To the Extent that Ayn Rand Makes Sense to Me

On a flight to Beijing last weekend, I, being myself, checked out the (female) cabin crew. I wasn't disappointed. One air hostess stood out from the rest. With a face your heart will palpitate for, she was also taller, curvier, and coyer.

She, however, was not the only aesthetic highlight of the flight. The other aesthetic highlight of the flight was reading Ayn Rand’s "Philosophy: Who Needs It". I bought the book 4 years ago but it made no sense to me then. I was not at all familiar with this Russian novelist/philosopher’s works (or anything philosophical, for that matter), other than knowing her allegedly pernicious influence on the former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in formulating monetary policy, and her superb mastery of the English language.

So who needs a philosophy? To answer the captioned question, Ayn Rand stated: 

“A philosophic system is an integrated view of existence. As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought … or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt…” (p7)

Rather than ‘need’ a philosophy, you already ‘have’ one. What you do need is a philosophic system under which to articulate your philosophy. The alternative will be “self-doubt”, and - so reasoning runs - lack of confidence, and ultimately, unhappiness. Just like my Cantonese.

But what is philosophy? It has 5 branches:

1.  Metaphysics: the study of existence
2.  Epistemology: the theory of knowledge
3.  Ethics: i.e. morality
4.  Politics: the principles of a proper social system
5.  Esthetics: the study of art

Think philosophy is too abstract to be useful?

“…abstract ideas are conceptual integrations which subsume an incalculable number of concretes – and that without abstract ideas you would not be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems. You would be in the position of a newborn infant, to whom every object is a unique, unprecedented phenomenon. The difference between his mental state and yours lie in the number of conceptual integrations your mind has performed.” (p6)

This must be epistemology. And this again makes sense to me. An incident at work can attest to this. When a manager tried to explain to me the accounting of a ‘cluster’ program under which different corporate entities distribute its profits. I looked at the ephemeron he wrote on the paper and had an epiphany, “Just like a partnership!” He nodded with approval, “A very complicated one, yes.” I must have some vague idea (i.e. abstract ideas) about the accounting of partnership to ‘subsume’ the concrete workings of the program thereunder.

So how to study philosophy? Ayn Rand advocates approaching philosophy as one approaches a detective story. “Follow every trail, clue and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero.”  One will not always find the immediate answers, but he “will acquire an invaluable characteristic: the ability to think in terms of essentials”.

To “think in terms of essentials”, one need to avoid the layman’s error of tending to “take the end result of a long sequence of thought as the given and to regard it as ‘self-evident’, or as an ‘irreducible primary’”.. And nothing is “self-evident” except the material of sensory perception.

This relates to me. An application in life will be: never take your so-called expert’s advice at face value. For example, when seeking legal advice, an intelligent client should be given the legal authorities - the ‘irreducible primary’ - upon which his advisors base their opinions. What they tell you to do is not, and should not be taken as, "self-evident". As the saying goes, "a fool and his money are soon parted." Only the gullible and the ignorant can't see the emptiness under the pomposity of their "experts" living off their clients' gullibility, ignorance and deep pockets. Likewise, when establishing the facts of a criminal case, the prosecution had better adduce direct evidence (e.g. CCTV record of a murder) rather than circumstantial evidence (e.g. a finger print at the crime scene).

But how about emotions? Are they ‘irreducible primaries’ upon which to base one’s course of actions? Ayn Rand thinks that an emotion is not a primary, but a “complex, derivative sum”. And it allows men to practice the “ugliest psychological phenomenon” of rationalization. A description of that process of rationalizing is “I can’t prove it, but I feel it’s true.” Men who rationalize “do not judge the truth of a statement by its correspondence to reality – they judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings.“ So self-help books that makes readers feel good about themselves by way of self-deceit, thus ‘judge reality by its correspondence to their feelings’ are, according to Ayn Rand, evil philosophical systems of rationalization. The cure is “introspection”, the conceptual identification of one’s inner states. 

Ever since I took up legal studies, I have grappled with reconciling two opposing conceptual integrations:  the difference between ‘feeling’ and ‘thinking’. Years of schooling taught me that thinking is the antithesis of feeling. The words of my high school math teacher still reverberates in my head, “When confronted with a problem, you will have some initial ‘gut feeling’ (感性认识) about it, but you need ‘rational thinking’ (理性思考) to prove that feeling.” But the boundary between the two may be blurred. For starters, when you see a word in interpreting a statute, do you ‘feel’ or ‘think’ about what it means? When the problem at hand involves a value judgment, a matter of tastes or personal preferences, it should be left to the democratic processes, as Justice Scalia would agree. The nitty-gritty of dealing with emotions, therefore, is to be absolutely honest about one’s feelings towards the issues: is it wrong, or you just don’t like it?

Starting to make sense of what was gobbledegook a few years ago is encouraging. It evidences my intellectual growth after I was done with formal schooling (from which I took pains to prevent interfering with my education!). Now that's called being "introspective", my friend.