The DIM Hypothesis: Why the Lights of the West Are Going Out

[Dan Haggerty]

Robert, thanks for the reply

If I may, and I’m at home enjoying some chilled Grey Goose so take this as open musing, but it sounds like the quoted passages are far more indicative of Peikoff monument building.

Without saying so Peikoff just outlined how we are supposed to consider his work as the next step of Rand’s work in epistemology, in one hand acknowledging her work as the blueprint while making her irrelevant to our evaluation of his “new integrations to metaphysics and epistemology”. He rides her framework while imploring us to ignore their presence while evaluating the whole. Then again that could backfire on him too.

How does one circumvent the locked doors of Objectivism as a closed system while managing to allow one’s work to become part of Rand’s? To be considered a great philosopher next to Rand? I think I need another drink.

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

[Selene]

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

Dan:

A cynic is a humanist with experience.

Adam

[caroljane]

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

Dan:

A cynic is a humanist with experience.

Adam

Not according to Wilde. I bet Dan knew the value of that bottle, but was regretting the price of it when it was empty. However, you can at least get 10 cents on an empty.

[Dan Haggerty]

Note to self - I'm more cynical when I drink.

Dan:

A cynic is a humanist with experience.

Adam

Not according to Wilde. I bet Dan knew the value of that bottle, but was regretting the price of it when it was empty. However, you can at least get 10 cents on an empty.

Nah… When I drink it is casually and for quality while enjoying some good music, not to pound it out like cheap whiskey! I have plenty left.

I’m saving the rest for election night…

[Ellen Stuttle]

Re #162 and #163:

Has Peikoff actually gone nuts? I'm asking seriously. I never listen to his podcasts and haven't followed threads here about those, so I don't know if Peikoff sounds in the podcasts like he's progressively deteriorating. But the passages quoted go even farther than the opening foundational chapters of The Logical Leap in dispensing with reality.

Ellen

[Brant Gaede]

Re #162 and #163:

Has Peikoff actually gone nuts? I'm asking seriously. I never listen to his podcasts and haven't followed threads here about those, so I don't know if Peikoff sounds in the podcasts like he's progressively deteriorating. But the passages quoted go even farther than the opening foundational chapters of The Logical Leap in dispensing with reality.

Ellen

It no longer matters. He's completely shot his wad. He can't defend DIM because that would implicitly acknowledge it wasn't properly vetted in the first place. He's trying, for instance, to lecture laypeople about physics. A philosopher has no chance lecturing physicists about physics so the lay crowd is his necessary default to escape the reductio ad absurdum. My first general impression trying to read this tomb and ancilllary commentary is he's trying to mechanize thinking so it might be programable into a computer and what that device says will be moral and truthful and all else not. This might be a complete blowoff of Objectivism in favor of the Great Leader, which might be a logical extension of Rand's own attitude respecting representations of her philosophy which effectively banned critical thinking amongst Objectivists and would be Objectivists.

What will happen to his book is what happened to A New Kind of Science: evaporation.

--Brant

still reading

[9thdoctor]

Re #162 and #163:

Has Peikoff actually gone nuts? I'm asking seriously. I never listen to his podcasts and haven't followed threads here about those, so I don't know if Peikoff sounds in the podcasts like he's progressively deteriorating. But the passages quoted go even farther than the opening foundational chapters of The Logical Leap in dispensing with reality.

Ellen

Careful now. Peikoff is liable to review Rand’s unique integrations in Metaphysics and Epistemology and conclude that they necessarily imply forming death squads to track down heretical Objectivists. Review Augustine’s letter about the Donatists for an idea of how the argument goes, not much mutatis mutandis needed.

[PDS]

Re #162 and #163:

Has Peikoff actually gone nuts? I'm asking seriously. I never listen to his podcasts and haven't followed threads here about those, so I don't know if Peikoff sounds in the podcasts like he's progressively deteriorating. But the passages quoted go even farther than the opening foundational chapters of The Logical Leap in dispensing with reality.

Ellen

Careful now. Peikoff is liable to review Rand’s unique integrations in Metaphysics and Epistemology and conclude that they necessarily imply forming death squads to track down heretical Objectivists. Review Augustine’s letter about the Donatists for an idea of how the argument goes, not much mutatis mutandis needed.

Combining an interesting analogy to Augustine and a you tube clip should be disallowed.

[9thdoctor]

Combining an interesting analogy to Augustine and a you tube clip should be disallowed.

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

[caroljane]

Combining an interesting analogy to Augustine and a you tube clip should be disallowed.

"The question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me."

Michael, that's Who, Doctor. New posting guideline: No viral St Augustine unless cauldrons of earthly loves are depicted.

