1938) “Ten thousand years of voices speaking of service and sacrifice—sacrifice is the prime rule of life . . . .” —The Fountainhead “A doctrine that gives you, as an ideal, the role of a sacrificial animal seeking slaughter on the altars of others, is giving you death as your standard. By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake . . . . / The word that has destroyed you is ‘sacrifice’. . . . / ‘Sacrifice’ does not mean the rejection of the worthless but of the precious. . . . ‘Sacrifice’ is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.” —Atlas Shrugged The first definition of SACRIFICE in my American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language is “The act of offering something in propitiation or homage; especially, the ritual slaughter of an animal or person for this purpose.” The second definition is “The forfeiture of something highly valued . . . for the sake of someone or something considered to have a greater value or claim.” (Middle English, from Old French, from Latin sacrificiium: sacre, holy + facere, to do, to make.) I suggest that Rand’s differences with precedent views on what is sacred is logically coupled with her rejection of various precedent views on sacrifice. In line with Rand’s view of the source of value and morality, one might reasonably eschew continued use of the notion ‘sacred’ in the conception and conduct of rational life. In her Anthem (1938), Rand spoke of the sacred within the purely earthly positive outlook she was innovating and holding forth at that time. Although she did not speak that way in the more complete and more solid positive outlook she was proposing in Atlas, I suggest that by the end of Galt’s Speech, one could consistently say that there is something sensible and sacred within the positive view, and that is our rational minds and lives in the world. Rand’s rejection of a virtue-laden notion of sacrifice goes suitably with her mature, new notion of what is sacred because the two avenues of value and morality—the mystical, other-worldly or the paramountly social—at the outset of Galt’s Speech are sot with notions of sacrifice that are not only contrary the new notion of the sacred fitting for Rand’s genesis and character of value and morality; but because even continued use of a notion of sacrifice not contrary the new sacred runs against its spirit. Under the second dictionary definition of ‘sacrifice’ I gave above, one could say that Rearden sacrificed ten years of his life to his consuming metallurgical project. Yes, in his disciplined behavior, other lovely things in life were forgone. But the notion of sacrifice is too bound up with externally sourced values and obligations to bring ‘sacrifice’ into some service in the new positive outlook where Rearden can freely and rightly set his own projects.

