Atlas Unshrugged

Ayn Rand? Seriously, Ayn Rand!!?

How does the family tree of Plato m. Aristotle produce such strange fruit?

Plato & Aristotle sitting in a tree.

K I S S I N G.

First comes love. Then comes marriage.

Then comes . . . Ayn Rand in a baby carriage???

In July I was in Chicago browsing in a bookstore with my brother and sister-in-law. I make this trip every couple of years in connection with business. It’ a bookstore that’s one of their favorites, and I have to say there’s nothing to compare with it here in Denver, CO.

As usual it wasn’t like I was lacking for something to read, but when you dangle a nickel bag in front of a junkie you know he has to have a taste. So I was jonesing for a new read.

I bought Arthur Herman’s The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization. It was an impressive 500+ pages of text. It had footnotes (nearly 50 pages) and a “select” bibliography (20 pages) and an index. All of the scholarly apparatus. Plus, Herman was billed as a “Pulitzer Prize Finalist.” All of the bona fides appeared bona.

I started reading as soon as I had some free time (that evening, I think). And it was engaging. But I had to set it aside so I could finish Thomas Piketty’s Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century. But once I finished Piketty I resumed The Cave and the Light. Down into the cave, looking for a light. I picked it up easily and, unusual for me, I stayed with it reading it through to the end.

The bitter end. I have to say that with a couple of minor twinges I found most of the book worthwhile. I was looking for a survey of Western European intellectual history. (What can I say? I’m a white man. Not dead yet, though.) This book promised to provide a survey of the topic with a story line. I didn’t expect that I’d necessarily agree with how each thinker was gerrymandered into the overall picture that Herman reveals. I’m comfortable reading someone’s take on a system of thought even when I think there’s a fair chance that the author will distort the subject. I’ve had plenty of practice with the willing suspension of disbelief.

But by the time I approached the closing chapters I suspected that Herman was a neo-conservative. And in the penultimate chapter I knew it. Popper’s attack on Plato, Hegel and Marx as enemies of the ”open society,” Hayek on markets as exchanges of information, the crumbling of the Berlin wall, et cetera, et cetera, blah, blah. (Sly Stone, Woodstock: “You know it’s just a fashion.”)

What we would like to do is to sing a song together. Now you see what usually happens is you get a group of people that might sing and for some reason that is not unknown anymore they will not do it. Most of us need approval . . . most of us need to get approval from our neighbors before we can actually let it all hang down. Now what is happening here is we’re going to try and do a sing-along. Now a lot of people don’t like to do it because they feel it might be old fashioned. But you must dig that it is not a fashion in the first place. It is a feeling and if it was good in the past it’s still good. We would like to sing a song called “Higher” and if we could get everybody to join in we would appreciate it. . . . What I’d like you to do is say “higher” and throw the peace sign up and it’ll do you no harm. Still again some people feel that they shouldn’t because there are situations where you need approval to get in on something that could do you some good. Now if you could throw the peace sign up and say “higher” and get everybody to do it, there’s a whole lot of people here and a whole lot of people might not want to do it because they could somehow get around it and they feel there are enough people to make up for it. And on and on, et cetera, et cetera, blah.

– Sly Stone, Woodstock Festival and Arts Fair, August 15 – 18, 1969. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=607eFLYuJ_g)

But what really frosted my nuggets was the introduction of Ayn Rand in the same way he introduces St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Plotinus. Begin with a paragraph or two about her early childhood (the formative years), then re-count the defining moment. And then distill thousands of pages of exposition of her “philosophy” (Excuse me while I wipe the vomitus from my keyboard.) into a couple of paragraphs by way of an extended metaphor.

It’s not that I think this treatment should be reserved for thinkers of greater stature than Alisa Rosenbaum (aka, Ayn Rand). (By the way, don’t you suddenly have a completely different mental image of her when you learn that her real name was Alisa Rosenbaum? Kind of like the way you feel when you learned that Cary Grant was really Archie Leach, huh. Not quite so muscular, not so dynamic.) The “treatment” is a stock formula in intellectual histories. It’s the implicit equation of Ayn Rand with a thinker like Karl Popper that I disagree with.

Where did I go wrong?

• You should have known before you bought the book that it was superficial. What did you expect? I have to say that my brother demurred when I showed it to him and suggested he could read it when I was finished. Kudos, John. But I, too, recognized that the treatment was superficial. I wasn’t expecting deep. It was breadth I was looking for.
• I did have some clues fairly early in Herman’s exposition of philosophers I was fairly familiar with, including Plato and Aristotle. But I excused this, again because I wasn’t expecting depth but historical comprehension.
• Somewhere after the halfway point, after the medieval period and the Renaissance, I noticed that there was less about epistemology and metaphysics and much more about ethics, social & political philosophy. Okay – I was willing to go along and learn more about ethics & social & political philosophy.
• When he was writing about the overthrow of classical Newtonian physics I was definitely suspicious. I have always believed that anyone who tries to draw metaphysical implications from relativity theory, quantum mechanics or string theory has got some splainin to do.
• Freud. Where was Freud? I just checked the index and the father of modern psychiatry isn’t in there. Really? You can write a whole chapter (out of 29) about Boltzmann, Ernst Mach, and the rise of post-Newtonian physics but you can’t even use the name “Freud”?
• Existentialism and phenomenology are glossed over. Sure, there is a fairly extensive treatment of Nietzsche. But not in relation to existentialism. He’s here because he helps sets the stage for the critique of Nazism and other fascisms that apparently owe their genesis to the will to power. Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky are mentioned, but only to remind us that existentialism unleashed moral relativism since God was overcome in their systems.

I’ve settled down some since I wrote the above. I’ve started reading Julia Annas, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic. I decided that rather than buying philosophy from a kit I’ll be a do-it-yourselfer and build my own overview of the tradition. It promises to be quite a journey.