Transcript: Ayn Rand, Immanuel Kant, and Real-World Ethics

Date of recording: November 6, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Hosts: Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell. Guest: Stephen Hicks.

For those who prefer to watch the video, it is here.

Editor’s Note: The Savvy Street Show’s AI-generated transcripts are edited for removal of repetitions and pause terms, and for grammar and clarity. Explanatory references are added in parentheses. Material edits are advised to the reader as edits [in square brackets].

Summary

The conversation delves into the ethics of scholarship, focusing initially on Ayn Rand’s philosophical originality and her relationship with other thinkers like Immanuel Kant and John Locke. Stephen Hicks discusses the nuances of Rand’s philosophy, her literary contributions, and the ethical implications of professional conduct. The dialogue also examines the intersections of Christianity and Objectivism, the moral principles guiding Israel’s actions, and the philosophical underpinnings of Kant’s and Locke’s views of knowledge. This conversation explores the evolution of scientific understanding, the nature of knowledge and the unknown, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and the future of education in light of the need for innovative approaches to learning that adapt to the changing landscape of education and career opportunities.

Takeaways

1. 1. Rand’s originality is significant despite some unacknowledged influences on her.
   2. Philosophy should diverge from literature in its methods.
   3. Professional ethics require savvy navigation of institutional norms.
   4. Christianity has various interpretations, some of which can align with Objectivism.
   5. Understanding different versions of Christianity is crucial for dialogue.
   6. Honesty is a common ethical principle across philosophies.
   7. Philosophical overlaps can exist despite fundamental differences.
   8. Kant’s ethics involves contextual judgment in moral decisions.
   9. Israel’s principles contrast sharply with those of terrorist groups.
   10. Philosophers should articulate their own views rather than channel others.
   11. John Locke’s empiricism emphasizes learning from experience.
   12. There is a distinction between what is not yet known and what is unknowable.
   13. The concept of the unknowable can hinder human ambition.
   14. We should not expect that the earliest theorists will get everything right.
   15. Kant’s Critique of Judgment is crucial for understanding modern art.
   16. The future of education is shifting towards innovative models.
   17. Anticipating future job markets is essential for education.
   18. Philosophical inquiry remains vital in understanding contemporary issues.

    

   Sound Bites

   1. “Rand is profoundly original on several things in philosophy.”
   2. “I think of her as a philosopher and a novelist, not as a scholar.”
   3. “I don’t want to try to channel Rand or Rothbard.”
   4. “Science has been a gradual march of pushing boundaries.”
   5. “The unknowable is a deadly insult to the human mind.”
   6. “Locke is an empiricist; we learn from experience.”
   7. “There’s nothing in principle that we cannot know.”
   8. “Kant’s views on aesthetics are disastrous.”
   9. “Kant is not really very interested in art.”
   10. “The future of education is wide open.”
   11. “We need to anticipate what education will look like.”
   12. “I have two books on the go, no deadlines.”

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   Hello and good evening. Welcome back to The Savvy Street Show. As always, we have a very special guest again tonight. We are going to concentrate our discussion on ethics, particularly Ayn Rand, Immanuel Kant, and the real world. I’m joined by my co-host, Roger Bissell, who is a writer, musician, and philosopher. Welcome to the show, Roger.

    

   Roger Bissell

   Thanks very much, Vinay. Our special guest this evening is Stephen Hicks. Stephen is a professor of philosophy and author of seven books, including Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, and Nietzsche and the Nazis. His writings have been translated into 20 languages. Most recently he was professor of philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois, and he received their Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010.

   To this, I would just like to add that Stephen has been doing podcasts for Open College, and in the past couple of weeks, he posted an excellent and fascinating lecture called “Does Immanuel Kant Matter?” I wish I’d seen this lecture years ago. That would have been terrific. If you listen to this podcast, you’re going to understand pretty quickly why Stephen got that teaching award. I’ll touch on two or three Kant questions later on, but for now, Stephen, welcome to The Savvy Street Show.

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Hi, thanks, guys, for the generous introduction.

    

   Roger Bissell

   You’re welcome. Stephen, I’d like to ask you first about the ethics of scholarship. Many of Ayn Rand’s fans, some of whom have really not read any philosophy other than hers, think that [all] her thinking is profoundly original. As she said, she only owed an intellectual debt to Aristotle, but it seems that she actually drew from quite a few other thinkers and was not always willing to acknowledge her sources. For instance, her dictum that each human being is an end in himself comes at least from Immanuel Kant, if not earlier thinkers, but Rand does not credit him or anybody actually for that thought. Her political philosophy can be found not only in the Founding Fathers, and she’s happy to acknowledge them, but also their original source, John Locke, and she doesn’t even mention him. In her philosophy of literature, she says that she is quoting Aristotle’s view of fiction, but she actually gets the wording almost verbatim from Albert J. Nock, who wrote a book called Memoirs of a Superfluous Man back in the 1940s. Nock admitted this was a very loose interpretation and not at all a translation, but she doesn’t mention Nock as the source for this. Now, is this being fair to Rand? And if not, maybe you could explain how these aren’t really scholarly lapses. Or if you think they are, then why do you think that she didn’t adequately credit her predecessors like John Locke or Albert Nock or Immanuel Kant—or Isabel Paterson, for that matter—for the insights that she got from them? How big of a factor do you think this is in her being regarded as more original than perhaps she was?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Well, that’s an interesting range of questions. The first thing I would say is that Rand is profoundly original on several things in philosophy, and that is a great accomplishment given the two and a half millennia of profound philosophers coming up with profound things.

   Now, which of those things are original, and which ones are not original? That’s an interesting intellectual-history question. I think it should be part of ongoing scholarship by Objectivists to say, here are the 100—I’m just making up a number here—100 significant things that go into Objectivist philosophy. Then, which ones are original, which ones are not original, which ones are more fundamental, which ones are more derivative? Let the discussion go on, and all of those figures you mentioned are worthy of comparison when one does the compare-and-contrast with Rand and her predecessors.

