Stephen Hicks, Ph.D.

Most dangerous philosophy book? (Spring 2011 edition)

For my Introduction to Philosophy course, a question on the final exam [pdf] was:

In your judgment, what is the most dangerous book we read this semester? First give a clear and sympathetic presentation of the book’s most important themes; second, state your criterion/criteria of dangerousness; finally, explain why you think the book is dangerous.

This semester we read Plato’s Apology, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Galileo’s “Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina,” Descartes’ Meditations, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. My twelve students’ responses:
* One voted for Socrates as most dangerous
* Two voted for Lewis and two voted for Galileo
* Three voted for Descartes
* Four voted for Freud.

Three students took issue with Freud’s dismissing religion as a childish illusion. One disagreed with Freud’s argument that religion illusion plays an important civilizing and palliative role for the common man, holding that encouraging society’s leaders to promote falsehoods is politically dangerous.

I hereby declare Civilization and Its Discontents to be the Most Dangerous Book in Introduction to Philosophy, Rockford College, Spring Semester 2011.

Related:
The most dangerous philosophy book (Fall 2009 edition).
The most dangerous philosophy book (Spring 2010 edition).
The most dangerous philosophy book (Fall 2010 edition).

Midterm test for Introduction to Philosophy

Here are the midterm questions [pdf] for my Introduction to Philosophy course this semester.

Gail Wynand’s power strategy (Part 1)

Like Peter Keating, Gail Wynand pursues a use-and-be-used career strategy. Wynand uses strong-arm tactics when necessary in building up his newspaper’s market; he manipulates his employees with money to break their integrity; he fires those like Dominique who refuse to bend; and he lets the lowest-common-denominator of public taste dictate the content of the newspaper he works so hard to build up. Like Keating, he acquires plenty of money and a position at the top of his profession’s social hierarchy.

So why is Wynand not just another Keating-type character? Why isn’t he literarily redundant to the development of the theme of The Fountainhead? Because Rand develops Wynand as more consciously aware of the strategy he is pursuing and of the risks it poses to his soul; consequently, Rand also develops Wynand as pursuing deliberate strategies to insulate himself from those risks.

Keating semi-consciously manipulates and meanders through life and ends up a selfless wreck of a man. Wynand consciously sees that risk but believes that he can achieve his goals in a corrupt world—and keep his soul intact enough to enjoy them—if :

1. He gets the right kind of power over other people.
2. He keeps a rigid separation of his work life and his personal life.

On the right kind of social power. Keating’s social power is based on schmoozing and lying. Wynand’s social power is based on money. Wynand makes a judgment here: a life of lying and schmoozing one’s way to the top is to commit to fakery and to losing one’s personal sense of what’s real and what’s illusory. By contrast, money as Wynand uses it is more honest. Wynand doesn’t fake; he is upfront when tempting employees with money to break their integrity, for example, or when trading the Stoneridge commission for Dominique. Keating will kiss you on the cheek, so to speak, while stabbing you in the back. Wynand will look you in the eye and straight-up make you an outrageous bribe.

On separating the public and the personal. Keating never figures out how to define his own personal values and draw his lines and so ends up letting himself be manipulated in his core values. Wynand defines his own personal values and ruthlessly resists all incursions upon them. He cultivates his own tastes in art, builds up his own collection of masterpieces, and keeps his art gallery off limits to the grubby masses. He spends significant time on his yacht, wandering the world at will, and again cultivating an oasis of meaningful privacy against a sordid world.

Wynand is thus a compromise character: In dealing with the external social world, he plays brilliantly the mutually-corrupting power-struggle game; but in his internal private life, he is committed to independence and integrity.

He is like Keating when at The Banner but like Roark when in his art gallery or on his yacht.

He is Roarkian in his ability to visual the end: doing things his own way according to his own highest independent standards. But he is Keating-esque in his judgment of the means necessary to achieve his ends: corrupting others and selling oneself in a base world to get power.

