Why I’m Not an Objectivist

[This is a raw, unedited article that I just finished writing. At some point in time, I’ll develop it further.]

Although I am a HUGE fan of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, and agree with most of its tenets, I don’t qualify as an Objectivists because I don’t embrace all its tenets—and Rand made it clear that to be an Objectivist, one must do so. Objectivism, according to Rand and her intellectual heir, Leonard Peikoff (who founded The Ayn Rand Institute in 1985), is a “closed system, “meaning that it is not subject to revision or expansion. When philosophy professor David Kelley, affiliated with Peikoff and the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI), argued for Objectivism as an “open system,” Peikoff rejected his argument, and Kelley left ARI, subsequently founding his own “Objectivist” institute, The Atlas Society.

Because I agree with Peikoff’s POV (that Objectivism is Ayn Rand’s philosophy) and reject Kelley’s (that Objectivism should not be delimited to Rand’s philosophy), I classify myself as a quasi-Objectivist, meaning that I have philosophic differences with Rand. I will now briefly describe some of these differences in the context of Rand’s five-branch philosophic hierarchy: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics.

Rand’s view on metaphysics is summarized in her statement: “Existence exists, and that is all that exists.” In other words, Rand delimits metaphysics to the physical, the manifest. By contrast, I maintain that all existents derive from a meta-physical, or hyper-cosmic, Existent, or Being. Per my view, this Being, which is Self-Existing, Self-Radiant, Self-Awareness, exists outside spacetime, and can only be recognized yogically (or ontically), through spiritual practices that yield Self-Realization, or Enlightenment. From my perspective, Rand is guilty of, ahem, Context-dropping.

In his book “The DIM Hypothesis,” which is all about championing Aristotelian thinking and dissing non-Aristotelian thinking, Leonard Peikoff mentions the Platonian “all-swallowing entity,” but he has nothing to say about it because he is an anti-mystic with no experience of this Reality. If he could experience this Reality, this Self-Existing, Self-Radiant, Self Awareness, his philosophic life would become more complicated, because he would somehow have to integrate Platonism (or Neoplatonism) with Aristotelianism. In other words, he would have to move beyond the “fishbowl” philosophy that is Objectivism.

If I were to build upon Rand’s philosophic hierarchy, I would insert Onto-Logic between Metaphysics and Epistemology. Onto-Logic, as I define it, is the yogic methodology (of Plugged-Presence) that enables one to non-contradictily identify (and palpably experience) the underlying Reality of the Platonian All-Swallowing Entity. This identification informs the yogi that this transcendental Existent is not a “floating abstraction” but a living Reality. Just as Objectivist epistemology employs logic to identify the facts of phenomenal reality, “Objectivist” onto-logic enacts onto-logic to identify (and commune with) transcendental Reality.

Words can hardly express how grateful I am to Rand for her seminal text “Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.” Without this book, I would never have been able to “crack the code,” philosphically speaking. That said, I have my differences with Rand regarding cognition. Firstly, I don’t buy her tabula rasa, or “blank slate,” argument. I contend that humans are born with inherent predispositions (and abilities) that correlate not only with their genes, but with their past lives (though I won’t consider that here). Studies of identical twins who grew up in separate environments prove that one’s genes dramatically trump one environment when it comes to IQ, educational attainment, and professional success. Secondly, although I appreciate Rand’s measurement-omission theory of abstraction, it doesn’t explain how young children so easily learn languages. My thinking is that the human brain in the young is hard-wired to, almost by osmosis, pick up languages, but as one ages, parts of the brain “ossify,” and this ability is lost.

Objectivist ethics champions rational self-interest, or egoism, and denigrates its antipode, altruism, which it defines as a moral obligation to live for others. Rand famously (or perhaps I should say, infamously) promoted “the virtue of selfishness” as the right ethos for humans, and her advocacy of this ethos, moreso than any of her other ideas, has made her an object of hatred for many.

While I fully embrace Rand’s Objectivist ethics, I have two criticisms of it. Firstly, Rand only grokked egoism in a limited, personal context. By contrast, Kashmir Shaivism, a Hindu Tantric Dharma, enjoins its followers to expand their egos to infinity, so that they literally embody and radiate as microcosms of Siva, the Godhead, or universal Consciousness-Energy. Secondly, although I admire Rands’s chutzpah in promoting “selfishness,” I think her brazen approach backfired, turning off umpteen potential Objectivists and quasi-Objectivists. If instead of championing selfishness she had advocated self-ownership and the non-initiation of force as the crux of her ethics (which libertarians now do with their philosophy), I believe that Objectivism would be far more popular today than it is.

Regarding politics, I have no disagreements with Rand. I think she nailed it by identifying the fundamental political dialectic as capitalism/individualism versus socialism/statism. She rightly identifies the former as the rational (and constructive) “isms” for man, and the latter as the irrational (and destructive) ones. Moreover, she rightly rejects any mixture of the two poles as an untenable compromise destined to devolve into full-blown statism, a euphemism for fascism.

Rand’s aesthetics can be classified as romantic realism. She defines art as “the selective recreation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments,” and for her, art that romantically portrays man as a hero by virtue of his volitional efforts reflects her Objectivist ideals.

I don’t view art through the narrow window that Rand does. For instance, I enjoy surrealistic art that depicts images (and states) that can’t be found in manifest reality. Such art instigates my opening to the transcendental Reality, which cannot be accessed through volition alone, but also demands surrender of it. Unbeknownst to Rand, this Reality isn’t a “floating abstraction,” but is experienced as a dynamic, all-subsuming Force that literally “crashes down” on the yogi.

I’ll now conclude by describing some of the differences I have with Rand that I have not yet mentioned. According to Rand, “Man does not possess any instincts.” In no way do I concur with this, nor do most people who have studied man’s nature. Rand, for instance, denies that sex is a non-rational biological drive, but all my male friends, including those who are students of Objectivism, disagree with Rand on this. As one of them puts it, “Rand doesn’t understand sex from a male perspective.”

Rand views man as having free will. From my perspective, men only possess degrees of free will commensurate with their will power. For example, a fat man who cannot lose weight because he compulsively binges on sweets displays a lack of free will that reflects his lack of will power. The more will power a man can exercise, the freer is his will.

According to Rand, “To think is a matter of choice.” Try telling that to anyone who has practiced meditation. Those who have meditated know that volition alone does not suffice to control one’s mind. If you haven’t meditated before, try to stop thinking for just a few minutes. In almost no time, you’ll likely find yourself thinking. As another experiment, try to protractedly just think about one thing. Before long, you’ll likely find other thoughts grabbing your attention. If you’ve experienced a traumatic event that can’t be changed—for example, your beloved dog was run over by a car—and thinking about it causes you pain, try to willfully stop dwelling on the event, and you’ll probably find that you can’t, that only over time do the recurring painful thoughts gradually subside. I’m not saying, a la Sam Harris, that free will is an illusion, I’m simply arguing, contra Ayn Rand, that free will is not just a matter of choice.

In summary, despite whatever differences I may have with Rand’s philosophy, Objectivism, I cannot recommend it too highly: it is must-reading for everyone interested in philosophy—especially mystics, most of whom are deficient in “real world” rational thinking.