   Along the way you introduced the word “scholar,” and I’ve never thought of Ayn Rand as a scholar. I think of her as a philosopher and a novelist. Here we’re focusing on Rand as a philosopher, but there are different modes of being a philosopher. One is to be a historian of philosophy, or to do your philosophy by putting yourself in an earlier school and acknowledging that you are working within that school—in which case, the standards for what you credit are more rigorous. I’ve always thought of Rand as primarily functioning as a philosopher who’s more in the “public intellectual” mode:

   “I’m working out these ideas. I’m not publishing in scholarly academic journals, and here are the ideas, here are my arguments for them.”

   It is a follow-up question, then, but I think a separate question, about which of those ideas she should give credit to other people for, or not. In many cases, when one’s functioning as a public intellectual philosopher, one takes for granted that other people are intelligent readers, and they will be making other sideway connections. I don’t see that, for much of the kind of philosophy that Rand is doing, part of the exercise is to say, “I’m using this idea and here’s the intellectual lineage of that idea.” That’s a bit of a digression. So, when it’s imperative upon you to say, “This idea I’m getting from someone else,” is if you are making any sort of a claim for originality or significance. Then, if you know that the idea came from someone else, it is of course part of your scholarly ethics to do so.

   I’ve never thought of Ayn Rand as a scholar…I’ve always thought of Rand as primarily functioning as a philosopher…in the “public intellectual” mode.

   Let me get down to one detail. To take the Kant one for example, I think here the formulation becomes very important because Kant does not say that we need to treat every human being as an end in himself—or, if we’re going to be more contemporary, or herself. That is something that Rand says. I think it is true that there are other philosophers prior to Rand who say things that are very close to that, but Immanuel Kant is not one of those. What Kant says in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where most people will have an introduction to Kant’s ethics, is that one has the moral obligation to respect the humanity in oneself and in other people. What he means by humanity is not the human being, the whole human being. If we think of the human being, a human being is a body and a mind, or animality plus rationality and emotionality and all the psychological stuff. Kant is very clear that he does not respect most of the things that we would put on the animality side of that divide. He sees those as things that are interferences with or obstacles to becoming a properly moral human being, while Rand would say the human being is an integrate, it’s the whole human being, and as an entire integrated human being, you have moral standing, you have political rights, and that’s what we need to respect.

   Kant is making a much more limited claim about what is worthy or potentially worthy in a human being. He has a kind of doctrine of Original Sin, that human beings are made of “warped wood,” as he puts it in some of his political writing, and that part of us we definitely should not respect or see as the source of rights. Instead, he believes that we have a certain kind of mind, that we have a rational faculty that sets us apart from other beings. It is that which is supposed to govern the animal side or the inclination side of our nature, and it is that which is worthy of respect, or potentially worthy of respect, if one acknowledges that in oneself and strives to live by it. The point, then, is when we’re talking about the issue of giving credit, in this case, I would put Kant outside the territory of philosophers for whom Rand would be in the tradition of, because he is coming out of a very different philosophical tradition epistemologically in terms of human nature, by the time we get to that very precise “humanity” formulation, and so forth.

   As for the other ones, I think we would again have to do the same thing: get down to brass tacks and look at what exactly Locke says, and certainly Rand’s political philosophy is broadly in the Lockean tradition. You mentioned Isabel Patterson, and we know that there were interactions there, so what did Isabel Patterson write, or what might have come up in conversation? Under what circumstances would it be appropriate, then, to say that Rand got this from Patterson, or Rand got this from Locke, or whoever?

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   Thank you, Stephen. We are going to revisit Kant but, for the moment, we’ll revisit Ayn Rand, particularly her fiction. As a fictional author, you are the master of the universe, and in her universe, Howard Roark doesn’t even finish his degree. He just gives it up. He’s very intransigent. But today in real life, he may struggle to get a single assignment as an architect because regulators say you’ve got to be qualified as a lawyer to do lawyering, qualified as an architect to do architecture. Among [professional occupations] the only thing you don’t need to be qualified to do is philosophy [much laughter]. Anyone can. So, what would you advise Roark?

   I had another illustration which was in real life. I encountered one young wannabe economist in his undergraduate [years], and I said the best thing for you to do is be quiet [lie low] till you get your tenure and then speak your mind if you’re a free-market economist. What would your advice be to Roark and to this young man?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   That’s a good question. The way you started to frame that question was interesting because there sometimes are divergences between literature and philosophy. In literature, one takes a theme or takes a factor and stylizes it in a certain way. It’s exactly right that Rand is trying to emphasize the themes of independence, intransigence, and so forth—that he knows he wants to become an architect, that he has his own vision for what it [takes] to be an architect, that the professors are not to dictate or try to direct his artistic vision in any way. So, quite properly, he’s pushing back on that. Then you say, how would that work now in the real world? There would be partly a historical question about whether all of the credentials were required in the 1920s that are now required in the 2020s. So, that would be a practical judgment.

   But what I would say is, to someone who is considering architecture as a profession, part of what you have to do before you go off to college and declare yourself for an architecture major is to be a savvy consumer and know what the college’s requirements are that you are applying to and know if there are professional bodies that may have a monopoly or guild status, as many of them do now, and make a judgment. If you are not willing to go down that road and jump through the hoops as required, if they offend your personal ethics, then what you have to say is, I’m not going to become an architect in this situation. If it is a matter of jumping through some hoops and I can live with jumping through some hoops, and maybe I can find a way to learn some things while I am jumping through those hoops, then you go ahead and go down that road.