The next question: Does Wynand’s strategy work?

Toohey’s five strategies of altruism [repost]

[We are reading The Fountainhead this week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, so this is a re-post for new readers this semester.]

The ethics of altruism holds that others are standard of value. One is good to the extent one puts the interests of other first, acts to achieve their interests, and when necessary sacrifices one’s interests for their sake.

In The Fountainhead, Ellsworth Toohey is the major strategist of altruism, and in my reading he uses five distinct variants of altruism to achieve his ends:

(1) Altruism as a policy of collectivism for the purpose of mutual self support;

(2) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to protect themselves against the strong;

(3) Altruism as a tactic of the weak to get support from the strong;

(4) Altruism as a strategy of the weak to get power over the strong in order to rule them; and

(5) Altruism as a strategy by the weak to destroy the strong out of envy, hatred, or revenge.

History provides many examples of Type 1 altruism, in, for example, religious communities that isolate themselves and live communally. The key organizing concepts of such communities are collective assets, solidarity, and conformity.

In The Fountainhead, Type 1 is combined with Type 2 in the official philosophy Ellsworth Toohey uses when preaching to the masses — for example in his speech to the strikers of the building-trades union (I:9). The key concepts in Toohey’s speech are unity and brotherhood for its own sake, on the one hand; and on the other the aggression of the owners and the consequent role of unions as a self-protection agency to fight back.

Type 3 altruism appears less in The Fountainhead, e.g., in the tactics Keating’s mother uses to live vicariously, both psychologically and — later in the novel — materially, through him. (It is much more developed in Atlas Shrugged, e.g., in the strategy that Rearden’s mother and brother pursue to ensure that he will continue to support them.)

Type 4 altruism is the altruism of power-lust. One sub-plot of The Fountainhead is the battle between Gail Wynand and Toohey. Wynand pursues the common “master” power strategy of physical wealth and intimidation (e.g., of his business competitors), while Toohey’s strategy is to use psychological power. An example from late in the novel when Toohey explains his philosophy to Peter Keating, who is now an empty shell of a man:

“It’s only a matter of discovering the lever. If you learn how to rule one single man’s soul, you can get the rest of mankind. It’s the soul, Peter, the soul. Not whips or swords or fire or guns. That’s why the Caesars, the Attilas, the Napoleons were fools and did not last. We will. The soul, Peter, is that which can’t be ruled. It must be broken” (4:14).

Toohey’s particular tactics to achieve the strategy are designed to make the strong doubt themselves. Toohey elaborates in detail:

“There are many ways. Here’s one. Make man feel small. Make him feel guilty. Kill his aspiration and his integrity. . . . Preach selflessness. Tell man that he must live for others. Tell man that altruism is the ideal. Not a single one of them has ever achieved it and not a single one ever will. His every living instinct screams against it. But don’t you see what you accomplish? Man realizes that he’s incapable of what he’s accepted as the noblest virtue — and it gives him a sense of guilt, of sin, of his own basic unworthiness” (4:14).

Guilty individuals are weakened and much easier to manipulate and rule.

Type 5 altruism is the most disturbing case of altruism. Type 4 altruism is about achieving power in order to rule, but ruling is still a positive goal. Type 5 is about getting power as a means purely to destroy. Rand clearly sees it operative, but many readers wonder whether she exaggerates her enemies’ positions.

Rand provides many examples of Type 5 altruism in Atlas, especially in the characters Lillian Rearden and James Taggart. But it was first made explicit by Toohey when he explained to Keating the real purpose behind his communal organizing, his writings critical of individuality, and his promotion of mediocrities. When Keating whinily asks him what he really wants, Toohey snaps: “Howard Roark’s neck” — and then elaborates: “I don’t want to kill him. I want him in jail. You understand? In jail. In a cell. Behind bars. Locked, stopped, strapped — and alive” (4:13). Toohey has no positive goal: he only wants to destroy an outstanding man.

