Objectivism for the First 250 Years

Are we using a philosophy, or running a museum?

I mentioned a while back that Stephen Hicks and Craig Biddle were conducting the first actual debate over an issue that has long roiled the famously fractious Objectivist movement: “open” Objectivism versus “closed” Objectivism.

The question is: Was the philosophy of Objectivism completed with Ayn Rand’s death and therefore closed off to any further additions, corrections, or innovations? Or is the philosophy open to expansion with new discoveries and the growth of knowledge? Is it Ayn Rand’s philosophy, not just in the sense that she originated it, but in the sense of being fully identical with her philosophical ideas? Or is it a school of philosophy to which later adherents can attribute new ideas?

The way I phrased that is, I think, accurate to the underlying issues—though to state the issue accurately will naturally predispose one to the second set of conclusions.

The Hicks-Biddle debate was held back in April, and you can view it online.

I found it very enlightening in some unexpected ways.

I am mostly just happy that we are finally talking about this out in the open, instead of sniping at each other from behind our barricades. The main thing that struck me is not that this was the first debate, but that it was a very civilized debate. In fact, in viewing it, you might not get the impression that this is such a knock-down drag-out issue that some people still refuse even to debate it (even while they spend a lot of time discussing why they won’t debate it).

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Given this history, it was strange that I found Stephen and Craig to be in substantial agreement on all of the really important points. Here is how I would summarize those points.

1. We can and should be doing more work to refine and extend Ayn Rand’s philosophical ideas.

2. Whoever comes up with these new refinements should take credit for them.

3. Scholars should note which ideas are part of Ayn Rand’s original work and which are later refinements or formulations added by others.

So what’s the big point of disagreement? Stephen says that the new ideas can be referred to as “Objectivism,” and Craig says that they should be referred to as “ideas that integrate with Objectivism.”

The argument isn’t over the substance of what we’re doing, but about the words we use to describe it. And there’s not even much disagreement there! If I write a book and say that my new ideas are “an Objectivist theory of history,” while Harry Binswanger writes a book and says that his new ideas are “epistemology on an Objectivist foundation”—is there really all that much difference?

It’s no wonder that, when the two debaters were asked at the beginning why this issue matters, they didn’t give a really compelling answer, certainly nothing that would explain the vitriol expended on this issue over the decades. (And the vitriol is still ongoing. See here to get a sense of the heat Craig Biddle has gotten for even debating this.)

But notice how we got to this low-conflict version of the debate. One of the best things about the discussion is that both Stephen and Craig started by saying we should ignore the history of past personal conflicts within the Objectivist movement and focus only on the philosophical issues. That is an excellent idea—but notice what happens when we do that. The issue of open versus closed Objectivism becomes relatively narrow, low-stakes, and low-energy.

It almost makes you wonder if this issue was mostly about the personal conflicts and factional in-fighting all along.

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If you go all the way back to the original sources on this, that is largely what you find. It’s not discussed much any more, and it’s been memory-holed so much that here is the only place online that I can find the essay that set it all off. But this idea of Open Objectivism versus Closed Objectivism was initially brought up in the context of a couple of relatively non-philosophical issues: Is it OK to speak at libertarian events or to read Barbara Branden’s book about Ayn Rand? But then Objectivists did what we Objectivist tend to do and tried to win the debate by escalating it. So there was a temptation to say that the debate wasn’t really about libertarianism. It was about the nature of philosophy itself. And then from there, in Leonard Peikoff’s 1989 essay “Fact and Value,” it became a way of saying who is a “genuine” Objectivist versus who should be invited to leave the movement and subsequently shunned.

To get an idea of how all of this was tied up with personalities and factionalism, I offer you a video of some Ayn Rand Institute-associated intellectuals talking about why they won’t debate the issue, and—look, I’m going to admit that I didn’t watch the whole thing, because I got halfway through and the overwhelming majority of the discussion was about how Nathaniel Branden was a bad guy. Branden passed away in 2014 and before that had not been intellectually active for many years.

So was there ever anything substantive to this debate? I used to endorse the Closed Objectivism view, so I understand some of the impetus behind it. There is always a guy out there who wants to change Objectivism to make it compatible with his pet idea—God or anarchism or the Universal Basic Income. So it’s natural to worry that such people will confuse or debase the philosophy for those who are encountering it for the first time.

But I came to realize how wildly overblown this problem is. How do people become aware of Ayn Rand? Primarily by way of Ayn Rand. Ask yourself: How many people know who Ayn Rand is, versus those who know who Nathaniel Branden is? The ratio was at least 10 to 1 at the height of Branden’s career, and these days it’s probably closer to a million to one. This is all the more true for some random guy on the Internet or a rogue assistant professor who has his own ideas for how Objectivism can be altered. If you find out about any of these people, it’s almost certainly because you’re already interested in Ayn Rand and already reading her own work.

So this isn’t really a problem, and when you think about it, declaring Objectivism to be closed isn’t really a solution. If you’ve ever encountered the sort of person who thinks that what Ayn Rand’s philosophy really needs is more room for God or the welfare state—do you think he’s gonna knock it off because you declared the philosophy closed?

