Boydstun
-
Posts
2624 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
240
Posts posted by Boydstun
-
-
Usual problem. Here's the link again.
-
An ample review of Richard Salsman's book Where Have All the Capitalists Gone? (2021) is in the latest issue of REASON PAPERS here.
-
KyaryPamvu,
I should not have said that Rand took the form of a building to be a possible work of art, only that it was a possible artistic work. I myself think it to be a possible work of art for the reasons stated in the earlier post.
Rand was not alone in finding metaphysical, cognitive, and evaluative linkages in art. Her final characterization of their assembly was under her concept of a metaphysical value-judgment.
Rand’s explications of sense of life and metaphysical value-judgments are in terms of metaphysics that bears on human life and the role and character of values in it. She said that a sense of life sums up one’s view of man’s relationship to existence. That suggests that when she said this subconsciously integrated appraisal that is sense of life includes appraisal of the nature of reality, she was confining the metaphysical appraisal to implications for moral, human life. That would include some notion of the intelligibility or lack thereof in existence in general and in living existence in particular.
Rand had used the phrase sense of life once in Fountainhead, twice in Atlas, and evidently routinely in conversation before beginning to write about the meaning of the phrase in 1965. The phrase and concept “tragic sense of life” was title of Unamuno’s book of 1913 (Spanish; translated into English 1921)
In Atlas Rand once used the phrase sense of life tied to a sense of beauty and to the love of human existence. During Dagny’s tour of Atlantis, she visits the composer Richard Halley, who plays some of his piano pieces for her.
- She was thinking of the years when the works he had just played for her were being written, here, in his small cottage on the ledge of the valley, when all the prodigal magnificence of sound was being shaped by him as a flowing monument to a concept which equates the sense of life with the sense of beauty—while she had walked through the streets of New York in a hopeless quest for some form of enjoyment, with the screeches of a modern symphony running after her, as if spit by the infected throat of a loud-speaker coughing its malicious hatred of existence. (AS 781)
In this passage, beauty and a sense of life saturated with it are aligned with life and the love of it. This is a use of the phrase sense of life consistent with Rand’s later definition of it.
Rand’s theory of esthetics is too restrictive in two ways. Firstly, the cognitive and emotional function of art is, I say, a family of end-in-itself integrations, among which Rand’s function is an important one, but only one. In “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand wrote that art fulfills a need for end-in-itself concretization of metaphysical value-judgments. That is consonant with her idea, stated earlier in “The Goal of My Writing,” that the function of art is to supply moments of sensing as complete the life-long struggle for achievement of values. In the later essay “Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand was not broadening her view of what is “the” function of art; she was only articulating more of the means by which it fulfills that function. In Rand’s view, there are other enjoyments in art besides fulfillment of that function, but no other function.
About psycho-epistemology: Rand and her circle had been using the term to refer to an individual’s characteristic method of awareness. Is the time scope of his outlook brief or long? Is his concern only with what is physically present? Does he recoil into his emotions in the face of his physical life and need for action? How far does he integrate his perceptions into conceptions? Is his thinking a means of perceiving reality or justifying escape from reality? Chris Sciabarra reports that Barbara Branden was the one who originated the concept (and, I presume, the word) psycho-epistemology. In her lecture series Principles of Efficient Thinking, Ms. Branden defined psycho-epistemology as “the study of the mental operations that characterize a man’s method of dealing with reality”. Nathaniel Branden further specified the compass of psycho-epistemology in an essay with that title in 1964.
Art performs the psycho-epistemological function, in Rand’s view, of converting metaphysical abstractions “into the equivalent of concretes, into specific entities open to man’s direct perception.” She held art to be a need of human consciousness. This stands in need of anthropological corroboration and crucial testing.
Secondly too restrictive, importance as Rand’s criterion of esthetic abstraction is a salient criterion in such abstraction, but the broader criteria of significance and meaningfulness also sort the esthetic from the purely cognitive and normative types of abstraction. Importance is the concept Rand took to be key in formation of a sense of life. She then restricted importance to a fundamental view of human nature. A sense of life becomes an emotional summation reflecting answers on basic questions of human nature read as applying to oneself. Such questions would be whether the universe is knowable, whether man has the power of choice, and whether man can achieve his goals.