Toohey is a fictional character, so his words alone don’t have much evidentiary status. But plenty of real-life individuals give us the evidence we need to see Rand’s point:

St. Augustine included the spectacle of Hell as one of the viewing pleasures for those in Heaven: “the good go out to see the punishment of the wicked . . . so as to witness the torments of the wicked in their bodily presence” (“The Saints’ Knowledge of the Punishment of the Wicked,” 426 CE).

Church father Tertullian exulted over his imagined destruction of the world and the torments of kings, philosophers, poets, and athletes in Hell:

“that last day of judgment, with its everlasting issues; that day unlooked for by the nations, the theme of their derision, when the world hoary with age, and all its many products, shall be consumed in one great flame! How vast a spectacle then bursts upon the eye! What there excites my admiration? What my derision? Which sight gives me joy? Which rouses me to exultation?—as I see so many illustrious monarchs, whose reception into the heavens was publicly announced, groaning now in the lowest darkness with great Jove himself, and those, too, who bore witness of their exultation; governors of provinces, too, who persecuted the Christian name, in fires more fierce than those with which in the days of their pride they raged against the followers of Christ. What world’s wise men besides, the very philosophers, in fact, who taught their followers that God had no concern in aught that is sublunary, and were wont to assure them that either they had no souls, or that they would never return to the bodies which at death they had left, now covered with shame before the poor deluded ones, as one fire consumes them! Poets also, trembling not before the judgment-seat of Rhadamanthus or Minos, but of the unexpected Christ! I shall have a better opportunity then of hearing the tragedians, louder voiced in their own calamity; of viewing the play-actors, much more ‘dissolute’ in the dissolving flame; of looking upon the charioteer, all glowing in his chariot of fire; of beholding the wrestlers, not in their gymnasia, but tossing in the fiery billows …” (De Spectaculis, written 197–200 CE).

St. Thomas Aquinas echoed Augustine: “In order that the bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned” (Summa Theologica, Supplement, Q. 94, Articles 1 and 3; written 1265–1274 CE).

And American “Great Awakening” leader, Jonathan Edwards gave a 1739 sermon entitled “The Eternity of Hell Torments” with the following disturbing affirmation:

“The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever.” And: “Can the believing husband in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving wife in Hell? Can the believing father in Heaven be happy with his unbelieving children in Hell? Can the loving wife be happy in Heaven with her unbelieving husband in Hell? I tell you, yea! Such will be their sense of justice that it will increase rather than decrease their bliss.”

So Toohey is in “good” company, so to speak.

In a forthcoming journal article, “Egoism in Nietzsche and Rand,” I discuss these five strategies from The Fountainhead in fuller detail, Rand’s use of them in Atlas Shrugged, and I make connections and contrasts to Friedrich Nietzsche’s earlier harsh critique of altruism. The article is to be published in the next issue of The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (Volume 10, Number 2).

Roark and Keating: first meetings [Re-post]

[We started The Fountainhead this week in my Introduction to Philosophy course, so this is a re-post for new readers this semester.]

I am a philosopher, and when I’m on the job I have been known to read literary works as “premises with feet.” Despite that occupational hazard I am also fascinated with how some great fiction writers can seamlessly integrate abstract philosophical themes with concrete literary portrayals.

When I teach Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, my focus in class is philosophical but I do like to point out along the way how her fiction-writer’s methods concretize, dramatize, and foreshadow her abstract themes. One example:

On the premise that first meetings matter immensely in life and literature, let’s look at our first meetings of Howard Roark and Peter Keating.

