The Metaphysics of a Corn Seed
I have one more new chapter posted at The Prophet of Causation. Like I said, I’m pushing this out while I can still concentrate on longer philosophical projects. At the rate I’m going, I’ll have the whole second half of the book posted by the end of next week—though the final chapter is one where I came up with some very interesting new ideas after the initial lectures, so it will probably take a bit more work.
The new chapter is “The Metaphysics of a Corn Seed,” hence the image above. It’s a takeoff on Ayn Rand’s use of “seed corn” to explain the role of capital in an economy. Well, she uses “stock seed,” but as someone who grew up in the Midwest, I couldn’t resist making it about corn. That, and it made for a more intriguing chapter title.
My last chapter was on the foundations of Ayn Rand’s political philosophy, and this one is on the specific application of her politics and particularly her case for property rights and capitalism. I present an analysis of Rand’s case for the right to property, and how it differs from John Locke’s, which I think is unique to me and which I have discussed in previous articles in this newsletter.
There is one observation from the book that I decided to cut out and save for this newsletter. It’s about the thing I find most compelling about how Ayn Rand talks and writes about philosophy—the thing that differentiates her from previous philosophers who I otherwise like but find somewhat unsatisfying.
John Locke in particular has a tendency to fall back on analogies and metaphors. In this chapter, I look at his famous passage about how we acquire property by taking unowned resources and “mingling” them with our labor. Locke is definitely on to something; there’s a real fact he’s trying to identify. But he gets stuck in the metaphor and doesn’t quite get to a literal description of reality.
A metaphor can be a step toward the literal, and it is often the first way we identify a new idea. It is natural we should try to grasp something new by comparing it to what is known and familiar, and many advances made by philosophers come first in the form of analogies and metaphors. But if the purpose of philosophy is to arrive at an exact understanding of an idea and ground it solidly in reality, it is necessary to dig beneath the metaphor.
That is one of Ayn Rand’s crucial and underappreciated philosophical virtues: her relentless insistence on looking for the exact and literal statement of a philosophical principle rather than settling for a metaphor. It might seem strange that this comes from a novelist, who you think would be more susceptible to the influence of poetic imagery. (See Victor Hugo, whose political and philosophical views are kind of a muddle for precisely this reason.) Then again, Rand’s literary style did strive for a kind of spare, literal exactness and realism in a way that I suspect may be unique to American writers in the early 20th Century. That is certainly the quality she brought to philosophy. That, and talking about philosophy in plain English (for the most part), avoiding unnecessarily technical or esoteric terminology, which is another occupational hazard of philosophers.
At any rate, this observation seemed a bit too “meta” to put into the book, and the chapter was already longer than I was aiming for, so I saved it for here.
The reason the chapter was longer is that I wanted to spend a little time talking about Rand’s views on representative government—my one concession to the change in political context from her time to our own. Here is how I put it.
Ayn Rand wrote most of her work in the historical context of the middle of the 20th Century and particularly the Cold War contest between capitalism and communism—a context that was concrete and personal for her as a refugee from the Soviet Union. It is natural, then, that her writing on politics focuses primarily on the case for property rights, freedom for production and trade, and “separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.”
She spent considerably less time writing about the separation of church and state, or political freedom, or representative government. This is partly because she largely took those elements for granted as not being seriously contested in the politics of her day….
In today’s context, when the global political contest is less between capitalism and socialism than between authoritarianism and “liberal democracy,” we might wonder whether Ayn Rand was on the side of the liberal democrats. Obviously, we are not using “liberal” or “democrat” in their narrow partisan senses, to refer to a member of the Democratic Party or a 20th-Century “liberal” advocate of the welfare state. We are using the term “liberal democracy” as political scientists use it, to refer to representative government combined with protections for individual rights.
This describes Rand’s position exactly, but with a special emphasis on the liberal part, on the protections for individual rights….
But she also offered some intriguing ideas about how those two elements—voting and individual rights—are connected.
I’ll leave off with that as a teaser for the rest of the chapter, and for the book, too, when it is ready for publishing. And I will be exploring some of the philosophy of democracy throughout this year on my own behalf and fully in my own voice.
In the meantime, you can subscribe to The Prophet of Causation to read the whole thing and get the last chapter as it comes out (and all the preceding ones, and the lectures and Q&As on which they are based).