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Transcript: Marco den Ouden Interviews the Authors of Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics

By Marco den Ouden

February 6, 2024

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Date of recording: January 30, 2024, The Savvy Street Show

Host: Marco den Ouden. Guests: Roger Bissell and Vinay Kolhatkar.

 

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].

 

For those who prefer video podcasts, it’s here.

 

Marco den Ouden:

I’ve read the book and it’s an excellent book. It really puts a new light on ethics in our time.

Hello and welcome to the Savvy Street Show. I’m your host, Marco den Ouden, and with me today in the studio [are]—well, actually not in the studio, you’re across the ocean—Vinay Kolhatkar and Roger Bissell, authors of a recently published book called Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics. I’ve read the book and it’s an excellent book. It really puts a new light on ethics in our time. And I’d like to ask both of you to give a short overview of what your objectives were and how you thought about getting there, working together. Let’s start with Vinay.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:
Firstly, thank you for your compliments, Marco, on the, as you said in your review, “new spin on ethics.” I would like to start by emphasizing that we do stand on the shoulders of intellectual giants that preceded us: Aristotle, Aquinas, Ayn Rand. For me personally, [other] influences insofar as this book is concerned, were psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, psychologists Julian Jaynes, Nathaniel Branden, and Abe Maslow. My objective was to first arrive at the ontology of a human being and a complete compendium of human psychological needs and a very brief overview of the physiological needs which I attempted in Chapter 3. I came up with 12 needs, even though relationships of all kinds were collated into one need. The second objective was to use that ontology of a human being, and Roger’s Chapter 4, for an ethics of a humane, meaningful life. The third objective was to extend the ethics into politics. In terms of how we went about it, four chapters were written individually, two by me, two by Roger [the Preface, Epilogue, and two other chapters were written jointly]. But we acted as the devil’s advocate for each other, [and] as an editor and as a sounding board [for the other], and that worked out extremely well.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Roger, do you have anything to add?

 

Roger Bissell:
Well, sure. You’ll just have to tell me when to stop adding. I, too, had three objectives. First of all, I wanted to show how powerful the true parts of Aristotle’s ethics and biology are, and secondly, to show how much we owe Thomas Aquinas for bringing these ideas to the modern world. That was what I set out to do in Chapter 2, primarily. And thirdly, I wanted to show just how Aristotelian and how fertile Ayn Rand’s ethical ideas are, as well as her idea about the basic importance of our pre-philosophical worldview. That was what I went into in Chapter 4. By pre-philosophical worldview, I’m talking about our basic view of life in the world that we grope for long before we get around to adopting a formal ethics and philosophy. Rand had a different name for it, but I simply call it Deep Meaning or deep meaningfulness. And based on this worldview, we then do two very important things. Eventually, as we’re reaching maturity, reaching adulthood, we look for, [and] try to find an ethics that makes the most sense and hopefully fits our worldview.

I wanted to show just how Aristotelian and how fertile Ayn Rand’s ethical ideas are, as well as her idea about the basic importance of our pre-philosophical worldview.

And then, secondly, if we really value being in control of our lives and not just drifting along, we will use that worldview as a foundation for our central life purpose, which is the personal meaning of our lives. And to me, the stress that Vinay and I set out to put for ethics on meaningfulness, both deep meaning and personal meaning, was one of the two vital parts of how we were going to modernize Aristotle’s ethics.

And the other was humaneness, and Vinay convinced me of the importance of this. We talked about the Orders of Humaneness quite a bit in our Zoom chats and so on. They are kind of a two-way or even a 360-degree way of looking at your relationship to others and to yourself. And they are a good way of staying on track for actualizing yourself and your life. You can’t fully actualize your life without paying proper respect to others, and you cannot do it either without paying proper respect to yourself and making your life the fullest it can be. And I agree that as we worked together, we did bounce a lot of ideas off each other, we were each other’s best critic, and sometimes we were our own best critic. We’d say, “Oh, you know, I rethought this. I need to run it by you. What do you think?” So, it was great. It was a lot of synergy, and the synergy was just tremendous.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Fantastic—that bit of insight into how you work together and what your goals were. You wrote the chapter that gives us an overview of Aristotle’s thought. And there are, of course, many mistakes that Aristotle made because of the time that he lived in. For instance, he didn’t have very good ideas about women and slavery. But these are historical digressions and not really the essence of Aristotle’s fundamentals. Can you go over the fundamentals briefly and why they are so important?

