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 |  Subject: Phony philosopher Michael Huemer: Ayn Rand: World’s Greatest Philosopher, or Incompetent Jerk?  Tue Oct 05, 2021 5:13 pm | |
| Ayn Rand the Philosopher
As a philosopher, however, Ayn Rand pretty much failed. I don’t just mean that she failed to figure out the objectively correct answers to lots of philosophical questions. After all, all or nearly all philosophers have failed by that standard. I mean that she failed to significantly advance the discussion. Most of her works are not intellectually interesting to professional philosophers, and this, I believe, is not merely because of philosophers’ peculiar tastes, but because of intellectual flaws in Rand’s philosophical work.
Again, I’m not going to detail Rand’s philosophical mistakes here. I’m just going to diagnose in a general way what I think went wrong.
People who are familiar with contemporary philosophy, when they look at Rand’s work, typically describe it as simplistic and poorly reasoned. That is because it is in fact simplistic and poorly reasoned. She neglects to support key assumptions that need justification. She does not anticipate objections that smart people would raise. When she talks about other philosophers, besides insulting them, she evinces minimal understanding of their ideas, like a student trying to write an essay on a book without ever opening the book, just based on looking at the front cover. Sometimes, she makes absurdly false generalizations about intellectual history that leave you wondering what planet she is referring to (e.g., when she describes the history of ethics as consisting of attempts to relegate ethics to the province of the irrational).
Why did this happen? Is it because she was stupid, or irrational, or mean?
Not really. I think she had one core intellectual flaw: she had no faith in other human beings’ cognitive capacities. She assumed that she had nothing to learn from other people, so she did not try to learn anything from them. This may be because while growing up in communist Russia, she was smarter and/or more rational than all the people around her, even the adults. It may also be partly a matter of laziness, since understanding other people’s ideas requires work.
Why is this a mistake? One would be correct to assume that most human beings are stupid or irrational when it comes to philosophy. If you’re a kid who has met all of 200 adults, it can easily happen that not one of them has had anything worthwhile to say about philosophy.
But what is true of a random group of people you run into in some random town is very different from what is true if you select the top people in a given field in the entire world. In the latter case, you’re going to find some amazingly talented and interesting people. Note also that contemporary thinkers are often much more sophisticated than those of the past, so you would also get a false impression of what there is to learn from other people if you just looked at the “great” philosophers of the past. (See .https://fakenous.net/?p=1754, .https://fakenous.net/?p=1168.)
For reflection: If you don’t learn anything from other thinkers, even the best thinkers in the world, what is more likely: that none of them have anything to teach, or that you’re a bad learner?
So Rand thinks other humans are stupid. So she doesn’t bother to look into what they have to say. She never seriously studies philosophy (outside of her own ideas), but she opines about it anyway. When you do this, you make errors that look silly to people who have trained for years. This would happen to anyone, however smart they are. (Analogy: if someone teaches himself to play chess, without ever consulting any books or any theory developed by other people, then, however smart that person may be, any decent tournament player will walk all over him in a match.) The basic reason for all this is that the truth about the world is complicated and subtle. So much so that it has to be progressively uncovered over the course of generations.
.https://fakenous.net/?p=2583&fbclid=IwAR2Frl4cxMscZrUQI8VARImxNag5IwfLFSgQSra0Z1sqv65OrLZ0KHoa2Rw
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