prof@chinet.UUCP (The Professor) (03/31/88)
In article <1232@PT.CS.CMU.EDU>, tsf@THEORY.CS.CMU.EDU (Timothy Freeman) writes: > I don't know much about philosophy, but I'm quite sure that Rand falls > in the "objective" side of the "objective/relative/subjective" reality > trichotomy. On the other hand, she emphasizes the need for the > individual to do his own reasoning, rather than blindly take someone > else's word about the nature of "objective" reality. This entire paragraph should be reworded. Rand CLAIMED to fall on the objective side of the triangle, by using terminology indicative of objective reasoning, but in reality all she did was to impose her own SUBjective ideas onto a philosophical framework that she called "objective," which when clouded by sufficient terminological mumbojumbo appears "objective" to a naive observer. (On the other hand, when she "emphasizes the need for the individual to do his own reasoning," she is spouting SUBjectivism, since all this allows for is the granting of the right to form personal individual judgments about the world based on learned irrationalities and prejudices.) I should also say that although Rand is blatantly guilty of this in almost all her work (as many others have already pointed out)--rewriting the language on the fly to suit her needs--she is far from alone in doing it. It seems that the very work of philosophy itself is the redefinition of crucial terms to suit particular ethical viewpoints at whim, using the new definition to explain something and then stepping back to claim that this "proves" something based on the "old" (commonly understood) definition. Rand should not be criticized simply for doing this when almost all philosophy is guilty of it, especially since there are far better reasons for criticizing Rand. > Her reasoning usually sounds more like browbeating than reasoning, This is because that's exactly what her "reasoning" is, despite its embracement by any number of pseudointellectual "individualists" looking for something to self-justify their notions of superiority and selfishness.