JARS V13 N2 - December 2013


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  • 1 month later...

The Gospel According to Ayn Rand: Anthem as an Atheistic Theodicy

Michael G. Simental

JARS 13(2):96–106.

From the Abstract:

A close consideration of the religious allusions in the text reveals that Rand was responding to religious collectivism as much as to the communist variety. In fact, Rand’s personal writings reveal that Anthem’s apotheosis of man is a response to religion’s denial of self, which Rand viewed as the offense of a collectivist society. In Anthem, Rand emphasizes her opposition to religion through the ironic employment of religious themes and images.

This paper is worth reading and pondering. Its familiarity with and acknowledgment of earlier works contacting its topic is pretty good. Mr. Simental does not neglect, for important example, the relevant contributions to Essays on Ayn Rand’s Anthem. Two substantial omissions in his considerations and in his acknowledgments in his topic area are (i) the remarks on the sacred in her literature that Rand placed in an Introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead and (ii) the considerable reflections of Leonard Peikoff on Simental’s topic included in Peikoff’s Introduction to the semi-centennial edition of Anthem. The edition of Anthem Simental used and cited in his essay is that very edition, yet there is no mention of Peikoff’s remarks on his topic. I doubt the justice of this omission.

In his Note 3, Simental writes: “Rand’s views on morality have much in common with Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. In terms of arguing that Anthem is a theodicy, it is beyond the scope of this article to explore the connection of the two philosophers.” For that connection in Rand’s thought in We the Living and in Anthem, see my Nietzsche v. Rand, the sections Rand 1929–38 A, B, C, and the references cited therein.

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  • 1 month later...

In the late 1900's, Durkhein observed that religion is nothing but the expression of the societal collective in terms which tie the society to the supernatural. God is always, 'our' god in he sense that it's understood by a particular group.

A few years later, Weber's students, Glock & Dine, devise a scale of religious intensity and found, not to their surprise, that for many, believing was a matter of social acceptance. It's just what people did.

They also developed a 'secular-religious continuum' to widely place so-called believers as to how two genres of attitudes effect daily behavior.

To this extent, religion and belief in god does not cause altruism and charity. Rather, the behaviors are caused by the social obligations within the community, and therefore only confirmed as the community's god's command to 'be ethical. not selfish'.

Part of what all societies do is to create 'deviant-space' for the expression of individualistic behavior. In This sense, everyone feels themselves to be 'free'.

In other words, Blake and Auden got it right, and Orwell got it partially wrong: it's the 'mind-forged manacles that should be feared, not an absurdist version of de-personalization.

Rand, for her part, was writing hollywood stuff that accidentally got transformed into a novel. Nothing to be taken seriously, as real strategies of control remain hidden elsewhere...

EM

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EM wrote:

A few years later, Weber's students, Glock & Dine, devise a scale of religious intensity and found, not to their surprise, that for many, believing was a matter of social acceptance. It's just what people did.

end quote

Interesting. Ever seen BB when she is angry?

Peter

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: ATL: Phil Oliver's Response to My Ayn Rand CDROM Questions

Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2001 02:32:41 EDT

David Bozzini, you wrote about the ARI people:

<< Whatever happened to benevolence? The "benefit of the doubt" extended to people one doesn't even know yet? >>

Benevolence is a quality the people at ARI are proud not to have. They have denounced David Kelley for proposing that it be listed among the Objectivist virtues. They are also without the least humanity. They excommunicate people left and right for daring to question the sacred word of Ayn Rand, thus turning Objectivism into a religion. All of this is demanded and orchestrated by Leonard Peikoff, thus turning himself into the Objectivist Pope. They have no spirit of humanity, no generosity of spirit, no good will; they have a fear of ideas not their own which, in order to answer, might require that they do new thinking.

There find great comfort in their interpretation of Objectivism. Like religion, where one simply has to refer to the word of God in the Bible, ARI simply has to refer to the word of Ayn Rand in ATLAS SHRUGGED. They don't have to think, they don't have to question, they don't have to respond to disagreements, they have lost all sense of wonder and curiosity. Nothing worse could have happened to Objectivism and the memory of Ayn Rand than the existence of this cult.

They are small-minded, petty, frightened people who well deserve the almost universal ridicule they receive.

