In I989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Peikoff issued a sweeping declaration about the nature of philosophy.
Contradicting an assertion by David Kelley, a former member of the Ayn Rand Institute, Dr. Peikoff pronounced unequivocally that Objectivism is a closed system and more significantly that every philosophy is immutable.
That manifesto, titled Fact and Value is still widely relied on. It is available at the Ayn Rand Institute website.
As I agree with the opening section of Fact and Value, in which Dr. Peikoff set out the relationship of facts to values, I won’t comment on that. I am interested here only in his pronouncement that a philosophy is immutable.
The following is an analysis of his arguments for that proposition. My first objection does not take long to state.
The essence of his position is a contradiction. He argues passionately that any philosophy, and particularly Objectivism, is an immutable system. But then he begs us not to mutate it. Towards the end he writes:
Let us not cohabit with or become alchemists in reverse, i.e., men who turn the gold of Ayn Rand into lead.
He can’t have it both ways. You can either transform Ayn Rand’s philosophy or you can’t.
Now I agree with him on one point. What Ayn Rand wrote is what she wrote (or said) and will remain so. As Omar Khayyam has it:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
But that’s very different from claiming her philosophy is immutable. “Immutable” means “impossible to change” and “change” is a wide abstraction that includes variation, refinement and improvement.
If you claim her philosophy can’t be changed, how do you account for the fact that she varied, refined and improved it herself, by means of editing hundreds, if not thousands of times?
And at one level Dr. Peikoff knows we are perfectly capable of mutating it in a very real sense, or he wouldn’t beg us not to.
So he is equivocating on two applications of the term “immutable”: on one hand validly, to the writings of an author who can no longer edit her work and, on the other invalidly, to what we can—and should do—when there is an element in a philosophy we think can be improved.
See if you don’t agree. I have quoted the relevant parts of his article below. My comments are underneath each quote:
From Fact and Value
IN HIS LAST PARAGRAPH, Kelley states that Ayn Rand’s philosophy, though magnificent, “is not a closed system.” Yes, it is. Philosophy, as Ayn Rand often observed, deals only with the kinds of issues available to men in any era; it does not change with the growth of human knowledge, since it is the base and precondition of that growth.
Philosophy doesn’t “change with the growth of human knowledge”? Untrue: our growing knowledge changes our perspective. For example, as Ayn Rand pointed out, it took the Industrial Revolution to establish the evidence for her philosophic discovery that reason is man’s means of survival, not just his means of knowledge.
Every philosophy, by the nature of the subject, is immutable.
How can you say any theory—philosophic or otherwise—is immutable? What if the originator discovers an error? Is it beyond his power to correct it, i.e., to change it?
You might be able to say that once its originator dies, he has no more to say on the subject. But the philosophy itself is immutable? Any theory including Objectivism is highly mutable, as Dr. Peikoff himself proved with his major change to Ayn Rand’s theory of first-level concepts. She established that first -level concepts are simple concepts of entities, i.e., nouns. He stretched the category to include high-level verbs such as “cause”. For detail, see my Amazon review of The Logical Leap.
So a philosophy can be improved or worsened.
New implications, applications, integrations can always be discovered; but the essence of the system — its fundamental principles and their consequences in every branch — is laid down once and for all by the philosophy’s author.
This only has plausibility if you treat any given philosophy as a proper noun and not as a concept. But, as abstract ideas are what the originator has discovered, they can be corrected or surpassed when necessary—or the subject is a millstone around mankind’s neck.
If this applies to any philosophy, think how much more obviously it applies to Objectivism. Objectivism holds that every truth is an absolute, and that a proper philosophy is an integrated whole, any change in any element of which would destroy the entire system.
Did Ayn Rand destroy Aristotelianism by correcting its flaws? On the contrary didn’t she strengthen it? If there were a flawed element in Objectivism, wouldn’t correcting it have the same effect?
In yet another expression of his subjectivism in epistemology, Kelley decries, as intolerant, any Objectivist’s (or indeed anyone’s) “obsession with official or authorized doctrine,” which “obsession” he regards as appropriate only to dogmatic viewpoints. In other words, the alternative once again is whim or dogma: either anyone is free to rewrite Objectivism as he wishes or else, through the arbitrary fiat of some authority figure, his intellectual freedom is being stifled. My answer is: Objectivism does have an “official, authorized doctrine,” but it is not dogma. It is stated and validated objectively in Ayn Rand’s works.
Unfortunately, Dr. P just turned such a doctrine into dogma by declaring it immutable. The metaphysically given is immutable. But you can’t claim such a status for the man-made without making a dogmatic assertion.
“Objectivism” is the name of Ayn Rand’s achievement. Anyone else’s interpretation or development of her ideas, my own work emphatically included, is precisely that: an interpretation or development, which may or may not be logically consistent with what she wrote. In regard to the consistency of any such derivative work, each man must reach his own verdict, by weighing all the relevant evidence. The “official, authorized doctrine,” however, remains unchanged and untouched in Ayn Rand’s books; it is not affected by any interpreters.
