The Passion of James Valliant’s Criticism, Part III


Neil Parille

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Michael Brown,

Glad to learn that back issues of Liberty magazine are available for purchase. Below is an issue you might like to have in your personal library.

Neil,

This is only an aside to your topic. You have mentioned that you do not have John Hosper's articles concerning his acquaintance with Ayn Rand. I still have an issue of Liberty magazine in which Professor Hospers recounts his conversations with Miss Rand. This is in Volume 4, Number 1 (Sept 1990) of Liberty. I don't know whether this publication is available in libraries.

Hospers had philosophy conversations with Rand over the years 1960 to 1962. In this memoir, he relates their discussions concerning free will, determinism, causality, identity, logic, language, necessity, contingency, possibility, skepticism concerning existence of the physical world, and analytic philosophy. These recollections are interesting to have as a companion to Rand's subsequent, nonfiction writings, especially her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology in expanded second edition.

In his memoir, Hospers also relates the personal side of his relationship with Rand. The evening event at which he was parted from Rand and her circle was by chance the evening that President Kennedy announced his naval blockade of Cuba.

[i was then almost 14 years old. My father was a civilian employee of the Air Force, where he worked in War Plans. He had been called to the base---a SAC base---earlier that day. As the President announced his decision to the world (Hospers reports Rand's single-word response: "Good"), my father was waiting in the War Room with the high brass. Those days of that autumn were a time of unspeakable danger for human kind, a level of acute total danger that has fortunately never returned.]

In 1968 Hospers received a phone call from Nathaniel Branden and Rand. She had heard that Hospers was presenting her philosophy in his classes, and she seemed grateful.

Stephen

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Michael Brown,

Glad to learn that back issues of Liberty magazine are available for purchase. Below is an issue you might like to have in your personal library.

Neil,

This is only an aside to your topic. You have mentioned that you do not have John Hosper's articles concerning his acquaintance with Ayn Rand. I still have an issue of Liberty magazine in which Professor Hospers recounts his conversations with Miss Rand. This is in Volume 4, Number 1 (Sept 1990) of Liberty. I don't know whether this publication is available in libraries.

Stephen

Actually, I should soon have a complete set of the magazine. I dropped about $100 getting about the first 10 years or so of the mag, and subsequently sent in another order to fill a few holes.

Hospers actually has several articles in those early issues of Liberty. There was, I recall, a 2 part memoir he wrote, which gave a complete history of his involvement with Rand. I believe there were also 1-2 others.

In addition was an interview with Roy Childs that focused a lot on Rand. And there was a similiar memoir by Tibor Machan of his dealing with Rand & Branden. Childs' work was a bit too gossipy for me (too much based on 2nd/3rd hand stuff). Machen's was pretty good, and I think pointed to much of the bad stuff of the NBI days to Branden, rather then to Rand. I think Machen was treated shabbily by both. There was also a good interview with Barbara Branden. Liberty would publish a more complete version of this interview, but that's no longer available (unfortunately).

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The Liberty John Hospers memoir, "Coversations With Ayn Rand," to which Stephen refers in post #26, appeared in two installments. In the first installment -- Volume 3, Number 6, July 1990 -- John talks about how he met Ayn Rand (when she gave a talk at Brooklyn College, as it was then called, where he was then teaching); about what he calls the "honeymoon" period of their relationship, in which literature was the main topic of conversation; about the importance of his discussions with her to his views on politics, a topic to which he hadn't previously given much thought; about some lingering questions he had on political issues.

In the second installment -- Volume 4, Number 1, September 1990 -- as Stephen describes:

[Hospers] relates their discussions concerning free will, determinism, causality, identity, logic, language, necessity, contingency, possibility, skepticism concerning existence of the physical world, and analytic philosophy. These recollections are interesting to have as a companion to Rand's subsequent, nonfiction writings, especially her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology in expanded second edition.

At risk of pushing the "fair use" provision (I figure the excerpt will encourage people to buy the remaining available copies), I'm going to type in the concluding part of the memoir, in which John describes how his relationship with Ayn came to an end. I find what he writes so heartwrenchingly poignant.

.

Memoir

Conversations With Ayn Rand

by John Hospers

Liberty

Volume 4, Number 1

pp. 51-52

September 1990

Newsweek wrote a terribly unfair piece about Ayn. I responded to it by letter, trying to answer their charges point by point. I gave Ayn a copy of my letter. Newsweek never published it, but that, said Ayn, made no difference; what mattered was that I had come to her defense by writing it and responding to the false charges.

