Non-Randian Egoists

[syrakusos]

I have some freedom this coming semester to pick several topics in sociology. One of my interest areas is the role of the individual and more closely, the roles available to an individualist within a complex organization. Toward that end I have been searching the literature in several related areas. I recently found books on selfishness and egoism and they raise some pertinent problems.

In the 19th century Henry Sidgwick brought back several discussions of rational self-interest originally from Hobbes. I found The Art of Selfishness (1937 1964) by David Seabury. From the Prentiss-Hall academic publishers there was a series on "Central Issues in Philosophy" in which the volume Morality and Self-Interest was edited by David P. Gauthier. Basing the presentations (10 essays on three broad problems) on the past, the editor looks again to Sidgwick and also to one G. E. Moore, also considered a proponent of rational egoism.

Ayn Rand appears in none of these and she refers to none in her own writing. Now it might be said that Rand was a novelist. However works of fiction do receive attention in formal philosophy. As a freshman and again as a sophomore in philosophy I had to read outtakes from Dostoevsky. For Sociology of the Workplace (a 300-level class) we were treated to The Jungle and encourage to read The Octopus. So, that Rand was not a formal, academic philosopher is not the strongest argument against including her works in academic studies of moral philosophy.

The opposite problem is likewise challenging. Why with her penchant for Hegel and Kant did she not address (and presumably correct or amend) the known egoists before her? This is a study I have just begun being on Christmas (ooops! er ah "holiday") Break. However in one evening of reading, I can see where Rand cut a few gordian knots. Every philosopher who attacked the problem of self-interest -- especially self-interest in a social context, the only one cogent from their point of view -- began with some special assumptions. That is to be expected. Otherwise every study would go back to Plato and Aristotle and boil down to "ain't.... is... ain't not... is too...." So in each generation a new paradigm placed the same old problems in new contexts. Rand's viewpoint was certainly deserving. It is on a desert island that an individual has a profound need for a morality of self-interest. That said, what of the individual within sociiety?

What I have found is at least half a dozen other ways to consider this problem. I post this here only to ask if others have also found additional egoist discussions aside from Rand (and of course Stirner whom we all know).

Edited December 22, 2007 by Michael E. Marotta

[Reidy]

I've just gotten hold of Bloomfield's anthology Morality and Self-Interest and so can't say much about it. Bloomfield himself is due to address the APA Ayn Rand Society next week, as has been mentioned here at OL. One of the contributors to the anthology is David Schmidtz of Arizona, a past speaker at ARS/APA.

In his intro, Bloomfield mentions this very desert-island situation as a way to distinguish between philosophers who say that ethics is primarily other-oriented (who thus would say that morality doesn't matter in this situation) and those who say it primarily concerns ourselves (and thus that it would).

Side point: Rand did mention Hobbes once in passing. When she was on the lecture circuit ca. 1960, Time reported on one of her appearances. She wrote them a fairly friendly letter pointing out that they wouldn't understand her by means of Hobbes or Spencer.

[UncleJim]

A man who lives on an island by himself has certain things he must do to remain a man on that island. This establishes the purpose of his existence. His purpose is to be what he is, wherever he exists. His purpose has nothing at all to do with another's purpose; which of course, is exactly the same as his.

Now when this man walks to the other side of the island and discovers another man his purpose does not change nor does the purpose for the existence of the other man.

Selfishness explains the nature of those actions which are a requirement of individual human survival. Selfishness does not allow for steeling, fraud and force to enter into how one human interacts with another. Selfishness; when applied to society, is called capitalism.

[Aggrad02]

Oriana Fallaci considered herself an aethiest, an individualist, and egoist. She was not a philosopher but a journalist/novelist. Her work is very interesting. She never (to my knowledge of her work so far which is limited) laid out a philosophy, but it can be gleamed from her novels.

Here is the first paragraph of the prologue of her novel A Man (It is very Rand-esque):

A roar of grief and rage rose over the city and boomed, relentless, obsessive, sweeping away any other sound, beating out the great lie. Zi, , zi, zi, He lives, he lives, he lives! A roar that had nothing human about it. In fact, it did not rise from human beings, creatures with two arms and two legs and mind of their own; it rose from a monstrous, mindless beast, the crowd, the octopus that at noon, barnacled, with clenched fist, distorted faces, contracted mouths, had invaded the square of the orthodox cathedral, then stretched its tentacles into the nearby trees, jamming them, submerging them, implacable as the larva that overwhelms and devours every obstacle, deafening them with its zi, zi, zi. Escaping it was hopless. Some tried. They shut themselves up in houses, shops, offices, wherever it seemed possible to find refuge, at lest not to hear the roar. But filtering through the doors, the windows, the walls, it still reached their ears and after a while they also succumbed to its spell. With the pretext of having a look they would come out, approach a tentacle and be swamped: to become a clenched fist, a distorted face a contracted mouth. Zi, zi, zi! And the octopus grew, expanded in sudden leaps, at each leap another thousand, another ten thousand, another hundred thousand. By two in the afternoon there were five hundred thousand, by three a million, by four a million and a half, and by five no one was counting. They did not come only from the city, from Athens. They also came from far away, by trains, by boats, on buses, from the countryside of Attica and Epirus, from the Aegean Islands, from the villages of Peloponnesus, from Macedonia, Thessaly: creatures with two arms and two legs and a mind of their own before the octopus swallowed them, peasants and fisherman in their Sunday suits, workers in their overalls, women leading their children, students. The people. That people which until yesterday had avoided you, left you alone like a irksome dog, ignoring you when you said: "Don't let yourselves be regimented by dogma, by uniforms, by doctrines, don't let yourself by fooled by those who command you, by those who promise, who frighten, by those who want to replace one master with another, don't be a flock of sheep, for heaven's sake, don't hide under the umbrella of other people's guilt, think with your own brains, remember that each of you is somebody, a valuable individual, responsible, his own maker, defend your being, the kernel of all freedom, freedom is duty, a duty even more than a right".