Why do they hate all the wetheliving.com lists? Because these lists raise questions and doubts about some of Ayn Rand's ideas. That is as heretical -- as "evil" -- as questioning the revealed word of God.

Barbara

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EM: electromagnetic pulse, El Monte - Chile, Effective Microorganisms, the letter m, Engineer of Mines, enlisted man, printing size.

EM wrote:

Rand, for her part, was writing hollywood stuff that accidentally got transformed into a novel. Nothing to be taken seriously, as real strategies of control remain hidden elsewhere...

end quote

Accidentally? Atlas Shrugged wasn’t a real force in society? Don’t take her seriously? Are you being facetious? I hope so, for she is our most beloved Saint, Ayn of Randland.

Are the “hidden” things you refer to the puppet masters like robber barons or “George Soros billionaires”? Or are the hidden things, beliefs and thoughts? Your idea that “real strategies of control remain hidden elsewhere...” got me looking up any threads on evil ideas and I found two letters placed at the end. JARS is probably a good place to put them too.

The end

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: ATL: "Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 18:23:17 EDT

I'm ready to try again to explain my discomfort with the concept of "evil ideas." I'm still groping, so please bear with me. But let me say that this discomfort most emphatically does not mean I'm suggesting that people cannot be evil, only actions can. Certainly people can be evil. The question in my mind is whether an idea, per se, can be evil.

It's safe to assume that "communism" is what those who say that ideas can be evil would use as an example. But we all have had the idea of communism in our heads: those who have accepted it as a value to be acted upon, those who have studied it, those who have considered it, those who have denounced it. So the mere presence of the idea in our heads is irrelevant to good or evil.

"Idea" and "belief" have been used as synonyms in many of the posts. But they are quite different. And this usage implies that the presence of an idea in consciousness can be evil--such that the communist and the student of communism equally hold an evil idea.

"Evil" should pertain to belief--that is, it should pertain to *acts of consciousness* with regard to anti-life ideas, the act of consciousness in accepting them as true.

Barbara

From: BBfromM@aol.com

To: atlantis@wetheliving.com

Subject: Re: ATL:Postscript to"Evil Ideas"

Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 20:04:41 EDT

An addition to my post on evil ideas:

If, as I suggested, evil requires an act of consciousness, not merely the presence of a false and potentially destructive idea--that means that the act of consciousness is volitional: it is an act of evasion.

Okay, let me restate my present position:

The locus of evil, of immorality, lies in a volitional act of consciousness, not in the presence or absence of any sort of idea. That act of consciousness, in order to be considered immoral, requires evasion and irrationality as the means to embrace ideas that are false and anti-life.

Barbara

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And I just wanted to mention that Objectivist Living is the living heir of Atlantis, OWL, and all the other sites at wetheliving.com. In my mind I see a thread connecting them and I think of their archives as rightfully if not legally belonging to Michael and Kat. Thank you both, and also the owners of wetheliving, Kirez Korgan and Joshua Zader.

Peter

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And I just wanted to mention that Objectivist Living is the living heir of Atlantis, OWL, and all the other sites at wetheliving.com. In my mind I see a thread connecting them and I think of their archives as rightfully if not legally belonging to Michael and Kat. Thank you both, and also the owners of wetheliving, Kirez Korgan and Joshua Zader.

Peter

Peter,

Much gratitude to you and them.

Michael

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  • 1 year later...

Since there has been quite a bit of discussion of Kant elsewhere on OL, I thought it might be helpful to draw people's attention to my article in Vol. 13, No. 2 (December 2013) of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies. It's a review of Peikoff's 2012 book, The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out, and it's entitled: "Beneath The DIM Hypothesis: The Logical Structure of Leonard Peikoff's Analysis of Cultural Evolution."

Some parts of the review are probably overly technical (too much alphabet-soup with the D, I, and M variants, for instance), but the second half of the review ought to be a helpful corrective to the unremitting Kant-bashing that has infested Objectivist writings and lectures since the 1960s. If you have not yet added this copy of JARS to your library, I strongly recommend you do so. Here is a link to the JSTOR web site, where you can order a copy: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jaynrandstud.13.2.issue-2. I understand that you can also order reprints of individual articles by emailing Penn State Press at this address: journals@psu.edu.