Not long after, New York University's philosopher Sidney Hook attacked her in print, and she wanted me to take him on as well. Knowing Sidney, I was disinclined to do this. He already knew about my acquaintance with Ayn, but we had never discussed it further (I hardly ever saw him). Should I now condemn him publicly and destroy a long-standing friendship? I knew that this friendship would be at an end if I condemned him.

Ayn was sure that nothing less than a public condemnation was required to prove to him how much I was devoted to "intellectual objectivity." But she had very little conception of the manners and morals of professional academicians--they can get along well and even be friends, while disagreeing strongly with one another on rather fundamental issues. The philosophic arena was one for the friendly exchange of diverse ideas. But for her, it was a battlefield in which one must endlessly put one's life on the line. I was not willing to risk years of occasional friendly communion with Sidney by condemning him publicly, even if I thought he was mistaken in some of his allegations.

But for Ayn this was a betrayal. It almost cost us our friendship. In the end she attributed my attitude to the misfortune of having been brainwashed by the academic establishment, at least with regard to their code of etiquette.

I once mentioned to her my friendship with Isabel Hungerland, a distinguished aesthetician from Berkeley with whom I would discuss issues at philosophical conventions. Ayn inquired what her politics were. "As far as I know, she's a liberal," I said. "What!" exclaimed Ayn, "a friend of yours--a liberal?"

I realized then that I was expected, once I knew Ayn, to sacrifice the friendship of all persons with political (and other) views opposed to hers. Not that I would have to--I was supposed to want to. It was immoral of me to continue to deal with such people. With many of them, as with Isabel, I had a kind of relaxed, laid-back relationship, never talking politics at all from one year to the next, and often not knowing what their political views were. But now I was supposed to excommunicate them all. "If thine hand offend thee, cut it off." I was not willing to plant a flag on a new terrain and thereby disavow my allegiance to all other views, and I deeply resented Ayn's attempt to steer me in that direction--or should I say, her assumption that I would "of course" do such a thing.

It wasn't that I would have been unwilling to declare where I stood, if I had been totally convinced and was prepared to defend it. I try not to back off of commitments. But my whole way of coming at philosophy was quite different from hers, and in spite of various attempts I don't think she ever understood mine. With her, it was as if she were developing a Euclidean geometry from a set of axioms; I, on the contrary, was the gadfly who kept puncturing the axioms or finding their meaning (in some cases) to be vague or confused. As a result of this I was convinced that "the high priori road" was not the way to go in philosophy; I was sure that a careful, step-by-step case-by-case approach, frustrating though it might be in the work required and the time needed to get anywhere with it, was the only road to progress. This wearied her, bored her, and ultimately repelled her.

===

The more time elapsed, the more the vise tightened. I could see it happening; I hated and dreaded it; but knowing her personality, I saw no way to stop it. I was sure that something unpleasant would happen sooner or later. The more time she expended on you, the more dedication and devotion she demanded. After she had (in her view) dispelled objections to her views, she would tolerate no more of them. Any hint of thinking as one formerly had, any suggestion that one had backtracked or still believed some of the things one had assented to previously, was greeted with indignation, impatience, and anger. She did not espouse a religious faith, but it was surely the emotional equivalent of one.

When I was authorized by the American Society for Aesthetics to ask Ayn to give a twenty-minute talk at their annual meeting, which would take place this time in Boston the last weekend of October 1962, I passed on the offer to her at once. She accepted, with the provision that I be her commentator (all papers were required to be followed by a response from a commentator). She thought that I would understand her views better than those who had no previous acquaintance with them. I consented.

And so it was that on the last Friday night of October 1962, she gave her newly-written paper "Art and Sense of Life" (now included in The Romantic Manifesto) [*]. In general I agreed with it; but a commentator cannot simply say "That was a fine paper" and then sit down. He must say things, if not openly critical, at least challengingly exegetical. I did this--I spoke from brief notes and have only a limited recollection of the points I made. (Perhaps I repressed it because of what happened shortly thereafter.) I was trying to bring out certain implications of her talk. I did not intend to be nasty. My fellow professors at the conference thought I had been very gentle with her. But when Ayn responded in great anger, I could see that she thought I had betrayed her. She lashed out savagely, something I had seen her do before but never with me as the target. Her savagery sowed the seeds of her own destruction with that audience.