The fundamental importance-questions whose emotional answers are vested in a sense of life were the same as Rand had listed the previous year in spelling out what are metaphysical value-judgments. Those questions had been:
- Is the universe intelligible to man, or unintelligible and unknowable? Can man find happiness on earth, or is he doomed to frustration and despair? Does man have the power of choice, the power to choose his goals and to achieve them, the power to direct the course of his life—or is he the helpless plaything of forces beyond his control, which determine his fate? Is man, by nature, to be valued as good, or to be despised as evil?
That last question would seem at first blush to be a normative question, rather than a metaphysical one. I suggest, however, that it is a question for (i) the metaphysics of life and value in general, to which, as metaphysical fact, man is no alien and (ii) for the metaphysics of mind joining (i) (see also Peikoff OPAR, 189–93).
Rand’s writings in the 1960’s and 70’s on esthetics were something of a hodgepodge. One should keep in perspective her esthetics as part of her philosophy. They are a part of it, but not an essential of it; for the essentials of Rand’s philosophy had already been set out within Galt’s Speech in Atlas Shrugged, and esthetics was not dealt with therein.
-
KyaryPamvu,
Rand expressed the view that the form of a building can be a work of art, and if it is, its theme is integral with the building’s purpose and its site (Fountainhead PK I 18, X 127, HR I 544–45, III 568, IX 633). Such a work takes function and site as constituents of its esthetic theme, which theme is the uniting principle of its specific form. The ornamentation of the building is integral with the function and theme of the structure. Ornamentation in the building that is a work of art rides on the method of construction; it is an emphasis of the building’s physical structural principles. Ornamentation must not choke the building’s sense, must not destroy its esthetic integrity, she remarked (PK XI 141, XII 171, XV 205).
The ornamentation inside the Stoddard Temple of the Human Spirit, designed by Roark, consists of the graded projections of its gray limestone walls and its vast windows. The temple is “open to the earth around it, to the trees, the river, the sun—and to the skyline of the city in the distance” (ET XI 356). Before that skyline, stands one ornament, true to the idea of this temple: one statue of a naked human body. There is another temple, one in real life, that is a work of art and is (partly) a capture in form of the theme, in Christian context, of its name: Thorncrown.
Roark’s buildings are characterized by Rand as analogous in their integrity and beauty to that of a living thing and the idea-plan of that living thing. Peter Reidy has written about this. As well, she characterized Roark’s buildings as analogous to a soul with integrity and as statements in form, statements of the life of men in their minds (PK I 18, X 129, XI 140, XV 205, ET X 327, HR II 558).
As you know, in Rand’s take, as with some earlier theories of art, the importance to man of a work as art “is not in what he learns from it, but in that he experiences it” (Rand 1963, 41). An art work as such, “an art work, as distinguished from a utilitarian object, serves no practical purpose other than that of contemplation” (37). I should point out, however, that a vase, a chair, or a building can be an artwork alongside its utilitarian function, and any expression of that function in the art is not the same as the function itself.
As you've likely noticed, the way in which Rand assimilated music (absolute music particularly) into her definition of art took some doing, and that is somewhat analogous to what she said about esthetics of architecture in The Fountainhead. In classic modern thought, analogies between music and architecture have often been made.
Rand's requirement that drawing and painting be figurative, and that artistic literature have a story and plot seem a contrived foisting of correct metaphysics in which there are no attributes or actions without objects or entities bearing them onto definition of art. The visual figure, such as a human body, or a story in a fiction might well be preferred by some of us because we have that corresponding sort of metaphysics, although such a 'because' stands in need of argument. Be that as it may, it is cheap to just avoid more and deep thinking about what is art by simply defining competitor conceptions of it out of contention at the outset, and for such a handy superficial reason at that. In the case of literature, in her dismissal of mood scenes as literary art because they have no plot, she ends up implicitly (without acknowledging it and perhaps not realizing it) kicking out such a poem as "Silent Noon" as an instance of literary art.
