Intellectual debate: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

[Paul Mawdsley]

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[Paul Mawdsley]

Oooohhh! You mean those pages where I did all that underlining and scribbling.

[Ellen Stuttle]

[Edit: Oops; I inadvertently deleted the quote from Shayne to which I was replying when I answered earlier. He figured out, though, that I was talking to him.]

[....] You just want to drop context as a means of attacking, just as you've dropped context by posting stuff from the talent thread into this thread, or stuff from Victor's art thread into this thread.

I wonder if you've forgotten that it was you who brought in the talent thread (post #77) and Victor who brought in the art thread (post #152). Maybe your point is that I should have ignored your and his respective references.

Ellen

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Edited January 24, 2007 by Ellen Stuttle

[sjw]

Maybe your point is that I should have ignored your and his respective references.

No, actually what I was thinking was what I said: I invited you to take your disagreement about the summary of the talent thread to another thread, like say, back there. You could always link from here with a note that you disagree with how I summarized. I don't see the point of getting into a detailed argument about it here. Which reminds me of a different thread that I should really have brought back here...

[sjw]

Is this the sentence in question?:

"An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise."--Ayn Rand

Is it your claim that the sentence misrepresents her considered view on the relationship between reason and emotion?

It is my claim that the line in Galt's speech is not a lesson in psychology, and is not qualified well enough to count as a precise philosophic claim, and that the proper qualifications are in her (and her associates') non-fiction. E.g., "an emotion that you cannot explain or control" strictly speaking does not exist in her philosophy, since she held that we could always explain and control (in a qualified sense) our emotions (as indicated in the last part of that sentence). The unqualified sentence also might seem to claim that merely deciding on a different set of ideas will automatically cause your emotions to change, which is of course not true, and not what she meant.

Edited January 24, 2007 by sjw

[Rich Engle]

Sounds to me like you're explaining Miss Rand on her behalf, post mortem, Shayne.

Oh, if only she could be asked if what you propose is correct. I think she would mop up the floor with you.

Remember, that was the peak of the novel. That was where she laid down the principles. She sat there and typed that, for all time. Do you think she was just deferring to the character? The characters bore incredible weight, but above all, they were vehicles to express her true sentiment.

Explain to me how she had any doubt in her mind what she had Galt say was other than what she believed.

That, I would like to see. You can't act as her mouthpiece, it simply can't happen.

Edited January 24, 2007 by Rich Engle

[sjw]

Explain to me how she had any doubt in her mind what she had Galt say was other than what she believed.

I think what she wrote is just fine as it is. Where did I say she had any doubt? Where did I say she didn't write what she believed? No where. You just misread me the same way you misread her. Explain that.

[Rich Engle]

No, you said a few things about that.

You said that there was nitpicking, sentence plucking. I responded that if any group of folks had a chance of context vis-a-vis Rand, they'd likely be at a place like OL. I mean, I don't have Rand books all over my place like I used to, and I rarely reread after all these years except when I'm looking for something, but even with that, I easily know her work well enough to work within context. That work has been a primary for me for nearly 30 years.

You said that there was a difference between how she expressed in fiction vs. the non-fiction (and also said, I believe, that I must have not read it or something, which is weird because I told you I've read all her books, many a good deal more than once).

I asked about Galt's line, simply, is that always, or sometimes? Blank out on that one.

So, today's word for you is "no."

[sjw]

No, you said a few things about that.

About what?

You said that there was nitpicking, sentence plucking.

True enough. I'm not getting your point though.

You said that there was a difference between how she expressed in fiction vs. the non-fiction.

Well I hope there was a difference--otherwise why did she write the non-fiction?

Still not getting your point.

I asked about Galt's line, simply, is that always, or sometimes? Blank out on that one.

You said a good deal more than that. You virtually asserted that Rand was unaware or didn't account for the fact that in a conflict between reason and emotion, emotions might be pointing in the right direction. And that was what I called you on.

So, today's word for you is "no."

No what?

[Paul Mawdsley]

Paul: I think you gave us enough to argue about for the next year... For now I'll reply to this point:

Yes and no. When we define "context," what do we mean, where do we draw the boundaries? Is the context that determines appropriateness or inappropriateness of an emotion in the eye of the perceiver or some absolute objective fact of reality distinct from the perceiver?

Well this is answered in ITOE. Knowledge--any knowledge including the type you refer to--requires both reality and consciousness working to a reality-oriented method. It's neither subjective nor intrinsic but objective. It sounds to me from this that you don't agree with Rand at this very basic level. I mean, it's hard to think of a deeper, more substantial disagreement with Rand's epistemology than the one implied by your statement here.

My point is that no perceiver has an absolute perspective. Reality is absolute, and knowledge is objective because reality includes our perceptual field that connects our consciousness to the physical world causally via the senses, but our perspective of reality is relative to our psychological, philosophical and spatial/temporal position in it. All knowledge is contextual. Shift the context and you shift the perception of reality. As with Einstein's special theory of relativity, no individual perspective can be considered absolute. This is why we have to concern ourselves with the eye of the perceiver when trying to know something about absolute reality. The eye of the perceiver biases the perspective to a particular psychological, philosophical and spatial/temporal position. The way to overcome this issue is to be able to see existence empathically—i.e.: via recreations of other individual's perspectives inside oneself. This allows one to generate a multi-angled perspective of reality that brings us closer to the absolute in the same way combining individual holographic images allows one to approach seeing the complete hologram when they are held together in the right way.

Epistemology has an inescapable subjective root that renders ITOE important but incomplete.

Rand was well aware of the fact that ITOE was incomplete. That's why she called it "*Introduction* to Objectivist Epistemology". My point is that your statement implies that you have a fundamental disagreement with ITOE regarding her comments on subjective/intrinsic/objective knowledge. Could you comment on this apparent disagreement?

Aside from the relativity of perspectives, there is another way epistemology has an unescapable subjective root. We cannot see the nature of the medium of our perceptual field. According to Rand, there are entities and there are the actions and interactions of entities. What is the perceptual field? It does not fit the category of an entity. It cannot be a disembodied action. So we must assume it is the net-effect of the actions and interactions of entities. How can we know the nature of these entities if we cannot observe them? We must accept that there are parts of existence that are not governed by causality (against Objectivism), there are parts that we cannot know (against Objectivism), or there are parts we must use our creative imagination guided by the principles of identity and causality to construct. If we choose the latter, it will require we subjectively create some part of the perceptual basis of our knowledge. This also applies to parts of the psyche that underlie and cause the phenomena that shapes the flow of consciousness and to hidden variables in quantum phenomena that are required by entity-to-action causation.

Paul