Philosophy as a Profession

Montaigne points out that “it is far easier to live like Caesar and talk like Aristotle than to live and talk like Socrates.” In other words, it is far easier to rest content in the smug satisfaction that one is in possession of the truth than it is to unremittingly persevere in the quest for truth, recognizing that one is and will always remain merely a seeker.

The intellectual of today obtains his smug satisfaction by becoming a “specialist.” Acquiring a narrow but exquisite understanding of one narrowly circumscribed area of knowledge, he becomes, or imagines that he becomes, a possessor rather than a seeker of truth. The truth he possesses, however, is not the sort of comprehensive truth that encompasses the human condition—or even his own individual condition—in its entirety. His specialized knowledge is from the outset intended to be relevant only in his “professional” life. The sole benefit it confers upon his “personal” life is the income he obtains by placing it at the service of his employers.

Our age endeavors to impose this same sort of separation of personal and professional life even in the realm of philosophy, thus effecting a grave and momentous change in what it means to be a philosopher. The philosophers of the past who lived austere and ascetic lives, for example, did not consider this an incidental fact about their “personal” lives, but rather a definitively important part of their philosophical method. Their austerity arose from a frank acknowledgment of the fact—a fact our age resolutely tries to conceal from itself—that every man must make an inevitable choice between two paths: the pleasant, agreeable path to wealth and honors, and the austere, difficult path to truth and wisdom. Hypocrites who claim to be lovers of wisdom, but in reality merely intend philosophy to be a “profession” in which they can achieve wealth and honors, justly deserve the ridicule that has been so aptly dispensed to them by genuine lovers of wisdom—for example, by Plato to the Sophists, by Schopenhauer to “university philosophy,”and by Nietzsche to “culture-philistines.”

Socrates’ character in the Republic observes that most of those who constitute the demos care very little for the pursuit of truth and wisdom, so that the relation of philosophy to a democratic regime must therefore be “as a foreign seed sown in alien soil”—that interaction with the regime inevitably results in the “perversion and alteration” of philosophy—and that the most advisable course for the philosopher is to remain quiet, to mind his own affairs, and to stand aside, as a man stands “under the shelter of a wall in a storm.” 

When the “professional philosophers” of today render their services to the democratic regime, there is indeed just such perversion and alteration. John Rawls, for example, tells us that philosophy conceived as a “search for truth” cannot possibly provide “a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society.” He proposes instead that we conceive of political philosophy as a process of collecting and categorizing the “settled convictions” of such a society and deriving our conception of justice to accord with these convictions. Thus political philosophy, formerly conceived as a quest for truth and wisdom about political regimes, is now redefined as a quest to reach predetermined conclusions that accord with the settled convictions of the present regime. Like any competent professional, the “professional philosopher” must place the interests of his employer—whether he conceives of this as his state, community, society or regime—above “personal” passions such as those that might inspire him to seek truth and wisdom.

The way to properly honor the classics

The way to properly honor the classics, Nietzsche tells us, is not to treat them as merely a source of historical knowledge, and not merely to imitate their methods and assimilate their results, but rather “to continue seeking in their same spirit, with their same courage, and not to weary of the search."

The great thinkers of the past undoubtedly intended to convey in their writing the truths they found and the methods they used in their search. For many, however, we must recognize another aim of equal or perhaps even greater importance. We must recognize that many of the great thinkers of the past earnestly sought to arouse in their readers those same noble passions that allowed them to become great thinkers in the first place—the passions that inspired their lifelong quest for truth and wisdom—that sustained their ardor in this quest—that gave them the audacity to defy all obstacles in their way.

When we write philosophy today, we proceed as if our sole aim were to convey information as efficiently and succinctly as possible. When we read philosophy, we proceed as if our sole aim were to extract the information contained therein as efficiently as possible. Seldom do we give our attention to understanding those artful contrivances which past writers have used to inspire the passion for truth and wisdom. Even more seldom do we attempt to produce any new such contrivances. In fact, the insipid academic writing style of our age often seems as if it were deliberately contrived to extinguish any sort of passion, or to repel those who already have it. We cultivate discipline, but not passion, forgetting that both are requirements for a genuine philosopher.

Ayn Rand and her followers

Ayn Rand’s acolytes congratulate themselves for having found in their mentor the apotheosis of Western culture, the woman who was finally able to purify the Western tradition from the taint of theism, altruism and irrationality that had infected it for centuries. They are, like all of us, busy people, and thus are very glad of this discovery. It spares them the trouble of reading all these tainted books. The Ayn Rand acolytes, like those fundamentalist Christians who believe that all truth is to be found in the Bible, now have an excellent excuse to avoid reading other books. They can remain ignorant of the entire trajectory of Western culture without feeling guilty about it. Perhaps most tragically, their complacency deprives them of the very knowledge about Western culture that would allow them to assess the validity of the claim that Ayn Rand constitutes its culmination. Philistines seem to be very adept and finding rationalizations to justify their philistinism, and in this regard the Ayn Rand acolytes are no exception.

In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand condemns impostors who demand that they be recognized for “erudition without study, authority without cost, judgment without effort.” (p. 63) When I read this, I think of no one more than I think of her own followers, who pose as philosophers without having studied philosophy, as sociologists without having studied sociology, as economists without having studied economics.

In another ironic twist, the Ayn Rand acolytes do not even find it necessary, when they laud independent thought and creativity, to devise their own way of expressing these sentiments. They merely parrot the aphorisms of their mentor.