   I would say the same thing with respect to your young [economist] example. Before you decide to go to graduate school in economics and get a PhD with an idea that “I’m going to become a professor of economics,” you have to research your field, be a savvy consumer, research the graduate schools and those that are highly doctrinaire. If the doctrine that they are pushing is alien to what you think is appropriate, or even if you don’t yet have a worked-out doctrine for yourself, but you know that one line is going to be pushed at that university, you don’t go to that university. If it turns out that every single university that’s available to you does not fit you and you don’t think you can get through, then you have to go into some other profession. I think the same thing would hold by the time you get your PhD and you’re considering whether you are going to become a professor at this university or that university. You have to make the judgment call about whether you are willing to do so.

   You can’t sabotage your own soul in order to fit in.

   Now, what I think you cannot do is stifle yourself during your years as a student or stifle yourself during your years as a young professor because you’re afraid of punishment from your professors or you’re afraid of punishment from your colleagues. If you start stifling yourself when you are young, that becomes a habit. You’re never going to be that useful as a philosopher, as an economist, as an architect. You can’t sabotage your own soul in order to fit in. So, the way to do this is—it doesn’t mean that you have to be a martyr right from the beginning, but you do your homework, you find amenable places, places that actually are open to different schools of architecture, different schools of economics, or whatever. You get plugged into the student grapevine as soon as you possibly can. You get plugged into the professor grapevine. You make contacts with professors, get mentors, start making contacts in the field so that people can write you objective letters of recommendation based on your actual qualifications and can protect you from the various punitive ideologists who are out there. I don’t think the situation is horrible right now, but there are analogies in history. If 300 years ago you wanted to become a philosopher, but you were in Catholic Europe, for example, and all of the official institutions were Catholic institutions, you had to work your way the way the smart, savvy people did 300 years ago.

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   Thank you. That is indeed an excellent answer. I’m going to persist on the question of sacrifice, but in a different context. Many libertarians, for instance, are Christians, and Rand said Christmas in the US is essentially secular. She loved Christmas. I’m not a scholar, but from what little I read, there was no obvious sacrificial altruism in Aquinas, and today we find some devout Christian conservatives like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Megan Kelly (she’s a Catholic), who are holding the fort against the censorship attacks on social media and especially on the misguided attack on fossil fuels. So, do such Christians successfully reconcile their ethics and their politics in a way that retains both this altruism and individual rights? Was Rand always wrong in attributing altruistic self-sacrifice to Christianity?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   That’s a great question. I think that it’s going to break down into two sub-things. One is going to be a philosophical question about whether Christianity properly understood is self-sacrificially altruistic and whether there are any elements in Christianity that are reconcilable with Objectivism, and that’s going to be a series of philosophical judgment calls. The other is a more journalistic, social question when we say we survey the cultural, political landscape of people who call themselves Christians. What do they believe, and do they believe what you believe to be the proper understanding of Christianity, or do they have a different version of Christianity?

   Now, my view is that philosophically there’s hardly any overlap between Objectivism and Christianity in its original form. Then when we get down to what do we mean by Christianity in its original form, by that I would mean what’s in the Bible and what’s in the earliest systematizers and commentaries on the Bible, everything up to and including Augustine [354–430 AD]. Now, that’s a philosophical judgment, that’s partly a historical judgment, and we have lots of arguments about what all of that means. I think if you take Augustine as representative of the best philosophical Christian historically up to that era, then Ayn Rand is the opposite, pretty much all the way up and down.

   But if we turn to the other question, if we then say, starting in the 21st century, and we look at lots of people like the ones you have named who think of themselves as good Christians, and they are intelligent people, what does “being a Christian” mean to them? For some of them, I think it is the case that some sort of selflessness, some sort of altruism, some sort of sacrifice as Objectivism defines those terms is indeed part of what Christianity means for them. But equally so, there are plenty of people who call themselves Christians, and when they talk about being selfless and being altruistic and so forth, their understanding of Christianity is not at all incompatible with some sort of Objectivist ethic from their perspective as well. For example, they would say that being selfless just means that sometimes you’re going to go second in line at the Christmas buffet dinner table. It doesn’t mean that you are always going to be first, right? I’m hungry, you’re hungry, but I’m going to let you go first, so, my hunger is a little less important. In this form, that’s a kind of selflessness, right? Or I’m sacrificing the chance to eat two minutes earlier than I otherwise would. So, it’s selfless, it’s sacrifice, right? And so on. That’s a trivial example, but many of them will say, “My ethic, even in a bigger picture, involves believing in God, but I don’t believe in the Augustinian God who’s really angry and is trying to punish us for our sins, and it’s all about sin and self-loathing and guilt and so forth. Instead, my conception of God is a much more benevolent conception of God. God created the world. He made it beautiful. He made human beings, He gave us bodies, so He wants us to enjoy the world and enjoy sex and so forth.”

   Christianity is already splitting into two very different religions.

   In that sense, Christianity is already splitting into two very different religions. Yes, God has given us a set of commandments and sometimes they’re a little bit strict. Sometimes there’s some wiggle room there. But the reason you’re following the commandments is you want to be a good person, and you understand that if you don’t have any sort of a moral rule guiding yourself and other people, it means we’re just going to be having to fight things out. So, it’s important to have principles so that we can all get along and respect each other, and if I’m a good person, yes, I’m going to have to sacrifice and be selfless along the way, but in effect, I’m building up my résumé so that when I die, God’s going to go over my résumé, see that I was a good guy, and I’m going to get into heaven. That ultimately is an egoistic framework, right? So, I have to endure some costs in the short term in order to get the big payoff in the afterworld. It’s not a deep altruism. It’s a much more benevolent, more egoist-friendly kind of Christianity.