At the beginning of Chapter 1, we meet Roark:

“He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. …
“His body leaned back against the sky. It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes. He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out. He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together …
“He was looking at the granite.
“He did not laugh as his eyes stopped in awareness of the earth around him …

At the beginning of Chapter 2, Keating is introduced. He is graduating top of his class, and the distinguished architect Guy Francon is giving the address:

“The hall was packed with bodies and faces, so tightly packed that one could not distinguish at a glance which faces belonged to which bodies. It was like a soft, shivering aspic made of mixed arms, shoulders, chests, and stomachs. One of the heads, pale, dark haired and beautiful belonged to Peter Keating.
“He sat, well in front, trying to keep his eyes on the platform because he knew that many people were looking at him and would look at him later. He did not glance back, but the consciousness of those centered glances never left him.”

The contrasts so far:

* Roark is by himself and his body is described in singular terms. Keating is indistinguishable in the midst of a crowd.

* Roark’s conscious focus is on nature. Keating’s consciousness is focused on other people’s watching him.

* Roark is naked. Keating is robed and capped in conventional graduation attire.

So right from the beginning we are introduced to Roark’s individualism and his orientation to reality; we are introduced to Keating’s collectivity and his social metaphysics; and we are invited by Rand to contrast the two directly.

Side note for another post: On the premise that who gets the first and word matters in life and literature: In The Fountainhead the first words are “Howard Roark” and the last words are …

A book recommendation

The main character is a young architect. A creative designer — he is visionary and innovative the use of materials. Before he can finish his formal training, a conflict with a teacher leads to his expulsion. So he has an extra challenge to breaking into his profession.

Another major character is a highly intelligent and independent woman. She loves the architect, but she has a confused, extreme, and occasionally idiosyncratic way of defining and pursuing her independence, which puts her in conflict with the architect.

Another key character is a younger man, who is dominated by his social-climber mother. To achieve his desired position in life, he manipulates, deceives, and otherwise maneuvers four men out of the way to get where he wants to be.

The book is Ken Follett’s World Without End. The characters mentioned above are Merthin, Caris, and Godwyn.

Before I read the book last summer, Marsha Enright recommended it to me and suggested that I would find in it strong echoes of another, classic work. Enright has published an article on the comparisons, along with a recommendation. I’m glad to second her recommendation, for World Without End is in its own right a gripping story, historically rich, and thematically deep. And she’s right about the striking parallels.

What is the most dangerous philosophy book?

For my Introduction to Philosophy course, the final question on the final exam was:

In your judgment, what is the most dangerous book we read this semester? Present the book’s most important themes and explain why you think it is dangerous.

We read five major authors in the course: Plato’s Apology and Crito, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, Descartes’ Meditations, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.

The fifteen students in the course responded this way:

None chose Socrates as the most dangerous.

One student voted Descartes’ Meditations as most dangerous, on the grounds that his radical doubt could be too unsettling to an unprepared mind, especially for those raised in conventional religious families.

Four students voted for Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents as the most dangerous book. Three cited his insulting dismissal of religion and one focused on his gloomy assessment of the human condition and his recommendation that we not aim for happiness in life but rather lower our sights.

Lewis’s Mere Christianity got four votes as most dangerous book. Three of the four students objected to Lewis’s relentlessly negative view of human nature, and the fourth added that he/she felt like Lewis was too bossily trying to impose his religious views on the rest of us.

Finally, Rand’s The Fountainhead was voted most dangerous by six students, for three different reasons. Three argued that the bad characters were presented so realistically that it would be too easy for readers to take the book the wrong way, i.e., as commending Keating’s or Wynand’s or Toohey’s paths as being the way of the world and so one might as well go along with it. Two argued that Rand’s insistence on independence, taken consistently, conflicts with religion. And one made a very brief argument that I didn’t understand and so don’t know how to state coherently here.

So I hereby declare The Fountainhead to be the Most Dangerous Book in Introduction to Philosophy, Rockford College, Fall Semester 2009.

In class: midterm test

The Midterm Test [pdf] for my Introduction to Philosophy course features questions on Apology, Crito, The Fountainhead, and Meditations.

Makes me want to be an undergraduate all over again.