-
What is the proof that there is such a thing as a sense of life in Rand's meaning given to that phrase? Persuasion that there is such a thing seems dependent on pointing to examples of it. I don't think that pointing to one's reactions to things are very persuasive that one has a sense of life in Rand's meaning of the term (cf.). I find the idea plausible only by considering my artistic creations, which is to say, the poetry I create. I don't think that one's responsiveness to a type of writing—say Rand's literature or Victor Hugo's—shows you that you have a sense of life and what it is. It shows at best that you can participate in the sort of sense of life the author exhibited of themselves. One should not be persuaded that one even has such a thing as a sense of life, in Rand's meaning of it, let alone what one's particular sense of life is, unless one has oneself created some art instances over some time and seen or begun to see how one is unable to get out of one's own creative skin and what that skin is.
-
THE OXFORD COMPANION TO PHILOSOPHY (1995, 2005) is an encyclopedia of issues and philosophers. It is 1056 pages long. It does not have an entry for Ayn Rand, although she is mentioned within an entry for Popular Philosophy. The entry begins by setting forth three sorts of popular philosophy: general guidance about the conduct of life; amateur consideration of the standard, technical problems of philosophy; and philosophical popularization.
There was movement called “popular philosophy” in eighteenth-century Germany. It included various definite philosophies, but criticized obscure technicalities and systematic elaborations, in an attempt to stay close to experience and usefulness for life. Frankly, general educated readers today, would find those writings quite technical philosophy. And frankly, the German Rationalist before them Christian Wolff held to the Enlightenment value of concern for the welfare and betterment of humanity (and he found a method for increasing the yield of grains). Then too, all the systematic, technical philosophers before them held forth practical philosophies, which is to say ethical systems. So I don’t give much weight to the claims of uniqueness in this self-declared popular-philosophy movement. The movement was eventually displaced by Kantianism.
Beside those guys, the entry mentions under philosophers giving general guidance about the conduct of life: Socrates, Aristotle, Stoics, Epicureans, Christian dicta (not really philosophy), Erasmus, Montaigne, F. Bacon, La Rochefoucauld, Samuel Johnson, and Benjamin Franklin. “By the end of the eighteenth century, prudence, and the idea of rational management of life, had been obscured by the clouds of romanticism.” That is to say, the allure of this sort of practical philosophy was outdone and displaced by the allure of philosophical romanticism, including Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Emerson and Shaw should be counted among this sort of practical philosopher. Others mentioned, from the twentieth century: Émile Chartier, Havelock Ellis, John Cowper Powys, Aldous Huxley, and Sydney Harris.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century (and to the present), “professional philosophers, after a long period of absenteeism from anything but the most abstract and uncommitted attention to the problems of conduct and practice, have resumed a measure of direct involvement, mainly at the political or collective level, but to some extent more personally, as in Richard Robinson’s AN ATHEIST’S VALUES and Robert Nozick’s unkindly treated THE EXAMINED LIFE.”
Skipping the second kind for a moment, the third kind of popular philosophy in this entry is popularization of philosophy. Among this kind are mentioned: Paulsen, Windelband, Benn, and Russell in his PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY, Hospers in his INTRODUCTION TO PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS and HUMAN CONDUCT, and Scruton’s MODERN PHILOSOPHY. T. Nagel, Blackburn, Midgley, Glover, and Singer are professional philosophers who have been lured into press in the popularization genre.
The second kind of popular philosophy is in contrast to institutional philosophy, which today means in contrast to academic philosophy. This kind of popular philosophy, though amateur, tackles the standard, technical problems of philosophy. Notwithstanding all their influence, the author of the entry puts Descartes and Hume in this category. I should add Spinoza. This sort of philosophizing flourished at presses in the nineteenth century, but languished in the twentieth century. Exceptions in the twentieth: C. G. Stone, L. L. Whyte, and George Melhuish, “and, in the United States, Ayn Rand, strenuous exponent of objectivism and self-interest.”
I’d say that Leonard Peikoff greatly contributed to expanding the range of standard philosophy problems that can be addressed by Rand’s philosophy in metaphysics and epistemology. His essay, “The Analytic-Synthetic Dichotomy” was a big expansion, even if only a short overview. In his History of Philosophy lectures in the early 1970’s, he gave square, competent presentations of the big guys through the ages and followed each with what Objectivism could say precisely of what was amiss or right in the particular philosophy.
