Philosophical Smoke and Mirrors

by Reginald Firehammer

In her “The Trojan Horse Concept,” Cass discusses the idea that tricks such as a “magician’s” smoke and mirrors, are actually being used today in what goes by the name “Objectivism.” Certain “interpretations,” and “mis-directions,” whether intentional or not, are, “presto/chango” turning Objectivism into something it is not.

In my response to that article I said: “You are right, there is misdirection and deception being used, both intentionally and unintentionally. At least two intentional misdirections come to mind: one is an attempt to use the language of Objectivism (there is no mind/body dichotomy, for example) to put over an agenda. The other is an attempt to smuggle certain concepts from psychology into Objectivism so certain individual’s can put over their own ideas which are, in fact, inimical to Objectivism.”

This is about one of the methods used to pull the trick off, a particularly subtle misuse of a term which is mostly misunderstood, rationalism.

Rationalism vs. Rationalism

To most people, “rationalism,” means, being rational, that is, using the faculty of reason to determine what is true or false, right or wrong, good or evil. It means, to most people, being objective as opposed to subjective.

It is a surprise to most people when a particular view they hold or argument they make is dismissed as, “rationalism,“The bewilderment is understandable; to most people the alternative to “rationalism” is “irrationalism.”

The reason for the confusion is because rationalism means two different things, one is good (and is the one everyone except some philosophers mean) and one is bad.

Good Rationalism

Good rationalism is what you and I most other people mean. Interestingly, those who use the term rationalism in the other way, the bad way, are frequently Objectivists who claim to be student’s of Ayn Rand. She, however, used rationalism in the normal way, the good way. For example, in one of her letters, from The Letters of Ayn Rand, she wrote the following:

Your letter gave me the impression that The Fountainhead was your first contact with the world of rationalism, of the possibility of whose existence you had no concept. You sounded to me like a man stunned by the discovery that man is a rational being. You sounded like a jungle savage at his first sight of New York. ….

I think that you are suffering from a bad case of literary “Naturalism.” And, again, it comes back to the issue of rationalism. If man is a conditioned animal, then his food and his bathroom activities are of equal importance with his creative work, except that nothing can then be of any importance whatever. If man is a rational being, then it is his mind and his chosen purpose which determine his standard of value and tell him why the time he spends at his work is significant and the time he spends in the bathroom is not. ….

Whatever confusion there may be in your thinking, it all stems from the same source and I suggest that you review your entire philosophy of life, starting with the premise of rationalism. The “mysterious” power which impressed you in The Fountainhead is not mysterious at all and its entire secret is contained in the word Reason. It is a power which is available to you—and if the kind of life presented in The Fountainhead appeals to you, you can have it in reality, you can live it, but you can do so only on the basis of complete, total, uncompromising rationalism. [Emphasis mine.] [The Letters of Ayn Rand To Stanley Greben, a fan, October 15, 1950.]

It is rationalism in this sense that is the only means to complete human happiness. As Ayn Rand put it, “Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions. [Atlas Shrugged, Part Three, “Chapter VII—This Is John Galt Speaking”]

It is this kind of rationalism that many so-called Objectivists repudiate by confusing it with the other kind of rationalism, “bad rationalism.”

Bad Rationalsim

Unless you are a philosopher or student of philosophy it is unlikely you have ever heard of rationalism in the “bad”sense. It does not mean, “rationalization,” which is a misuse of reason to justify and excuse what is, in fact, a wrong or irrational view or act.

Philosophical rationalism is the view that all knowledge can be achieved by reason alone, completely divorced from evidence (or with minimal evidence) from perception. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz are frequently cited as examples of “rationalist” philosophers, but the list ought to include Berkeley, who was the father of the modern version of rationalism, Plato, who was the first and worst of the “rationalists.”

Philosophical rationalism is in contrast to empiricism which is the view that all knowledge is derived from and based on what is directly perceived. Bacon, Locke, and Mill are frequently cited as examples of empiricists, but the first was Aristotle.

Perhaps no one has understood more clearly the differences between good rationalism and bad rationalism than Ayn Rand, who not only understood the differences, but the reasons for them.

“Cosmology” has to be thrown out of philosophy. When this is done, the conflict between “rationalism” and “empiricism”will be wiped out—or, rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out. ….

Now I think that he [Thales] meant, and all subsequent philosophers took it to mean, a metaphysical attempt to establish the literal nature of reality and to prove by philosophical means that everything is literally and physically made of water or that water is a kind of universal “stuff.” If so, then philosophy is worse than a useless science, because it usurps the domain of physics and proposes to solve the problems of physics by some nonscientific, and therefore mystical, means. On this kind of view of philosophy, it is logical that philosophy has dangled on the strings of physics ever since the Renaissance and that every new discovery of physics has blasted philosophy sky-high, such as, for instance, the discovery of the nature of color giving a traumatic shock to philosophers, from which they have not yet recovered. [AR is referring to the discovery that our perception of color depends on the nature of the light and the human visual system as well as on the nature of the object, which led many philosophers to conclude that perception is subjective.]

