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Reflections of an elderly former student of Objectivism

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I am now 76. Back in grade school and early college I considered myself a "student of objectivism". I no long do. I'm secular, trained as a scientist (PhD, Biological Sciences, Stanford), and now label myself a "natural philosopher" and writer. But I remain in agreement with much of Objectivism. Why have I pulled back from "student of" status? I have posted a 9-part essay about my reflections on Objectivism--and how it needs to be improved. You can see this on grandpahays.substack.com. Select the "Archive" choice right under the substack title. Then see the posts entitled starting with "Reflections" posted on Jan 22.

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I would like to welcome you to the forum, but beware. Ayn Rand says, "A political battle is merely a skirmish fought with muskets; a philosophical battle is a nuclear war." And, boy, are you in for it. :P

Did you know the best book about Objectivism (in my opinion) didn't come out until 1991? I myself didn't discover it until 1998. It is Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR). It gathers up the essentials of her philosophy into a single book -- and it might be the reason that some of what you are saying in your essays doesn't jive with the Objectivism I know.

I think OPAR's coverage of epistemology, though correct, was somewhat weak, but that's because the big breakthrough didn't come until later, when Peikoff collaborated with David Harriman to produce Induction in Physics and Philosophy. Peikoff delivered this as a lecture course and Harriman wrote the book. It provides a solution to what philosophers call the "problem of induction" along with several examples from the history of science. As you are a scientist, it might be of interest to you.

You say that Ayn Rand rejects evolution, but that is not my impression. She did say she wasn't a student of evolution, but I think she was pleading ignorance rather than rejecting it. Another Objectivist philosopher, Harry Binswanger, has written a book about epistemology called How We Know which works out an understanding of the senses and how they grasp reality, and his work is explicitly compatible with evolution. (Rand did reject the notion that "survival of the fittest" requires humans to kill each other like animals, which is the way some other philosophers interpreted Darwin's discoveries.)

I have never regarded Objectivism as a "guide for my life." It isn't specific enough for that. Rather, I regard it as a set of tools for figuring out reality, staying consistent with it, and avoiding certain dangerous errors. (Whether I myself am successful in using those tools correctly is beside the point of this post: they are the best tools, as far as I can tell.)

I don't think Objectivism needs to be "improved," but people's understanding of it does, and that includes clearing up a lot of misconceptions about it -- to the extent this is possible...

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On 1/25/2023 at 2:56 PM, Boydstun said:

Go Gramps! Thanks for sharing your interesting life course at your site. Do you live near Sedona?

The old identification "Students of Objectivism" faded away many years ago. Whether one studied Objectivism decades ago or just started this year, the replacement identification of one's self is Objectivist or Not, and if the latter, what are your differences from and coincidence with Rand's philosophy. One is said to be an Objectivist, said both by David Kelley and by Leonard Peikoff, if one concurs with the elements of the philosophy that are essential to it. Which elements are among the essential ones is left to the judgment of the self-identifier. 

I hope to read your installments, and sometimes comment a bit on them here. I have some information on Rand's formal education is science, which you mentioned, and I'll try to list it here when I get a minute to look it up.

 

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11 hours ago, necrovore said:

. . .

Did you know the best book about Objectivism (in my opinion) didn't come out until 1991? I myself didn't discover it until 1998. It is Leonard Peikoff's Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand (OPAR). It gathers up the essentials of her philosophy into a single book -- and it might be the reason that some of what you are saying in your essays doesn't jive with the Objectivism I know.

. . .

necrovore,

I agree that OPAR is the best single book on Rand's philosophy, at least of books addressing only her philosophy.

You wrote that OPAR gathers up the essentials of Rand's philosophy into a single book. In speaking informally, that statement is not objectionable. However, I want to stress that it is incorrect strictly speaking. Peikoff's book OPAR contains Rand's philosophy, but it needs to be stressed that not everything in Rand's philosophy is essential to her philosophy and not everything in OPAR is essential to Rand's philosophy. Her theory of art, for example, is not an essential. That is because it was not included in Galt's Speech in Atlas Shrugged. Rand's philosophy is contained in Galt's speech, and that means that all the essentials of Rand's philosophy in also contained therein. Why do I say that Rand's philosophy is contained in Galt's Speech? Because at the heading of the reprint of the Speech in her book For the New Intellectual, she placed these words: "This is the philosophy of Objectivism." Anything that is essential to Objectivism is contained in Galt's Speech. Nothing added to the philosophy thereafter is essential to it, excepting such things as could be said to be briskly implicit in Galt's Speech, such as the positive points that Rand wrote in her later essays "The Metaphysical and the Man-Made" and "Kant versus Sullivan". 