Appearance of the Blackburn A COMPANION TO AYN RAND is a milestone breach of the silence on and snubbing of Rand by academic philosophers. This breach was made possible by the renowned Aristotle scholar and Objectivist Allan Gotthelf. Another breach is the Ayn Rand Society within The American Philosophical Association and the books issued by that Society under an academic press. Another: Chris Sciabarra’s AYN RAND: THE RUSSIAN RANDICAL and his JOURNAL OF AYN RAND STUDIES. The thesis of his book on local Russian influences on Rand’s philosophy were contested by James Lennox, Barbara Branden, and others knowledgeable of Rand and her development, but in the course of his book, Sciabarra exposes to a wider scholarly audience a very detailed view of Rand’s philosophy itself. I should mention that the professional philosopher Robert Nozick preserved his early challenge to Rand’s ethics by including it among his papers in his book SOCRATIC PUZZLES. Academic presses have issued other books on Objectivism or putting it into technical philosophical work: three books by Tara Smith and one by David Kelley.
Although Nietzsche after 1890 was widely read among people outside academia, and a cult of Nietzsche burned brightly until WWI, he was shunned by the academy there and here until after WWII. That would be about five decades after his death (really ten for full blaze). Rand has been deceased about four decades. The question of how far Rand’s philosophy might become a stable and large topic of academic philosophers in the coming decades remains entirely impenetrable to me. By now though, it appears Rand’s philosophy will for a long time to come continue as a help to some people in making a life for themselves and as, for some, an entryway to philosophy more generally.
This is a picture of Ayn Rand in 1951 being read by a college student maybe 15 years later.
-
Mini-Series of Atlas Shrugged from Daily Wire+
(November 2022 announcement)
Jeremy Boreing, Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson are producing for DailyWire+. Dallas Sonnier and Amanda Presmyk are producing for Bonfire Legend. Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow are producing for Atlas Distribution Company. Scott DeSapio, Joan Carter and Danielle Cox are executive producers.
The deal was negotiated by Dallas Sonnier and general counsel Joshua Herr on behalf of DailyWire+, Roger Arar and Kaslow on behalf of Atlas Distribution Company, and Tim Knowlton of Curtis Brown Ltd. on behalf of the Peikoff Family Partnership and the Estate of Ayn Rand.
-
-
On 11/25/2022 at 7:05 PM, tadmjones said:
. . .
But until then, there are multiple other sources of information and dismissing out of hand information from provably inaccurate sources is a time saver.
You should share some of these other sources; their bottom line numbers and how they got them would be nice. I had been simply curious how many lives were estimated to have been saved by preventative measures that were taken against this contagious disease. And the links I shared here were simply what came up in the google.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I should mention that information provided for our own community here in Lynchburg—tracking the number of new cases, new deaths, and available ICU at our hospital—were useful to us in the decisions we made to protect ourselves during the pandemic. We are old and retired. We stopped going to the gym for many months. Many members did not renew their membership during that time. My husband did not leave home, as he has severe COPD. The Governor came around to closing gyms for several months. We have returned now, and we follow the routine of wiping down the contact points, even though we all know it was found that spread of that virus was mainly airborne, not contact. We continue that simply because it's a good habit, for other disease transmission, protective of self and others.
The "individualist" refusal to wear masks in our local grocery store during the pandemic reminded me of back when the AIDS pandemic was going on. Within the libertarian political press there was promotion of Dr. Duesberg's conjecture that AIDS was not caused by HIV (but by other factors such as poor diet, partying all night, running oneself down by taking "recreational" drugs, and assault of AZT [the only anti-HIV med at the time] on the body; stop doing those things and the whole problem will go away). This press was plainly not motivated by providing me with good advice on what I should do. It was motivated by politics, especially government-research expense. It was implausible to the educated on its face and morally obscene. People who could have had an eventual chance of being rescued died on regular schedule from taking such advice. I did not take that advice. I spat on it. I followed the information in my Scientific American and the advice of my doctor (a scientific guy) and Dr. Fauci and his agency. Those researches and drug developments saved my life and preserve it to the present. (By the way, a vaccine has never been found for that virus; nature is a giant.)
I doubt there is any government program whatever that cannot be twisted into part of a design to control the lives of the citizens and curtail their freedom—from providing for the common defense to building interstate highways. I have property rights in my acreage. That is a bundle of specific rights. I have a right to fell any timber on our place that I please. I have a right against others felling them without my consent. I do not have a right to burn leaves under all wind conditions. That last is not an attempt by law to become master of my life. That thought is ridiculous, and if one believes that sort of thing, one needs to get a grip. Neither is it plausible that some despot in the future is going to come along and use the leaf-burning constraints to snuff my free life.