~A~ ~B~ ~C~ I should mention that America did not enter WWI until April 1917. Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics was reviewed anonymously in the New York Times Review of Books on 16 July 1915. The title for the review was: “German Spirit Due to Kant, not Nietzsche.” The subtitle was: “Professor Dewey Traces Prussian Militarism Back to the Famous Philosopher of the Eighteenth Century and His Categorical Imperative.” That is a fair subtitle, and the review (leaving aside its large attention to Nietzsche in its outset) makes a fair representation of GPP. The outset: “Not Nietzsche, but Immanuel Kant is responsible for the spirit of twentieth century Germany. Not belief in the superman but belief in the categorical imperative and the thing-in-itself has sent Germany to war with the world. Not Thus Spake Zarathustra but The Critique of Pure Reason explains the amazing utterances of Bernardi, of Treitschke, of Wilhelm himself.” I was able to find this review thanks to the online archive of the New York Times. Dewey had observed that many had been saying it was the philosophy of Nietzsche that explained Germany’s war aggression. Dewey had curtly dismissed Nietzsche’s influence as “a superficial and transitory wave of opinion” (GPP 28). ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The chapters of German Philosophy and Politics are three: German Philosophy: The Two Worlds German Moral and Political Philosophy The Germanic Philosophy of History My plan is to treat 1 as Dewey applies it to WWI, then as he applies it to WWII and the rise of the Hitler’s National Socialism, then what is Peikoff’s corresponding 1982 treatment concerning Two Worlds. Then I’ll do the same sort of time-slice for 2 and perhaps 3. I want delay that task for two posts. In the present post, I’ll remark on some of those utterances of Bernardi alluded to in the NYT review. In the next post I want to dig into the interest the reviewer had and presumed the reader had in the influence of Nietzsche. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ By the time of Bernhardi’s book (1912), Friedrich Nietzsche’s books had been flying off the shelves for about two decades (Safranski 2002, 318–26; Aschheim 1992, 29–84, 101–27; Tuchman 1966, 349–51; Thomas 1983). “At the beginning of the war, Nietzsche was already so popular that 150,000 copies of his Zarathustra were printed in a special edition and handed out to the soldiers at the front along with Goethe’s Faust and the New Testament” (ibid. 329). There are some sayings glorifying unreasoning war in the sections of Zarathustra “On War and Warriors” and “Conversation with the Kings” (§2), although the former also contains elements subversive of the organized collective action that is war (see further Pippin 2006, xi; Aschheim 1992, 128–48; Thomas 1983, 103–4). I think Bernhardi was silent on Nietzsche because of the latter’s loud atheism. Then too, notwithstanding the common merit the two see in war per se, Nietzsche’s individualism could undermine actually making war (1878 I 481; 1882, 5). Ernst Haeckel was the premier champion of Darwin’s theory of evolution in German lands. Darwin’s Origins of the Species (1859) had come into German translation in 1860. Haeckel mastered the theory and soon embraced it. Some of Haeckel’s work in biology provided significant evidence for the theory beyond evidence mustered in Origins. In that work, Darwin had withheld judgment on whether humans were descended from other animal species. Since the eighteenth century in Germany, there had been speculations concerning the development of life from hypothetical amorphous forms into the greater articulation and ramification seen in species today. Thinkers such as Herder and Schelling had included in these pre-Darwinian accounts of species transformation speculations of how human kind had arisen. Haeckel charged immediately from Origins to the conclusion that humans descended from other, less perfect animals, and he alleged in print new implications for human nature and society. In 1871 Darwin would publish his own evolutionary conclusions and conjectures concerning humans (see Richards 1999, 135–45). Haeckel wrote popular accounts of his evolutionary ideas in 1868 and 1874, which became best sellers. Three decades later, he issued three more popular books on his evolutionary ethics, or social Darwinism. One of them The Riddle of the Universe (1899) sold a hundred thousand copies in its first year. “It quickly became Germany’s most popular philosophic work” (Gasman 2004, 14). In this book, Haeckel staunchly defends atheism, proclaims a scientific morality based on evolution, and derides Kant and much of Christian morality. Neither Haeckel nor Nietzsche had been promoting war with France. It is Bernhardi’s voice leading that chorus, but part of his rationale is reasoning from Haeckel and Nietzsche (1878, 477; Z, above; 1887 II, 24). The quotation of Bernhardi above continues: I have not been able to find that quote in Goethe, and I notice that other scholars have also not found it. For now its accuracy and context remain unknown. My doubt over of the fidelity of Bernhardi’s quotation of Goethe in support of an evolutionary struggle for existence is increased when I open Goethe and Darwin (1906) by the scholarly theologian Rudolf Otto. He writes that the principle of natural selection through the struggle for existence belongs exclusively to Darwin’s theory, that it is by all means alien to and contrary to Goethe’s way of thinking according to potentiality (9). Perhaps Bernhardi was paraphrasing somewhat Goethe’s biological law of compensation: “One part [in an organism] cannot be added to unless something is taken from another” (quoted in Richards 2002, 416; also 447, 456). Bernhardi’s picture of the effective and efficient intrasocial organization fits fairly well the picture of the organism put forth by Haeckel’s student, the embryologist Wilhelm Roux, whose 1881 treatise The Struggle of the Parts in the Organism was a crucial influence on Nietzsche in divining will to power as the essence of all life (Moore 2002, 37–38, 78–79). (To be continued.) References Aschheim, S.E. 1992. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990. California. Bernhardi, F. 1912. Germany and the Next War. A.H. Powles, translator. 1914. Longmans Green. Darwin, C. 1859. On the Origin of Species. John Murray. ——. 1871. The Descent of Man. John Murray. Dewey, J. 1915. German Philosophy and Politics. Henry Holt. Gasman, D. 2004 [1971]. The Scientific Origins of National Socialism. Transaction. Haeckel, E. 1899. The Riddle of the Universe. J. McCabe, translator. 1900. Harper & Brothers. Kant, I. 1781, 1787. Critique of Pure Reason. W.S. Pluhar, translator. 1996. Hackett. ——. 1795. Towards Perpetual Peace. M.J. Gregor, translator. In Immanuel Kant – Practical Philosophy. 1996. Cambridge. Moore, G. 2002. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. Cambridge. Nietzsche, F. 1878. Human, All Too Human. R.J. Hollingdale, translator. 1986. Cambridge. ——. 1883–85. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, trans. 2006. Cambridge. ——. 1887. On the Genealogy of Morals. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, trans. Vintage. Otto, R. 1906. Goethe und Darwin / Darwinismus und Religion. Vandenhoeck & Kuprecht. Peikoff, L. 1982. The Ominous Parallels. Stein and Day. Pippin, R. 2006. Introduction to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A. Del Caro, translator. Cambridge. Richards, R.J. 1999. Darwin’s Romantic Biology: The Foundations of His Evolutionary Ethics. In Biology and the Foundations of Ethics. J. Maienschein and M. Ruse, editors. Cambridge. ——. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life. Chicago. Safranski, R. 2002. Nietzsche – A Philosophical Biography. S. Frisch, translator. Norton. Thomas, R.H. 1983. Nietzsche in German Politics and Society 1890–1918. Manchester. Tuchman, B.W. 1966. The Proud Tower. Bantam.

