Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Objectivism: Open or Closed System?
Excerpts from Chapter 5 of David Kelley's The Contested Legacy of Ayn Rand

...In "A Question of Sanction," I said that while Objectivism is a magnificent system of ideas, it is not a closed system. I made this point in passing, as a comment about the value of tolerance. But it has become an issue in its own right. [Leonard] Peikoff [who is Rand's heir] claims that Objectivism is closed; it is "'rigid,' 'narrow,' intolerant,' and 'closed-minded.' " He claims that those who disagree with him about the primary issues in this debate should not call themselves Objectivists. In the name of "quality-control," he urges that they leave the movement or be driven out.

The issue he has raised concerns the nature of philosophy as such. But what exactly is the issue? What does it mean to say that a system of ideas is open or closed? These are metaphorical terms. What is their literal content?

A philosophy is a body of principles that add up to a fundamental and distinctive view of reality and of man's place in it. In order to give us a fundamental view, a philosophy must address a broad range of issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and other areas, and do so in a systematic way. This is what distinguishes a philosophical system from an isolated philosophical position in a particular area, such as egoism in ethics. In order to give us a distinctive view of reality and man, moreover, a philosophy must take a definite position on the issue it addresses, a position different from that of other philosophies. A system that tried to embrace every viewpoint, in a spirit of ecumenism, would not be a philosophy; it would be a vague and contradictory hash.

A body of principles does not exist apart from the individual minds who grasp them. Knowledge presupposes a knower, an 'ism" requires an ist." A philosophy defines a school of thought, a category of thinkers who subscribe to the same principles. In an open philosophy, members of the school may differ among themselves over many issues within the framework of the basic principles they accept. Those issues include a vast array of detailed questions in every area of philosophy, as well as the proper formulation of the basic principles themselves and their interrelationships. Over time, moreover, the philosophy develops. It grows and expands, in the way a science does, as thinkers build on the work of their predecessors. Of course there must be limits on the process if the system is to retain its identity. A system cannot embrace every point of view, nor can it develop into its Opposite. In an open system, however; these limits are set by fundamental Principles: the system is defined by the essential tenets that distinguish it from other viewpoints. A closed system, by contrast, is defined by specific articles of faith, usually laid out in some canonical text. Internal debates are highly constrained and usually short-lived; they are typically settled by a ruling from some authority.

Peikoff denies that Objectivism—or indeed any philosophy—is an open system. "Every philosophy," he says, "is immutable. New implications, applications, integrations can always be discovered; but the essence of the system —its fundamental Principles and their consequences in every branch—is laid down once and for all by the philosophy's author." In the case of Objectivism, of course, the author is Ayn Rand, and the philosophy is defined by an "official, authorized doctrine" Contained in her works. Peikoff seems to allow that some further development of her ideas is possible, as long as it is "logically consistent with what she wrote." Atlas Shrugged and her other writings are to Objectivism, he says, what the Constitution is to the legal system of the United States. A judge must accept the entire Constitution and make sure that his decisions are Consistent with every sentence in it; an Objectivist, Presumably, must take the same approach to Ayn Rand's texts.

Peikoff is saying, in other words, that the philosophy is dosed in the sense of being complete: nothing essential may be added to the system, which was laid down "once and for all" by Ayn Rand. Future developments will consist only of new "implications, applications, integrations"—a list from which the term "discoveries" is conspicuously absent. And he regards Objectivism as closed in the sense of having a highly specific identity: as a philosophy, it includes every philosophical belief she expressed; as a school of thought, it excludes anyone who disagrees on any point. In sum, Objectivism is nothing less, and not much more, than the content of her works.

These extraordinary claims have no precedent and no foundation. The historic systems of philosophy, as distinct from religions and totalitarian ideologies, do not exhibit the features he ascribes to Objectivism. Nor are those features consistent with the content of Ayn Rand's philosophy , especially her theory of knowledge. Peikoffs view of Objectivism as a closed system is yet another expression of intrinsicism. And its practical import is an essentially tribal view of the movement, an attitude that breeds insularity and authoritarianism.

Open and Closed Systems

It has been said that Western history is a battle between the followers of Plato and Aristotle. The great, all-encompassing debate in philosophy is between those who accept and those who deny the existence of a world beyond this one; and their champions are Plato and Aristotle. Plato believed in a realm of ideal timeless perfection, which lies beyond this perceivable world of matter and change, and which we can grasp only through a mystical transcendence of the senses. He regarded man as torn by warring elements—a body mired in this world and a soul yearning for the other—and therefore propounded an ethics of renunciation, to free the soul from earthly desires. Aristotle is the quintessential this-worldly philosopher. He denied that there is any world beyond the one we live in, the world of nature, the world we perceive with our senses and understand by reason. He rejected Plato's mysticism. He held that there is no necessary conflict between mind and body, or reason and emotion. Man in his view is an integrated being who should seek his happiness in this life, and may hope to achieve it.

What I have described in these broad terms are the two philosophical tendencies we refer to as Platonism and Aristotelianism. ...Ayn Rand identified a third broad tendency: the materialist, subjectivist, relativist approach that she represented by the symbol of Attila. This philosophical system had many exponents, from the Sophists of ancient Greece to Karl Marx and a host of other thinkers in our own era, but it did not spring from a single author of the stature of Plato or Aristotle.

