Why Can’t Professional Philosophers Get Ayn Rand Right?
This is an article by Mike Mazda, an associate fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute. Mazza examines the various distortions of Rand’s ideas that have propagated within the world of academic philosophy.
I’m not in complete agreement with this article, mainly because:
It doesn’t highlight the difficulties in understanding Rand’s arguments that are made possible by the fact that what she wrote were summaries or outlines of her finished views, and that she died before writing her planned “detailed”, “systematic” treatise on her philosophy. (And no one in her lifetime asked her the questions that would have enabled them to write that treatise themselves.). Similarly, Mazza doesn’t even touch on the limitations of existing Rand scholarship.
When Mazza gives his own clarification of Rand’s texts, it is not always clear that he has the correct interpretation of Rand. He himself may be underestimating how radical Rand’s views are. A much longer work would be necessary to establish such interpretations.
Excerpt:
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My focus in this article is to show the main reason Rand’s critics consistently fail to interpret her accurately. It is not necessarily that they are intellectually dishonest (though this can be a contributing factor). It is primarily that their approach is *parochial*. That is, because they take for granted a philosophical framework that Rand is calling into question, they do not think of her as a real philosopher and therefore think she isn’t worth taking seriously. Their method is, in essence, a form of question-begging. In standard question-begging, an argument on one side of a dispute assumes a premise that is, in fact, the very thing in question. What I call *philosophical parochialism* begs questions concerning philosophy’s basic assumptions, standards, and methods….
Rand has also received criticism from sympathetic critics who also fall into the trap of parochialism. Robert Nozick, a significant figure in late twentieth-century academic philosophy, was politically sympathetic to Rand and a fan of Atlas Shrugged. Yet, he begins his analysis of Rand’s argument for egoism with this puzzling statement:
“I would most like to set out [Rand’s] argument as a deductive argument and then examine the premises. Unfortunately, it is not clear (to me) exactly what the argument is. So we shall have to do some speculating about how steps might be filled in, and look at these ways.22”
Unlike Rachels and Rachels or Pojman, Nozick does not pretend to give us Rand’s argument. Nothing in his text suggests hostility and his Objectivist friends reject the claim that he was hostile to Rand.23 But also unlike Rachels and Rachels’s or Pojman’s reconstruction, Nozick’s does touch on the essential facts Rand uses in her case for egoism. The likely explanation of his approach is a misuse of the principle of interpretive charity: Nozick wants to give the best possible case for Rand’s views, and to him such a case would be an iron-clad deduction. He can’t find one, so he provides his own.
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From Rand’s preface to For the New Intellectual:
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This book is intended for those who wish to assume the responsibility of becoming the new intellectuals. It contains the main philosophical passages from my novels and presents the outline of a new philosophical system.
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The full system is implicit in these excerpts (particularly in Galt’s speech) but its fundamentals are indicated only in the widest terms and require a detailed, systematic presentation in a philosophical treatise. I am working on such a treatise at present; it will deal predominantly with the issue which is barely touched upon in Galt’s speech: epistemology, and will present a new theory of the nature, source, and validation of concepts. This work will require several years; until then, I offer the present book as a lead or summary for those who wish to acquire an integrated view of existence. They may regard it as a basic outline; it will give them the guidance they need, but only if they think through and understand the exact meaning and the full implications of these excerpts.
When I say that these excerpts are merely an outline, I do not mean to imply that my full system is still to be defined or discovered; I had to define it before I could start writing Atlas Shrugged. Galt’s speech is its briefest summary.
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From Rand’s foreword to Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology:
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This series of articles is presented “by popular demand.” We have had so many requests tor information on Objectivist epistemology that I decided to put on record a summary of one of its cardinal elements—the Objectivist theory of concepts. These articles may be regarded as a preview of my future book on Objectivism, and are offered here for the guidance of philosophy students.