Part of the last:

I set off in search of your tale. The familiar legend of the hero who fights alone, kicked, despised, misunderstood. the familiar story of the man who refuses to bow before churches, fear, fashions, ideological formulas, absolute principles from whatever direction they come, in whatever color they are dressed; a man who preaches freedom. The familiar tragedy of the individual who will not fall in line, who will not resign himself, who thinks with his own head, and therefore dies, slain by all.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orianna_Fallaci

[Jim Profit]

Edited February 6, 2009 by Michael Stuart Kelly

[Brant Gaede]

I live under capitalism not because I want too. But because people have banded together and enforce the rule of law. It's only in my rational self interest because there's no real choice. It's either a death sentence or grim and bearing this shit.

But I'd kill, steal, rape, fraud, and otherwise commit any sortof immoral activity against another human being the moment I knew I could get away with it. Freedom entails the best and worst in men. Freedom can make us creative and happy, and it can make us cruel and depraved...

You cannot tell me there's never been anyone you havn't wanted to see suffer, but havn't tried to sabatoge their life? Why? Did you honestly feel there was some rational reason for this? Or were you too distracted by being taught as a child by religious ideology what's good and what's bad? And even if you weren't, that damn law will still get in your way...

You're an SOB. Go away, please, go shit on another forum.

--Brant

[Jim Profit]

Edited February 6, 2009 by Michael Stuart Kelly

[Brant Gaede]

You're an SOB. Go away, please, go shit on another forum.

--Brant

Are you too intillectually weak to comeup with a reasonable and strong argument against me?

Am I that surpirior where you've resorted to begging this quickly for me not to embaress you any further? I havn't even targeted you specifically, everything I say I mean as a general term. Yet you seem fixated on what I have to say. You feel awfully threatened by me. Envy perhaps?

Rapist! Troll! I know exactly what you are you bastard! Go away!

--Brant

[Chris Grieb]

You're an SOB. Go away, please, go shit on another forum.

--Brant

Are you too intillectually weak to comeup with a reasonable and strong argument against me?

Am I that surpirior where you've resorted to begging this quickly for me not to embaress you any further? I havn't even targeted you specifically, everything I say I mean as a general term. Yet you seem fixated on what I have to say. You feel awfully threatened by me. Envy perhaps?

Rapist! Troll! I know exactly what you are you bastard! Go away!

--Brant

Bant; You don't like Jim? Please let me know.

[John Tate]

I think the best way to tackle thinking about self-interest from a desert to a society is to simply illuistrate with fiction to yourself the desert with one man, and then add another to the story, perhaps a worthless parasite who lives off of the first man. Then, how he deals with the looter, for example, by not giving in consciously and defending himself from physical demands. Add more, from there, build a society and see what you like.

[syrakusos]

Side point: Rand did mention Hobbes once in passing. When she was on the lecture circuit ca. 1960, Time reported on one of her appearances. She wrote them a fairly friendly letter pointing out that they wouldn't understand her by means of Hobbes or Spencer.

I will get the Bloomfield book. I went back and re-read the Gauthier anthology. I also just finished writing a large paper on Herbert Spencer. He took Hobbes to task on moral issues. I can see why Ayn Rand appreciated the difference between Spencer's approach and her own: Spencer did not focus on the individual qua, but on society and studies psychology, etc., only by way of establishing a groundwork for the study of society.

Oriana Fallaci is easier to understand in non-fiction, sorry to admit. I am happy that others find her fiction valuable.

[UncleJim]

I think the best way to tackle thinking about self-interest from a desert to a society is to simply illuistrate with fiction to yourself the desert with one man, and then add another to the story, perhaps a worthless parasite who lives off of the first man. Then, how he deals with the looter, for example, by not giving in consciously and defending himself from physical demands. Add more, from there, build a society and see what you like.

I'm not sure when you added the second man you chose a "worthless parasite." Such a person cannot exist except by sanction of the first; i.e., the achiever. In other words: he [the parasite] did not pre-exist his existence as a parasite because he would have died as soon as he was abandoned by his parent supporters.