From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: The Two Faces of Ayn Rand
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 17:41:26 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <1jPnzX#6ZgjKk1F5fHB2DO4Tc1JKfHk=esr@snark.thyrsus.com> esr@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond) writes:
>There's been a lot of pro- and anti-Randian argument in t.p.t recently.  Most
>of it implicitly assumes that one has to take Randian thought as a whole or
>leave it.

  Because that's how she, herself, presents Objectivism.  She may have
  had other thoughts, but it's her claim that she constructed a system
  demonstrating the existence of some absolute ethics that's under
  contention here.   When people refer to "Randianism", *that* is 
  what's being discussed.  


>I think Peter Nelson is entirely correct in rejecting Objectivist epistemology
>as junk; his arguments are cogent, correct, and (to anyone with a technical
>knowledge of epistemology) quite devastating.

 Thanks.  I just quoted this here because I liked the way this sounded.


>The Rand who wrote the powerful, passionate arguments against altruism and
>for individual liberty that we see in _Anthem_, _Atlas_Shrugged_, and _The_
>Fountainhead_ had, on the evidence, not yet formulated her philosophy as the
>"total system" which Objectivism was to become.  Her moral arguments stand
>on their own; she appeals not to a not-yet-invented "epistemology" but to
>the reader's understanding of how human beings think, feel and behave in
>response to different ethical choices and social surrounds.  Her arguments
>are consequentialist and empirical, not hollowly a-prioristic.

>The historian Robert Conquest has cynically observed that the behavior of most
>organizations can be reliably predicted by the hypothesis that, eventually,
>they become controlled by a secret cabal of their enemies.

  Wow!  HP (my employer) has been around longer than most other high
  tech companies (we celebrated our 50th anniversary a few years ago)
  and we're still doing well.   I have no reason to think we're con-
  trolled by "a secret cabal of our enemies", although if they were
  really secret I couldn't tell.   But the convenient thing about saying
  "eventually" is that it might always happen later.

  Why do I mention this?  Because it illustrates a problem with poetic
  truths such as Conquest's, above, and those found in works of fiction.
  It's often easy to find exceptions to them, or to state them in ways
  where it's not even clear what the truth is that's being stated, and
  therefore it can't be apprehended, or refuted, or even supported,
  by conventional logic.    In other words how do we debate a poetic
  truth?  

  In his essay in the New York Times a few weeks ago on the Libertarian
  Party, William Safire made an interesting point.   He said that
  their ideas should not be read as "prose", but as "poetry".  All
  this time I've been criticizing them as prose and although I voted
  for them before, I was wavering in this election because I just
  can't logically justify much of their platform.  But armed with 
  Safire's insight I voted for Marrou/Lord last Tuesday.  

                  
---peter






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