Yes. I notice that my image for things arising in fiction writing are actually pretty much just a flash and pretty vague, like in a dream. I imaged Rearden's auto as in a style in the vicinity of 1957. I attach a photo of one like that, but my own reading-image would be nothing so definite and complete as this image. (In that era, our next-door neighbor bought a new car like this one in the photo every year. He was rich because he had invented a stone-cutting machine. He had attended school only through eighth grade. Our family could afford to live in that neighborhood only because we built our own house with our own hands.) I notice that something Rand wrote in that scene did not come about in the future of America. Gobs of rich people or nearly rich people today love having an auto that proclaims how well-to-do they are. The styling might not be so hot these days, but the company-emblem on the vehicle will still make the desired statement.

Welcome to Objectivism Online, Pidge. Which did you read first, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged? In the three times you read Atlas, can you recall any of how it was a different experience for you in the different readings? What were the years in which you first read these two novels? Here is a picture of me in college in the late 1960's, which was the era I first read Rand, together with photo of Rand in the early 1950's:

(This is not an experimental result, but theoretical. This thread is a pretty good place to keep this notice nevertheless.) 17 March 2022 This new result in mathematical physics resolves the Hawking information paradox. A striking thing about Hawking’s theoretical discovery in 1976 of radiation from the event horizon of a black hole was that it resulted merely from doing quantum field theory in a classical general relativity spacetime (not a quantum spacetime or quantum gravity). It was not an introduction of new fundamental physics or new theory of spacetime. That is also true of this new result being announced this month. Both results exhibit harmony of quantum mechanics and general relativity, whatever greater unity and deeper understanding of the two is found in the future. Quantum Hair and Black Hole Information From the Introduction of the 2022 breakthrough paper by Calmet and Hsu, which has apparently resolved the Hawking information paradox: “In 1976 Stephen Hawking argued that black holes cause pure states to evolve into mixed states. Put another way, quantum information that falls into a black hole does not escape in the form of radiation. Rather, it vanishes completely from our universe, thereby violating unitarity in quantum mechanics.[*] “Hawking’s arguments were based on the specific properties of black hole radiation. His calculations assumed a semiclassical spacetime background – they did not treat spacetime itself in a quantum mechanical way, because this would require a theory of quantum gravity. The formulation of the information paradox has been refined over several decades, as briefly summarized below. . . . “Hawking (1976): Black hole radiation, calculated in a semiclassical spacetime background, is thermal and is in a mixed state. It therefore cannot encode the pure state quantum information behind the [event] horizon. “No Cloning (circa 1990): There exist spacelike surfaces (‘nice slices’) which intersect both the interior of the BH and the emitted Hawking radiation. The No Cloning theorem implies that the quantum state of the interior cannot be reproduced in the outgoing radiation. “Entanglement Monogamy (circa 2010): Hawking modes are highly entangled with interior modes near the horizon, and therefore cannot purify the (late time) radiation state of an old black hole. “These formulations are limited by the assumption of a semiclassical spacetime background. Specifically, as we elaborate in what follows, they do not address the possibility of entanglement between different background geometries (gravitational states). Recently it was shown that the quantum state of the graviton field outside the horizon depends on the state of the interior. No-hair theorems in general relativity severely limit the information that can be encoded in the classical gravitational field of a black hole, but the situation is quite different at the quantum level. “This result is directly connected to recent demonstrations that the interior information is recoverable at the boundary: they originate, roughly speaking, from the Gauss Law constraint in quantization of gravity. It provides a mechanism (‘quantum hair’) through which the information inside the hole is encoded in the quantum state of the exterior gravitational field.” [*] Quantum Unitarity and Conservation of Information

A neat guide to what is in OPAR is here. Thanks to KP.