When her colleague Nathaniel Branden and I had a walk in the hall immediately following this exchange, there was no hint of the excommunication to come. But after the evening's events were concluded, and by previous invitation I went to Ayn and her husband Frank's suite in the hotel, I saw that I was being snubbed by everyone from Ayn on down. The word had gone out that I was to be (in Amish terminology) "shunned." Frank smiled at me, as if in pain, but he was the only one. When I sensed this, I went back to my room. I was now officially excommunicated. I had not so much as been informed in advance. It was all over. In the wink of an eye.

So now a two-and-a-half year friendship was at an end. It had come with such suddenness, I couldn't quite handle it at first. The long evenings with Ayn were now a thing of the past. I was now the one to feel a sense of betrayal.

But my pain was not entirely unmixed with relief. The pressure had been mounting, and certain tensions between us had been increasing steadily. Being forced to choose between friendship and truth as I saw it (even if I saw it mistakenly) was not my way of conducting intellectual life. I would sooner or later have had to escape from the vise, I reflected. Perhaps it was better this way, with an outside event precipitating the break. Sooner or later, probably sooner, I would have been too explicitly frank or honest, and she would have had an angry showdown with me, and that would have been that. Or so I told myself. At any rate, along with the pain and the desolation, I felt a sense of release from an increasing oppressiveness, which had been inexorably tightening.

At dinner earlier that evening, when the radio announcer said that Kennedy would not call off his blockade of Cuba even at the risk of nuclear war, Ayn had said, "Good!" Privately I wondered whether she had also said "Good" in connection with the break in our relations. Perhaps she merely reflected with regret that the years of her efforts on my behalf had been largely wasted.

At any rate, that night was the last time I ever saw her.

===

But I heard her once after that. In the late summer of 1968, not long before the Big Break, Nathan phoned me in California and said "I want to put you on the line to someone." The conversation with Ayn was very brief. "I understand that you are presenting my philosophy to your classes," she said. I replied that I was--I considered Ayn's views in several of my courses, without thereby implying that I did so with total agreement. She seemed gratified, and wondered how I was, and then turned the telephone back to Nathan.

===

I thought of her endlessly during the years. Her enthusiasm for ideas, her intensity, her unfailing bluntness and those piercing eyes--the image of those things was never far away from me, especially when I assigned some of her essays in my classes and discussed them with students point by point. But I never regretted that I had not been enveloped further in the web of intellectually stifling allegiances and entanglements, the route I had seen so many of her disciples go.

In the next few years, as her non-fiction essays appeared, I read them avidly and made many notes and comments in the margins--points to raise with her, questions to ask her. But of course I never got to ask them.

And then, almost fifteen years [he mis-subtracted; it was almost twenty years] after my expulsion, I heard on the radio that she had died. I felt, even after all these years, a devastating sense of loss. It was hard to stay in control during my talk at the memorial service for her in Barnsdall Park in Los Angeles.

How often, on visiting New York, I had almost stopped at her apartment building. No, I thought, her friendships are broken but her enmities last. It wouldn't be any good. and surely she had treated me pretty shabbily. But I thought of her, up there in that apartment, without Frank now [**], and I wanted to be mesmerized by those piercing eyes once again, and have another all-night discussion as in the old days.

I never got up the courage to take that step. It would probably have been useless. The occasion is past, and the past is gone forever.

That, I thought to myself with a certain grim irony, is at least one necessary proposition to which she would have given her assent.

-

[* I think he has to be misremembering what she presented. "Art and Sense of Life" didn't appear until the March 1966 The Objectivist, and it builds on some earlier essays, especially "Philosophy and Sense of Life," which appeared in February 1966, and "The Psycho-Epistemology of Art," April 1965. He might mean "The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age," which appeared in the November 1962 The Objectivist Newsletter, although that article is too short to need twenty minutes' delivery time and it doesn't seem by any stretch of latitude "technical" enough to be delivered at a meeting of a philosophic society. So I'm puzzled as to what paper she did give. Maybe there's a record in the Society's archives.

[Added note: I just looked in the original Newsletter to see if there was any indication of where "The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age" was delivered. It says "(Excerpts from a lecture delivered at the Creative Arts Festival of the University of Michigan)," no date given for when that was. She might of course have reused the lecture at the American Society for Aesthetics meeting.]

