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Next week we’re starting The Fountainhead in my Introduction to Philosophy course.
On education: “I came here to learn about building. When I was given a project, its only value to me was to learn to solve it as I would solve a real one in the future.”
On creative motivation: “I don’t intent to build in order to have clients. I intent to have clients in order to build.”
Can’t wait.
I am organizing a session for the Association for Private Enterprise Education conference to be held April 11-13, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The theme is “Reason in Hayek and Rand.”
Here we have two giants of twentieth-century thought, but few comparative studies have been done. So as a start I have chosen Reason as a focusing theme and have solicited papers from several scholars on topics such as the following:
* How does Friedrich Hayek’s account of reason compare to Ayn Rand’s?
* Hayek is more focused on reason’s role in social causation while Rand is more focused on reason as an individual phenomenon. True?
* Is it accurate to say that Hayek is a sociologist of reason while Rand is a philosopher of reason?
* Hayek is an empiricist, broadly speaking, as is Rand, but Hayek’s reason is more Humean while Rand’s is more Aristotelian. True?
* Hayek has been interpreted as being a skeptic about reason and as tending to postmodernism (e.g., by Theodore Burczak). True? And if so, does this put him in direct contrast to Rand, who is a strong anti-skeptic?
* Hayek sometimes seems ambivalent about the relation between reason-based discoveries of social science and normative issues. Rand tightly integrates reason’s descriptive and normative functions. Issue here?
* On socialism: Hayek argues a reason-as-fatal-conceit thesis, while Rand places the blame primarily on an ultimately irrational altruism. Are these interpretations complementary or in conflict?
When the session’s panel is finalized, I’ll post it.
Since its 2006 publication, my 2:45-hour documentary on Nietzsche and the Nazis has been available from Amazon, Netflix, and other venues.
Beginning this summer, Netflix has made the documentary available via video-stream, which has led to a healthy uptick in feedback — including gratifying praise, interesting new angles, thoughtful disagreement — and a smattering of ad hominem and/or otherwise vituperative attacks from those whose interpretations of National Socialism or Nietzsche are very different than mine.
Probably par for the course when dealing with such weighty matters and polarizing political movements and philosophers.
This summer I have been turning the script into a manuscript (and am almost finished). The manuscript includes the footnotes for all the key quotations and assertions, along with a full bibliography. This will enable scholars and other interested thinkers to check everything for accuracy and to use it for other scholarly purposes.
The script and manuscript are in 38 sections [pdf of the scene selection menu]. The plan is to release the manuscript sections serially over the next few months, each section containing the text, relevant images, and being available in both HTML and PDF formats. When all of the sections of the manuscript have been released, a full version in PDF will also be made available.
Alongside that process, I will post in response to the many very good emails I’ve been receiving from those who have watched the documentary. By far, the most email I’ve been receiving focuses on the two most controversial interpretive points in the documentary:
1. On the Nazis: I argue that they were socialists and anti-capitalist. .
.
2. On Nietzsche: I argue that he is an individualist only in a very limited sense and that he is much more a collectivist than he is an individualist. .
Those two theses have generated the most heat, so in near-future blog posts I will take up two important issues:
Were the Nazis really socialists?
and
Was Nietzsche an individualist or a collectivist?
If those issues interest you, please sharpen your debating skills, brush up on your history and philosophy, and prepare for some serious intellectual fun.
[Go to the Nietzsche and the Nazis page. Go to the StephenHicks.org main page.]
This semester’s major authors and texts will be Plato’s Apology and Crito, Descartes’s Meditations, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Rand’s The Fountainhead.
We will be covering those authors and their views in their own right and using them as launching points for discussion of issues such as the existence of God, free will and determinism, the mind-body problem, and the meaning of life.
We will also use a number of shorter pieces from Daniel Dennett, Martin Luther, John Steinbeck, Rupert Brooke, and others as supplements.
Here are PDF files of the three-page syllabus and schedule and the seventy-three-page supplemental Readings in Philosophy booklet I put together.
The New York Times’s extended article on Rand’s influence includes some snark from philosophers over whether she really was a philosopher. Oh, come on.
It reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception by the philosophers at the University of Basel (I haven’t come across their names in the history books) when Nietzsche assumed his teaching position there. As biographer Marianne Cowen tells it, the professors told their students not to take Nietzsche’s courses since he was a lightweight and not really a philosopher:
“For a time, Nietzsche, then professor of classical philology at the University of Basle, had no students in his field. His lectures were sabotaged by German philosophy professors who advised their students not to show up for Nietzsche’s courses.”
It’s the same old story of conservative insiders — many of them ideological, many of them second rate, many of them one-issue thinkers, many of them turf warriors — resisting the innovative outsider. We’ll see how it goes when Rand’s arguments are engaged more systematically within the profession.
The New York Times published a wide-ranging piece on John Allison and the controversies over Ayn Rand’s philosophy and influence: (“Give BB&T Liberty, but Not a Bailout”, August 1, 2009).
It’s a mix of solid and straight-up reporting along with slightly off and completely wide-of-the-mark interpretations. Here’s a short letter I sent off to the Times’s editor this morning.
Dear Editor:
Ayn Rand is a pro-government thinker, contrary to the opening caption in your extended article. Saying that Rand is “anti-government” is like saying she is anti-battery-acid. Battery acid is very useful — when its power is properly focused and contained. Outside those confines, it is corrosive.
Sincerely,
Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Executive Director, The Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship
Rockford College
5050 East State Street
Rockford, Illinois 61108
.
.
I haven’t read Anne Heller’s book, but Timothy Sandefur’s review makes me want to. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)
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“Read the news today? It’s like ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is happening in real life,” as this Facebook group points out.
Many intelligent observers have noted the connection, which has led to sharply increased sales of Atlas and prominent coverage of Atlas’s themes in Business Week, Forbes, the New York Times, the Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and other major publications. And from across the pond comes this British magazine’s tribute and commentary on Ayn Rand’s significance. (Thanks to Bob H. for the link.)
Amity Shlaes’s recent piece in Bloomberg is well worth reading: Atlas Is Shrugging With a Growing Load. Shlaes is the author of a recent history of the Great Depression and so is well positioned to offer commentary on our times. A pair of key quotations from Shlaes’s piece:
On punitive taxation: “In 1986, a year when Atlas Shrugged sold between 60,000 and 80,000 copies, the top 1 percent of earners paid 26 percent of the income tax. By 2000, that 1 percent was paying 37 percent, and Atlas Shrugged sales were at 120,000. By 2006, the top 1 percent carried 40 percent of the burden.”
On government fiat money and deficit financing, quoting Rand: “Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, ‘Account overdrawn.’”
Today’s events are a consequence of political, economic, and, more importantly, philosophical principles adopted by the most influential thinkers and doers of the last several generations. The antidote, accordingly, requires that this and the next generation’s most influential thinkers and doers change their philosophical course.
For follow-up material on Rand’s philosophical analysis of the roots of the crisis and the antidote, I recommend the following.
For general readers, here is my introductory overview of Ayn Rand’s biography and ethics at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
For all readers, here are two recent anthologies of essays on Atlas Shrugged, one edited by Professor Edward Younkins and the other edited by Professor Robert Mayhew.
For a technical, book-length discussion of Rand’s ethical theory, here is Tara Smith’s Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics. For further discussion of Professor Smith’s book, here is my review [pdf], published in Philosophy in Review, and Carrie Ann Biondi’s extended review [pdf], published in the most recent issue of Reason Papers.
For a philosophically-informed analysis of the crisis by a top-level financial professional, I recommend John Allison’s analysis. Allison is Chairman of BB&T and one of the great businessmen of our generation. Evidence: BB&T is one of the major banks that is still very healthy. Like Todd Zywicki, I recently heard Allison speak on the origins of the financial crisis and how BB&T avoided being sucked into the mess, and I recommend his analysis highly.
As we are suffering through yet another hard experiential lesson about collectivism and enforced altruism, let’s resolve to learn the lesson clearly and in principle so that the next generation will see more encouraging signs like these.
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