

Ayn Rand’s “Philosophy: Who Needs It?” seems to some people to be a stunning defense of the value of philosophy. To me, it reads like polemical, hyperbolic nonsense. It’s bad armchair psychology.*

Rand compares the average person to an astronaut who, to avoid feeling unease and taking responsibility for himself, tries to evade a number of foundational questions.

Most men spend their days struggling to evade three questions, the answers to which underlie man’s every thought, feeling and action, whether he is consciously aware of it or not: Where am I? How do I know it? What should I do? By the time they are old enough to understand these questions, men believe that they know the answers. Where am I? Say, in New York City. How do I know it? It’s self-evident. What should I do? Here, they are not too sure — but the usual answer is: whatever everybody does. The only trouble seems to be that they are not very active, not very confident, not very happy — and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of. ….A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation — or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.

Rand’s probably right that most people don’t spend much time thinking about philosophy. Fair enough.

She asserts that failing to think through foundational philosophical questions, or that failing to having an integrated philosophy, causes “fear and … undefined guilt,” a lack confidence and happiness, and so forth. But notice she does not offer any evidence for these claims.

To what degree philosophical beliefs (or whether having an integrated philosophy) affect our behavior or our mental health is a social scientific question. In principle, we could test whether studying philosophy, or in particular studying or adopting Objectivism, makes people happier, more confident, less fearful and guilty, or whatnot. We could in principle study whether any correlations (between philosophical beliefs and behaviors, or between philosophical beliefs and psychological health) are selection or treatment effects. We could test to what degree people compartmentalize their beliefs, and how such compartmentalization affects their health and behavior. Some people actually do such work.

If we wanted to know whether changing philosophical beliefs changes behavior, we’d study this with the tools of the social sciences. We’d suspend judgment until the evidence comes in. After all, it’s possible that changing our deep beliefs has little impact on our day-to-day activity. (It’s not like Berkeley acted much different from Reid.) It’s also possible that our behaviors and our psychological health are caused by deeper factors, and our philosophical beliefs are merely epiphenomenal. Perhaps the emotional dog wags the rational tail. Perhaps the economic superstructure causes us to behave in certain ways and believe certain things. Perhaps we’re each genetically disposed to behave in certain ways and to have a particular degree of psychological health, and we end up accepting beliefs that go along with those dispositions. (Unusually altruistic people become utilitarians or whatnot.) Or perhaps adopting new philosophical beliefs has the effects Rand claims it does.

Again, these are all social scientific questions. A rational person would try to use good social scientific methods to tease out the causality here, and would suspend judgment until the evidence comes in. A rational person would not try to answer this stuff from the armchair, the way Rand does.

Rand has no evidence for any of her claims. Even her own anecdotal experience is unhelpful. She was, by all accounts, a rather miserable person, surrounded by other miserable people (some of whom she seems to have made miserable).

Further, there’s no reason, a priori, to assume that having the correct philosophical beliefs will make you happier or more confident. Most studies find that, all things equal, religious people are happier than atheists. That doesn’t mean atheism is false. Maybe the truth sucks.

Rand claims that philosophy is incredibly important, yet doesn’t take it seriously herself:

You might claim — as most people do — that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? “Don’t be so sure — nobody can be certain of anything.” You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” You got that from Plato. Or: “That was a rotten thing to do, but it’s only human, nobody is perfect in this world.” You got that from Augustine. Or: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” You got it from William James. Or: “I couldn’t help it! Nobody can help anything he does.” You got it from Hegel. Or: “I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s evil, because it’s selfish.” You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: “Act first, think afterward”? They got it from John Dewey.

Some people might answer: “Sure, I’ve said those things at different times, but I don’t have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today.” They got it from Hegel. They might say: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: “But can’t one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?” They got it from Richard Nixon — who got it from William James.

Two things: 1. Rand doesn’t have any evidence that these ideas originate in these philosophers, or are popular because of them. Maybe Hume, Plato, James, Kant, Dewey, and all the other evil mystics of muscles and mystics of the mind got these ideas from laypeople or their culture at large, rather than vice versa. Maybe they were just writing up things they’d already heard. To know what causes what or who influence whom here, one would need to do serious intellectual history,

2. Rand doesn’t have a good grasp on what other philosophers think. It’s not clear she actually read any of these people. Rand is notorious for attacking straw men. Here’s Huemer on that point:

Rand seriously misrepresents the history of ethics. Essentially, she leads the reader to believe that there have been only two alternative views in ethics: (a) that moral knowledge comes by mystical revelations from God, and (b) that moral principles are arbitrary conventions. Either way, ethics is regarded as “the province of the irrational.” One other position is mentioned: that of Aristotle, who allegedly based ethics on what noble and wise people choose to do but ignored the questions of why they chose to do it or why he thought they were noble and wise. Next to these alternatives, Rand’s theory looks almost reasonable by comparison. However, the above is a gross caricature of the history of ethics, and Rand makes no effort to document her claims with any citations. In short, Rand draws plausibility for her position by attacking straw men.

Suppose you’re a high school senior who has never read any philosophy. You come across Ayn Rand’s non-fiction works. You start reading. Holy crap, you think, the history of Western thought is mystical, evasive misology and nonsense. Thank God Galt that Rand has come along to save us. The only thing keeping us from falling into the Abyss is Rand’s stunning defense of reason and rights. I’d better donate some money to the Ayn Rand Institute and save Western civilization from imploding!

But now suppose you’re a college senior majoring in philosophy. You’ve read the history of philosophy and surveyed the contemporary academic landscape. Then you come across Rand. You start reading. Holy crap, you think, she has no idea what she’s talking about. She appears to misunderstand every major debate. Her way of describing other philosophers is almost entirely wrong. (A Randian reading this might respond, “Brennan, you aren’t proving to us that she’s wrong about philosophers. Where’s your argument? Well, yeah, you’re right that I didn’t insert here all my lecture notes about the history of Western philosophy.)

Perhaps Rand thinks these other philosophers are so evil that it’s best to lie about them. She needs to ensure her readers never bother to read them and get seduced by evil ideas, and to do that, she needs to make them seem absurd. More plausibly, my guess is that Rand just didn’t know what she was talking about.

Rand gets one thing right:

If you do not understand [philosophers’] theories, you are vulnerable to the worst among them.

Amen.

*(Yes, sure, lot’s of supposedly scientific psychology turns out to be bad. But that doesn’t justify armchair psychology. When you discover that many experiments are reproducible, you cannot then rationally respond, “Screw it, I’ll just believe whatever I want about how the mind works.”)