This is perfectly plausible but ignores the fact that, if there are holes in its foundations or upper stories, they can and should be fixed.
THIS, I FINALLY SEE, is the cause of all the schisms which have plagued the Objectivist movement through the years, from the Brandens in 1968 on through David Kelley, and which will continue to do so for many years to come. The cause is not concrete-bound details — not differences in regard to love affairs or political strategy or proselytizing techniques or anybody’s personality. The cause is fundamental and philosophical: if you grasp and accept the concept of “objectivity,” in all its implications, then you accept Objectivism, you live by it and you revere Ayn Rand for defining it. If you fail fully to grasp and accept the concept, whether your failure is deliberate or otherwise, you eventually drift away from Ayn Rand’s orbit, or rewrite her viewpoint or turn openly into her enemy.
This is wishful thinking about the schisms. What about the human evil—such as envy and status protection—on the gatekeeper side of the wall?
Now I want to consider consequences.
How destructive is it to declare any philosophy immutable? Consider the following four questions:
Whose philosophy is it anyway?
Once a person learns a philosophy, he has the option of making it his own. It may be Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but it is now also his. If he then finds it inadequate to reality, integrity demands he makes any changes he sees fit.
Or doesn’t Dr. Peikoff grant him that right?
Is philosophy metaphysically given or man-made?
Dr. Peikoff implies that because Objectivism is true, it is beyond change, all the while insisting that there is no dogma in Objectivism. But as noted earlier he just introduced a dogma.
No matter how good a philosophy is, the assumption of perfection is a form of dogmatism.
Any philosophy is man-made. It must therefore be treated as such. To quote Ayn Rand:
It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. (From her article The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made.)
To exempt any philosophy from that rule is profoundly anti-Objectivist.
Does change equal destruction?
What Dr. Peikoff is actually arguing is that change in philosophy equals destruction. But change is far from synonymous with destruction. A change may be an improvement.
His argument about philosophy’s immutability is similar to his arguments about concepts. He decreed concepts don’t change once formed. His reasoning was that it would be destructive. Yet on page 25 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology Ayn Rand showed a child benefiting by expanding (i.e., changing) his concept “animal”.
The idea that change equals destruction is an arbitrary dogma.
What does a closed system imply?
One of the implications of a system being declared closed is that you can’t integrate the system with anything else. There is no way to make the connections. By definition the door is shut. That’s a serious mistake with philosophy. You should be able to integrate any philosophy with other philosophic ideas that are compatible. The result will be an expanded understanding.
It boils down to why we adopt a philosophy in the first place. We adopt a philosopher’s system because we think it will aid our thinking and our ability to act. But the intellectual freedom to make changes in that philosophy, if we think reality demands it, is paramount, or that system ceases to be a good servant and becomes a bad master.
Reality is the standard, not any philosopher’s ideas about reality, no matter how great the philosopher.
My conclusion is that the immutability and closed system doctrines are stifling to rational thought and will shrink the perspective of anyone who adopts them.
They are the Berlin Wall of Objectivism.
Dr. Peikoff, tear them down.
© Tom Minchin © June 2017
NEXT QUESTION
If a philosophy is not immutable, what about a concept? Is it immutable too, as Dr. Peikoff claims? In Objectivism the Philosophy of Ayn Rand he wrote, “a concept once formed, does not change”. Is that right and why does it matter?
The most crucial idea in human existence is reason. The best definition of reason was offered by Ayn Rand, who wrote that it is “the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses.”
How do we retain the identifications and integrations reason makes? By means of concepts.
What are they? Are they mental entities or something else?
As I will show on this site, our understanding of these abstractions has just begun. I offer a new concept of what a concept is.
Why should you care? Because whether you know it or not, concepts are variables. If you don’t know it, you will be controlled by people who change them below your awareness.
Have you noticed how the meaning of the concept “peer-reviewed” has been corrupted in climate change subjects? If you haven’t, you’ll be taken in by fake science presented as fact.
But surely concepts have fixed meanings? Great thinkers like Aristotle and Ayn Rand thought so. That doesn’t make it true. Ayn Rand thought that the only alternative to fixed meanings was arbitrary meanings.
But there is another alternative. Consider the following:
How do you shoot down an ICBM? You integrate two variables with sufficient precision. You take the changing paths and acceleration of two missiles and coordinate them. What is my point? The human mind can deal with variables.
Huge progress was made when mankind learned to do it mathematically.
Here’s an example–a system where the variables of speed, direction and rail shapes are beautifully coordinated:
The discovery of how to coordinate variables has a bearing on concepts.
According to all previous theories, meaning is either fixed or arbitrary. My theory holds that it is neither. I hold that the meaning of a concept can vary and a concept is coordinated with its varying context to produce a precise shade of meaning. You can control it.
If a concept is an immutable mental entity, how is that possible? Well, to start with, a concept isn’t even a mental entity—not fundamentally.
What is it exactly? The next several articles will answer that in detail.
My curiosity began when I realised Ayn Rand had made a statement about selfishness that did not square with the evidence….