Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand

[nathanielbuildsatesseract]

For Ayn Rand's birthday, I'm reposting my review of Leonard Peikoff's book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. This material was originally published in February of 2015. I've made a few copy-edits and added a few footnotes, but the basic text remains essentially unchanged.

In 1943, a friend of Ayn Rand's suggested her readers needed a non-fiction summary of her philosophy. Rand's response ("Oh, do they? What if I went on strike?") gave her the idea for Atlas Shrugged. Despite that being the last work of fiction she ever wrote, it wasn't until nearly a decade after her death that Leonard Peikoff published the first book-length account of Objectivism. Which is quite unfortunate, because he didn't do a terribly good job of it.

Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand almost reads as if Rand had written it herself. Peikoff writes with the same voice, the same flow, and the same set of ideas. I regularly had to remind myself who the true author was.

When it comes to summarizing Objectivism, Peikoff did pretty well. He pulled together Rand's ideas from dozen of books, essays, newsletters, and speeches to present a cohesive overview. Nevertheless, he couldn't quite give it that extra oomph to make it a truly inspired read. The epilogue, "The Duel Between Plato and Aristotle," made an attempt, but failed to deliver.

(On the subject of the epilogue, I was hoping to finally get convincing arguments against the ideas put forth by Plato and Immanuel Kant. Unfortunately, Peikoff continued the trend of philosophical character assassination instead of presenting and refuting their ideas in full. The book was long enough as it was, but you'd think such a lengthy discussion of Objectivism would include proper defenses from its detractors.)

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Peikoff begins where Rand does: metaphysics. If you've read Atlas Shrugged, this will mostly be review material. Of note, though, are the notions of "primary of existence" and "primacy of consciousness." These underscore the majority of Objectivism and will appear throughout the book.

After metaphysics comes epistemology, and easily the strongest chapters. Peikoff gives us a proper rundown of perception, concepts, and reason—better than any I’ve read elsewhere (thought I'll admit I haven't yet read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology).¹

Things begin to go downhill when we reach ethics. I think, honestly, that the Objectivist epistemology isn’t that contentious among the philosophers actually trying to get things done (as opposed to clever-sounding navel-gazing), but it's the ethics that gets a lot of people. Contrary to what's often said, they aren't derived directly from epistemology, but from Rand's view of man.

Personally, I find this view to be around 95% accurate, with some notable problems. The largest has to do with the notion of certainty. Ayn Rand was certain that we can be certain—that we can trust our sensory inputs. To be clear, there's a difference between statistical and functional certainty. While an ideal Bayesian would always assign some probability, however tiny, to the possibility I'm hallucinating, I'm "sure" that I'm typing up a review of OPAR on my laptop. These two states shouldn't be confused.

In the later ethics chapters, other problems begin to crop up. Objectivism rejects the notion of a malevolent universe in favor of a benevolent one. Actually, the universe is neutral. Not just cold and impersonal–fundamentally alien. Being creatures adapted by billions of years of evolution to the task of living on Earth, it may seem like the world is good to us. Peikoff's writings on Virtue and Happiness reflect this subtle mistake.

By the time we reach politics, the writing is beginning to really drag, though I may have been reading my emotions into it. At this point, I was really wanting the book to be over, and furthermore, the material wasn't speaking to me.

Objectivist politics is founded on three premises. First, the non-aggression principle, which is dependent on the benevolent universe premise. I think the non-aggression principle is extremely valuable heuristic for achieving optimal societal outcomes, but there are cases where it breaks down. What then?

Second, Objectivists see government as an institution to protect rights. Their idealized government doesn't really line up with the way governments traditionally behave, and no good mechanism is suggested for making a minarchist government work better. A society of rational libertarians is great, but such a society has a free-rider problem, and will quickly decay. Or is there something I'm not seeing?

Third, Objectivists are egoist individualists. This is the political premise I stand by most closely, though there are certainly cases where mutual self-denial leads to better overall outcomes for the group. Does achieving these ends warrant the use of force? Can rationalists coordinate such behavior without violence?

The chapters on Government and Capitalism don't give me any answers. Peikoff describes the mechanism by which a mixed economy slides toward statism, without actually offering any solutions beyond "accept Objectivism". Things are further muddled with a definition of statist which would apply to even the most hardcore of anarchocapitalists.

Instead of dealing with free rider problems and market failures, Peikoff trots out the tired libertarian line about the power of free markets (with passing praise for the Austrian School of Economics). To me, this whole section felt really, really weak. It's not likely to convince anyone who isn't already an Objectivist. If anything, it turned me off.

Finally, we get to talk about Art. By this point I was running out of patience, and felt the entire chapter was unnecessary. That said, it would be a good place to start if you want to understand Ayn Rand's esthetics. The most interesting things, though, was only tangentially related to art. Before giving an example from The Fountainhead, Peikoff writes "Anyone who has read this far is, I assume, familiar with the novel."

Leonard, what the fuck?

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431 pages into a 460 page book, Peikoff reveals that this book has prerequisite reading. Or rather, he wasn't writing for a general audience, but for people already converted. Talk about ineffective marketing…

Now, I want to be fair to Peikoff. OPAR is one of the first books he wrote rather than edited, and the first without any input from Rand herself. But for something that took six years to write, you'd think he could do better.

You'd also think high-status Objectivists would stop genuflecting to Ayn Rand after she died, but no. Almost every mention of Rand's ideas or writings comes with an honorific adjective or adverb, usually a variant of "eloquent". I may buy him a thesaurus for Christmas.

From an academic standpoint, OPAR is alright. It describes the basics of Objectivism in depth, but without any real vigor. If you want to get someone interested in Ayn Rand’s ideas, Atlas Shrugged is still the way to go, despite being more controversial and covering less ground.

P.S. I’ve read some good things about Chris Sciabarra’s book Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, which discusses both the philosophy and the historical context, but I can’t explicitly recommend it until I get my hands on a copy.²

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¹At the time I originally wrote this, that is. I've since read both Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology and The Virtue of Selfishness.

²I have since obtained a copy of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical, but sadly have not yet managed to work it into my reading queue. Among other factors, my desire to finish the books I mentioned above contributed to the delay.