   Now, whether you think that is true Christianity, whether all of that can be worked out, whether you can come up with good arguments for that philosophically, that’s another issue. But I do think it is true to say that we have to recognize that for many people, that’s what Christianity in 21^st-century America means, and when we are dealing with them, our discussion with them needs to get granular fairly quickly. We have to say, I know what I might think of Christianity and what you might think of Christianity, but we go into these discussions knowing there’s a thousand different versions of Christianity out there. What’s yours? Spend some time defining the terms as good discussions would go. Figure out what that person means, map their terminology onto your terminology, and then deal with them on that individual basis. In that case, you would find a certain amount of overlap and sometimes more overlap than you would expect. So, you can have more friendships and more kinds of alliances than you might think if you just think, “My understanding of Christianity is just Augustinian Christianity, and all of the rest is bad faith Christianity or really smuggling in Augustinianism, so I’m going to be hostile to them and dismiss them.” That’s not a way to be fair to the [other] individuals, much less build a healthy society.

    

   Roger Bissell

   Very good. The overlap idea that you just mentioned and building a connection to understand other people I think is very important. I wanted to ask a question that relates to that, about Kant’s ethics and about Ayn Rand’s ethics. There’s an interesting parallel that has to do with the issue of emergency situations or helping others in need.

   The stereotype view, and maybe this is the bedrock of Kant’s position, is that we should always do our duty. We should do what is right. That would include not only what’s right for yourself, but also what’s right for others, like seeing to the needs of others. That’s it, just what you’re supposed to do and don’t do what you would like to do. I do find in some of his writings, though, that there is—and you might think this is like more peripheral or more derivative or something—the idea that when he gets into like a real-world or a real-life situation—where he has to think about, “what would I do?”—then he starts talking about, and I can quote him, in his 1797 Introduction to The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics.

   I’m only bound then to sacrifice to others a part of my welfare without hope of recompense because it is my duty, and it is impossible to assign definite limits. How far that may go. Much depends on what would be the true want of each according to his own feelings and values. And it must be left to each to determine this for himself, for that one should sacrifice his own happiness, his own wants in order to promote that of others would be a self-contradictory maxim if made a universal law. This duty therefore is only indeterminate. It has a certain latitude within which one may do more or less without our being able to assign its limits definitely.

   It doesn’t sound like he was advocating a blank check, a sacrifice-till-you-drop kind of thing. Rand herself was coming at it from the other direction. Barbara Branden had answered a question, “What would you do to help the poor in a free society?” as: “Whatever you want, no one would stop you.” Shortly after that, Rand wrote “The Ethics of Emergencies” and says that you do have a very real, although limited, obligation to help others in need, and it’s very importantly dependent upon your context of values. How important are they to you? What’s the situation? Does it involve risking your life for a total stranger, et cetera? So, it seems like they [Kant and Rand] both came to a very similar position that they felt very clearly and strongly about, from very different directions. Doesn’t this happen often when we have people starting out from what might seem like polar opposite positions, and yet they arrive at something that really is a lot more common sensical than where either of them might have started out from?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   I think that’s right, and your way of putting it is, on a particular issue, a situation of helping another person, that concrete situation, both Rand and Kant are going to say there are contextual judgment factors that are going to enter in, and those contextual judgment factors are going to be nested within a broader philosophical framework. Then, as you put it, that philosophical framework is completely different when you tease it out. So, all of the issues that you were putting out at the formulation of that question about duty and wants and so forth, all of that becomes very important.

   Kant is not necessarily the most extreme anti-Objectivist philosopher out there.

   Now, I think in one sense, it’s a standard issue. We might then say, for example, just to take a homey example, you can find lots of people who will agree that honesty is a good policy, that you should be an honest person. Basically, 80 or 90 percent of all moral philosophies will say, yes, honesty is a good policy. Then the tricky bit, and where the philosophy work has to be done, is when you try to answer the “why” question.

   There is a difference, philosophically, though, between people who say, “Well, I think honesty is the best policy, because [I’ll give a quasi-Objectivistic answer] I live in the real world, and I have to recognize that facts are facts, and if I start lying to myself about what facts are real and which ones aren’t, because I have certain emotions and so forth, I’m not going to be able to function well in reality. Part of functioning well in reality is that there are other human beings out there, and we need to do joint value pursuit, and that requires communication and trust, and trust requires a policy of honesty, and so forth. So, as an individual and socially, I’m going to live better to the extent that I’m honest, so honesty is the best policy, and so I as an Objectivist might then be ruthlessly principled in being honest in my life.”

   But we then might say, here’s another person, and we’ll go back to Vinay’s earlier question. Suppose we have an Augustinian Christian who will also say honesty is the best policy, and that person is ruthlessly honest in his life, and you say, “Why are you ruthlessly honest?” and the person says, “Because God said I have to be honest, and I am aware that God is always watching me and will punish the bejeebers out of me if I ever tell a lie.” So, those two people, in terms of their practical conduct, will act identically in 99.9% of the situations. As principled ethical people, they are committed to the principle of honesty in their formal ethics, but obviously, their metaphysical and epistemological context is completely different.

   A parallel thing can come up in the case of Kant, I think, on some issues; I don’t think in all issues. Because of those philosophical differences, there will be lots and lots of divergences, but Kant is not necessarily the most extreme anti-Objectivist philosopher out there, so you can expect that in some cases there will be overlaps, even though there are lots of divergences. I don’t know if you want to follow in on how some of those philosophical fundamentals will lead to those divergences, or if that’s enough for now.

    

   Roger Bissell

   I would say, probably enough for now. I would encourage people for one thing to check out that podcast I mentioned before. You enumerated five key elements of Kant’s philosophy, and anybody who’s familiar with Rand’s ideas can see there are some powerful differences there and how they would work out in particular issues. I guess you just have to want to get into it.

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Yes. Let me just ask: the podcast you’re referring to is in Open College, “Does Kant Matter?” I think it’s episode 56 or 57 or so. [Roger: Right.] Okay. That one is mostly focused on Kant’s epistemology. It doesn’t have very much to say about his ethics, but I do have one hopefully forthcoming soon in my Philosophers Explained series where we go through Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in some detail. That one drills down onto the ethical issues. Ultimately, of course, the epistemology and the ethics in Kant has to be integrated, so that would be even further. But thanks for the plug, by the way.

