Seddon's Salvos - Rand on Rawls
by Fred Seddon
This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth. I will certainly join the festivities since I owe Rand quite a bit. I will enjoy re-reading some of her fiction (in fact my Existentialism class is reading Anthem this semester) and I will teach both Philosophy: Who Needs It? and The Virtue of Selfishness during this year. I will also be addressing the West Virginia Philosophical Society on Rand’s theory of truth. But I will not be touting her as a scholar or as a judge of scholarly works, since I believe she wasn’t a very good one. But David Kelley would seem to disagree with me.
On page 10 of the December 2004 issue of Navigator, David Kelley, my colleague and occasional boss, has an insert titled “Rand on Rawls.” I would like to make a few comments on this insert. Rawls is another philosopher whom Rand did not read, but instead of having to rely on a second party, e.g., N. Branden, who claims that she never read Kant, we have it from the horse’s mouth (if I may paraphrase one of her titles) that she has “not read and do[es] not intend to read” Rawl’s A Theory of Justice. (PWNI 131) So what she offers us is a “review of a review.” (This reminds me of Derrida writing on the Margins of Philosophy.)
Although Kelley questions such a technique (of reviewing a review instead of reading the book itself) he does go on to say that “she was nonetheless able to describe, precisely and essentially, Rawl’s method of argument.” He also applauds “how presciently Rand’s (sic) was able to foresee the book’s future—drawing on nothing but a book review and her own profound understanding of the way bad ideas are spread.” What is the nature of her “profound understanding?” How are bad ideas spread and who originated the technique for spreading them? If you didn’t guess Immanuel Kant, you are not old enough to be a SOLOist. Rawls is a disciple of Kant, she tells us, and so he uses Kant’s method for spreading bad ideas. I will quote the whole paragraph from Kelley. The quotation can be found on p. 141 of PWNI.
Kant originated the technique required to sell irrational notions to the men of a skeptical, cynical age who have formally rejected mysticism without grasping the rudiments of rationality. The technique is as follows: if you want to propagate an outrageous evil idea (based on traditionally accepted doctrines), your conclusion must be brazenly clear, but your proof unintelligible. Your proof must be so tangled a mess that it will paralyze a reader’s critical faculty—a mess of evasions, equivocations, obfuscations, circumlocutions, non-sequiturs, endless sentences leading nowhere, irrelevant side issues, clauses, sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses, a meticulously lengthy proving of the obvious, and big chunks of the arbitrary thrown in as self-evident, erudite references to sciences, to pseudo-sciences, to the never-to-be-sciences, to the untraceable and the unprovable—all of it resting on a zero: the absence [emphasis in Rand, not in Kelley] of definitions. I offer in evidence the Critique of Pure Reason.
First, note the irony. Rand is using a book she never read to predict the style and future success of a book she vows never to read.
But even if one doesn’t believe Branden, her statement that they are no definitions in the Critique of Pure Reason borders on the silly. Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Critique knows that the case is just the opposite of what she says. If anything, Kant is a definition-mongerer. (I thought this was a word but couldn’t find it in two different dictionaries, but I like it so much I’m going to claim invention rights. The word means someone who delivers an excess of something, e.g., Kant gives us an excess of definitions in the Critique of Pure Reason.)
Whether one begins at the beginning of CPR where Kant defines analytic and synthetic (A6/B10), or the middle of CPR where Kant defines immanent and transcendental principles (A296/B351), or near the end of the book where he defines discipline (A709B738) and architectonic (A832/B860), there are so many definitions that he begins to overload our crow. I would even claim that if you open the CPR at random to any page, you’ll be within five pages of a definition. Kant loves to define things. Check it out.
Why Kelley calls Rand’s screed a precise and essential description of Rawls’s argument is beyond me. His exact words are, she was “able to describe, precisely and essentially, Rawls’s method of argument.” Huh!? She can’t even get Kant right, let alone get Rawls right at one remove. Perhaps Kelley is just getting carried away with the glow of the anniversary celebration.
There are other libertarians who access Rawls differently. Consider Robert Nozick. On p. 183 of his Anarchy, State and Utopiahe writes the following:
A Theory of Justice is a powerful, deep, subtle, wide-ranging, systematic work in political and moral philosophy, which has not seen its like since the writings of John Stuart Mill, if then. It is a fountain of illuminating ideas, integrated together into a lovely whole. Political philosophers now must either work within Rawls’ theory or explain why not. The considerations and distinctions we have developed are illuminated by, and help illuminate Rawls’ masterful presentation of an alternative conception. Even those who remain unconvinced after wrestling with Rawls’ systematic vision will learn much from closely studying it. I don’t speak only of the Millian sharpening of one’s views in combating (what one takes to be) error. It is impossible to read Rawls’ book without incorporating much, perhaps transmuted, into one’s own deepened view. And it is impossible to finish his book without a new and inspiring vision of what a moral theory may attempt to do and unite; of how beautiful a whole theory can be. I permit myself to concentrate here on disagreements with Rawls only because I am confident that my readers will have discovered for themselves its many virtues.
Did Rand and Nozick read the same book? Oh, I forgot, she never read the book. That would seem to give Nozick a bit of an edge.
So fellow-SOLOists, when I celebrate Rand’s birth throughout this year, I will be focusing on her novels and her philosophical essays. Alas, for scholarship I will go elsewhere.
As for what Kelley describes as “how presciently Rand’s [sic] was able to foresee the book’s future” I can only say, so what?! Given her argument (or lack thereof) it would seem she just got lucky. Nozick’s description would seem more of an indicator of the books future success than Rand’s.
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