 

Roger Bissell:

I do want to say one thing before I get to that, and it is that Aristotle had a very interesting idea of the relationship of the individual to the community. Unlike Plato, I think, he didn’t treat the community as more important than the individual, but he did think that the community was essential to your living your own best life as an individual. There’s a certain amount of participation in the community and in the economy, and conforming to the pattern and the rules and procedures, that are required by that. There are, of course, some boundaries or limits. There are some excesses that, if you’re a reasonable person, you should not tolerate them—and when Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he was explaining why we were breaking with our British cousins, and it was that kind of situation, exactly. But in general, there are these wonderful benefits of living among others, like friendship and trade and knowledge, and it’s such a great cluster of benefits that it’s almost a no brainer to stay in even a mediocre society, where you have a mixed economy and government, rather than just run off and live in the forest by yourself. I don’t think it occurred to Aristotle that people would find social living to be objectionable, if it wasn’t fully libertarian.

 

I don’t think Aristotle has gotten full credit for just how important these foundational facts and methods are for his ethics.

Now, putting that aside, I want to answer your question. Aristotle’s insight into human beings was that they’re not only rational beings, but they’re social beings, and that’s very important. His psychology and his biology are all focused on those facts. And he made some very important identifications—and Thomas Aquinas picked up on these, too—that there are at least three crucial aspects of all successful life. There’s survival, and there’s flourishing. These two we’ve heard a lot about over the years, but there’s also what we might call “generativity” or “legacy.” Whether they’re the same thing or different, we could talk about that, but they are the essential parts of living the fullest life, if you want to have a meaningful and a humane life as a rational and social animal. What else about Aristotle? Well, he was a realist. He was a naturalist. I don’t mean he was a cynical realist. I mean, he looked right here at the real world, right here on earth. We have the ability to know it by using our senses and our reasoning to recognize that things have a nature and they act according to their nature. So, right there are the concepts of “identity” and “causality.” And this is just bedrock stuff, essential points, if you want to have a philosophy and sciences based on facts, so that you can discover truth about the world and use it to guide your life. He also thought that principles for thinking and acting—in other words, what we call “method”— are very important to philosophy and science and to living well in general. You can see this all through his philosophy. His laws of logic. He defined the principles of definition and deductive logic. The syllogism came from him; his stress on how important inductive reasoning is; and dialectics as a way to resolve intellectual disputes and to fortify our first principles, our axioms.

I don’t think Aristotle has gotten full credit for just how important these foundational facts and methods are for his ethics. He didn’t just do like some people say he did, and just kind of take a survey of what the good men did. He also looked more broadly at all living beings, and he saw that there were certain things that they all had in common in order to live well. So, he was really fact-based. He was very scientific and methodical, very thorough in understanding life and what the real requirements for each creature are—plant, animal, human—[their] needs to have the fullest life.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Oh, great. You mentioned human nature and Aristotle’s take on human nature. Vinay, you actually wrote the next chapter, which is called “The Essence of Human Nature.” You write about humans as “introspecting animals.” And you argue that this is what sets man apart from the other animals. And you also go on to speculate that perhaps the introspective human is in fact a new subspecies of Homo sapiens. I found that quite a fascinating idea, and I wonder if you can elaborate on that point and about man as an introspecting animal.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you, Marco. Yes, you’re right. The human mind is capable of reminiscing about the past and planning the future. And we do so by talking to ourselves. So, the mind creates an identity of itself, mind and body inside the “virtual mind space.” We can also observe our own mental state, which we call “introspection,” and that’s a huge leap. The one question that has not been answered by the theory of evolution is: When did this process actually take place? Paleoanthropologists say that Homo sapiens, so human beings, arose roughly 160,000 years ago. Linguists say language arose only 30,000 years ago. So how did we speak to ourselves before 30,000 years ago? And we can’t do so without any kind of language, and those languages were rudimentary. They didn’t survive to this day.

Ayn Rand speculated that the chasm between apes and humans was so large, she felt distinctly uncomfortable about it, and Jaynes, I think, would have given her the answer.

Now, Julian Jaynes was a Princeton psychologist, and he published his magnum opus in 1976, and he has some jaw-dropping theories. One of those theories is that human beings did not develop an ability for introspection till about 30,000 to 3,500 years ago; and, of course, the lower limit is highly controversial. So, the subspecies is really an analogy. If you had a time-traveling machine, and you took a human being from 100,000 years ago, he or she would be compatible with the rest of the human race. They would be able to bear children or start a family. But it’s such a different species that I end up calling it a subspecies. Mind you, even Ayn Rand speculated that the chasm between apes and humans was so large, she felt distinctly uncomfortable about it, and Jaynes, I think, would have given her the answer.