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   No problem, you deserve it. We are going to move later to Kantian epistemology, but, before that, let me ask a very simple real-world question: [How to get] peace in the Middle East: It’s like the smoker who says it’s very easy to give up smoking. I’ve done it many, many times in my life. There have been many peace accords [none that have lasted].

   Now we’re on the ethics of self-defense and war. Has Israel responded correctly to the most recent Hamas and Hezbollah attacks? What would be your speculative take, if Ayn Rand was the advisor to Netanyahu today? What would she tell him to do? And if Murray Rothbard was the advisor, what would he tell him to do?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Well, I’ll answer the first part of the question. I’m not going to try to channel Rand or Rothbard on that particular set of issues. I think philosophers should speak for themselves. It’s fine to say, I’ve learned a huge amount from Rand, I am an Objectivist, and so I can make those guesses, but I don’t want to try to put words in her mouth. [Vinay: Okay, that’s fine.]

   The other thing is that I’m not a foreign policy expert. I’d say I’m a pretty smart guy who keeps up on news affairs, and I have my philosophical perspective, but don’t treat my word as the philosophical-foreign-policy-expert guru.

   On this, what I would say is, the right way to think about Israel versus the various Islamist terrorist groups that are out there is that you look at the two in terms of their general principles, what they are committed to explicitly, and by their actions that they have engaged in.

   Between these two, it’s very easy to say that Israel is a basically decent nation. It’s committed to human rights, just a generic understanding of human rights. We respect individuals. We have democratic procedures. All of our citizens are able to participate. We take education seriously. We take property rights seriously. We allow people to practice their religion in their own way or not practice religion in their own way. We try as much as possible when we have conflicts internationally to work through diplomatic channels and so forth. That is the mark, at least in principle, of a decent civilized nation.

   By contrast, it’s very clear to me that the various terrorist groups are, on just everything that I said, the exact opposite of that. They don’t care about individual lives. They don’t actually care about life on earth. Most of them explicitly say that martyrdom for the cause is their highest moral value, and they are willing to use all of the people under their control, aside from themselves—women, children, everyone else—as a means toward the end of the cause. They are not at all interested in live-and-let-live with respect to religious matters, with respect to political matters. They’re not interested in diplomatic channels except as a way of manipulating gullible people and manipulating the international community, as just one more tool in the battle. So, they are a deeply uncivilized, deeply immoral set of groups. That should be pretty transparent and obvious.

   It’s very easy to say that Israel is a basically decent nation.

   Now, the next thing that you have to do is to say, “Those are the principles. How consistently do the two sides act in accordance with their principles?” There I want to say, Israel is going to be making a thousand different decisions a day. That’s going to be hundreds of thousands of decisions over the course of decades. Do they get every single one correct? Obviously not. But there’s a huge difference between those who are trying to live according to their [decent] principles and make mistakes once in a while versus those who are trying to live according to their principles and do so consistently, but they are the wrong principles.

    

   Roger Bissell

   All right, I would like to turn now to epistemology and, instead of comparing Rand to Kant, I’d like to ask your thoughts about John Locke in relation to Kant. I read a book a few years ago by Hillary Kornblith on inductive reasoning, and he talked about Locke’s view of essences. The example I remember is gold. Gold has certain attributes that most people think of as gold: it’s hard, it’s malleable, it has a certain color, et cetera. That’s what we grasp about it through observation. On the other hand, there’s it’s inner nature, which we don’t really observe, but we kind of infer it. Atomic theory started out that way. They had the idea that there were these tiny particles, but nobody could see them. They just figured that they have to be there to make experiments come out right, and those were the real essences, what was down there that you couldn’t observe. Science has been a gradual march of pushing this boundary of what we know and what we don’t know, and that boundary seems to move so that what was previously unknown now is something that we know.

   Kant, before he went off the rails and went into technical philosophy, was a fairly accomplished physicist, an empirical and theoretical physicist. When he talked later as a philosopher about what was not known and what was not observable, that was an area that everybody thought, okay, we can’t ever observe it. But when I cut my teeth as a Junior Objectivist, I read this one essay that talked about the concept of “the unknowable” as a deadly insult to the human mind, and it chokes off your ambition to understand, to be told something’s unknowable. So, my question is, isn’t that kind of a package deal of [on the one hand] that which is not yet known and is unknowable in that sense, [that is] for the time being it’s unknowable and [on the other hand] that which is forever unknowable?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Your tail-end question—yes, I agree. That’s the important distinction, and that’s the territory the philosophers have to work on. So, if you start historically, as you did with John Locke, in the early modern world, I think of John Locke overall as one of the good guys, particularly for his political philosophy. I think he’s not as good on ethics. He’s more eclectic there, but his mind and his heart are in the right place. He is trying to naturalize ethics, and he does think ethics can be put on a naturalistic and quasi-scientific footing, a rational footing, but he has some other elements that undercut that and work against that. Then when we turn to his metaphysics and his epistemology, he was a real-world naturalist first, but he did think that we could do natural theology and prove our way to the necessary existence of a God, but within the bounds—actually that’s a Kantian formulation—within the confines, then, I’ll say, of using reason, so that Christianity or religion more generally is a reasonable position to adopt. It’s not a matter of faith. Then to use all of that to bracket the epistemological issues that your question is asking us to turn to.

   Overall, John Locke I think is a good guy in his epistemology. He is an empiricist. We don’t have innate ideas. We need to learn everything from experience. We have to try to trace all of our ideas back to our experiences. We need to be willing to change our minds when the evidence changes. We need to be sensitive to degrees of evidence and to use the language of possibility and probability and be somewhat hesitant before we claim certainty, and so on. So, he’s working out all of the epistemology that’s going to underscore the developing scientific method.

