You Can't Think for Yourself? The Contradiction of Ayn Rand's Moral Theory

Ethics
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Did Ayn Rand try to teach people how to think? Or did she try to tell them what to think?

One of the benefits of independence is having the right to think for yourself. This benefit, believe it or not, is a result of Cartesianism. Before DesCartes in European culture, people were almost entirely engaged in groupthink. They had little or no sense of individualism. HIs doubting encouraged, in principle, independent thinking. “I think, therefore, I am” places the emphasis on the self instead of the tribe. His mind-body dualism focused on mind. And while that may seem solipsistic, it encouraged further investigation into the mental attributes of humans. 

This was not brand new to Western civilization, but it hadn’t existed to even a small extent since the ancient Greek philosophers. This started with Socrates who focused on individual reasoning powers and questioned authority. 

John Locke was a hero of Enlightenment individualism. He emphasized many if not all of the rights and freedoms we enjoy today, even as they are being slowly eroded: the rights to personal life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness through productive living. 

Locke wrote about natural morality, with happiness as the natural good central to his moral philosophy. While Locke didn’t line out a list of values and virtues the way Ayn Rand did, he encouraged such virtues as tolerance toward others as long as their beliefs didn’t intrude on the lives of others.

Ayn Rand, however, provided a list of values and virtues for people to obey. They are the things you should do, according to Rand, in order to be happy - and obedient to her powers of reasoning. 

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1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

. . .

Ayn Rand, however, provided a list of values and virtues for people to obey. They are the things you should do, according to Rand, in order to be happy - and obedient to her powers of reasoning. 

That is false and you can easily know it is false. 

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26 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

That is false and you can easily know it is false. 

This quote is from an economic context, but it serves to illustrate Rand’s attitude toward the willing self-blindedness of those who dared to disagree with her.

From https://medium.com/illumination/unveiling-the-exasperating-contradictions-in-ayn-rands-philosophy-ff4e0c249a4a -

 

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She called Friedrich Hayek a “pernicious enemy” because in her eyes he compromised with collectivism. (p. 112) Hayek wrote “A Road to Serfdom” which many on the Right embrace as an anthem against big government.

She also attacked Milton Friedman and George Stigler for their arguments against rent control. She agreed rent control was bad but thought the basis of their arguments were “collectivist propaganda” because they did not argue for the “inalienable right of landlords.” (p 112)

Rand is essentially an island, not on the Left for sure — she vehemently disagreed with collectivism — but not happy with those on the Right. _ You had to agree with her completely. _ [Emphases added.]

 

 

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@Ogg_Vorbis

In thinking about Rand’s moral theory and its possible contradictions, it’s good to actually deal with Rand’s texts and show any contradictions in it. If there is something in the theory stating the nature of human being that is false, well that is also a kind of contradiction, a contradiction with reality, and that is a contradiction very worthwhile to articulate. So are contradictions within her writings. But neither sort of contradiction can be shown without quoting the pertinent exact text so people know you are talking seriously and can see what your charge comes to specifically. How Rand dealt with her competitors and what she thought about the history of philosophy is not her moral theory and its moral advice. Text:

“Your life depends on your mind. . . Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man. // Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. . . . Live and act within the limits of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. . . . Your mind is fallible, but . . . an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. . . . Accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.” (1975, 1058)

Again and again at this site and indeed overwhelmingly, whether they are agreeing with Rand or disagreeing with her, I’ve seen people at this sight thinking for themselves, as the preceding quotation recommends. They can think for themselves, they love to think for themselves, and they do.