Perfectly consistently with what I have just stated, it should be understood that not everything in Galt's Speech is philosophy at all, and so not part of Rand's philosophy—such would be any representations of the history of philosophy or the psychologies and motives of religionists and of materialists (e.g. Marxists, Behaviorists) and psychologies of savages and of dictators.

 

Edited by Boydstun
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Evolution and Human Nature - by Grandpa Hays

Grandpa Boydstun highly recommends A Naural History of Human Thinking (2013) by Michael Tomasello.

Also Ascent to Volitional Consciousness by John Enright.

The correct link to Neil Parille's  "Ayn Rand and Evolution" is here.

In 1981, a year before her death, Rand remarked at a public forum: “I must state, incidentally, that I am not a student of biology and am, therefore, neither an advocate nor an opponent of the theory of evolution. But I have read a lot of valid evidence to support it, and it is the only scientific theory in the field.”

The great work on the reception of Darwinian evolution and impacts of it on social theory in Russia is Darwin in Russian Thought (1988) by Alexander Vucinich. In college in Petrograd, Rand took a course in biology and passed as Highly Satisfactory. One can read a bit about biology professors at her university in that era in "The Rand Transcript Revisited" in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, V21N2, Dec. 2021 and references cited therein, by Chris Matthew Sciabarra and Pavel Solovyev.

Evolution and all of biology is an important input into philosophical anthropology. It bears on the question What is Man? It bears on the nature of the human mind and human values. When Rand speaks of Man as a moral ideal for each human in Galt's Speech, what Man consists of is informed partly by biology. And that is so implicitly even if life is not such a leading idea in one's philosophy as in Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Guyau, Bergson, or Rand. 

Rand had an essay in which she speculated about the rise of the mind of humans, their conceptual faculty, in the far past. I don't find which essay it was just now, but I'll make a note of it here when I find it. Her picture has the advance being made by an individual man, with the advance then being adopted by other members of his species. In a similar vein, she had the most basic function of art to be not in social sharing or communication, but in a need attending the conceptual way of life, which is individual human life. She had the most basic function of language to be the enablement of cognition by the individual human mind, not communication.

That last is flatly athwart the book I mentioned above by Tomasello in which from evolutionary history and individual early childhood development in humans (modern scientific findings), it is argued that advantage of better communication comes first, upon which the greater ability for thought and objectivity arise. Dr. Hays, I think that that book is what contains the truly square way in which Rand's ideas about what is the human being, thence what should be the human's ideals, get fumbled on account, ultimately, of modern evolutionary biology.

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1 hour ago, dream_weaver said:

She gave pause to "the missing link" in Selfishness Without a Self.

Greg, I see it now in the next-to-last paragraph of "The Missing Link." I had checked for Rand's little speculation on the beginning of human thinking in that essay, but I had not spotted it there. Now I see it.

By the way, the phrase "missing link" insofar as it has been used with any allusion to biological evolution, as you may know, has served to insinuate that there is something wrong with evolutionary theory and to reinforce that false claim. It's use should be avoided. Every link found gives rise to two new missing links for the religious Believer impervious to findings of science concerning biological evolution.* 

I notice a more recent use of "missing link" in the title of a philosophy paper: "Ein Missing Link in der Geschicte der Transzendentalphilosophie – De Longue Durée des akademischen Aristotelismus bie Kant." Again, here too, that common-currency usage of "missing link" should be avoided because of its anti-evolutionary baggage and reinforcement thereof.

Here is that little speculation of Rand's we should note:

"A certain hypothesis has haunted me for years: I want to stress that it is only a hypothesis. There is an enormous breach of continuity between man and all the other living species. The difference lies in the nature of man's consciousness, in its distinctive characteristic: his conceptual faculty. It is as if, after aeons of physiological development, the evolutionary process altered its course, and the higher stages of development focussed primarily on the consciousness of living species, not their bodies. But the development of a man's consciousness is volitional: no matter what the innate degree of his intelligence, he must develop it, he must learn how to use it, he must become a human being by choice."