   I think of John Locke overall as one of the good guys, particularly for his political philosophy.

   But then, as you’re pointing out, a big part of that is this issue of concepts. When we are talking about starting with empirical data where we sense the world or we perceive the world and we have particulars, how do we then give an account of where our more abstract formulations come from? So, I’m looking at my own image, I’m looking at you, and I’m looking at Vinay, and if we look at all of the particular dimensions of us, we are different: different voices and skin tones and sizes and shapes and so forth. Nonetheless, we are all human beings, and we want to say that concept of “human being” comes from our empirical observations and so forth. But what is this abstract thing that we call “human being,” this idea that we now have in our mind, and how does it come from the human being? Locke has an unsatisfactory answer to that question, which leads his empirical philosophy down one dead end.

   Closely related to that is the issue that you related where, even if we stay at the perceptual level, Locke has this idea that, say, if I look at you or you look at me, I am aware of a certain number of features, and those are qualities of you, but they’re not necessarily the qualities that underlie you and make you—you. You have some sort of inner structure that makes you a human, and Vinay has that same inner structure that makes him human, and so do I, but I’m not able to observe that. I know it has to be there, but I can’t [observe] that. So, he [Locke] says, there’s a distinction between particular qualities that you have, these primary qualities that I’m not able to observe, and secondary qualities that I am able to observe. He does say that, in principle, those primary qualities … we’re not ever going to be able to observe those. At most, we’re going to be able to infer that they must be there, but cognitively that’s going to remain in some indeterminate status in my mind.

   That, of course, is something that the subsequent generations of philosophers went to work on. That led to another dead end, and that, three generations later, is what set the stage for Kant and his innovations. So yes, this issue of the relationship between the particular and the abstract and the issue between primary qualities and secondary qualities and Locke’s wanting to say that the primary are in principle unknowable—those are two weaknesses that get exploited by later philosophy, and so on. But you have to put all of that in the context of Locke’s overall epistemology. So, the difference [between Locke and Kant]—we still have to come back to the other distinction you introduced [about the presently known and what cannot be known]—is to say that Locke is still [at the] early stage in modern epistemology.

   Just like anything else that goes on in philosophy and psychology and science, we would expect that the earliest theorists are not going to get everything right. So, the question is once we realize that there’s a mistake, we’ve teased out that mistake, there’s a difference between those who go back and say we have to figure out what led us to cause that mistake in the first place, so that we can come up with a better theory of knowledge—versus those who say this theory led to a mistake, therefore knowledge is not possible anymore, I’m not even going to try to improve the theory. I’m going to give up and become a skeptic of some sort. I think that’s the road that Kant and some of the other skeptics go down.

   To come, then, to the other distinction that you introduced, I think the right way to formulate it, then, is to say we’d have to reformulate Lockean epistemology or maybe just not call it Lockean epistemology anymore—to say we have a new kind of empiricism, where we don’t invoke the primary-secondary distinction or the distinction between particulars and abstract essences, that we have a theory of concept formation, and we have a more robust theory of perception. (We haven’t talked about Locke’s representationalism yet in perception. That’s another issue that opens cans of worms that are problematic.)

   So, we have a new and improved, broadly empiricist philosophy that avoids the Kantian trap. I think the right formulation, then, is to say, we observe what we observe, and we know what we know, but we have to recognize that there are lots of things that we don’t know yet, and that there is nothing in principle that we cannot know, just that we haven’t gotten there yet. That’s the divide between those who want to say there are certain sorts of things that we can say are off-limits to knowledge on principle. That’s the philosophical gold nugget that needs to be won. The distinction, just to echo Roger’s words, between those who say, we know what we know, and we also know that there are lots of things we don’t know, but we have the tools to be able to eventually get to those things, there’s nothing in principle that we cannot come to know versus those who want to say there’s a principled and fundamental distinction between things we can know and things that are unknowable. That’s the foundation or the metaphorical gold nugget that needs to be claimed by foundational philosophy.

    

   Roger Bissell

   Good. I was hoping you would say that. This is very helpful, and I really appreciate your thoughts. I thought I should ask you if you take Venmo. You know, PayPal, something like that.

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Venmo? Oh, that’s the cash payment thing?

    

   Roger Bissell

   Yes. I’m thanking you!

   Being a musician, I’m really interested in aesthetics. What Rand wrote about in The Romantic Manifesto was very interesting and helpful. Some other philosophers I’ve read on music and art and so on were not as helpful. I’ve heard some philosophers say that Immanuel Kant’s views on aesthetics are disastrous, just as bad as his other philosophical views. But there is at least one passage in his Third Critique where he says something that sounds a lot like Rand’s definition of “art.” I should be able to recite this in my sleep, but she said art is “the selective recreation of reality, according to an artist’s metaphysical value judgments.” Leonard Peikoff put a little bit of a gloss on it, saying the result of making an artwork is what he called “a universe in microcosm, a view of the universe in the form of a deliberately slanted concrete.” So, you’ve got a miniature world in this artwork, and Kant [says], “the imagination as a productive faculty of cognition is a powerful agent for creating as it were a second nature out of the material supplied to it by actual nature.”

