Poet of the Sociopath

[Guyau]

Rand "is the cold, stony advocate of self-interest, the poet of the sociopath." That quotation is from the book AYN RAND AND THE RUSSIAN INTELLIGENTSIA (2022) by Derek Offord. He goes straight to Rand's various representations and condemnations of altruism and collectivism and to her holding high ethical egoism and attendant inversions of traditional virtues, such as the displacement of humility with pride. He sees the audacity of Rand's vision of a guilt-free human life.

The author sticks to the clashes between Rand’s ethics and the traditional, altruistic ones, secular or religious. He takes no notice of continuities of the old and the new and ways in which the latter took up the old with redefinition and placement in an orderly account of value per se. By sticking to only the stark clashes and by ignoring facets of the psychology of Rand’s protagonists—indeed conjecturing that such things as empathy and concern for others are entirely absent in those characters (and in their creator)— Offord makes it easy on himself to slide from Rand being the poet for personalities asocial, to antisocial, to sociopathical. Even the asocial is in full truth not fitting of Rand’s protagonists.

This book is another distortion and smear of Rand’s philosophy. It is a smart one, by someone who actually has read Rand’s novels and The Virtue of Selfishness. He is of independent mind, not one repeating old critical reviews by others.

comment

Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia

 

[william.scherk]

On 9/2/2022 at 9:13 PM, Guyau said:

[Offord] goes straight to Rand's various representations and condemnations of altruism and collectivism and to her holding high ethical egoism and its attendant inversions of traditional virtues, such as the displacement of humility with pride. He sees the audacity of Rand's vision of a guilt-free human life.

The author sticks to the clashes between Rand’s ethics and the traditional, altruistic ones, secular or religious. He takes no notice of continuities between the old and the new and ways in which the latter takes up the old with redefinition and placement in an orderly account of value per se. By sticking to only the stark clashes and by ignoring facets of the psychology of Rand’s protagonists—indeed, conjecturing that such things as empathy and concern for others are entirely absent in those characters (and in their creator)—Offord makes it easy on himself to slide from Rand being the poet for asocial, to antisocial, to sociopathical. Even the asocial is, in full truth, not fit for Rand’s protagonists.

This book is another distortion and smearing of Rand’s philosophy. It is a smart one, by someone who actually has read Rand’s novels and The Virtue of Selfishness. [Offord] is of an independent mind, not one repeating old critical reviews by others.

The Amazon.com page for Ayn Rand and the Russian Intelligentsia has the trusty "Look Inside" feature enabled -- for the front matter and part of the introduction.  Here's a passage from the intro:

Quote

If, on the other hand, we look for reasons why Rand's fiction has
had such appeal to readers beyond the critical literary world, then
it is surely on its didactic, exhortatory and ideological content that
we should focus. For many readers, Rand's writings offer a form of
revelation. They provide guidance of a quasi-philosophical nature
on how people should live their lives, make decisions, conduct
relationships and fulfil their human potential. Numerous admirers
from many backgrounds and walks of life have recorded their feeling
that her work has in some way liberated, empowered, inspired or
vindicated them and increased their confidence in the validity of their
own experience and ambitions. On another level, Rand's corpus
amounts to an exploration of American identity. For this reason, it has
been suggested, 'a brief infatuation with Rand' has become a 'common
American adolescent rite of passage'.

For a right-leaning adult
readership, meanwhile, Rand's merit lies in her defence of capitalism
and her belief that, in Jonathan Chait's words, 'the natural market
distribution of income is inherently moral, and [that] the central
struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of
their superiority redistributed' by envious parasites or humanitarians
with a social conscience. Or as Burns puts it, Rand's writings have
functioned as 'the ultimate gateway drug to life on the right'. It is
understandable, then, that Rand's reception has been much more
favourable in the business world than in the literary world.  Moreover,
the erotic aspect of her novels, which contain explicit descriptions
of (often violent) sex that were unusual in mid-twentieth-century
fiction, no doubt helps, for some readers, to glamourize the arrogant
and acquisitive ideologues whom she heroizes.
It is not necessary to subscribe to a traditionalist view that only
canonical literary works warrant lasting attention in order to agree
that Rand's writings deserve close study. Irrespective of the reader's

opinion of their intrinsic intellectual or literary quality, they have
extrinsic value of various kinds. It cannot be denied, for example, that
they remain intensely topical, as attested by the introductory list of
influential admirers I have given, or that they are a conspicuous feature
of the context of which historians of early-twenty-first-century Western
culture and politics must take account. As Lisa Duggan has argued, it
may be difficult for readers who are not drawn into the Randian cult
to refrain from explaining her work 'as the compensatory fantasy life
of a tortured soul who was perhaps a sociopath'. Nonetheless, Duggan
insists, we must engage with this work in order to understand Rand's
great impact on the world fashioned by the rise of neoliberalism. 
Above all, Rand's work is instructive as an example of exploration of
the limits to which one might dare to apply unconventional ideas in
practice, as a quintessential expression of an ideological paradigm and
way of thinking, and as a vivid account of the possible implications of
living in accordance with certain values.

I will be looking out for a commentary or review from Chris Sciabarra.

Edited September 4, 2022 by william.scherk
Fixed minor orthographic errors (Look Inside excerpts were OCRed with ShareX)

[Guyau]

Thanks, Bill, for posting the description at Amazon. It is a helpful complement to the description at the publisher Bloomsbury. I have not been able to read the book yet (gave it only a glance so far), as I have to stay pretty tightly on beam with an invited scholarly article I’ve been making for the last few months for a journal with definite deadlines.

This is a short book, but big and serious in thought. His research of Rand’s two main novels is extensive, and gives his book the patina of thoroughness. It looks to me this book will establish itself as the most important critical book on Rand coming from a thinker entirely and life-long outside the Objectivist ambit.

I don’t know yet what real use he is putting earlier Russian thinkers to in connection with Rand. At a glance, it did not look like anything so tight or historically ambitious as thinker A and thinker B influenced Rand in a positive or negative way. Rather, it looked more like religious thinker A and secular thinker B each have some logical kinship or antithesis with Rand.

He enters a long footnote on the book by Chris Sciabarra. Very respectful and accurate. I gather that the thinkers and the intellectual and literary movements that Offord found worth connecting to Rand are not, at least not entirely, overlapping with what Chris excavated.

In the case of classic philosophers such as Hume or Kant, the excavations, in the last few decades, of the intellectuals and their works with whom the classic philosopher’s arguments engage (usually unnamed) has been helpful in getting some understanding of how the philosophies of Hume and (more extensively) Kant came about. However, I think we should not look at the writings of a Hume or Kant or Rand and reconstruct them as somehow really expressing not what they say on their face, but as bearing a different, hidden meaning, which are the views of intellectual ancestors. What the philosopher themselves wrote can be understood on its face (especially our contemporary Rand), and interesting as it is to compare the philosopher to others, we should take Hume, Kant, or Rand on the face of what they wrote, although always taking text in context and in comparison to what they wrote across all their works they chose to publish.