"Man—every man—is an end in himself . . . ." That is not, logically, in Rand's ethical system only the pylon for the moral rightness of self-interested action, but for respecting ends-in-themselves that are other people. Jackassery "individualism" is not helpful to the cause of constraining government in the big ways it infringes the rights of individuals. Providing for the common defense has passed, starting at least with FDR, on to protecting people from hurricanes and epidemics. And there is a regularization of the extensions as time goes by: Goldwater denounced Medicare and Social Security as socialism; Trump said no, only the Obama-Care addition was socialism. I suggest that what is horribly wrong are the massive outlays without adequate revenues and the ways in which government can take over particular lives seriously such as was done by the military draft or, less drastically, by wage and price controls or by denying people the right to go to work or keep the firm open during the pandemic—rather than letting our citizens volunteer to save their country or save others against totalitarianism in the war or letting them make their own decision on whether to stop going to work or school during the pandemic (thereby putting the blames for untoward consequences on nature, rather than on government).
The idea put about these days that every ill impact of government action on one's cherished freedoms is the main and evil objective of people behind the policy action is egocentric, subjectivist, and false. All over our acreage every year all the plants and all the animals are behaving as if their species was trying to take over the world, but there is no such intention; they have no such broad intentions or any intentions at all. Personifying cumulative bad results from our organized collective action that is the US government and writing a fiction of that evil personage is intellectually lazy and does not help in tuning to reality.
-
Perhaps I should have put this item under the World History sector. Although it concerns Religion, it is not some current of religion especially Current Event.
This video is a great help to me. I have listened to the first hour. I want to absorb the book. I’ve had the book a while, but have been intimidated from taking it up and getting into it because the Roman characters are “Greek to me.” I sensed that I needed to have my encyclopedias around me for looking up the various names, which I have delayed and delayed. I needed the history of the Roman Empire (and really gotten into the head) of which I am ignorant.
As a study of religion/state roles prior to this era, I have been studying Robert Bellah’s book Religion in Human Evolution – From the Late Paleolithic to the Axial Age. I have been on the alert in this long human story from before the Greek/Roman/Christian epoch for the evolution of the ritual of sacrifice because I want it as background on the book On Sacrifice (biblical/rabbinical) by Moshe Halbertal, which I have begun to write about at OO on another thread in connection with all of Ayn Rand’s writings on sacrifice.
In the video, the part about how the Jewish monotheists could not accept the Roman gods/rulers-pantheon reminded me of the American Revolution and Thomas Paine’s remark that goes something like this: “Who then shall be the King of America? I’ll tell you friend. He rules above . . . .” (and his adjoining blueprint for a purely rule by the Law of constitution).
-
Creating Christ – "Did Roman Emperors create Christianity? Archaeological evidence now links the first Cristians with ruling elites of Rome. A conspiracy to end the great conflict between Jews and Rome changed the course of history. This secret revealed here."
-
On Walsh on Rand on Kant – Between Metaphysics and Science
That 2010 paper of mine can be read at the site linked above.
I have completed the new intense paper on the paper of George Walsh and the comments on Walsh by Fred Miller at the 1992 session of the Ayn Rand Society. My 2010 paper was not bad and is one slice through the Walsh presentation of Kant's philosophy and Walsh's criticisms of Rand's understanding and representation of Kant in metaphysics and epistemology. My new paper is entirely different from the 2010 one in the new one's treatment of Walsh's paper, Rand's misunderstandings, and the real clashes between Kant and Rand. Plus the new paper treats Miller's comments on Walsh, which the old paper did not. I expect my new paper to be accepted for publication, and if that is so, I'll link to it here when that issue of the journal comes out.