Some might find Ayn Rand’s strident condemnations of other writers to blame for the philistinism of her acolytes. I do not. There is nothing inherently blameworthy in exaggerating one’s differences with other thinkers and artists. This is what allows a writer to make these differences clearly visible. The fault lies rather in the credulousness of her readers, who uncritically accept her judgments about other writers without even taking the trouble to read them.

Ayn Rand did not get to be Ayn Rand by reading only the books that she agreed with. She read and carefully analyzed the opposing viewpoints too. They offered a challenge, an exercise in refutation skills. Wouldn't those who admire Ayn Rand want to choose books from her reading list, the books that led, via both positive and negative influences, to her becoming the writer they admire?

While many have lamented the baneful influence of Ayn Rand on her “inner circle” of followers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, most fail to consider the possibility that the followers may have corrupted the leader just as much as the leader corrupted the followers.

The integrity of Ayn Rand’s philosophical views and the quality of her writing, it seems to me, begin to degenerate after the 1950s, precisely the time in which she begins to interact with her admirers. This can be seen by contrasting The Fountainhead with Atlas Shrugged.

The Fountainhead displays a reflective attitude toward capitalism, recognizing that private property is a necessary requirement for the independent man to exist, yet also recognizing the potential for the independent man to be corrupted through commerce with secondhand men.

Just as democracy must be limited, because the majority does not always understand or respect the rights of men, so the man engaged in commerce must carefully limit the influence he allows potential trading partners, because the majority of these potential partners will not understand or respect the integrity of his work. If he fails to maintain such a limit, his integrity will inevitably suffer.

To put it another way, the individual who breaks free from the collective power of the state only to then submit to the collective power of “the market” is hardly worthy of being called an individual. The truly independent individual always steadfastly adheres to the course demanded by his own genius, irrespective of whether the state approves of it, whether the community approves of it, whether the market approves of it.

In Atlas Shrugged, this sort of reflective attitude toward capitalism is largely absent. By then Ayn Rand's writings on capitalism have for most part degenerated into simple-minded panegyric, blissfully if not willfully disregarding the influence of secondhand men in the market.

Those who read Ayn Rand’s books and take away from them nothing but her praise of commerce are, it seems to me, like the followers of Henry Cameron in The Fountainhead who are impressed by nothing but the economical aspect of his innovations. “The sole part of his argument irresistible to the owners of new structures was financial economy; he won to that extent.” (p. 473)

Those who read Ayn Rand’s books and take away nothing but her praise of political freedom resemble another group of Cameron’s followers—those for whom “the freedom from arbitrary rules, for which Cameron had fought, the freedom that imposed a great new responsibility on the creative builder, became mere elimination of all effort.” (pp. 473-474)

The fact that Ayn Rand devoted her later writing primarily to the commercial and libertarian aspects of her philosophical and artistic vision might perhaps result in part from the fact that these are the aspects in which her followers took the greatest interest. Her followers did not care so much for the vision of the uncompromising man faithful only to his own genius. But they were very fond of the vision of the commercial man faithful only to his own material interests. This was a much less demanding vision, much more comfortable. This, therefore, was the vision she chose to develop in her later work.

In the period between The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the method by which Ayn Rand presents her philosophy has also degenerated.

Among the techniques The Fountainhead uses to criticize the philosophy of the secondhand man, one of the most effective is the speeches made by the secondhand men themselves (Peter Keating, Ellsworth Toohey). These speeches, by making the assumptions behind the secondhand man’s philosophy explicit, show just how corrupt and inhuman such a philosophy really is.

In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand speaks of “ponderous inanities ... uttered as a revelation and insolently demanding acceptance as such.” (p. 491) But in Atlas Shrugged, we find the former critic of such inanities uttering them herself. She never tires, for example, of repeating “A is A” and “existence exists.”

The sheer number of repetitions of such statements makes one suspect that perhaps Ayn Rand had begun after all to understand the mental capacity of her followers and to adjust her style of presentation accordingly. Perhaps she, like Gail Wynand’s teacher in The Fountainhead, had given up on trying to teach the best and the brightest and, devoting her attention to the slow and the dull, “repeated and chewed and rechewed, sweating to force some spark of intellect from vacant eyes.” (p. 403)

More importantly, however, the fact that Ayn Rand in her later years degenerated to the point where she could only respond to sophisticated arguments about the nature of reason and language with ponderous inanities like “A is A” and “existence exists” suggests that she was no longer taking the trouble to really understand opposing arguments. She coarsely grouped classes of philosophers together and classified them as evil and corrupt, without stopping to consider that perhaps, in some cases, some of their arguments may have been correct and some incorrect.

When I hear the later Ayn Rand condemn philosophers and whole schools of philosophy, branding them as “evil,” I think of Alvah Scarrett calling Howard Roark “a crank and a freak and a fool.” (p. 524) When Scarrett disparages Roark, it is only because he doesn't understand his work.

Ubi nihil valeo, ibi nihil velim

A favorite motto of Samuel Beckett was "Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis," or, "where you are worth nothing, there you must want nothing." The quote seems to come originally from Arnold Geulincx, a 17th century Flemish philosopher.

Democracy gives the ordinary citizen the illusion that his vote gives him some influence upon the state. This illusion, like the illusion that the lottery is a path to wealth, will only confuse those who are bad at calculating probabilities.