In fact, this kind of view merely means: rationalizing from an arrested state of knowledge. Thus, if in Thales’ time the whole extent of physical knowledge consisted of distinguishing water from air and fire, he took this knowledge to be a final omniscience and decided on its basis that water was the primary metaphysical element. On this premise, every new step in physics has to mean a new metaphysics. The subsequent nonsense was not that empiricists rejected Thales’ approach, but that they took him (and Plato) to be “rationalists,” i.e., men who derived knowledge by deduction from some sort of “innate ideas,” and therefore the empiricists declared themselves to be anti-rationalists. [June 19, 1958, The Journals of Ayn Rand, “16 - Two Possible Books”]

Philosophical rationalism is bad, very bad. It has been devastating to philosophy. It lead directly to German Idealism and to Kant, whose work, Critique of Pure Reason, a supposed antidote to the “pure” (disconnected from empirical evidence) reason of rationalism, in fact, made the connection between the perceived world (empiricism) and conscious world (reason) forever disconnected.

Leonard Peikoff describes that disconnection this way:

“The intrinsicists, who write off this world as unreal and unintelligible, detach logic from percepts. To these men, logic is a tool oriented to a higher reality; it is the means of making self-consistent the divine ideas (whether these are claimed to reach us through Scripture, innate endowment, or the Hegelian dialectic). The result is rationalism with its floating systems of thought, “floating” because unrelated to sensory evidence.’ [Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand “Chapter 4—Objectivity”]

Rationalism, which in its broadest form, is the acceptance of anything as a source of knowledge, apart from or in addition to reasoning from empirical evidence, takes a number of forms including, a priorism (knowledge one is born with, or “just has somehow”) mysticism (knowledge one has from some source other than evidence, e.g. revelation, “mystic insight, ” or “faith”), and intrincism (knowledge of values that are innate–divorced from ends or purpose).

About Ayn Rand and rationalism, Peikoff wrote:

“She had such a passion for ideas because she thought that ideas are practical—that they are the most practical things in the world. In this regard, her approach was the opposite of that which philosophers call ‘rationalism.’ ‘Rationalism’ amounts to the viewpoint that ideas are detached from reality, unrelated to daily events, and without significance for man’s actual life—that they are nothing but floating abstractions to be manipulated by ivory-tower intellectuals for their own amusement, just as other men manipulate chess pieces.” [The Voice of Reason—Essays in Objectivist Thought, “Epilogue,” “My Thirty Years With Ayn Rand: An Intellectual Memoir,” by Leonard Peikoff]

It is obvious that both Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff understand the nature of philosophical rationalism, and ruthlessly guard against it in their own reasoning. Yet both have been accused of philosophical rationalism by, of all people, those who claim to be Objectivists.

Rationalistic Smoke

One of quickest ways to dismiss an opponent’s arguments is to accuse that opponent of the very kinds of arguments and methods the arguer is using. It works, because the defence requires two kinds of counter argument: first to prove one is not using the kind of arguments they are being accused of, which always sounds defensive, and, second, to prove the arguer is in fact doing what he is accusing the other of. In most cases, it is too difficult, uninteresting to others, and not worth the bother; the maneuver works by default.

This is one of the favorite ploys of a certain class of individuals who have insinuated themselves into Objectivist circles with the intention of using the influence of that philosophy and it’s author, to promote an agenda and ideas which are in complete contradiction of Objectivism. The method is simple, they promote those aspects of Objectivism with which they agree, and repudiate all aspects of it, or arguments from it that demonstrate their views contradict Objectivism by labeling them rationalism.

When one points out that the only faculty human beings have for determining correct choice is reason, and that feelings and desires, in themselves are non-cognitive, it is labeled rationalism. When one points out that human beings have a specific nature that determines how they must live to be successful and enjoy their lives, it is labeled rationalism. When one points out that the view that says people “just know” what they ought to do is a priorism, it is labeled rationalism. If someone points out the view that some choices are right because they are predetermined by birth or some preconditionin is intrincism, it is labeled rationalism. When one points out that both the mind and emotional capacity are tabula rasa at birth and must be developed by the individual and to hold that some desires are pre-determined and one does not have to discover their source or meaning is subjectivism, it is labeled rationalism. Of course, anything labeled as rationalism is dismissed–no discussion is necessary.

In the end everything that is the right kind of rationalism which rejects everything except objective reasoning from the evidence is repudiated as the wrong kind of rationalism. It is a smoke screen to cover the true intent and meaning of what is being put over in the name of Objectivism.

Under the Cover of Smoke

Under the cloud of this “rationalism” smoke, it is irrationalism, the truly bad kind of rationalism, that is being promoted. These irrationalists deny human beings have a specific nature that determines what is good and bad for them, like a specific kind of stomach that precludes poison being a good thing to eat—they call it intrinsicist.

They reject the idea that one must always use the best reason of which they are capable when choosing their values and how to live their lives—they call it mysticism.

They insist that what a person is, is determined by some mysterious unknown; that a person is not, as Ayn Rand said, “a being of self-made soul,” but a creature whose identity is determined by genes and environmental influences or something else—but they deny that is intrinsicist.

They insist one has knowledge that is not derived objectively by reason, but is, “just there”—but they deny it is a priorism. They are sure there is knowledge that does not require the mind—but do not regard that as mysticism.

I call the view, that says “the body (the ‘heart,’ ‘electricity,’ ‘sexual chemistry’ etc.) has reasons which, as yet at least—Rand notwithstanding—the mind knows not of,” the grossest of subjectivist mysticism, on the basis of which any outrage may be justified. It is this kind of irrationalism that is being promoted as Objectivism under the cover of the false accusation of rationalism against all arguments that refute it.

—(07/14/05)