[** The context, with his describing the ongoing quality of his thoughts of stopping at her apartment building, makes it sound as if Frank died years before Ayn. Frank only died about 2-1/2 years (November 9, 1979) before she did (March 6, 1982).]

.

___

Edited by Ellen Stuttle
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I used to like John Hospers before reading that excerpt.

You had me momentarily scared when I read that sentence, starting to think, "What? You're going to say you dislike him from the excerpt?"

Then you went on:

Now I really like him.

Whew!

I like him very much. I think he is SO FINE a person, a mind, a spirit. He's still doing well, and still razor sharp, at either just past his 90th birthday or just before his 90th birthday. Larry talked with him on the phone recently -- sad occasion, death of a mutual friend, but they talked about some other things, too. Larry couldn't remember if John said he'd just turned 90 or if he said he'd soon be turning 90. I think it's the latter. I seem to recall one summer when Larry was in California doing some work at JPL and I talked to John on the phone, only time I've ever talked with him myself, and it was his birthday -- they'd gone to dinner and a movie; I think that was in the summer... Ah, well, so both Larry and I are having "senior moments" and can't recall for sure.

Thank you for posting that. I have wanted to read it for some time.

I find it in some ways the most informative of any of the recollections about her because of its getting into details of particular discussions.

I hope he and Liberty will allow the entire two-part essay to go up in his corner here on OL one day.

I hope so, too. I'd like to see the whole thing available on the web.

Ellen

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Ellen,

Thank you for posting that. I have wanted to read it for some time.

I hope he and Liberty will allow the entire two-part essay to go up in his corner here on OL one day.

I used to like John Hospers before reading that excerpt.

Now I really like him.

Michael

Michael, Liberty might very well allow the essay to go up now. I suggest you contact Stephen Cox, the editor, and enquire.

John will celebrate his 90th birthday in June. He is an amazing man. He moves more slowly now, and with a cane, but his mind moves as quickly and lightly as ever. He is as fine and decent a person as I have ever been privileged to know. He and I often talk about Ayn -- especially about the good days of our relationships with her -- and we sometimes have tears in our eyes as we speak. With Jim Kilbourne, we spend regular evenings having dinner together and listening to music, from Mario Lanza to Gustav Mahler. The three of us talk politics a bit, but mostly esthetics, struggling to understand the rationale of our remarkably similar musical tastes. And with Jim and other friends we watch our favorite old movies, introducing special young friends to such films as "Brief Encounter."

If any of you would like to send John your good wishes on his birthday, please let me know so that I can give you his email address.

Barbara

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Actually, I should soon have a complete set of the magazine. I dropped about $100 getting about the first 10 years or so of the mag, and subsequently sent in another order to fill a few holes.

I wish I'd known this a couple years ago, as I'd have given them to you for shipping cost. I ended up sharing a pretty much complete set of the first decade of Liberty among a dozen other members of the Karl Hess [Libertarian Supper] Club, here in L.A., along with my selling off nearly a hundred books to them.

The imperatives of a small (and shared) apartment, an eternal bookshelf shortage, and limited life attention work against keeping all the paper, bound or unbound, I've gotten in 30 years of L and O activism. I didn't want those magazines to molder slowly in the storage locker, mostly filled with family memorabilia, that I've been paying to rent each month. That ends up shelling out for a subscription seven or eight times over. I'd rather that they be actually used and read.

By the way, Tibor Machan has spoken more than once to the Karl Hess Club, to great acclaim. I'd greatly enjoy our having him again. "Neo"whatever or not, he makes many concepts accessible to a broad audience, as his thrice-monthly op-ed columns in the Orange County Register attest.

O'course, having Barbara Branden or John Hospers return would also be special!

Edited by Greybird
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  • 2 weeks later...

To add to my list to things that were first mentioned in PAR and then subsequently confirmed, I just noticed that in PAR on p. 399 Barbara says that during her meeting with Rand in 1981 that Rand mentioned that she hired a mathematics tutor and that she was pondering the relationship between math and philosophy.

In Gotthelf's book On Ayn Rand at page 25, he mentions those two facts. ("he received tutoring in algebra . . . .She reflected further on the relationship between mathematics and concept formation . . .").

Edited by Neil Parille
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I just took a look at SOLOP and saw that Neil mightily distressed Valliant. See here.