By contrast, the person most likely to be impacted by the idea that Objectivism is a closed system is the sincere and earnest young person who cares about showing respect for Ayn Rand and her achievement. But those are precisely the people we want to be encouraging to add new ideas, whatever words they use to describe these additions. The problem with closing the philosophy to prevent its abuse is that it is a solution focused more on fear than on opportunity. It attempts to block off a negative consequence without considering the positive consequences it might also block off.

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That gets us to the reason why this is important, regardless of the history of Objectivist schisms and conflicts.

The question is: Are we using a philosophy, or running a museum?

I can explain what I mean by that by answering two objections Craig Biddle brings up in this debate and in some pieces he has written at his own site.

First is the argument that Open Objectivism is a “frozen abstraction.” This is the fallacy Ayn Rand identified in which you confuse one example of an abstraction for the abstraction itself. Craig applies that to this issue.

[P]hilosophic truth is not the same thing as Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism. If the principles of Objectivism are true, and I think they are, then they fall under the broad umbrella of “philosophic truth”—but they are not the equivalent of that umbrella. To treat them as the equivalent is to commit the fallacy of the frozen abstraction, which consists in substituting a particular conceptual concrete for the wider abstract class or category to which it belongs. In the case at hand, it consists in substituting a specific true philosophy, “Objectivism,” for the general class or category of “true philosophy.”

Craig has named the right issue but applied it the wrong way.

In the debate, he makes the point that Objectivism is a proper noun, but it is a proper noun for a set ofabstractions. “Ayn Rand” is a proper noun that refers to a specific concrete entity, a person who lived at a specific time and said certain specific things. But while a philosophy can be referred to by a proper name, it is obviously a different kind of thing, because it doesn’t refer to a concrete entity. It refers to a body of ideas—and those ideas are, by their nature, open-ended.

In the debate, Craig worries that “every time anybody discovers a new truth, or what they think is a new truth, it’s going to get packed in there, and then somebody says, ‘Well, what do you think about Objectivism,’ now, ‘I don’t know, what the latest thing that got packed into this thing?’… That is not how concepts or proper names work.” I am assuming that he misspoke in saying initially that this is not how concepts work, because this is exactly how concepts work. The open-endedness of concepts is a crucial idea put forward in Ayn Rand’s Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology. A concept refers to a certain class of things in the real world, including those you already know about and all the new ones you will encounter in the future. So there is always new knowledge and there are always future observations that can be added to it.

The philosophical ideas that are parts of Objectivism, like “the primacy of existence” or “concept-formation by measurement-omission” or “rational self-interest” are open-ended in the sense that they refer to all future examples and everything we will ever know about them. This means, among other things, that these ideas can and must encompass any new information or new formulations that will be discovered in the future.

The actual frozen abstraction is to equate “the philosophy of Objectivism” with only the specific formulations used by Ayn Rand. That’s what the Closed Objectivism position ultimately has to mean. The minute anyone summarizes or paraphrases Ayn Rand’s ideas, putting them into new words, he is in danger of introducing a new connection or implication that Ayn Rand did not intend or that might even diverge from her meaning. I say “danger,” but from my perspective, it’s an opportunity. Part of the value of talking about her philosophy in your own words is that you discover new things. But if the goal is to keep the philosophy in the exact state that she left it to us—well, new formulations are risky. To keep the philosophy truly closed, it would have to refer, not to an open-ended body of ideas, but to Ayn Rand’s specific words.

That’s what I mean about this being an example of a “frozen abstraction.” “The philosophy of Objectivism” would be reduced to a single concrete: the collected writings of Ayn Rand. It would refer to a stack of books, not the ideas they communicate.

The second thing I want to respond to is Craig’s opening in the debate, where he tries to demonstrate the absurdity of Open Objectivism by projecting what would happen if he declared himself to be a Marxist while changing Marxist ideas.

But that’s not a good example to use for this point, because one of the most striking things about Marxism is exactly how many variations and sub-variations the philosophy has accumulated over the years. Somewhere in my house I have a copy of a book titled Main Currents of Marxism, which is an overview of the different variations of Marxism that were put forward during the 20th Century. It’s about 1200 pages long.

The Marxists have not always been good about accepting these variations, and their often vicious factionalism spawned many an old joke. (That joke, in turn, is a variation on this one. Don’t ever say that you didn’t learn anything from this newsletter.) This, by the way, is why I heave a sigh whenever someone looks at the fractiousness of Objectivism and says we’re a “cult.” No, this is just standard-issue movement politics. The left fights among themselves over petty differences, and so do conservatives, and so do the libertarians and the greens. Everybody does it. I think Objectivists, as advocates of reason, ought to be able to do better. But I suppose it’s somewhat utopian to think that we would automatically escape the petty policing of ideology purity.

The point is that this is what it looks like when a philosophy is actually being put into use by a large and active movement of intellectuals. The main problem with Closed Objectivism is that nobody has been able to furnish me with an example of a philosophy, any other philosophy, that has been treated in this closed manner. Not the Aristotelians, not the Empiricists, not the Marxists. (The other example Craig cites in the Montessori system, but I actually know people whose job is to incorporate new ideas and discoveries into Montessori education.)