-
ReasonFirst,
Descartes thought the only reason we humans err is that we let our will outrun our understanding. He and many others thought that God could not err. That was because they thought error would be an imperfection. That is foolishness, I say. Where there is no error, there is no intelligence. God was traditionally thought of as having a will (there was the choice to make the world and to make humans) and as having understanding, or intellect. Although Descartes would emphasize the extent of the divine will, whereas Leibniz would emphasize the extent of the divine understanding, all could agree that for God, Its will cannot outrun Its understanding. Its understanding, Its intellect, may be pure act, but it is not a process requiring time to obtain knowledge. This idea of divine infallibility (and omniscience) in comparison to human fallibility (and partial ignorance) might be thought analogous to a real refrigerator and a perfect refrigerator, as in thermodynamics. The Second Law says the perfect refrigerator can be compared to real refrigerators, but no real ones can attain coincidence with the perfect one. I think that analogy would be an inappropriate analogy. Although we can get better at avoiding errors (and I would say that the best outside help on that is elementary logic texts which include informal fallacies as well as formal ones; the former can be supplemented by the informal fallacies Rand formulated, or anyway rediscovered and renamed, such as the Stolen Concept Fallacy |—>The Art of Reasoning), we would rationally expect to make errors even when proceeding with the greatest care and conformance to logic. We must not suppose it is possible to make no innocent errors, even as we get more skilled in avoiding them and even with the self-correcting methods of the hard sciences. That would be an error. For comparisons of human intelligence with other intelligence, I should suggest comparison of our cognition with the cognitive powers of the great apes, and not with imagined chimera such as God.
A Natural History of Human Thinking
-
-
In the Asian Flu epidemic of 1957-58 in the US, vaccination of the military was the top concern of the government to get done.
-
Harrison, a general good will towards people might be among the reasons for not wanting to put falsehoods in anyone's head unless you've specific good reason to do so. Therefore, one might form a habit to that effect, which does not require rethinking the whole issue every time someone asks you for information.
Harrison, in the link from which I quoted in the first paragraph of the OP, I was indeed disputing the correctness of Rand's egoism in its beneficiary aspect. She recognized, in the intro to VOS, that this part of her ethical egoism required argument beyond her basic theory of value and her agent-egoism (the parts of her ethical theory I agree with).
I have stated many times that because ethical egoism is an essential part of Rand's philosophy Objectivism and I reject her full egoism package, I am not an Objectivist, notwithstanding all I agree with of it in many fundamental things. (If there's an essential of the philosophy you disagree with, you're not of that school; by the way, nothing conceived by Rand or her associates later that was not already in Galt's speech could possibly be an essential of the philosophy.) I have come around to a conjecture as to why so many readers, whether friends of Rand or opponents, cannot let it sink in that this writer and thinker (me) is a no-go on Rand's ethical egoism (which is the best one in the history of philosophy), and so I'm not an Objectivist in ethical theory. My conjecture is that people are so used to opponents of Rand distorting her views, which I do not. I think people who do those distortions have reached a tired stage of making dead their own minds. They don't really expect to be doing any new thinking or rethinking anything from seriously, accurately engaging with what Rand actually wrote.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This fall I needed to return to working on (a final draft of) a scholarly paper on Kant for a publication. That is why I have not yet returned to what I promised for this thread nor the thread on sacrifice. In the interim, I came across more recent thoughts from the Aristotelian scholar Richard Kraut concerning ethical egoism, more recent than I had written about in the piece "A Rejection of Egoism."* So I'll try to convey his more recent and more elaborate thoughts on that also when I can come back to serious posting.
-
My method of travel is train if I don't want to drive. Any of these suffice for Amtrak:
- State or provincial driver's license
- Passport
- Official government-issued identification (federal, state, city or county government or foreign government)
- Canadian provincial health card ID card with photo
- Military photo ID
- Student identification (university, college or high school photo ID)
- Job Corps photo ID
-
France produces 70% of its electricity from nuclear, and it exports electricity to other countries. It can help other parts of Europe fulfill energy needs acutely in short supply for this winter, due to cutback of natural gas from Russia. At present 26 of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are off-line for maintenance and repairs. A huge scramble is underway to get that work buttoned up and get back on-line. President Macron’s administration has submitted a plan to Parliament to build six new enormous reactors in France starting in 2028.
—from NYT 11/15/22
-
-
-
-
The purpose of the land-alliance is for perfection of property rights in land among would-be land-owners in the alliance. Indirectly that purpose serves the sustenance of life, and place for liberty, because land in its unperfected-rights status, as I detailed in the essay, leaves parcels of land titles open to endless contestation including by force. There is no reason inherent to the land alliance function that a member of the alliance cannot invite someone from outside to stay on the alliance member's private property, to work for them, rent from them, buy the land (thence pay alliance dues for the alliance maintenance) or to engage in other cooperative projects with the present land owner. Then too, the right of a land owner in the alliance would have the right to exclude other people from their property regardless of where they came from.