Now that I type that paragraph out, I'm not so sure it's the one I was recalling after all. But, anyway, concerning this paragraph I've just now quoted, it bears our consideration in the present discussion, and on this quoted paragraph, I should say: NO. The great apes of today and we humans share a common ancestor. There is no evidence that the great apes today, other than us, had any advance in consciousness at all since our divergence a couple of million years ago. For the human line, we have evidence of tremendous evolutionary development of brain (biologically heritable) since the divergence, and there is evidence that these changes in human-species brain ran with changes in ability for representations, iconic, idexical, and linguistic/symbolic, as set forth in The Symbolic Species (1997) by Terrance Deacon. These are hypotheses of how we humans got our common brain ability for acquiring language and concepts in the way we do in childhood and beyond. Rand is right, down from Galt's Speech, to characterize the present human species and each specimen to be either rational animal or suicidal animal. She is right to characterize today's human individuals as beings of volitional human-level consciousness. But it is illicit to read that volitional character of human conceptual consciousness back into the evolutionary rise of the brain constitution making that sort of volition possible.

 

Edited by Boydstun
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I was supposed to include the following in my post before last, but failed to do so.

 

In her paper “The Objectivist Ethics” that Rand delivered at a Symposium at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, she said:

“Only a living entity can have goals or can originate them. And it is only a living organism that has the capacity for self-generated, goal-directed action. On the physical level, the functions of all living organisms, from the simplest to the most complex—from the nutritive function in the single cell of an amoeba to the blood circulation in the body of a man—are actions generated by the organism itself and directed to a single goal: the organism’s life.”

It becomes clear in the full context of the essay that by “the organism’s life” she meant the individual organism’s life, not the species. Since she was in that paragraph talking of organisms in their physical, automatic operations, she could pretty smoothly be talking not only about life of the particular individual life, where there are individuals, as well as life of colonies, where that is the life form, and as well of continued life of a species. But she never took up that line. Her talk just stuck with individual organisms. She didn’t talk of organization of the organism as directed not only to individual survival but to reproduction as well. She could well have done that. It would complicate her move from biology to ethical egoism only slightly. She could have it that in the human animal, there is enough controlling of itself and its surroundings such that it can leave off the major physical end of reproduction, leave that to one’s fellows, and sensibly continue, in an elaborate way, the other main end, which is individual survival.

When Rand published her paper “The Objectivist Ethics” in The Virtue of Selfishness (1964), she added a footnote to the paragraph I quoted above. In the Note, she elaborated the paragraph further:

Quote

When applied to physical phenomena, such as the automatic functions of an organism, the term “goal-directed” is not to be taken to mean “purposive” (a concept applicable only to the actions of a consciousness) and is not to imply the existence of any teleological principle operating in insentient nature. I use the term “goal-directed,” in this context, to designate the fact that the automatic functions of living organisms are actions whose nature is such that they result in the preservation of an organism’s life.

 

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The religious believer has difficulty applying eternal to existence. I remember struggling to apply eternal to god, or the notion of eternal life. Fortunately I put in in the unresolve category to be circle back to should more of the puzzle pieces be discovered.

The public school wasn't much better when it came to teaching evolution to students that were exposed to the creationist story. By then there were too many things to try to remember what all had to be sorted out later. Those were the years I took to math and ultimately descriptive geometry. 

The fast paces of indoctrination make it challenging enough for any child, be it religious instruction, or some of the ways some of the sciences are presented to keep track of the questions to which the responses didn't quite add up and further questioning often met with the expectation that "you ask too many questions" or a variation on that theme 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I see that my post about evolution was seen by folks on this site, and it caused a minor flurry of activity. That pleases me, since I wanted my postings to cause people to think and build on the ideas of Rand and others--including myself. I again encourage you to look at my other substack posts, particularly those in the series "Reflections." You can find them by going to substack.com, and search for my posts: grandpahays. Then go to the post archives for the full list. I started posting the "Reflictions" series starting 22 Jan.

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