I think we need to start moving to that kind of perspective on this. We can talk about these other movements as broad schools of thought with many variations because we see them in the context of hundreds of years, even thousands of years, of development.

So it’s worth asking: What will Objectivism look like after its first 250 years?

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If this seems outlandish, reflect that we are farther along toward that milestone than you may think. The Fountainhead was published 80 years ago, and the birth of Objectivism as a fully developed philosophy happened somewhere between then and the publication of Atlas Shrugged 66 years ago. So we are somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way toward the quarter-millennium mark.

The original discussions about Open versus Closed Objectivism, such as they were, took place in the late 1980s, only a few years after Ayn Rand’s death, when it might have seemed unlikely that there would be new additions to be made to Ayn Rand’s ideas. But as the decades pile up, and certainly as centuries pass, the amount of new knowledge about Objectivism that is valid and useful, even indispensable, is going to build up. I am currently working up a list of Objectivist ideas in need of further development, which I will publish after I get a chance to get feedback from other scholars. The list is not short.

So these new ideas and observations and developments are going to build up. What will people eventually do with them? Will there be a dozen little sub-philosophies? Objectivism and Peikoffism and Kelleyism and (heaven forbid) Tracinskiism. (Would that have two i’s or one?) Or would we incorporate new ideas into Neo-Objectivism? Or would we go the Marxist-Leninist route and talk about the doctrines of Randism-Peikoffism and how they differ from “Robert Tracinski Thought”? Or will people decide for another 200 years to use kludgy elocutions like “philosophy on an Objectivist foundation” or “in the Randian tradition”?

Maybe they will call it “the Objectivist school.” But I think they will do what people have done with every other philosophy and just call it “Objectivism,” and it will be understood that the original article, the origin of the name and the benchmark for everything else, is the work of Ayn Rand. They will do this out of actual epistemological necessity, because when someone creates a new idea here or there, he has not in fact created a whole new philosophy. It serves the epistemological function of economy of thought to file those new ideas as a variation on an existing philosophy.

Some of these later developments will be widely and uncontroversially accepted. By long-established argument, they will have won people over as valid and consistent with the rest of the philosophy. There will no doubt be crackpot splinter versions that are not consistent with Ayn Rand’s philosophy and are widely regarded as such. Then there will be vigorous debate about other additions and elaborations whose status is not so obvious.

But this kind of debate will all just seem normal. As it should.

This is where we’re going to end up, and it’s where we have to end up as knowledge continues to grow and advance. I don’t expect that any of the fundamentals of Ayn Rand’s philosophy will be overturned by new knowledge, because I think they are true. But I know from first-hand work in this field that there is a great deal still to be added and expanded upon.

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That leads to my own personal interest in this and my sense of why it matters.

In my recent course on Objectivism, The Prophet of Causation, I did not set out specifically to say anything new. I deliberately set myself the goal of just looking at the existing ideas, albeit from a new and clarifying perspective. But in doing that, I had to come up with all sorts of new ideas and connections. Just to attempt to understand the philosophy to the best of my ability, I had to come up with new ideas about it. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be doing my job.

And I’m not the only one. Way back in 1987, when I was first entering the movement, Leonard Peikoff gave a set of lectures titled “Objectivism: State of the Art,” in which he described the new things he had learned about Objectivism in the process of writing his book about the philosophy. And then a few years later, he declared the philosophy closed.

The point is the everyone who actively uses Objectivism as a philosophy, certainly every professional intellectual working in this field, has to do the same thing. And that’s great, it’s exactly what we should be encouraging. We should give awards for it, an annual prize—a cash prize, I hope—for the person who makes the best and most useful new addition to the philosophy of Objectivism.

But we can’t do that if we accept the idea that any such new discovery is not Objectivism. If you have to count every new formulation and new idea as something outside of Objectivism with a totally new name, then in effect, you are asking for “Objectivism” as a name to slowly go out of existence. And the faster it goes out of existence the better, because that means we’re adding new ideas and new understanding.

Like I said, that is not how this has ever worked before, and I can’t find a compelling reason to start now. I don’t think the name “Objectivism” will fade out of use with the growth of knowledge. I think it is this insistence on an idiosyncratic approach to terminological distinctions that will fade.

I don’t think there are actually that many people who will defend intellectual stasis as an ideal, so we’re not actually arguing over anything substantive. But there are those who, because of the history of internal Objectivist movement politics, will soldier on with a stubborn insistence on one terminological preference over another, nearly identical one.

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The only reason the terminology matters at all is that it sends a message about what we are supposed to be doing when we study, discuss, and use the philosophy of Objectivism. Is discovering new knowledge about Objectivism like engaging in a voyage of discovery, where you set out to find new lands and new vistas? Or is the goal to dig up and preserve relics of a civilization whose achievements are all in the past?

Do we approach the study of Objectivism as exploration, or as archaeology?

When we reach the first 250 years of Objectivism, I hope and expect that we will be able to give that first answer.