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49 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Text:

“Your life depends on your mind. . . Accept, as your moral ideal, the task of becoming a man. // Do not say that you’re afraid to trust your mind because you know so little. . . . Live and act within the limits of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life. Redeem your mind from the hockshops of authority. . . . Your mind is fallible, but . . . an error made on your own is safer than ten truths accepted on faith, because the first leaves you the means to correct it, but the second destroys your capacity to distinguish truth from error. . . . Accept the fact that any knowledge man acquires is acquired by his own will and effort, and that that is his distinction in the universe, that is his nature, his morality, his glory.” (1975, 1058)

Again and again at this site and indeed overwhelmingly, whether they are agreeing with Rand or disagreeing with her, I’ve seen people at this sight thinking for themselves, as the preceding quotation recommends. They can think for themselves, they love to think for themselves, and they do.

The first thing I want to ask is if “the task of becoming a man” refers to women becoming women also. And if your observation that they can think for themselves refers to the female forum members also. Rand only referred to women in the context of her theory of romantic love. You may say that she meant “man” in the sense of humankind, but she didn’t. She wrote “men,” she said “men.” And she meant “men,” not women. Furthermore, the whole of her writing indicates that she meant “men of the mind,” not those “brutes” who perform menial physical tasks whose methods were invented by others. Work, in Rand’s context, was creative work done by thinking men, not brutes.

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Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. 

"The Meaning of Money,” (from a speech by Francisco D’anconia in AS)
Quoted in For the New Intellectual, 89

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others…

 

“Galt’s Speech,” (from a speech by John Galt in AS)
For the New Intellectual, 130

 

D’anconia was excellent at insulting and stereotyping his miners who do all the physical labor of extracting the copper. Without his great mind, these “unthinking brutish blanks” would obviously be either extremely poor, or starved to death. 

 

Beyond that, my extensive experience with Objectivists indicates that they are apparently very anxious about taking any non-Objectivist philosophy seriously enough to discuss, lest Rand’s anger be dealt upon them although she is long dead. On my forum (not this one), when a curious lurker asked about the science of pragmatics, he was instantly set upon by a pack of Rand’s own version of the unthinking brute for _ daring _ to ask about Pragmatism in an Objectivist forum. I’m not saying anybody on this forum is Rand’s version of the unthinking brute, but that she was a “witch doctor” who created a new variation on the “Atilla” with whom to surround herself. Perhaps they have evolved over time…

Rand didn’t know about the existence of “strikers” who, like Galt in most of AS, perform brute tasks for a living, but conserve their mental energy for thinking deep, creative thoughts. I once knew, for example, a bricklayer in London who was a master at mathematics. So you never know what those “brutes” may be thinking about while they get their hands dirty so their bosses can wear clean white shirts and dine in the finest restaurants. Some of them, very few perhaps, may be pondering the origins of the cosmos while transporting trash with a wheelbarrow all day. I daresay that Rand didn’t get out of the house enough to find out what humanity is really all about, but preferred to remain comfortably locked inside of her own subjective idea of Man.

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Yes, that usage of “man” in that context just means “human”. That had been commonplace usage in somewhat earlier times from ours, and you are wrong about Rand meaning only males by it. It includes both males and females. If you argue with someone while thinking they mean males only when they really mean humans, you are arguing with a phantom, a mere nothing.

And she did not restrict “man” to men of the mind. You can tell when she is using “man” as a model or ideal (as in “Man is man”) and when she is speaking of men descriptively only. Her definition of man in full description was that man is a rational animal or a suicidal animal (by failings in rationality). 

I’m starting to lose confidence that you are a source of useful information.

 

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15 minutes ago, Boydstun said:

Yes, that usage of “man” in that context just means “human”. That had been commonplace usage in somewhat earlier times from ours, and you are wrong about Rand meaning only males by it. It includes both males and females. If you argue with someone while thinking they mean males only when they really mean humans, you are arguing with a phantom, a mere nothing.

And she did not restrict “man” to men of the mind. You can tell when she is using “man” as a model or ideal (as in “Man is man”) and when she is speaking of men descriptively only. Her definition of man in full description was that man is a rational animal or a suicidal animal (by failings in rationality). 

I’m starting to lose confidence that you are a source of useful information.

