Michael Huemer wrote an article called Why I am Not An Objectivist many years ago. The first part is quite interesting to me, in that I read it now as claiming that Objectivists reject the map-territory distinction, which seems like quite the impediment to developing the art of rationality / thinking about ‘mapmaking’ as a cognitive discipline.
[edit] To elaborate how this connects, the Objectivist looks like someone who is so attached to the superiority of simulacra level 1 over 3 that they install allergies against all sorts of relativism or subjectivism, in ways that make them unable to keep moving up the level of abstraction and consider the relative merits of different ways of thinking about reality. (Anna Salamon talks sometimes about people who jump straight from Kegan level 2 to Kegan level 4, without passing through 3, as one of the nerd archetypes.)
It also makes them uninterested in looking for the ‘synthesis’; why should good merge with evil?
We don’t need to rely on Huemer’s gloss; the distaste for map-territory distinctions and reasoning under uncertainty being too subjective can also be seen in the source material. Consider this line from Atlas Shrugged:
“Dagny”, he said, looking at the city as it moved past their taxi window, “think of the first man who thought of making a steel girder. He did not say, ‘It seems to me’, and he did not take orders from those who say, ‘In my opinion.’”
(Psychologically, Rand is totally in the right in that people very often do use such language to evade responsibility for thinking, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence.)
Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand also describes this amusing moment from the writing of a planned miniseries adaptation of Atlas Shrugged:
Only once during their association did Ayn’s wrath descend on Stirling Silliphant. He had added the word “perhaps” to a statement made by Dagny—and Ayn angrily shouted: “You’ve destroyed Dagny’s character on this page! You’ve made her qualify her thinking! She always knows what she’s doing—she doesn’t use words like ‘perhaps’ or ‘maybe.’” The offending word was removed.
I’m a big fan of Rand, and I liked her Objectivism work too, but exposure to a lot more philosophy, LW, and college-level math ruined a lot of her non-fiction work for me.
I once dated a ‘card-carrying’ Objectivist and it was, sadly, too much of a ‘religion’ for them and their fellows. They were very upset that I mentioned reading about Rand’s alleged abuse of diet pills or of her ‘reluctantly’ accepting the fact of evolution via natural selection.
But, subject to the law of equal and opposite advice, I still think her ‘message’ or ‘vision’ is important for a lot of people. She is the prime example, to me, of a ‘Kegan level 4’ (fiction) author.
Let’s get our ontology correct. She used philosophical tools to approach philosophical problems, and wrote essays on the results in philosophical terminology. That makes her a philosopher. If her results were incorrect, at worst she’s an incorrect philosopher like so many others throughout history who moved philosophy into “less wrong” territory.
The same is true of Buddhism, and Christianity too: in addition to being religions, they’re philosophies, making ontological and ethical statements and explaining how those were reached. And atheism, while a philosophical viewpoint, also has had religious social structures built around it, such as taboos against self-coding as religious.
Exploring the philosophical “realm” and “mining” new seams of gold ore (or fools’ gold) is what makes one a philosopher, whether one comes in with a pickaxe and mule like the ’49′ers or a bulldozer and dynamite like the industrial strip-miners.
Michael Huemer wrote an article called Why I am Not An Objectivist many years ago. The first part is quite interesting to me, in that I read it now as claiming that Objectivists reject the map-territory distinction, which seems like quite the impediment to developing the art of rationality / thinking about ‘mapmaking’ as a cognitive discipline.
[edit] To elaborate how this connects, the Objectivist looks like someone who is so attached to the superiority of simulacra level 1 over 3 that they install allergies against all sorts of relativism or subjectivism, in ways that make them unable to keep moving up the level of abstraction and consider the relative merits of different ways of thinking about reality. (Anna Salamon talks sometimes about people who jump straight from Kegan level 2 to Kegan level 4, without passing through 3, as one of the nerd archetypes.)
It also makes them uninterested in looking for the ‘synthesis’; why should good merge with evil?
We don’t need to rely on Huemer’s gloss; the distaste for map-territory distinctions and reasoning under uncertainty being too subjective can also be seen in the source material. Consider this line from Atlas Shrugged:
(Psychologically, Rand is totally in the right in that people very often do use such language to evade responsibility for thinking, but reversed stupidity is not intelligence.)
Barbara Branden’s biography The Passion of Ayn Rand also describes this amusing moment from the writing of a planned miniseries adaptation of Atlas Shrugged:
I’m a big fan of Rand, and I liked her Objectivism work too, but exposure to a lot more philosophy, LW, and college-level math ruined a lot of her non-fiction work for me.
I once dated a ‘card-carrying’ Objectivist and it was, sadly, too much of a ‘religion’ for them and their fellows. They were very upset that I mentioned reading about Rand’s alleged abuse of diet pills or of her ‘reluctantly’ accepting the fact of evolution via natural selection.
But, subject to the law of equal and opposite advice, I still think her ‘message’ or ‘vision’ is important for a lot of people. She is the prime example, to me, of a ‘Kegan level 4’ (fiction) author.
She’s just not a philosopher.
Don’t get me wrong, I agree with a ton of her observations. As much as I agree with a ton of Buddhism. It is just not Philosophy.
Let’s get our ontology correct. She used philosophical tools to approach philosophical problems, and wrote essays on the results in philosophical terminology. That makes her a philosopher. If her results were incorrect, at worst she’s an incorrect philosopher like so many others throughout history who moved philosophy into “less wrong” territory.
The same is true of Buddhism, and Christianity too: in addition to being religions, they’re philosophies, making ontological and ethical statements and explaining how those were reached. And atheism, while a philosophical viewpoint, also has had religious social structures built around it, such as taboos against self-coding as religious.
Exploring the philosophical “realm” and “mining” new seams of gold ore (or fools’ gold) is what makes one a philosopher, whether one comes in with a pickaxe and mule like the ’49′ers or a bulldozer and dynamite like the industrial strip-miners.