There is a difference between having a right and perfection of that right, regardless of whether the right is against violence against one's person or against one's power to use some land. Locke, as I recall, has you still having a right even if there is no law to protect it, because you can still appeal to heaven. That might be seen as an extension to infinity concerning correct judgment on the validity of one's rights-claim. That is a dubious extension, and I demonstrated in the essay by example that the idea that there is always only one correctly just claim is false.
Do not neglect my definition of having a right in terms of being right at the outset of the essay. I had formulated that definition very shortly after having become read in Rand's works up to the late 1960's. I happened to jot it down on a slip of paper, which got preserved through the couple of decades before I had begun writing and came to this paper in which it could finally be shared. Some have doubted whether my definition applies to any but claim-rights, that-is, it might not apply to liberty-rights. I was familiar with that distinction, but never checked out my presumption that the latter sort of rights are reducible to the former. And I'm not going to think about it now or study those old pertinent books anew concerning that distinction, or do anything else new in political philosophy.
I regularly take talk for a moral right, whether in everyday talk or scholarly expression, as merely whatever ought to be recognized as a legal right. I suppose a legally unrecognized right could be called a merely moral right, though that does not mean that every utterance claiming a moral right is within the ball park of reasonable consideration. I'd be reluctant to call an an entirely unrecognized right an imperfect right, which should be reserved for rights-claims at least getting close to getting over the legally needed goal-line. So, if my romantic sexual behaviors are criminalized by the state, it would sound sensible to say I have a moral right against such proscription, but not sensible to say I have an imperfect right against such proscription. (Since 2003 I've had a legal right against such proscription anywhere in the US, but if it is rescinded by the present Supreme Court, I simply lose that legal right; it does not go into status of an imperfect right, only into the status of a merely moral right.)
I know there are other times we use the idea of having a right when the alteration of rightness of the use of force is not the sort of response in view. But tribes, chiefdoms, and states, archaic or modern, are wielders of deliberate force, and the state and near-state and rights is what I was addressing.
Although I'm not going to develop my political philosophy further, I am going to maintain our own land for our purposes, and for this afternoon, that means I'm going out to pull weeds, starting right now.
-
Quote
Direct coercion is clear because the boundary of a person’s body is (generally) clear. To identify property rights, we must know the boundaries of possessions and the history of their possession.
When a cigarette comes into existence, it is a possession with plain boundaries. One can stand in a strong possessive relation to the object within those boundaries over the entire history of its existence. The boundaries of the land from which the cigarette was produced, the boundaries of land use, are also objective boundaries.
One can use unowned land in various ways, and those ways can then confer various kinds of possession—all of them weak—up to the boundaries of use. Until we draw up boundaries for land to forestall use by others, we cannot possess the land in the clear way that we can possess chattel. Possession is always an incident of ownership, but in the case of land, it cannot arrive before ownership. (from Part II)
ET, I'd say that a person standing outside of territory under the land state alliance to which I belong would still have rights that should be respected by persons under that alliance. It would be a violation of that outside person's rights were I to go across to him, pull a gun, and stick him up or to go across and force him back to my place and force him to help me with the work around the place.
So no. Your concluding principle in the preceding post is not a correct one under this theory.
-
ET, ownership rights are a bundle of specific rights of control over a single property. So for example, I have a right to cut down any timber I please on my acreage and to exclude by force of law anyone coming on my land to spray paint words on the house or set fire to my woods. But in the bundle of specific rights making up my property rights is not a right of mine to burn leaves under all wind conditions.
There was no claim of some collective right to land within some boundaries encompassing all the individual land ownerships. There is only a mutual alliance concerning the process for recognitions and enforcements of private property rights in lands owned (or would-like-to-be owned) by alliance members.
