Objectivism

This article is a brief summary of Objectivist philosophy and some related topics. For details see articles on Objectivist metaphysics, Objectivist epistemology, Objectivist ethics, and Objectivist politics. For the movement that advocates Objectivism, see Objectivist movement. For other uses of the term, see Objectivism.

Objectivism is a philosophy developed by Ayn Rand that encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

Objectivism holds that there is a mind-independent reality; that individuals are in contact with this reality through sensory perception; that humans gain objective knowledge from perception by measurement, and by forming concepts that correspond to natural categories by measurement omission; that the proper moral purpose of one's life is the pursuit of one's own happiness or "rational self-interest;" that the only social system consistent with this morality is full respect for individual human rights, embodied in pure, consensual laissez-faire capitalism; and that the role of art in human life is to transform abstract knowledge, by selective reproduction of reality, into a physical form - a work of art - that one can apprehend and respond to with the whole of one's consciousness.

Summary and Sources

Ayn Rand characterized Objectivism as a philosophy "for living on earth," grounded in reality and aimed at achieving knowledge about the natural world and harmonious, mutually beneficial interactions between human beings. Rand wrote:

My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Rand first presented her philosophy in her 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. She subsequently elaborated some aspects in her two newsletters, The Objectivist Newsletter and The Ayn Rand Letter, and in The Objectivist, a journal she edited, in which only authors who largely agreed with Objectivism were published. She did not publish in conventional academic journals. Much of the non-fiction Objectivist corpus is available only in the form of audio recordings.

Origins of the name

Objectivism derives its name from its conception of knowledge and values as "objective", rather than as "intrinsic" or "subjective". According to Rand, neither concepts nor values are "intrinsic" to external reality, nor are they merely "subjective" (by which Rand means "arbitrary" or "created by [one's] feelings, desires, 'intuitions,' or whims" (like Wishful thinking)). Rather, valid concepts and values are, as she wrote, "determined by the nature of reality, but (remain) to be discovered by man's mind."

Rand chose Objectivism as the name of her philosophy because the ideal term to label a philosophy based on primacy of existence - Existentialism - had already been pre-empted by philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard, and Simone de Beauvoir.

Objectivist principles

Metaphysics: objective reality

Main article: Objectivist metaphysics

Ayn Rand's metaphysics is based on three axioms: the axiom of Existence, the law of Identity, and the axiom of consciousness. Rand defined an axiom as "a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it." As Leonard Peikoff noted, Rand's argumentation "is not a proof that the axioms of existence, consciousness, and identity are true. It is proof that they are axioms, that they are at the base of knowledge and thus inescapable."

According to Rand, "Existence exists" (the "axiom of Existence") and "Existence is Identity." To be is to be "an entity of a specific nature made of specific attributes." That which has no attributes does not and cannot exist. Hence, "A is A" ("Law of Identity:") a thing is what it is. Whereas "existence exists" pertains to existence itself (whether something exists or not), the law of identity pertains to the nature of an object as being necessarily distinct from other objects (whether something exists as this or that). As Rand wrote, "A leaf cannot be all red and green at the same time, it cannot freeze and burn at the same time. A is A."

Rand held that when one is able to perceive something that exists, then one's "Consciousness exists" (the "axiom of Consciousness,") consciousness "being the faculty of perceiving that which exists." Objectivism maintains that what exists does not exist because one thinks it exists; it simply exists, regardless of anyone's awareness, knowledge or opinion. For Rand, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something," so that an objective reality independent of consciousness has to exist first for consciousness to become possible, and there is no possibility of a consciousness that is conscious of nothing outside itself. Thus consciousness cannot be the only thing that exists. "It cannot be aware only of itself — there is not "itself" until it is aware of something." Objectivism holds that the mind cannot create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality.

Objectivist philosophy regards the "Law of Causality," which states that things act in accordance with their natures, as "the law of identity applied to action." Rand rejected the popular notions that everything has a cause (existence itself does not,) or that the causal link relates action to action. According to Rand, an "action" is not an entity, rather, it is entities that act, and every action is the action of an entity. The way entities interact is caused by the specific nature (or "identity") of those entities; if they were different there would be a different result.