   Now, it seems to me that Kant has gotten the fundamental nature of art exactly correct. Whatever else he may have said about how it should be made, that is what it is, he said. So, I’m wondering how to take that into account when we talk about Kant as maybe being responsible for how irrational and ugly some of modern art is. How did we get to modern art from somebody who seems to have really gotten the essence of art, at least that part of the nature of art, correct?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   That’s a huge topic. Let’s start with the quotation you mentioned. I think I’m a little less impressed than you with Kant’s perspective on defining art, because when you say that what the artist is doing with his imagination is creating something that’s a second nature, if that’s what it boils down to, then I ask, what is that second nature? That’s compatible with simply saying that the artist is imitating nature, so I can paint a landscape, say, or a portrait that really looks just like the first nature, the original thing. It’s a duplication in imaginative form or in another medium and so forth. There’s a long history of theories of art that say art is essentially imitation, or what are sometimes called just straightforward photorealists as the ideal, or what Rand calls naturalism as the improper theory of art. If that is what Kant is saying, then I think it’s quite distinct from what Rand is saying, because she is then saying that the art does start from taking in nature in some sense but notice what she’s doing. She’s saying it’s not just according to imagination something happens, it’s according to value judgments. There’s nothing about value judgments in the Kantian formulation. [Also], it’s not value judgments in general, it’s very specifically metaphysical value judgments. So, I think that’s importing a whole lot more content into a definition of art that makes it a lot more precise. Again, I think doing a deeper dive into the terms will start to lead one to tease out various differences.

   Now, there are two other parts to your very big question. One was about Kant’s theory of aesthetics in general and all of the other things that he might have said about art and aesthetics, and the issue of whether there is a connection between Kant writing in the 1790s and being a very prim and proper, rigid Prussian philosopher and all of the wild and crazy stuff that goes on in modernist and postmodernist art now, 120 going on to 200 years later. So, let me say a little bit about the first and then ask if we have time to dive into the second in our remaining time.

   Kant wrote three big books, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, Critique of Judgment, and it’s in the third one, which was the latest one, that he has some things to say about art. What’s interesting is that Kant—this is an interpretive move that I’m giving you right now—Kant is not really very interested in art. It’s one of the things about him that he didn’t really care for music that much. He didn’t have any paintings or artwork in his home even after he was able to afford it. Apparently, he didn’t read fiction very much. Art, at least in terms of his personal life, did not have much of an impact. While in Critique of Judgment, he does use examples of art, it’s more that he is using artistic examples to illustrate more general points about human psychology. So, he’s interested in aesthetics much more broadly, and art is just one kind of aesthetics.

   We might say, to take another kind of example, suppose it’s a dark and stormy night, already evoking the language, and you decide, I’m going to go out into this dark and stormy night and experience the elements, and suppose you live near the ocean and there’s a cliff overlooking the ocean, and you go stand at the edge of the cliff overlooking the ocean on this dark and stormy night, and all of the elements are just raging around you, and you work yourself up into a certain psychological and emotional state. That’s an aesthetic, but it doesn’t have anything to do with art. It’s also true that art can, when you immerse yourself in it, cause you to get into certain emotional, intellectual, psychological states. So, there is this stuff that’s going on psychologically in a more general sense. Sometimes nature evokes it, sometimes our interactions with other people evoke it, and sometimes people or artistic things can evoke it. It’s that more general level of psychological experience that Kant is interested in, and art is just one example of it.

   Kant is not really very interested in art…he’s interested in aesthetics much more broadly.

   The other important thing about this Third Critique is that he comes to it very late in his career. He comes to it not because he’s particularly interested in art or even in aesthetics, but as he is working out his full and comprehensive philosophy, he realizes that there is a gap in his philosophy that has not yet been filled. So, he’s got his Critique of Pure Reason, and there he’s just talking about reason in its purified, abstracted sense, very technical epistemology, and what it means for science—nothing about anything else in the case of human psychology, just focused on that. But he’s also very interested, as we know, not only in epistemological issues and what can be known. He’s also very interested in moral issues. So, we have this sense of duty and obligation and sometimes guilt and command, and how can I make sense of there being a principled moral philosophy, given that we have these bodies and these inclinations and all of these temptations to break the rules and do things that we shouldn’t be doing, nonetheless, rationally to do my duty no matter what, and to work out morality, including a more robust psychology that’s going to take into account the emotions and the inclinations and our animal natures and various temptations and so forth.

   So, he’s written these two big books, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason. But then he does realize that all of that is still very abstract, and he hasn’t said anything about the place of the aesthetic in our lives. Clearly this is a big part of our lives, and he hasn’t said anything about how I can take this very abstract epistemology worked out in Critique of Pure Reason and this very abstract moral theory and work out how that’s going to apply to concrete practical situations in my life. So, I’ve got a big philosophical gap, and that’s what Critique of Judgment is [there for]. Now, along the way, he does have a lot of things to say about art, and he uses some artistic examples, but I don’t want to let the tail wag the dog when we’re talking about Critique of Judgment.

   Let me just say one more thing because I’m engaged with this art issue, and Roger’s question about the connections between Kant and modernist and postmodernist art is a very important question. It is a fact that if you look at the big thinkers philosophically in the 20th century and the big name art critics in the 20th century—here I’m thinking of Clement Greenberg, the big-name art critic who celebrated Pollock and abstract expressionism, and Barnett Newman and Jerry Saltz, the longtime writer for the Village Voice on artistic matters, and Arthur Danto, probably the most famous philosopher of art, and Roger Scruton—every single one of them will say, if you want to understand modern art, and some of them postmodern art (and here we have to add Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard if we’re going to start talking about the postmoderns), you want to understand what’s going on in 20th century art, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is what you need to reflect on. Not so much the first half of the book, which focuses on themes of beauty, but the second half of the book where he’s focusing on the concept of the sublime. Now, that’s heavy-duty philosophy, but these are the heavy-duty people who know the art, who know the art history, who know the philosophy. They’re all saying it comes from Kant. So, when Rand also comes along, and she has just a throwaway line at one point that says [if] you want to understand modern art, read Kant’s Critique of Judgment, she’s keeping very good company in doing so.

   Then just to do some self-advertising here, I think it was last year, I did an interview in Norway with an artist and art critic named Jan-Ove Tuv, who’s a disciple of Odd Nerdrum, a well-known international artist. Jan-Ove is also independently working his own art career, but he’s a very well-read art history and philosophy guy. He knew that I had written some things on this and lectured on this Kant material. So, we have a one-hour interview where we talk exactly about this issue: what’s Kant’s philosophy, and how does it connect to what’s going on in modernist and postmodernist art? Just go here on YouTube, and you’ll have my take [on it].