(Rights to "airwave" bands for radio broadcasting are rights to land in the economic sense of land, contrasting with other factors of production such as labor. These rights too require alliance of potential frequency-band owners who have their rights perfected [backed by effective force, might]. But these exclusivities of the transmission medium for its exploitation get their property rights perfection by piggy-back on the social mechanism for perfecting property claims in land and transmission facilities built on that land. If air waves over that land can be usurped (or made useless, speaking more practically) by contesters from offshore, then the alliance will have a decision of response to take to best secure their own perfections of property rights of broadcasters based within the alliances' boundaries of perfected property rights in land.)
The rights to private ownership of a land property are not something conferred by the alliance, but by claimants in their exploitations of that land. But the mutual alliance confers recognitions, backed up with force, supported by alliance dues, for what processes submitted by claimants for why something is their property are valid within the alliance. Rothbard's rules for coming to own previously unowned land are not the same as Epstein's, etc. To neglect to mention any conventions in such purported property rights acquisition, to pretend that such is all settled by natural law, and to paint a picture in which only one or the other—say Rothbard's or Epstein's—is a just acquisition process, is more plausibly deceptiveness of the salesperson (notably Rothbard) than reflection of stupidity.
But all this and more can be learned by carefully studying my old article of some thirty years ago. It is probably not that no one besides me and the editor carefully studied the article, but because the readership was not large and I was a nobody, that no public notice of it was made until its reappearance, on the website Rebirth of Reason early in this century. In truth by now it is such old hat to me, and my intellectual work has since been no longer in political philosophy, theory of rights, and theory of strategic games, that it's not exciting to me any more, and it is a distraction from what I should be working on the remainder of this year, a topic in history of metaphysics and epistemology. I have lately had other reason to dig into the latest anthropology on pre-state organizations of society in their religions and collective violence powers—tribes of hunter-gathers, then chiefdoms—and on to subsequent archaic states and more recent states in those respects, for the sake of my long-term ethical theorizing and not for ever returning to the cutting edge of political philosophy.
But I wanted to show you the window on financing and the topic within which that proposal arose, at least for me. I had not set out, those decades ago, to find a solution to the just financing problem. But once I had the theory of the land state in the earlier part of the text, well, I was driving on a Sunday on the Stevenson southwest out of Chicago to put in some needed overtime commercial work. It was morning. I was traveling to a nuclear plant (the last built in America) where I worked and which was in its pre-operational testing phase. Thinking, as most always in a moment to do so, a shadow went by in the back of my mind, I followed it and thought: "Well I'll be damned. That's it." Given the analysis and conception of the land state, the natural attendant method of financing fell out as natural as an apple. That I still remember that scene is an indication that it was a very fine moment in that stage of my life.
(I doubt this is the case, but I hope in your remarks, you were not and will not be looking about for a wedge into discussing anarcho-capitalism v. minarchy. It bores me a long time now. It remains a mystery to me that there are people, even professional philosophers as a side-interest of theirs, who are so old that they could be my own children and yet they remain interested in that sub-sub-sub-department of political philosophy and take an interest in persuading the young folks for whom the world was born this morning of the correctness of anarcho-capitalism, instead of persuading and inspiring the young people to get out and make some money, incur no debts, and be the serious business that is happiness. Top priority. No excuses. I'm fine to just leave that pretty-old-folk behavior as one of those mysteries of life not worth solving, and at any rate, I'll not be discussing the issue, beyond what I wrote decades ago.)
By the way, as you will see in wider study of the article text, it is not that only land owners have rights. It was only the need of perfecting the claims to ownerships in land in the economic sense that was needed to also perfect the exclusivity rights individuals have in their labor and bodies, where as you also noticed or repeated, those boundaries are given by nature, not drafted by our coordinated behaviors.
My Thoughts on the Objectivist Aesthetics
in Aesthetics
Posted
That kind of analysis seems awfully speculative to me. It is plausible that if Dagny likes Hank to command her in sex and likes to comply and likes him to bind her, and as seems likely, is even more excited if restraints incorporate some Rearden metal, she is not going against who she is. But that is plausible already, just because we know from real persons that submissive in bed does not entail submissive in life. I'd say we don't need to figure out why she is turned on by her submissiveness in sex and do not need to find some sort of justifying explanation of how her sexual slant squares with her independent self-directing productive life. Or why it is necessary to burden understanding of either with Rand's notion "sense of life." True, Rand and N. Branden would try for the squaring and try to buckle on that particular burden. But that was a mistaken mental excursion, ambition, and responsibility.