Epistemology: reason

Main article: Objectivist epistemology

The starting point of Objectivist Epistemology is the principle, presented by Rand as a direct consequence of the metaphysical axiom that "Existence is Identity," that Knowledge is Identification. Objectivist epistemology studies how one can translate perception, i.e., awareness acquired through the senses, into valid concepts that actually identify the facts of reality.

Objectivism states that by the method of reason man can gain knowledge (identification of the facts of reality) and rejects philosophical skepticism. Objectivism also rejects faith or "feeling" as a means of attaining knowledge. Although Rand acknowledged the importance of emotion in humans, she maintained that the existence of emotion was part of our reality, not a separate means of achieving awareness of reality.

Rand was neither a classical empiricist (like Hume or the logical positivists) nor a classical rationalist (like Plato, Descartes, or Frege). She disagreed with the empiricists mainly in that she considered perception to be simply sensation extended over time, limiting the scope of perception to automatic, pre-cognitve awareness. Thus, she categorized so-called "perceptual illusions" as errors in cognitive interpretation due to complexity of perceptual data. She held that objective identification of the values of attributes of existents is obtained by measurement, broadly defined as procedures whose perceptual component, the comparison of the attribute's value to a standard, is so simple that an error in the resulting identification is not possible given a focused mind. Therefore, according to Rand, knowledge obtained by measurement (the fact that an entity has the measured attribute, and the value of this attribute relative to the standard) is "contextually certain."

Ayn Rand's most distinctive contribution in epistemology is her theory that concepts are properly formed by measurement omission. Objectivism distinguishes valid concepts from poorly formed concepts, which Rand calls "anti-concepts". While we can know that something exists by perception, we can only identify what exists by measurement, and by logic (defined by Rand as "the art of non-contradictory identification,) which are necessary to turn percepts into valid concepts. Rand's procedural logic specifies that a valid concept is formed by omitting the variable measurements of the values of corresponding attributes of a set of instances or units, but keeping the list of shared attributes - a template with measurements omitted - as the criterion of membership in the conceptual class. When the fact that a unit has all the attributes on this list has been verified by measurement, then that unit is known with contextual certainty to be a unit of the given concept.

Rand did not consider the analytic-synthetic distinction, including the view that there are "truths in virtue of meaning", or that "necessary truths" and mathematical truths are best understood as "truths in virtue of meaning," to have merit. She similarly denied the existence of a priori knowledge. Rand also considered her ideas distinct from foundationalism, naive realism about perception like Aristotle, or representationalism (i.e., an indirect realist who believes in a "veil of ideas") like Descartes or Locke.

Objectivist epistemology, like most other philosophical branches of Objectivism, was first presented by Rand in Atlas Shrugged. It is more fully developed in Rand's 1967 Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. Rand considered her epistemology and its basis in reason so central to her philosophy that she remarked, "I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

Ethics: rational self-interest

Main article: Objectivist ethics

Unlike many other philosophers, Ayn Rand limited the scope of ethics to the derivation of principles needed in all contexts, whether one is alone or with others. Her philosophical principles for dealing rationally with others are derived in Objectivist politics.

In her one-sentence summary of Objectivism (see Summary and Sources, above) Ayn Rand condensed her ethics into the statement that man properly lives "with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life." According to Objectivist epistemology, however, states of mind, such as happiness, are not primary; they are the consequence of specific facts of existence. Therefore man needs an objective standard, grounded in the facts of reality, to achieve happiness. The human faculty of happiness is a biologically evolved measuring instrument (a "barometer") that measures how well one is doing in the pursuit of life. Therefore the standard by which one can judge whether or not some action will lead to greater or lesser happiness is, whether or not it promotes one's life. But, as Rand writes,

"To live, man must hold three things as the supreme and ruling values of his life: Reason, Purpose, Self-Esteem."

The ethics of Objectivism is based on the observation that one's own choices and actions are instrumental in maintaining and enhancing one's life, and therefore one's happiness. Rand wrote:

"Man has been called a rational being, but rationality is a matter of choice — and the alternative his nature offers him is: rational being or suicidal animal. Man has to be man — by choice; he has to hold his life as a value — by choice; he has to learn to sustain it — by choice; he has to discover the values it requires and practice his virtues — by choice.

"A code of values accepted by choice is a code of morality."