 

Those are your opinions. And I am primarily concerned with Objectivists. 

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9 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

Beyond that, my extensive experience with Objectivists indicates that they are apparently

Hold it right there… Ayn Rand is not responsible for misunderstandings or misrepresentations of her views, even popular misunderstandings.

Unfortunately it is fairly common for some people to misunderstand her views, and then for some others to hold that those misunderstandings are actually her views, when they are not.

It is better not to accuse people of holding certain ideas unless you know what you are talking about.

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20 minutes ago, necrovore said:

Hold it right there… Ayn Rand is not responsible for misunderstandings or misrepresentations of her views, even popular misunderstandings.

Unfortunately it is fairly common for some people to misunderstand her views, and then for some others to hold that those misunderstandings are actually her views, when they are not.

It is better not to accuse people of holding certain ideas unless you know what you are talking about.

Boydstun doesn’t want to see anything about Rand being a man-worshipper, which she was. Males, not humans in general. And you think I misunderstand her views, and that I accuse others of misunderstanding her views. 

I have read everything she wrote several times, except for most of those boring journal entries of hers. They are, however, quite revealing indeed, for what I read. And quite damning in one way. Shall I go on?

 

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Boydstun stated that he sees people on this forum thinking for themselves all the time.

I need to provide a better answer than my previous one.

The CONTEXT of my OP was the ability to think morally without relying on a list of values and virtues provided by Ayn Rand.

I ended the OP by stating that Kant provided a formula for people to make up their own set of morals, as long as they were rationally validated by the CI. He did not provide them with a set of rules or duties to follow.

The contrast between Rand’s and Kant’s theories was to show the difference between an individualistic moral theory from the Enlightenment that teaches people to think for themselves, and an allegedly individualistic moral theory that only tells people what to think with a set of rules to follow.

I hope that clarifies things. This is original work, so misunderstandings will happen.

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26 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

Boydstun doesn’t want to see anything about Rand being a man-worshipper, which she was. Males, not humans in general. And you think I misunderstand her views, and that I accuse others of misunderstanding her views. 

I have read everything she wrote several times, except for most of those boring journal entries of hers. They are, however, quite revealing indeed, for what I read. And quite damning in one way. Shall I go on?

 

I do see Rand’s two uses of the term man. That is not news. She said that over the body of her work, she would write “To the Glory of Man.” That was her use of the term as model or ideal human. It is plain when she is using man to mean male to which she would be a man-worshipper with the right one. That is not Man, the general ideal for humans. Rand’s views on sexual roles are also not news.

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1 minute ago, Boydstun said:

I do see Rand’s two uses of the term man. That is not news. She said that over the body of her work, she would write “To the Glory of Man.” That was her use of the term as model or ideal human. It is plain when she is using man to mean male to which she would be a man-worshipper with the right one. That is not Man, the general ideal for humans. Rand’s views on sexual roles are also not news.

If I posted any news, it was obviously my (correct) idea that Rand told people what to think, rather than teaching them how to think for themselves (as if they were individuals and not drones). I recently found that another non-Objectivist made the same observation, and I cited the blog address somewhere around here. 

If it’s hard for you to distinguish new from old in my writing, from now on I promise that I will parenthesize everything I write on this topic with either (new) or (old).

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37 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

Boydstun doesn’t want to see anything about Rand being a man-worshipper, which she was (old). Males, not humans in general. And you think I misunderstand her views, and that I accuse others of misunderstanding her views (old; I’ve seen this tactic before). 

I have read everything she wrote several times, except for most of those boring journal entries of hers. They are, however, quite revealing indeed, for what I read. And quite damning in one way (very old). Shall I go on?

 

 

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1 hour ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

The contrast between Rand’s and Kant’s theories was to show the difference between an individualistic moral theory from the Enlightenment that teaches people to think for themselves, and an allegedly individualistic moral theory that only tells people what to think with a set of rules to follow.