Here is a brief summary of the review:

ABSTRACT: Dismissing criticisms that Leonard Peikoff’s book, The DIM Hypothesis, is unscientific, deterministic, or rationalistic, this essay focuses on problems with the logical framework of Peikoff’s study of Western culture. In particular, Peikoff has conflated two different kinds of rationalists and empiricists and has completely overlooked combinations of the Platonist and so-called “Kantian” modes. As a result, his three pure integration “modes” actually produce not just two “mixtures” but a total of six. Furthermore, without absolving Kant of very serious philosophical errors, the author marshals evidence that the real culprit responsible for the culturally disastrous “Disintegration” mode was one of Kant’s predecessors.

Here is a list of the section-headings:

[Part A - Shortcomings with Peikoff's DIM Methodology]

1. Some Problems with the DIM Mixtures

2. Tilt!

3. Why Are There Four Too Few DIM Mixtures?

4. Syllogisms and DIM Mixtures: A Not-So-Ominous Parallel?

5. Dueling Explanations for the DIM Mixtures?

[Part B: Setting the Record Straight about Kant]

6. Yet another Problem: Haggling over Hegel

7. Kant We Just Be Friends?

8. Kant and Twentieth-Century Conservatives: "With Friends Like These..."

9. The DIM Hyperbole: Peikoff's Tortured Indictment of Kant

10. Conclusion

Here is an excerpt from the Conclusion:

My fear, after having witnessed over twenty years of disheartening and counterproductive factionalism in the Objectivist movement, is that Peikoff’s latest opus will instead be either accepted and used uncarefully, or uncarefully rejected and discarded. In other words, my concern is that partisan mentalities and personalities in the movement will drive the discussion of DIM, and it will end up as just another bone of contention in the ongoing conflict between the rival factions, rather than having its intellectual merits judiciously weighed.
Its supporters and opponents aside, it’s even more worrisome to contemplate the possibility that DIM may actually be its own worst enemy. A historical model should strive to be even-handed and accurate, not to engage in stereotypical obfuscation and steroidal intensification of vendettas against bêtes noires and other grudge objects. In this regard, the unrepentant Kant-bashing in DIM is my biggest (though not my only) concern. Perhaps I am off base, and perhaps Kant deserves all the opprobrium that has been heaped upon him, but for the good of the Objectivist movement, the Objectivist critique of Kant needs to be scrutinized vigorously and, for the obvious reason, independently of those who have made it their hobbyhorse or chew bone.
The same applies, of course, to the DIM hypothesis in general. If the Objectivist movement is going to be identified with a new framework through which to view culture and the future, and in terms of which the culture we hope to change for the better will judge it and us, DIM had damned well better be valid.
Another final excerpt, as a teaser:
...the historical Kant combined “Kant” (whoever that was) with both Aristotle and Plato, creating a D1 rationale for science and a D3 rationale for religion. Kant was therefore not a destroyer, a nihilist, but a philosopher misguidedly employing nihilist premises in combination with Integrative ideas from Aristotle and Misintegrative ideas from Plato. Kant was a mixed type, twice-over, not a pure, Disintegrative D2 type.
So, now we must ask: who was the “Kant” that the actual, historical Kant employed in this task? Who else before Kant also held that “the laws of logic, like all human knowledge, have no basis in reality,” on the basis of which the actual, historical Kant could attempt to rescue both science and religion from the blind alley of pre-Kantian skepticism? Whose anti-Aristotelianism was it that the historical Kant “sanctioned”? To answer these questions is, I maintain, to unmask the actual person responsible for the D2 Disintegration mode of Peikoff’s DIM model, the man whom Peikoff calls “Kant.”
The strongest lead in answering these questions, I maintain, lies in the pragmatic, post-Kantian empiricists. It is extremely noteworthy that these men, including August Comte and J. S. Mill, claimed as their mentor not Kant, but [...]
Peikoff says that the base of the Knowing Skepticism of Comte and Mill is “Kant’s detachment of knowledge from reality” (2012b, 59). Kant, however, did not originate this idea. He merely adopted it and other nihilistic premises uncritically, as the “given,” from [...].
Peikoff also points out that Mill’s acceptance of causality was based on “the laws of association discovered empirically” (58), that Mill viewed logic and causality as “devoid of necessity” (58), and that Comte viewed the universe as “no more than a stream of human experiences” (54). These are essentially [...] positions.
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