There is a difference, therefore, between rational self-interest as pursuit of one's own life and happiness in reality, and what Ayn Rand called "selfishness without a self" - a range-of-the-moment pseudo-"selfish" whim-worship or "hedonism." A whim-worshipper or "hedonist," according to Rand, is not motivated by a desire to live his own human life, but by a wish to live on a sub-human level. Instead of using "that which promotes my (human) life" as his standard of value, he mistakes "that which I (mindlessly happen to) value" for a standard of value, in contradiction of the fact that, existentially, he is a human and therefore rational organism. The "I value" in whim-worship or hedonism can be replaced with "we value", "he values", "they value," or "God values," and still it would remain a dissociated-from-reality ethics-killer. Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshipping "selfishness-without-a-self." She held that the former is good, and the latter evil, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.

A corollary to Rand's endorsement of self-interest is her rejection of the ethical doctrine of altruism — which she defined in the sense of August Comte's altruism (he coined the term), as a moral obligation to live for the sake of others. George H. Smith says: "For Comte, altruism is not simple benevolence or charity, but rather the moral and political obligation of the individual to sacrifice his own interests for the sake of a greater social good. It should be noted that Ayn Rand did not oppose helping others in need, provided such actions are voluntary. What she opposed was the use of coercion — that is, the initiation of physical force — in social relationships. The doctrine of altruism, in Rand's view, is evil partially because it serves to justify coercion, especially governmental coercion, in order to benefit some people at the expense of others."

Central to Objectivist ethics is the concept of "value." Rand defined value as "that which one acts to gain and/or keep." The rational individual's choice of values to pursue is guided by his need, if he chooses to live, to act so as to maintain and promote his own life. Rand did not hold that values proper to human life are "intrinsic" in the sense of being independent of one's choices, or that there are values that an individual must pursue by command or imperative ("reason accepts no commandments"). Neither did Rand consider proper values "subjective," to be pursued just because one has chosen, perhaps arbitrarily, to pursue them. Rather, Rand held that valid values are "objective," in the sense of being identifiable as serving to preserve and enhance one's life. For example, food is an objective value, because it is objectively true that food is required for survival.

For Rand, morality is a "code of values accepted by choice." According to Leonard Peikoff, Rand held that "man needs [morality] for one reason only: he needs it in order to survive. Moral laws, in this view, are principles that define how to nourish and sustain human life; they are no more than this and no less." Objectivism does not claim that there is a moral requirement to choose to value one's life. As Allan Gotthelf points out, for Rand, "Morality rests on a fundamental, pre-moral choice:" the moral agent's choice to live rather than die, so that the moral "ought" is always contextual and agent-relative. To be moral is to choose that which promotes one's life in one's actual context. There are no "categorical imperatives" (as in Kantianism) that an individual would be obliged to carry out regardless of their consequences for his life.

Politics: individual rights and capitalism

Main article: Objectivist politics

The transition from the Objectivist ethics to the Objectivist theory of politics relies on the concept of rights. A "right", according to Objectivism, is a moral principle that both defines and sanctions a human being's freedom of action in a social or societal context. Objectivism holds that only individuals have rights; there is, in the Objectivist view, no such thing as a "collective right" that does not reduce without remainder to a set of individual rights. Furthermore, Objectivism is very specific about the set of "individual rights" that it recognizes; as such, the Objectivist list of individual rights differs significantly from the ones adopted by most governments, for example.

Although Objectivist literature does not use the term "natural rights", the rights it recognizes are based directly on the nature of human beings as described in its epistemology and ethics. Since human beings must make choices in order to survive as human beings, the basic requirement of a human life is the freedom to make, and act on, one's own independent rational judgment, according to one's self-interest.

Thus, Objectivism contends, the fundamental right of human beings is the right to life. By this phrase Objectivism means the right to act in furtherance of one's own life — not the right to have one's life protected, or to have one's survival guaranteed, by the involuntary effort of other human beings. Indeed, on the Objectivist account, one of the corollaries of the right to life is the right to property which, according to Objectivism, typically represents the product of one's own effort; on this view, one person's right to life cannot entail the right to dispose of another's private property, under any circumstances. Under Objectivism, one has the right to transfer one's own property to whomever one wants for whatever reason, but such a transfer is only ethical if it is made under the terms of a trade freely consented to by both parties, in the absence of any form of coercion, each with the expectation that the trade will benefit them. Objectivism holds that human beings have the right to manipulate nature in any way they see fit, as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others. From this, the right to property arises.