This brings me pleasure because it is sinking in to Valliant (in an undeniable manner, for as much as he wants to deny it) that there is something he is not communicating to the public that Neil is. And there is an undeniable and highly inconvenient result that Neil's presentation of his numerous errors, contradictions, double standards, etc., is totally eroding his credibility to everyone except devout tribe members. (I don't think he is even convincing peripheral tribe members any longer—not once they look at his texts both in book and online.)

I happen to think that one of the main problems is plain English. Neil speaks English from a cognitive first, then normative direction like you are supposed to. This means that he tries to understand what he is discussing before he states what value it has. If you don't know what something is, how can you say whether it is good or bad?

Valliant, on the other hand, starts from the value judgment and tries to cram in all the facts to fit his prejudice. This leads to some statements and rationalizations that sound amazingly boneheaded (which they are). Here is one example in the same post I linked above. He blasted Neil for not seeing a contradiction in Barbara's book (Passion) that does not exist unless you are a time traveler (or exist mentally in the kind of quantum world where time travels in all directions), but then excused Rand for an actual contradiction (at least, there was no time travel involved) and blasted Neil for "over-simplification and context-dropping." Translated, this meant that Rand's (and Barbara's) words meant what Valliant wanted them to mean, not normal English meanings.

The word boneheaded keeps coming to my mind, but I think there is an epistemological issue on a deeper level operating here. (But boneheadedness is also present.) I think Valliant started from the following evaluations: Rand is always good, the Brandens are always evil. He put this where the cognitive part should have been—the "What is it?" part. Thus the proper noun is not "Rand," but "the good Rand." Ditto for the Brandens. They are no longer "the Brandens" for cognitive identification, but instead, "the evil Brandens." I am talking concept here, so even when the words were not these, the meaning of Rand is "the good Rand" and the meaning of a Branden is "an evil Branden." It is metaphysical in Valliant's usage. From that premise, it is easy for Rand to have context and actually be good when she is not, and the Brandens to be evil in all contexts and even have evil motives when they are good.

Most all of the facts presented in PARC follow this kind of thinking. Peikoff in "Fact and Value" stressed that there are no facts without value (at least implicit value). Valliant, like so many Objectivist boneheads I have read (not all Objectivists are boneheads, but many are), swallowed the idea whole and used it as a license to excuse himself from the task of correctly identifying the facts. On a literal level, these people do not need the cognitive part (to think) for grounding their concepts since they operate under the delusion that their feelings already provide it. They practice precisely what Rand ranted against all her life, that emotions are not tools of cognition. To them, their evaluations (which are emotions at root) are their main tools of arriving at cognitive premises from which they build their concepts.

To them, the ostensive definition at root is not waving their arm around and saying "I mean this." It is feeling something and saying "My feeling is a fundamental axiom." That's a serious problem and it needs to stop. Period. It is crappy boneheaded thinking and it is wrong. It is ITOE warped into a form of whim-worship. It is an embarrassment to the Objectivist world.

There is another problem at times. When I first read the following statement, I was a bit out of focus like one normally is on skimming. At that moment it made sense. However, on going back to review and focusing in on the passage, I started having trouble understanding it, even after trying to understand it through the ass-backwards lens of normative first, then cognitive. Valliant is addressing Neil and talking about Barbara below.

You ask, in effect: "Why, if she's ever being dishonest, would Ms. Branden provide the evidence of Rand enjoying the 'here and now' after claiming that Rand was incapable of such enjoyment?" You even assert that this "actually helps" the biographer's credibility when she makes the first claim about Rand.

PARC does not argue that this was a matter of dishonesty, only the sort of distortion which results from the biases we should expect given the biographer's own biography.

Could somebody please translate this into English for me? I am trying to recapture the thought I had on reading it out of focus, but it now eludes me. The more I read this passage, the less sense it makes.

Michael

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Michael,

As Jim Valliant's meltdown progresses, it becomes more and more obvious, even to the casual reader, that he and his book proceed from the following assumptions:

Ayn Rand always good; Nathaniel and Barbara Branden always bad

Half-truths told by Rand, splendidly honest; half-truths told by "the Brandens," horridly evil

Bad arguments made by Rand, not what they seem; bad arguments made by anyone else, what they seem

And he actually appears to believe that if Robert Hessen, who knew Ayn Rand personally, would just read a book by Jim Valliant, who didn't, he would repent of all of his negativity toward Ayn Rand. (Unless, of course, Dr. Hessen astonishingly persisted in his aberration, in which case he would be promptly added to the "always bad" column.)