In any case, if this is the level at which Peikoff claims that a philosophical system is closed in the sense of being complete, he is certainly wrong in his claim about its identity. The systems I have mentioned have had many exponents in addition to Plato and Aristotle themselves, and within each camp there have been many variants. Platonists have argued with themselves, and with Plato, over issues that fall under each of the points in my description. The same is true of Aristotelians and materialists.

...In our own era, the most influential system is that of Immanuel Kant, whose ideas have also gone through a great many permutations. There have in fact been very few orthodox Kantians. Most People use this term to refer to ideas that share Kant's basic epistemological view about the relation of mind to reality, or his ethical view about the relation between values and duty. Objectivists typically use the term even more broadly, to refer to virtually all our opponents: positivists and pragmatists, Freudians and behaviorists, existentialists, linguistic analysts, the entire gamut of unreason. Many of these thinkers would not agree with a word Kant wrote.

Kant's philosophy, moreover, was instrumental in the growth of modem collectivism, because of his view that reason is inefficacious and his ethical theory that we must subordinate our personal interests and happiness to duty. Most Objectivists, myself included, would say that collectivism is the political expression of Kantianism. But Kant himself was an individualist. He was a classical liberal who believed that individuals had rights, that they are ends in themselves who may not be used for social purposes. Here is a case in which the consequences of a system for an entire branch of philosophy are the exact opposite of those laid down by its author.

...Over time, the accumulated experience of those who practice Objectivism will produce a moral tradition, a body of reflection about the issues that arise in applying the principles. As this happens, the philosophic content of Objectivism will become more complex and detailed. Philosophers who specialize in various fields will address issues that Ayn Rand did not consider, and put forward ideas that were not hers.

This will not be a matter of adding blocks to a monolithic structure, with everyone in full agreement at every step. People will disagree about the proper approach to a given problem and the merits of proposed solutions. New insights and connections at this level will also lead thinkers to modify points that they previously took as settled. They may find it necessary to reformulate principles, or qualify them, or reconceive the hierarchical relations among them. And any such modification will of course be a subject of debate. All of this is part of the process of inquiry. It has been part of the brief history of Objectivism to date, and it is to be expected in light of the Objectivist theory that knowledge is contextual. When Ayn Rand urged us to check our premises, she never exempted her own.

The greatest contributions to this development will come from the most rational and independent minds, whose only concern is the truth. They will not function with double vision, as Peikoff demands, keeping one eye on reality and the other on Ayn Rand's texts. This approach would be inconsistent with any philosophy of reason. It is especially deadly for a philosophy that has so much potential yet to be realized. An Objectivist thinker must be a thinker first, an Objectivist second. He must regard Ayn Rand as he regards any great mind from whom he has learned: he gives her credit for her discoveries, and admires her accordingly, but admits no obligation to accept her as an authority...

...Peikoff also argues that philosophy does not change with the growth of knowledge because "it is the base and precondition of that growth." This is less than a half-truth, since it is true only of the axioms. An axiom is a self-evident principle that is implicit in all knowledge. Once it is grasped, it is not subject to further confirmation, qualification, or revision in light of new evidence, because it defines the standards by which evidence is used. Apart from the axioms, however, philosophical principles are not self-evident; and while they serve to integrate the rest of our knowledge, they do not provide its base in the way the axioms do. On the contrary, such principles rest inductively on the very body of knowledge which they integrate and explain. As a result, these principles are not acontextual; they are not evidentially closed. By the very nature of inductive knowledge, they are subject to further confirmation, qualification, or revision.

[Some argue that] Ayn Rand's relationship to [her] philosophy is the same as her relationship to her literary works: she is the author of Objectivism in the same sense that she is the author of Atlas Shrugged. She is accordingly free to stipulate the content of the term. Objectivism includes all and only the philosophical doctrines she embraced, and the system was closed with her death. No one may add to these doctrines, or abandon or revise any of them, and still call himself an Objectivist—just as no one can alter the content of her novels. The attempt to do so, some might add, is like the efforts of the mediocrities in The Fountainhead who claimed the right to disfigure Roark's buildings.

This view is radically mistaken. A literary work is a creation, the concrete embodiment of an idea by a specific author. A philosophy, by contrast, is a body of theoretical knowledge about reality. That is why, as Ayn Rand herself pointed out, a philosophical discovery cannot be copyrighted. The discovery itself, as distinct from a specific text in which it is conveyed, is not the property of the discoverer. Property must be concrete, but a philosophy is a viewpoint that may be held by an open-ended number of people. Moreover, as a body of knowledge, a grasp of certain facts in reality, its content is determined by the nature of those facts, including their relationships and implications, not by anyone's stipulation...