On the Objectivist account, the rights of other human beings are not of direct moral import to the agent who respects them; they acquire their moral purchase through an intermediate step. An Objectivist respects the rights of other human beings out of the recognition of the value to himself or herself of living in a world in which the freedom of action of other rational (or potentially rational) human beings is respected.

According to Objectivism, then, one's respect for the rights of others is founded on the value, to oneself, of other persons as actual or potential trading partners (whether it be trading in a material or emotional sense).

Objectivist political theory therefore defends capitalism as the ideal form of human society. Objectivism reserves the name "capitalism" for full laissez-faire capitalism — i.e., a society in which individual rights are consistently respected and in which all property is (therefore) privately owned. Any system short of this is regarded by Objectivists as a "mixed economy" consisting of certain aspects of capitalism and its opposite (usually called socialism or statism), with pure socialism and/or tyranny at the opposite extreme.

Far from regarding capitalism as a dog-eat-dog pattern of social organization, Objectivism regards it as a beneficent system in which the innovations of the most creative benefit everyone else in the society. Indeed, Objectivism values creative achievement itself and regards capitalism as the only kind of society in which it can flourish.

A society is, by Objectivist standards, moral to the extent that individuals are free to pursue their goals. This freedom requires that human relationships of all forms be voluntary (which, in the Objectivist view, means that they must not involve the use of physical force), mutual consent being the defining characteristic of a free society. Thus the proper role of institutions of governance is limited to using force in retaliation against those who initiate its use — i.e., against criminals and foreign aggressors. Economically, people are free to produce and exchange as they see fit, with as complete a separation of state and economics as of state and church.

Aesthetics: Romantic Realism

The Objectivist theory of art flows fairly directly from its epistemology, by way of "psycho-epistemology" (Objectivism's term for the study of human cognition as it involves interactions between the conscious and the subconscious mind). Art, according to Objectivism, serves a human cognitive need: it allows human beings to grasp concepts as though they were percepts.

Objectivism defines "art" as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments" — that is, according to what the artist believes to be ultimately true and important about the nature of reality and humanity. In this respect Objectivism regards art as a way of presenting abstractions concretely, in perceptual form.

The human need for art, on this view, stems from the need for cognitive economy. A concept is already a sort of mental shorthand standing for a large number of concretes, allowing a human being to think indirectly or implicitly of many more such concretes than can be held explicitly in mind. But a human being cannot hold indefinitely many concepts explicitly in mind either — and yet, on the Objectivist view, needs a comprehensive conceptual framework in order to provide guidance in life.

Art offers a way out of this dilemma by providing a perceptual, easily grasped means of communicating and thinking about a wide range of abstractions. Its function is thus similar to that of language, which uses concrete words to represent concepts.

Objectivism regards art as the only really effective way to communicate a moral or ethical ideal. Objectivism does not, however, regard art as propagandistic: even though art involves moral values and ideals, its purpose is not to educate, only to show or project.

Moreover, art need not be, and often is not, the outcome of a full-blown, explicit philosophy. Usually it stems from an artist's sense of life (which is preconceptual and largely emotional), and its appeal is similar to the viewer's or listener's sense of life.

Generally Objectivism favors an esthetic of Romantic Realism, which on its Objectivist definition is a category of art treating the existence of human volition as true and important. In this sense, for Objectivism, Romantic Realism is the school of art that takes values seriously, regards human reason as efficacious, and projects human ideals as achievable. Objectivism contrasts such Romantic Realism with Naturalism, which it regards as a category of art that denies or downplays the role of human volition in the achievement of values.

The term romanticism, however, is often affiliated with emotionalism, which Objectivism is completely opposed to (though Objectivism seems to hold romanticism as more emotional [in the sense of merely being related to emotions] than most forms of art, and as less emotionalist i.e. relating to the use of emotions for decision-making.) Many romantic artists, in fact, were subjectivists and/or socialists. Most Objectivists who are also artists subscribe to what they call Romantic Realism, which is what Ayn Rand labeled her own work.

Some Objectivists use the term Byronic to label the sorts of romanticism with which Objectivists disagree.

Varieties of Objectivist philosophy

As of 2006, there are two main, competing comprehensive interpretations of Objectivism. Leonard Peikoff presents his interpretation in Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, E. P. Dutton (1991). David Kelley presents his interpretation in The Logical Structure of Objectivism (unpublished).