Normative abstractions run riot...

Robert Campbell

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Michael,

Here's my best effort to decipher Mr. Valliant's statement:

You ask, in effect: "Why, if she's ever being dishonest, would Ms. Branden provide the evidence of Rand enjoying the 'here and now' after claiming that Rand was incapable of such enjoyment?" You even assert that this "actually helps" the biographer's credibility when she makes the first claim about Rand.

PARC does not argue that this was a matter of dishonesty, only the sort of distortion which results from the biases we should expect given the biographer's own biography.

I think Mr. Valliant is obliquely referring to his claim that Ayn Rand never have encouraged anyone in her circle to repress their emotions, button their lips when they wanted to say something they thought she would condemn, etc. etc. Rather, he is insinuating, it is "the Brandens," in their rampant rationalism and profound failure to understand Ayn Rand's true message, who inflicted these conditions on themselves, then blamed Rand for them.

But others may bring illumination where I have failed...

In any case, Mr. Valliant doesn't always attribute the same statements to unconscious cognitive distortions as opposed to deliberate misrepresentations. He can't decide, for instance, whether Nathaniel Branden never really "got" Rand's message, and part-cluelessly, part-guiltily pretended that he had--or NB never wanted to get the message, and was out to take AR to the cleaners from Day 1.

Robert Campbell

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Over on SOLOP, Neil wrote,

To the best of my knowledge, no one whom Branden interviewed has says he or she was misquoted or has dissociated himself from the book. (The only possible exception is the housekeeper, but that's via Peikoff and so is hearsay.)

Someone please refresh my memory. What exactly is it that the housekeeper is alleged to have said about how her statements were represented by Barbara? Has Valliant claimed that Peikoff has claimed that the housekeeper has claimed that she was misquoted in some way, or is Valliant not even being that specific?

J

Edited by Jonathan
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Robert,

A few points --

1. Dr. Hessen was responding to a question about whether Rand displayed anger during Q&A sessions. He responded that she did and gave some examples. He then goes on to say that PAR is accurate. So there is a lot of context dropping by Valliant.

2. Valliant didn't know Rand nor (to my knowledge) does he know Dr. Hessen. But note that he has no problem from these few paragraphs of diagnosing his motives and psychology --

Hessen's judgment is even more warped by personal experience than that of his dear, old friend, Ms. B.
No, it was merely the passionate intensity of Rand's personal esthetics -- and that Rand believed esthetic values to be eloquently revealing of one's soul -- that seemingly disturbed Hessen.

But if you knew Rand well for 18 years or more, your judgements about Rand's motives and psychology don't count (unless they are positive).

3. Note that there is never enough evidence to establish or confirm anything negative about Rand (except her one Humanizing Character Flaw, anger) to Valliant. But when people who are biased against the Brandens make generalized statements that Rand was a luv, that's good enough for him. (Valliant has actually defended the claim that Rand named Peikoff her "intellectual heir" even though Peikoff has never given the time, place or words used when this designation was made.)

I could go on, but that should be enough for now.

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Jonathan,

According to PARC, Peikoff said that the housekeeper (Eloise Huggins) told him (Peikoff) that the bottles were used for mixing paint. I don't think PARC even makes the claim that the housekeeper contested the idea that Frank drank too much.

I believe that since PARC Valliant has said that the housekeeper told Peikoff that she was angry at the implication (which is not made explicit in PAR) that she reported Frank drank excessively.

Edited by Neil Parille
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I have just posted an article in the ARI Corner called Why Nobody Takes PARC Seriously Anymore. I want to post the audio clip here for those who do not want to wade through another long article about PARC.

Valliant made the assertion that he checked the ARI archives for doubting the story of Barbara Branden's meeting with Ayn Rand at the end of her life (calling the story "arbitrary"). He later tried to gloss this over, especially after Neil blindsided him with corraboration from the ARI archives. His later reaction and meltdown shows just what a bonehead he actually is.

For those interested, here is the audio clip and transcription. It is from that July 2006 boneheaded attempt to undercut Barbara's "Objectivism and Rage" speech at the TAS summer seminar by staging a booksigning nearby around the same time and bringing Perigo over from halfway around the world. They tried to cash in on TAS's public, but they flopped miserably.