[Robert Campbell]

The roots of hell-in-a-handbasketude:

[…] not all modes are created equal. The overwhelming dominance of M—anticipatory [i.e., before the dawn of Western philosophy] or explicitly philosophical—would mean that its fundamentals have been so entrenched in the mind of our species that we have never truly escaped them. Men, it seems, have remained in some form god-oriented, in part or in whole, almost without exception since the origin of the species. Even the I periods retained a background belief in the supernatural. Mankind, even its best Western representatives, is frighteningly close to its primitive roots. (p. 285)

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Oh, boy. "Would mean" -- I have warned my students about the conditional and the subjunctive, many a time,

[Robert Campbell]

Carol,

I wouldn't have written "would mean" in this context.

In the preceding couple of pages, Peikoff has put forth estimates of the relative durations of M, I, and D dominance in Western cultural history. I dominance is rare and fragile; D couldn't exist until Immanuel Kant brought it into being; so from 500 BC till the present day... you can do the math.

Peikoff believes that M has been overwhelmingly dominant, and believes he has provided evidence to that effect.

So why the hell didn't he write "means"?

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

That was my thought, why the hesitance and the disclaimers every step of the way (as it seems to an outsider). It is as if he wants to say, look, I have to maintain that Objectivism was completely defined by Ayn Rand, but I can do some good embroidery around the edges of her perfect core.

[Robert Campbell]

Carol,

In the two paragraphs preceding this quotation, Peikoff draws on two familiar Randian ideas:

(1) "Primitive" human beings had only low-level concepts and a few "floating abstractions" to think with; so they all unavoidably had "perceptual mentalities"

(2) There may be still many such specimens of subhumanity among us (as per a couple of her journal entries and her article on "The Missing Link")

So the only parts that are sort of new are the notion of an ongoing human dependence on religion (Peikoff once said, in his history of philosophy lectures, that "philosophically speaking, God died in the 18th Century") and the identification of a purely religious world view as M₂.

Baby steps.

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Good. Grief.

I did not know that Rand believed cultural circumstance divided human beings into "primitive" and well, us.Biologically and in evolutionary terms we were the same, with the same individual capabilities as the "civilized man", and her rejection of this truth is an historically collectivistic notion that Hitler or Stalin would be proud of.

[Jerry Biggers]

Carol,

In the two paragraphs preceding this quotation, Peikoff draws on two familiar Randian ideas:

(1) "Primitive" human beings had only low-level concepts and a few "floating abstractions" to think with; so they all unavoidably had "perceptual mentalities"

(2) There may be still many such specimens of subhumanity among us (as per a couple of her journal entries and her article on "The Missing Link")

So the only parts that are sort of new are the notion of an ongoing human dependence on religion (Peikoff once said, in his history of philosophy lectures, that "philosophically speaking, God died in the 18th Century") and the identification of a purely religious world view as M₂.

Baby steps.

Robert Campbell

Dealing only with Rand, and not Peikoff (imperfect clone that he is), I do not believe that Rand meant that those that she referred to as primitive were literally sub-human. Unless she meant sub-human in the sense of their not living up to their full human potential. For example, she on occasion, usually her Ford Hall Forum lectures, referred to Arab nations opposing Israel as "savages." trying to destroy the only free civilized society in the Middle East. But even in this case, I doubt that she would defend a position that they (the Arabs) are literally, sub-human (e.g,, neanderthal), only that they acted in a non-civilized manner that she called sub-human.

I question whether we can take anything in her so-called "Journals" as representative of her mature thought. They weren't supposed to be published in the first place. I doubt that Peikoff can point to a letter where she gave him authority to print everything that she herself did not want to see in print while she was alive. (Parenthetically, editor Harriman better hope that there is not an afterlife where he woul have to acount for his actions to Rand).

[Ellen Stuttle]

My first general impression trying to read this tomb and ancilllary commentary [...].

HAHAHA!

I'm not sure if "tomb" is a typo or what you meant to write. Funny, funny either way.

Careful now.  Peikoff is liable to review Rand’s unique integrations in Metaphysics and Epistemology and conclude that they necessarily imply forming death squads to track down heretical Objectivists.

Leaves me out, since one can't be a heretical X if one never was an X. And doesn't answer the question.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

I do not believe that Rand meant that those that she referred to as primitive were literally sub-human. Unless she meant sub-human in the sense of their not living up to their full human potential.

I think that when she spoke of "sub-humans" she didn't mean a literal sub-species but instead biological humans who don't choose to activate properly (according to her) human consciousness. Recall, she wrote in Galt's Speech that "to be human is an act of choice." [see my EDIT below]. And, in a sentence of major importance, over the meaning of which I puzzled for years, that "man is a being of volitional consciousness." My ultimate understanding of her meaning there is that properly to be "man" -- i.e., properly to have the "essential" characteristic of "man" -- requires volitionally activating conceptual consciousness.