Libertarianism

File:Ayn Rand Reason.jpg

The libertarian Reason Magazine dedicated an issue to Ayn Rand's influence one hundred years after her birth.

Main article: Libertarianism and Objectivism

Libertarianism and Objectivism have a complex relationship. Though they share many of the same political goals, Objectivists see some libertarians as plagiarists of their ideas "with the teeth pulled out of them,"[3], attempting to achieve social goals without first establishing sufficient philosophical support, whereas some libertarians see Objectivists as dogmatic, unrealistic, and uncompromising. Ayn Rand herself despised libertarianism. In Ayn Rand's own words,

"Above all, do not join the wrong ideological groups or movements, in order to 'do something.' By 'ideological' (in this context), I mean groups or movements proclaiming some vaguely generalized, undefined (and, usually, contradictory) political goals. (E.g., the Conservative Party, which subordinates reason to faith, and substitutes theocracy for capitalism; or the 'libertarian' hippies, who subordinate reason to whims, and substitute anarchism for capitalism.) To join such groups means to reverse the philosophical hierarchy and to sell out fundamental principles for the sake of some superficial political action which is bound to fail. It means that you help the defeat of your ideas and the victory of your enemies."

[Ayn Rand, "What Can One Do?" Philosophy: Who Needs It], and

"For the record, I shall repeat what I have said many times before: I do not join or endorse any political group or movement. More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called 'hippies of the right,' who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs."

[Ayn Rand, "Brief Summary," The Objectivist, September 1971].

According to Reason editor Nick Gillespie in the magazine's March 2005 issue focusing on Objectivism's influence, Ayn Rand is "one of the most important figures in the libertarian movement... A century after her birth and more than a decade after her death, Rand remains one of the best-selling and most widely influential figures in American thought and culture" in general and in libertarianism in particular. In the same issue, Cathy Young says that "Libertarianism, the movement most closely connected to Rand’s ideas, is less an offspring than a rebel stepchild."[4]

Responses to Objectivist philosophy

Rand's ideas are often supported with great passion or derided with great disgust, with little in between. Some of this comes from Rand challenging fundamental tenets of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and some may be due to her own all-or-nothing, take-it-or-leave-it approach to her work. She warned her readers that, "If you agree with some tenets of Objectivism, but disagree with others, do not call yourself an Objectivist; give proper authorship for the parts you agree with — and then indulge any flights of fancy you wish, on your own."

Academic philosophy

Most academic philosophers have long considered Objectivism to be a pop philosophy and unworthy of their attention. For example, David Sidorsky, professor of philosophy at Columbia University, characterizes Rand's work as "outside the mainstream of philosophical works," and more of an ideological movement than a well-grounded philosophy, which explains in part why it is not more widely taught. In recent years, however, there are signs that this is beginning to change, with the publication of several academic books on Rand and the creation of the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. That said, there are only two Objectivist philosophers, Tara Smith (University of Texas at Austin) and James Lennox ((University of Pittsburgh) holding tenured positions at one of the top fifteen leading American philosophy departments . Some academics have concluded that some of its central claims are demonstrably false. Others have argued that even if specific Objectivist claims are correct, Objectivist arguments are fallacious. For example, Robert Nozick, a prominent libertarian philosopher, largely agreed with Rand on political issues but did not find her argument for ethical naturalism persuasive.

During her lifetime, the academic world largely ignored her. Philosophers did not react favorably to her radical libertarian politics and what they considered crude attacks on their profession and major figures in the history of philosophy (for example categorizing those who disagreed with her viewpoints into "mystics of the muscle" and "mystics of the mind.") According to Scott McLemee, a critic and essayist with a special interest in the intellectual history of American radical and countercultural groups, she "once threatened to sue a professor for writing a critical study of her work." Rand is not found in many of the comprehensive academic reference texts, including the Oxford Companion to Philosophy (1995) or the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (2nd ed.), each over a thousand pages long, nor is there an entry for her on the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A lengthy article on Rand appears in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and she has a brief entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Chandran Kukathas, a political theorist, which includes the following passages:

"The influence of Rand’s ideas was strongest among college students in the USA but attracted little attention from academic philosophers. [....] Rand’s political theory is of little interest. Its unremitting hostility towards the state and taxation sits inconsistently with a rejection of anarchism, and her attempts to resolve the difficulty are ill-thought out and unsystematic."