This mp3 was posted on Solo Passion for a while. It is from the Q&A after Valliant's speech. I cut off the beginning and end to reduce the size. What is left was extracted whole, without editing, from the original.

Valliant's opinion of Barbara's last visit to Ayn Rand

If you have any trouble operating the player, just right-click on the title and choose "Save target as" (or link or file or something similar) to download the mp3 file to your hard disk. The file name is Valliant2006_07_06_QA-shortened.mp3.

Transcription:

Valliant: Yes, Andrew?

Andrew: What do you think of the fact that Barbara Branden visited Ayn Rand before she died, uhm [unintelligible]?

Valliant: No. There is no corroboration in any of Ayn Rand's notes or in any of the evidence from the Ayn Rand Archives that there was such a meeting as Barbara Branden describes later in their lives. That doesn't mean it was the case. It doesn't mean it wasn't the case. I will have to say what I said [unintelligible] in the book about that.

Everything that either one of the Brandens says that does not have independent corroboration from a credible source is to be dismissed out of hand as an arbitrary assertion.

What can be more self-interested than her reconciled with Ayn Rand?

She didn't think I was such a bad person. She forgave me. Forget what 1968… all that denunciation by Ms. Rand, because, you know, in the end she forgave me.

What could be more nakedly self-serving than such an assertion? If there was such a meeting, I have no idea what was said. I have no idea whether or not Ayn Rand spat in her face if there was such a meeting, which, probably, would have been the appropriate behavior. But no. No.

Branden has a similar story about his third wife meeting Ayn Rand—Devers Branden—and such a semi-reconciliation as well.

Both stories I dismiss out of hand.

Can there be any doubt that Valliant claims to have the authority of the Ayn Rand Archives to doubt Barbara's story?

He lied about this. He did not have such authority and did not even consult the archives about this. And he has never owned up to this lie.

Michael

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  • 2 weeks later...

I have read all 3 of Neal Parille's review of PARC and (despite not having read PARC or PAR) completely agree with his assessment.

Its PARC's author's silence or lack of rebuttal to Neal Parille's review that speaks volumes of Mr. Valliant's credibility (or lack thereof).

When Buddha was out teaching his philosophy, he made it emphatically clear to his followers that he did not want to be "deified". Unfortunately, after he passed away, one faction of the Buddhist movement did just that.

Instead of focusing on the teachings of Buddha, the mystic Buddhists made their philosophy into a religion and made Buddha into a god.

Christianity did the same with Jesus. Islam did the same with Muhammed. And now the orthodox Objectivists with the Ayn Rand Institute want to do the same thing with Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand was a wonderul individual and I love her philosophy. But I could not think of any way to better insult Ms. Rand's memory by making her out to be a victim which is what Valliant and the ARI folks do while trying to "deify" her at the same time.

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Its PARC's author's silence or lack of rebuttal to Neal Parille's review that speaks volumes of Mr. Valliant's credibility (or lack thereof).

Mike,

If that were the only problem, one could give him the benefit of the doubt. The problem is that he actually did rebut Neil's reviews. It's such a convoluted mess stretched out over many posts and threads that you have to read it to believe it.

Michael

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Right now Campbell and Valliant are going back and forth with each other. It's a war zone. Valliant is showing signs of cracking, but I'm not really enjoying the overall spectacle. The way the *discussion* is framed means it can go on forever. Perigo makes his customary remarks giving little indication he's been really reading the various apropos threads, especially the highly detailed posts. I read them but have no interest in diagraming out the arguments on clear plastic then overlaying them to marvel at the trite and numerous interlocking, conflicting complexities. This drives people away from Objectivism, of course, just as much as the soporific, denatured Rebirth of Reason Web site. Might be for the best; Objectivism carries too much mass that is called "Objectivism" that should be called other things. The virtue of integrity, for example. The Fountainhead is all about integrity and personal individualism and creativity (illustrated by a character with the mind and psychology of an engineer), not about Objectivism. Did Howard Roark study Objectivism to learn about integrity? Did Ayn Rand? Various virtues are part of Objectivism, of course, but are hardly exclusive to Objectivism. To an extent one can study Objectivism by studying integrity by pointing out where and why it is Objectivist, but primarily one should be studying integrity.

--Brant

Edited by Brant Gaede
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