Ellen

PS: I don't agree, however, regarding taking material in the "Journals" as "representative of her mature thought." I think there's a lot in the "Journals" which adds depth of background to Rand's published writing, though always with the question of what wording details in the "Journals" might have been altered.

EDIT: See my post #207 re the wording "to be human is an act of choice." That's paraphrase, not an exact quote. I copied some exact passages from Galt's Speech in #207.

[9thdoctor]

Leaves me out, since one can't be a heretical X if one never was an X. And doesn't answer the question.

Maybe you haven't read much Kafka, but suffice it to say that once you're on the list, there's no getting off the list.

[blackhorse]

As Peikoff would say of DIM ; you didn't know that.

[Robert Campbell]

Jerry,

It isn't just journal entries. She published "The Missing Link" in the Ayn Rand Letter.

Carol,

Ayn Rand said a lot of things about "savages" that do not accord, shall we say, with the best contemporary anthropology.

Peikoff emulated her in OPAR; for instance, when he declared that if a savage said "2 + 2 = 4," the savage wouldn't be able to understand that statement or the reasons for its truth, so his assertion would be arbitrary, and therefore neither true nor false.

Mr. Boydstun went ballistic, you may recall, when I suggested that by a strict application of Peikoff's own doctrine, his own statements regarding Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem would have the same status as the savage's recitations regarding basic facts of arithmetic.

Robert Campbell

[caroljane]

Jerry,

It isn't just journal entries. She published "The Missing Link" in the Ayn Rand Letter.

Carol,

Ayn Rand said a lot of things about "savages" that do not accord, shall we say, with the best contemporary anthropology.

Robert Campbell

Elegantly put. It is fascinating to wonder how her philosophy might have been different if she had been drawn to deep study of other fields , such as anthropology even in its 1930s state, or world history.

[Jerry Biggers]

Carol,

In the two paragraphs preceding this quotation, Peikoff draws on two familiar Randian ideas:

(1) "Primitive" human beings had only low-level concepts and a few "floating abstractions" to think with; so they all unavoidably had "perceptual mentalities"

(2) There may be still many such specimens of subhumanity among us (as per a couple of her journal entries and her article on "The Missing Link")

So the only parts that are sort of new are the notion of an ongoing human dependence on religion (Peikoff once said, in his history of philosophy lectures, that "philosophically speaking, God died in the 18th Century") and the identification of a purely religious world view as M₂.

Baby steps.

Robert Campbell

Robert.

It has been quite a while since I read "The Missing Link" (now included in her posthumous book, Philosophy: Who Needs It),

so I will re-read it. I don't recall her saying that that there are (literally) "subhumans" (i.e., those not versed on ITOE?) wandering around in a pre-conceptual daze). Or, words to that effect.

Carol, I regret to say that I have not read every one of your 4,910+ posts, so I may have missed your answer to my next question: I am getting the impression, based on your continued expressed amazement/astonishment that Ayn Rand may have said such-and-such, as recounted on this forum. So, my question is, Have you read Ayn Rand? Not what someone else says she said, here or elsewhere; but what she herself said in her novels and collections of essays. At a minimum, The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged, The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal..

[9thdoctor]

The roots of hell-in-a-handbasketude:

I'm just wondering, how well do you suppose the following might apply to The DIM Hypothesis:

These sorts of leaps are so pervasive and extreme, that the work [

The DIM Hypothesis

] does not qualify as a piece of scholarship at all. It is pure arbitrary conjecture, decorated with footnotes and references that establish nothing. Is it any wonder that [clip] scholars don't take this work seriously enough to address in print. The book is so sub-par that it is an embarrassment to those of us who want to do serious scholarship on [clip] in an academic context. To engage in debate with [Peikoff] would be to legitimize his work — to say, in effect, "This is real scholarship and is now a part of the literature on this subject." But his work is not scholarship, it's arbitrary musing, and it should be treated as such. I can only see one reason for a legitimate scholar to mention it at all, which is to make it clear that he doesn't regard [Peikoff]'s prattling as part of the intellectual project with which he is engaged.

Now simply saying that one does not take [Peikoff] seriously as a scholar, or dismissing him out of hand, does not constitute an argument from intimidation. It's on par with ignoring the readings of Madame Cleo and saying that it is irrational to regard her as a legitimate source of information about the future. If a policy of ignoring and demeaning this sort of material was intellectually illegitimate, then every expert in every field would be required to address every bit of garbage published by every two bit crackpot, and this would go on without end. (Especially since the crackpots would post responses to every criticism on their blogs, and the intellectuals then would be required to address these responses as well.)