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   [Our time’s almost up]. Let me finish with a very short, really simple question. I believe you have had a decades-long teaching career with Rockford University. What led you to stop that, and can you elaborate on your future plans?

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Yes. It was an amicable parting of the ways. Many small universities in the United States and around the world are migrating away from their liberal arts college roots. Rockford University, when I joined, was very much a liberal arts college, but it’s starting to move much more in a professional program direction. So, they were, from their perspective, trying to make a sound business judgment since I was a guy with tenure and basically a lifetime contract. They made an attractive buyout, so that I would give up tenure and go along. My career has been nicely and gratifyingly moving so that I’ve got lots of opportunities for interesting projects, and those have been increasingly attractive to me, also, for the last couple of years. Basically, we negotiated a contract buyout and that came to fruition this past year.

   You mentioned that I have this Open College podcast series. That’s an ongoing project. The plan is that I will be doing a podcast once a week or so. My publisher out of Toronto does a very nice job of producing that with good production values.

   With another team, I’ve been doing a series called Philosophers Explained, where we do a close reading of important philosophical texts. I think it’s always important to read the philosophers in their own words to develop one’s interpretive muscles, and I love reading the great philosophers, including all the ones I disagree with, [and] getting all of that out there. So, we’re doing also, basically, one a week of those.

   I’ve been thinking for a number of years about the future of education, particularly the future of higher education. When I started my Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford University, I think 17 or 18 years ago, we started to do a lot of experimenting with what online education means for the future. What self-study and hybrid programs do best? What can be done with podcasts? What can be done with videos? Given a lot of the economic issues, does it make sense for young people to borrow $100,000 [in] student loans to get a general bachelor’s degree when there are lots of other things available? So, trying to do some informed crystal-ball gazing about what new educational delivery methods will look like and experimenting with those, and trying to say, what’s the future going to be, 15 or 20 years or so from now.

   Coming at it from the technology side, if we say that part of education is to make you into a full, well-rounded person, but at the same time, you want to have a fulfilling career, then it’s not just learning a certain amount of interesting stuff, but setting yourself up to make a good living, hopefully doing something you like. At the same time, we know that we’re living in a highly entrepreneurial culture. There’s a great deal of churn among the biggest companies in the world. Robotics and artificial intelligence are accelerating the rate of change. That raises a question for those of us who are educators. Two or three decades ago, we didn’t know that we needed certain kinds of computer programmers or people who could do robotics; 50 years ago, we didn’t know that we needed digital film editors and social media influencers. So, how do we anticipate with young people, who are now just starting out in their education, what kind of companies they’re going to be working for? A lot of those companies don’t exist yet. They’re going to be doing brand new things, and the jobs and functions and skillsets and mental sets don’t necessarily exist yet.

   With that in mind, I’ve been also for the last three years working with three startups in the higher-education space, and they’re all doing or working toward very different models. I’ve been on the advisory board of two of them.

   The higher education landscape is wide open and it’s a huge market.

   One is a new university (The School of Innovation) being founded in England, in Britain, and their focus is on entrepreneurship and innovation. Their argument is that to be successful in the next world, you might need to be an entrepreneur—or, even if you’re not a classic entrepreneur, at least you’re going to need to be entrepreneurial, whatever that psychological set and skillset means. They’re putting that front and center in developing their pedagogy and the new institution. And innovation: everything is changing, so the idea that you’re just going to get a job and do the same thing for 40 years is ridiculous. That’s also not good for you as a human being, anyway. I’ve been on the advisory board and working with them. The School of Innovation is going to be a hybrid model where there’s some prepackaged material that students can work their way through; but at various points, the students come to a campus for mentorship and meeting with other students.

   Another model is Reliance College—you probably know the name, Marsha Enright [Roger and Vinay nod]. Her model is to say that there is something timeless in the great classics, and there’s something irreplaceable in getting a small group of people together who’ve done their homework and done some reading and talking about the great works and the great ideas in person. She wants to start a brand new, bricks-and-mortar institution focusing on Socratic methods. I’ve also been doing some advising for that model as well. Reliance College, Marsha Enright’s new institution, is totally geared toward in-person [learning].

   The third one I’ve been involved in is Peterson Academy, which is a totally online program. This sounds a little self-congratulatory but, from their perspective, rather than trying to hire the best professors you can and bring them to one institution and then attract [students], you go out and say, who are the best professors in the world on various topics and what can they teach best? Bring them to the studio in Miami, have them teach the course, combine that with first rate post-production values, and then put it online. I’ve done several courses for them as well.

   So, three very different models, and all three of them I think could succeed because the higher education landscape is wide open and it’s a huge market. I’m doing a lot of that.

   Then, of course, I’ve got some writing projects, two books on the go. Don’t ask me for a deadline, but I’m optimistic that by the end of 2025, I’ll have two more books out, now that I’ve got some more sustained time to crank them out.

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   Thank you. Self-imposed deadlines I can relate to. I’ve moved my deadlines quite a bit on books that I was supposed to have finished by the end of 2024. But it’s been an absolutely lovely and insightful discussion. So, thank you, Roger, for co-hosting this with me.

    

   Roger Bissell

   You’re welcome and thank you.

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   You’re welcome. And thank you, Stephen, for coming on to the show and taking on some very difficult questions.

    

   Stephen Hicks

   Yes, it was a real pleasure for me, too. Very good questions. I’ll look forward to seeing it online.

    

   Vinay Kolhatkar

   Yes, you will. And to the viewers, thank you for tuning in. That’s how you become more savvy about the world around you—by tuning into The Savvy Street Show. And let me end with Ed Murrow’s classic line: Good night and good luck.

    

    

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