An expert on Ayn Rand, Professor Allan Gotthelf [5], answered Kukathas and remarked that "the entry is not only not worthy of Rand, but also not worthy of the Encyclopedia."

According to Scott McLemee, "Rand's work is fiercely antiacademic. She did not think much of professors of literature or philosophy. And they have returned the favor. At least, until recently. No doubt, most of her novels are still devoured on the reader's own time; but young people are increasingly likely to encounter Rand's books in the classroom."

As the quotation suggests, academic institutional support for Objectivism has increased in recent years. Cambridge University Press has published Tara Smith's Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics: the Virtuous Egoist. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews recently published a review of Smith's book by Helen Cullyer of the University of Pittsburgh. The review ends with the following:

"It should be stressed in conclusion that whether one is a fan or a detractor of Ayn Rand, the issues raised by this book are manifold and provocative. This book should force a debate of renewed vigor about what we mean by egoism, whether and how the egoism / altruism dichotomy should be applied within eudaimonistic ethical theories, and what our ethical theories imply about our political outlook. Smith provides us with a version of egoism that will need to be argued against by those who find it distasteful or misguided, rather than simply dismissed." [6]

In addition to the recent publication of Smith's book, the forthcoming issue of The Review of Metaphysics will publish an article by Allan Gotthelf on Rand's theory of concepts. [7] A recent conference at the University of Pittsburgh, "Concept and Objectivity: Knowledge, Science, and Values," featured presentations by Objectivists Onkar Ghate, Allan Gotthelf, James Lennox, and Darryl Wright alongside influential mainstream academics such as A.P. Martinich and Peter Railton. [8]

There are, or have been, Objectivist programs and fellowships at the University of Pittsburgh (Dept. of History and Philosophy of Science), University of Texas at Austin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Arizona and several other universities. And there are some 50 members of The Ayn Rand Society, a group affiliated with the American Philosophical Society, Eastern Division. Leonard Peikoff published a comprehensive presentation of Objectivism entitled Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, though the book was not published by an academic press. Other works have been directed at academic audiences, such as Viable Values by Tara Smith, The Evidence of the Senses by David Kelley, and The Biological Basis of Teleological Concepts by Harry Binswanger. An academic journal, the Journal of Ayn Rand Studies has been publishing interdisciplinary scholarly essays on Rand and Objectivism since 1999.

Douglas J. Den Uyl, professor of philosophy at Bellarmine College, argues for more academic study of Objectivism. He says Rand's views are unique moral defenses and "are interesting intellectually. They are worth following through. They are worth debating. They are worth discussing. And for that reason I think Rand is going to remain an interesting, controversial, and important figure for some time to come." Uyl is co-editor of The Philosophic Thought of Ayn Rand which compiles analyses of Rand's philosophy from various philosophers.

The Ayn Rand Institute has spent more than $5 million on educational programs advancing Objectivism, including scholarships and clubs, and offered free copies of Anthem and The Fountainhead to teachers all across North America. This is consistent with taking advantage of the fact that "an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand usually begins in high school or the early years of college."

For detailed summaries of specific responses to Objectivism, see bibliography of work on Objectivism.

Cult accusations

Main article: Objectivist movement

Several authors, such as Murray Rothbard who helped define modern libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism; Jeff Walker, author of The Ayn Rand Cult; and Michael Shermer, founder of The Skeptics Society, have accused Rand and Objectivism of being a cult. Walker compares it with organizations that have been considered cults such as Scientology. Anton LaVey describes his religion, Satanism, as "just Ayn Rand's philosophy with ceremony and ritual added".

The Biographical FAQ of the Objectivism Reference Center website, discusses these allegations and offer a letter in which Rand replies to a fan who wrote her offering cult-like allegiance by declaring "A blind follower is precisely what my philosophy condemns and what I reject. Objectivism is not a mystic cult".

Criticism of Ayn Rand’s reading of the history of philosophy

Rand regarded her philosophical efforts as the beginning of the correction of a deeply troubled world, and she believed that the world has gotten into its present troubled state largely through the uncritical acceptance, by both intellectuals and others, of traditional philosophy.