...The implication of everything I've said is that if Objectivism is to be regarded as a philosophy rather than a body of dogma, it cannot be defined in the manner Peikoff demands. The alternative is not, as he claims, the freedom to rewrite Objectivism as one wishes. The alternative is to define it objectively. He himself observes that the essence of a philosophy consists in its fundamental principles. Ayn Rand said a great many things, not all of them fundamental. Even if we restrict our attention to her philosophical statements (which is itself an act of interpretation), we will find that they cover a wide range, from the general to the specific, from the fundamental to the derivative. We need to discriminate among them. We need to ask: What is distinctive about Objectivism? At what key points does it differ from other philosophies? What are the essential principles that give it its internal structure as a system? What are the broad avenues that we keep returning to as we make our way through the philosophy?

An analysis of this kind is a delicate scholarly task. It requires extensive knowledge not only of Objectivism, but also of the other systems from which it must be distinguished. A vast number of considerations must guide one's judgment about whether to include or exclude a given principle...

...Like any other philosophy, in short, Objectivism has an essential core: a set of basic doctrines that distinguishes it from other viewpoints and serves as the skeleton of the system. The implication is that anyone in substantial agreement with those doctrines is an Objectivist. I believe that a great deal of damage has been done by refusing to take this attitude. It's been thirty years since Atlas Shrugged was published, the length of an entire generation. After all that time, only a handful of philosophers are willing to identify themselves as Objectivists, and our output has been pretty thin; a complete bibliography would not amount to much. This is partly because Objectivism lies so far outside the main-stream of academic thought. But another reason is the insistence on defining Objectivism in the narrow fashion that Peikoff urges, and the atmosphere of dogmatism that accompanies it. In the name of preserving the purity and integrity of the system, Objectivists have too often relied on stereotypical formulations of Ayn Rand's ideas. They have been quick to pounce on thinkers who might have been their allies. They have greeted new extensions of the system with a timid caution that reminds me of the Council of Scholars in Anthem, who spent fifty years debating the wisdom of accepting that radical innovation, the candle. These policies have discouraged independent thinking, they have driven away creative minds, they have kept Objectivism from being the living, growing philosophy it could be.

... Peikoff is concerned, not with spreading the truth, but with spreading Ayn Rand's actual ideas; this is his criterion for the integrity of the philosophy. The attitude is typical of an intellectual tribe. As a result, such tribes are characterized by constant purges and schisms; Objectivism has been far from unique in this regard.

...The anti-conceptual mentality is intrinsicist: it regards concepts and principles as self-evident, as if they were concretes that could be perceived directly, without the need for integration. Any dissent, accordingly, must be a kind of blindness, a perceptual defect that is not to be answered by arguments, but explained by appeal to causes. And every tribal doctrine contains a theory designed to provide such an explanation. Marxists dismissed the objections of their opponents as expressions of bourgeois class interest. Freudians interpreted all criticism as a sign of unconscious psychological problems. These self-protective mechanisms insulate the doctrine from any challenge or counter-evidence, producing a closed system of belief. Ultimately they insulate the doctrine from evidence altogether; they are fundamentally irrational. This is why the issue of the scope of honest error has a vital significance for Objectivism. If we assume in advance that anyone who rejects our ideas must be irrational, we have started down the path that turned Marxism and Freudianism into secular religions.

All of the tribal features I've mentioned have been countered to some extent by the rational content of the philosophy, and by the many benevolent, independent, rational, nondogmatic, fully conceptual minds it has attracted. All of these features, moreover, have been identified and denounced by the leaders of the movement during various periods of reform. As a result, the Objectivist movement has never had the fully tribal, anticonceptual character of the other doctrines I have cited. It has been the intellectual equivalent of a mixed economy. But another tribal feature has never been addressed, and the failure to do so has undercut every effort at reform. This final trait—the saddest to write of—is the deification of the founder.

Ayn Rand deserves admiration for her achievements, for her independence of mind, for her courage in staying true to her vision through a firestorm of public abuse. She deserves gratitude for the knowledge she gave us. The difference between a rational school of thought and an intellectual tribe is an attitude that goes beyond such admiration and gratitude. A tribe regards the ideas uniting its members as embodied in some unique form in its founder, so that the founder's person and actions have a transcendent kind of value, his assertions have a kind of authority transcending the method used to support them, and attacks on him represent a transcendent form, the very depths, of evil. This attitude was described by religious thinkers as idolatry, or worshipping the concrete symbol in place of what it represents, and Ayn Rand has been its object. For many Objectivists, the truth, the power, the grandeur, the overriding importance of her ideas became vested in her as a person—and, through connection with her, in certain other individuals and organizations—as if there were no distinction between the abstract philosophy and these particular concretes...

...Since our ideas are founded on reason, let us make sure that we associate on terms consistent with the needs and standards of rationality. Rational knowledge is acquired by integrating the facts, by sifting and weighing the evidence, and a vital part of this process is open discussion and debate. We should encourage this process. Rationality means integrity, a loyalty to the conclusions of one's own mind. We should honor this, even in a person whose conclusions we disagree with. Rationality requires justice, adhering strictly to the facts in judging other people, and applying moral standards impartially. We should practice this. And a rational person is independent. Above all, as I said in "A Question of Sanction," let's encourage this virtue within our own ranks. Let us welcome dissent, and the restless ways of the explorers among us.

These are the policies appropriate to an open system, a philosophy of reason.