I hope that clarifies things. This is original work, so misunderstandings will happen.

Individualism does not equate to being able to rewrite reality.

Ayn Rand did not hand out a set of “commandments,” and even wrote that such a thing was offensive.

She did identify principles of morality. She claimed that they were derivable from objective fact. She showed how to derive them.

This is similar to the way Newton identified principles of physics. Newton is not opposed to individualism merely because he came up with Newton’s Laws and then claimed they were universal and not subject to individual choice.

Newton, like Rand, showed how he came up with his principles. The description of how is more important than the principles themselves, but his work would have been incomplete if he had merely described the “how” and left the principles themselves to implication. So it is with Rand.

The identification of Newton’s Laws was a major breakthrough in Enlightenment thought because it showed, on a scale never before seen at that time, the power of the mind to grasp reality. Ayn Rand’s morality does the same thing (although historically later).

Her principles are not meant for the kind of “blind obedience” that religionists encourage from people. If some people take her principles that way, it’s because those people have probably grown up with religion and they don’t know any other way to handle such principles. People new to Objectivism sometimes enthusiastically graft it onto what they already “know” without realizing that they’re still acting on unidentified anti-Objectivist principles. (Then others observe their behavior and think it’s Objectivist behavior when it isn’t.)

Newton was obviously not meant for blind obedience, either, and it was not the final word on physics. Future discoveries made Einstein possible (and necessary). The same thing is probably also true with Rand. There are probably moral principles yet to be discovered, that apply in situations Rand didn’t consider, but they would still have to be validated by reference to reality and the requirements of human life.

(Besides, applying the principles correctly, to your own circumstances, can require considerable amounts of “thinking for yourself.”)

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Well, the way I see it anyway, is like this:

Rationality: she got it from Aristotle

Productiveness: she got it from Locke.

Pride: she got it from NB who was a psychology student during a time when “self-esteem” and “self-actualization” were trending in universities.

Euclid was meant for blind obedience, because people were blindly obedient to his geometry until the early 19th century.

People identify things all the time, but that doesn’t make them correct.

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11 minutes ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

People identify things all the time, but that doesn’t make them correct.

I didn’t say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

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7 minutes ago, necrovore said:

I didn’t say her principles were correct because she identified them. I said she showed how to derive them from objective fact.

I don’t see that concept being derived from objective fact here http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/productiveness.html. I see where she calls non-thinkers (the majority of men) “blanks” and “brutes.” 

And I see a lot of Rand telling people what they MUST do, as if they had to listen to her.

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From this forum’s homepage: “Man must act for his own rational self-interest” “The purpose of morality is to teach you[…] to enjoy yourself and live”

”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.”

MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.

 

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11 hours ago, Ogg_Vorbis said:

From this forum’s homepage: “Man must act for his own rational self-interest” “The purpose of morality is to teach you[…] to enjoy yourself and live”

”Man MUST act for his own rational self-interest.”

MUST. Okay then, MAKE me. Because last I heard there are only two things that people MUST do: pay taxes, and die.

 

Ogg, you may recall that Rand worked with different sorts of ‘musts’ (as do we all) if you recall what you read in her essay “Causality versus Duty.” That all animals must die is a must from a necessity in nature. That one must pay taxes is a man-made must. Another division of “musts” is between the unconditional ones and conditional ones. The latter are of the if-then form: “If such-and-such is to be accomplished, then condition so-and-so must obtain.” So there are four kinds of ‘musts’. For man-made and conditional, we have: “If you don’t want to suffer the penalties of a legal violation, you must pay your taxes.” For nature-given and conditional, we have: “If there is to be a fire here, there must be oxygen” and “If you are to breathe, there must be oxygen” and “If you want to live and enjoy yourself, you must do certain things and not others.”  For man-made and unconditional, there is apparently no such thing (maybe you can think of one). For nature-given and unconditional, we have: “Angular momentum must be conserved” (meaning only it always will be conserved come what may).