Previously at Objectivism Online and pertinent to the windings of this thread, from KP:

Glad you asked. I was thinking of bending over backwards to the point of foolishness trying to resolve what look like contradictions in a philosophy. Yes, one should interpret charitably, and it is standard work for philosophers to compose arguments on how something that appears inconsistent in some other philosopher is not really inconsistent when one gets in hand the right and fuller perspective of that other philosopher (based on text of that other). But sometimes the right conclusion really is that, having tried hard for resolution, a philosophy has an internal contradiction, and something in it is false for that reason. So if one finds what looks like a contradiction within a philosophy, don't go the way of Bible-Believer interpretation and suppose that the philosophy must be without contradiction really---the philosopher was super-smart---and we are just unable to see how the contradiction is resolved.

I’d like to add a bit to the preceding post, just to say that there are essentials and other things in Rand’s philosophy that are elaborated a bit in her writings after her 1957. From Galt’s Speech, one can see that she is some sort of empiricist, and this gets elaborated a bit in her later compositions ITOE and “Kant v. Sullivan.” Her definition of causality given in “The Metaphysical and the Man-Made” is a further elaboration of her conception of causality put forth in GS. Her addition of her distinction intrinsic/subjective/objective for value in “Captialism, the Unknown Ideal” and her application of that distinction to concepts or thought in ITOE might well be an addition, rather than an elaboration of things in GS (good research project). Rand’s essay “Causality v. Duty,” I’d estimate as elaboration of ideas on value in GS. Her addition of talk of “ultimate value” and the immortal-robot gedanken that appear in OE, but not in GS, I’d say are only elaborations of value theory in GS. From GS one can see that Rand’s philosophy relies on axioms, and whether what she says about them further in ITOE is another research problem as to how much in ITOE is elaboration of what was in GS and how much is new, innovation since GS (new at least in published text). Her measurement-omission element in her theory of concepts is no mere elaboration of anything in GS.

RationalEgoist, I don’t think it will do to say that if Rand did not live to say something was part of her philosophy, then it is not. Something can be logically entailed by what definitely was stated by her as part of her philosophy. The entailment will do. (Additionally, as you would know, just me saying that something is part of my philosophy does not really show that my dicta is part of philosophic views at all, and if philosophic, my stating it does not make it necessarily consistent with other parts of my philosophy.) Here is such an entailment, taken from my fundamental philosophy paper published last summer: Rand’s informal say-so years later was not required for the thesis being part of her philosophy. Had she died before making that remark, as you see above, we could infer that the thesis was part of the philosophy she invented and stated in Galt’s Speech. I’m not letting you off the hook, by the way, from being an Objectivist, simply because you disagree with Rand’s esthetics. Her philosophy in that area, like her theory of concepts, was not included in Galt’s Speech, and anything essential (or 'core' or 'fundamental') to her philosophy is in that text. Mere exemplification of her theory of literature in her novels is no setting out of her theory. She wrote above the text of Galt’s Speech in her book For the New Intellectual “This is the Philosophy of Objectivism.” Anything essential to the philosophy is in there or in its logical entailments. Rand’s esthetics and her theory of concepts are, of course, part of her philosophy of Objectivism. But they are not essential to the philosophy, however fine and important they may be in various ways. So. You’re not off the hook. I’m delighted by your remarks about the rightness of just realizing and stating that one is not an Objectivist if one disagrees with an essential (or ‘core’, or ‘fundamental’) of the philosophy. The practice of enthusiasts of Rand’s fiction and philosophy thinking that when they have come to disagree with something essential in the philosophy, then Rand made a mistake in what was her philosophy and that it needs revision, while keeping the name Objectivism, has always been absurd. Neither Objectivism nor any other philosophy has as its definition “that in philosophy which is true” even if it happens that some philosophy such as Objectivism is entirely true. (Well, OK, I do concede that idiots are allowed that definition.)

Yes, and previously.