Especially in the title essay of her early work For the New Intellectual, Rand levels serious criticisms of canonical historical philosophers, especially Plato, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Herbert Spencer. In her later book, Philosophy: Who Needs It, she repeats and enlarges upon her criticisms of Kant, and she also accuses Harvard political theorist John Rawls of gross philosophical errors. The same essay acknowledged that she hadn't read Rawls' work, and was basing her critique on a review of it.

Some have accused Rand of misinterpreting the works of these philosophers (see, e.g., Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the History of Philosophy by Fred Seddon) — or of failing to read them at all, and deriving her misconceptions second hand.

Rand's interpretation and criticism of the views of Immanuel Kant, in particular, have sparked considerable controversy.

Critics take issue with Rand's interpretation of Kant's metaphysics: like early critics of Kant, Rand interpreted Kant as an empirical idealist. It is a long-standing question of Kant scholarship whether this interpretation is correct; in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant claimed that his transcendental idealism was different from empirical idealism; in the second edition he even attempted to refute the latter. Contemporary philosophers such as Jonathan Bennett, James van Cleve, and Rae Langton continue to debate this issue.

Other critics focus on Rand's reading of Kant's ethical philosophy. Rand held that Kantian ethics improperly takes self-interest out of ethics: "What Kant propounded was full, total, abject selflessness: he held that an action is moral only if you perform it out of a sense of duty and derive no benefit from it of any kind, neither material nor spiritual; if you derive any benefit, your action is not moral any longer...It is Kant's version of altruism that people, who have never heard of Kant, profess when they equate self-interest with evil." Thus Rand apparently interpreted Kant as claiming not only that actions motivated by self-interest lack moral worth, but that actions which contribute to self-interest lose whatever moral worth they might possess, regardless of how they are motivated. Kant's defenders claim that Kantian ethics is primarily an ethics of reason, because the categorical imperative amounts to a demand that the intent behind one's actions be logically consistent, or in Kantian terminology, that "the maxim of one's act be universalizable." Furthermore, the Kantian duty of respect for persons includes the self, since one's self is as much a person as anyone else.

Though Rand denigrated Kant's system as the absolute opposite of Objectivism, Kelley Ross suggests that Rand drew on Kantian ideas without realizing it: "She despised Immanuel Kant but then actually invokes 'treating persons as ends rather than as means only' to explain the nature of morality,"[9] In Rand's favor, Kant clearly did maintain (in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals) that an action solely motivated by inclination or self-interest is entirely lacking in moral worth. While many Continental philosophers influenced by Hegel and Nietzsche would agree that Kant's own ethical theorizing is itself motivated by or expresses a sort of ascetic masochism, and many analytic philosophers championing virtue ethics (e.g., Bernard Williams) would agree that Kantian ethics places excessive demands on the moral agent, Rand appears alone in characterizing Kantianism as always requiring self-sacrificial effects. The contemporary philosopher Thomas E. Hill has explicitly defended Kant against this charge in his article, "Happiness and Human Flourishing in Kant's Ethics," in the anthology Human Flourishing.

Another attack on Rand comes from her outright rejection of David Hume's ideas at the foundations of her philosophy. Hume famously maintained, "No is implies an ought," but Rand disagreed by arguing that values are a species of fact (see is-ought problem). She wrote, "In answer to those philosophers who claim that no relation can be established between ultimate ends or values and the facts of reality, let me stress that the fact that living entities exist and function necessitates the existence of values and of an ultimate value which for any given living entity is its own life. Thus the validation of value judgments is to be achieved by reference to the facts of reality. The fact that a living entity is, determines what it ought to do." The libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick, has suggested that Rand's solution begs the question by assuming that one's own life is the highest value as a hidden premise of the argument. See also Objectivist Metaethics, Controversy over Ayn Rand.

See also

• Ayn Rand
• The Collective
• Ayn Rand Institute
• Leonard Peikoff
• Bibliography of work on Objectivism
• Objectivist movement
• Nathaniel Branden
• Neo-Objectivism
• Minarchism
• The Objectivist Center
• Libertarianism

External links

• Ayn Rand Institute
• Essentials of Objectivism at the Ayn Rand Institute
• Criticisms of Objectivism
• The Center for the Advancement of Capitalism
• The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy — Ayn Rand
• The Objectivism Reference Center — Includes both advocacy and criticism articles
• Objectivism101 -- an introductory, yet thorough primer on Objectivism and using it as a tool for living