 

Marco den Ouden:

It’s an interesting topic, fascinating topic.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Yes, so just one thing to add. What happened was…if you go into the brain, there’s no substrate or material that accounts for consciousness. It’s like the brain’s a computer. No hardware has changed when consciousness came in, but there is a massive, huge software upgrade, which is language.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Right. I always like the comparison of the brain and the mind to computers, and there’s a lot of revolutionary stuff in science today that goes a long way to explaining how the brain works. Roger, you quote extensively throughout the book from Ayn Rand and more or less on par with Aristotle. But, you also say that even though your own ethical and political models differ in significant respects from Ayn Rand’s, it’s instructive to see how congruent her ethical values and virtues are with the pillars of her metaphysical optimism. Can you elaborate on this? Where do these ideas diverge and where do they converge?

 

Roger Bissell:

Oh, sure. There are some points where I strongly agree with her, and some where I go further than she did. You referred to her metaphysical optimism. I think that’s another good point. That was her particular position on Deep Meaning about the world and life, whether you’re optimistic or pessimistic about the world and life. I guess there are four main views, and they even have an A and B, so it’s like four times two, and I’ll just run through them quickly. First, 1A) her own view was the world is intelligible, and 1B) humans are capable of knowing it. 2A) the world is open to human effort, and 2B) humans are capable of acting and achieving goals. 3A) the world is worth the effort we put into knowing and acting, and 3B) humans are capable of being good and living a good life. And 4A) the world is emotionally worth the effort, and 4B) human beings are capable of feeling good about themselves and their lives. Now, because a person can take a positive or negative view on any of these—I was running through the combinations the other day, and I said, “Wow, there are 16 possible worldviews,” but I really think there are 256. If you go 1A positive, 1B negative, or just mix them and match them, there are all these possibilities. And I know that not everybody had this sparkling positive take across the board. The human race is a lot of mixed people. I don’t want to say mixed up—some of them are—but mixed. We have a lot of variation.

Now, if you use Rand’s view as the foundation for an ethics, I think it goes straight across into the Objectivist Ethics. If you know the world, that translates into the cardinal value of reason and the virtue of rationality. Achieving values…that translates into purpose and productiveness. If your actions and character are worthy, that translates into self-esteem and pride. And if you feel good about yourself and your life, that translates into what Rand said was the moral purpose of your life, which is happiness.

Now, one way I go beyond Rand is I see that ambition is not just involved in pride, which she called moral ambitiousness, but also in rationality and productiveness. Intellectual ambition: you want to know more and more. You don’t ever say, “Well, I think I have learned enough. I’m just going to coast the rest of my life and do Sudoku puzzles or something.” And for practical ambition, wanting to achieve more—why would you ever stop? I mean, if all you do is to tighten the screws, I guess maybe you’d get arthritis and want to quit. But, generally speaking, why wouldn’t you want to keep doing and keep learning? It just seems like that’s part of being human. Even pursuit of happiness. Now, I think that’s a virtue. Rand doesn’t mention it as a virtue, but I think that’s an exercise of ambition. You can only be truly happy, in my opinion, if you exercise rationality and productiveness and pride.

I used to think Rand’s politics was based on her own ethics, but I don’t anymore.

So…let me say a couple of things about her politics. I used to think Rand’s politics was based on her own ethics, but I don’t anymore. I really get the argument that some people are making that you can’t just go directly from her reason, purpose, self-esteem into limited government and individual rights. I think it’s not her ethics, but what she identifies as being true about any ethical system whatsoever. Ethics by definition—no matter whether it’s a Christian ethics, the Nazi ethics, the Objectivist ethics, Utilitarians—by definition, it means freely chosen action. You cannot consistently demand freedom of action for yourself without granting it to everyone else. So that’s how free thought, free speech, free market, etc., logically follow from the very nature of ethics—and not from Objectivist ethics, but just from what ethics requires. I don’t think Rand made that connection clear enough. I think you can find it in her journals. You can pick little things here and there that help make the case, but she really didn’t spell that out, I think. And so, many of her followers have been looking in the wrong place for [the] bedrock, the foundation of her politics. Like I said, it’s in the nature of morality. One other point: I’ve got a deeper analysis than I think that Rand did of the political spectrum. One result of that is that I find that the politics and economics of Objectivism are essentially compatible with libertarianism—libertarian politics and Austrian economics—and that they are not at odds with each other as Rand and some objectivists, and I would also say, some Thomists and Aristotelians would claim.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Interesting thoughts. There’s quite a difference…you contrasted [her] politics and her ethics, and there’s quite a difference between Atlas Shrugged, which is very political, and The Fountainhead, which is more psychological. And one of the focuses in The Fountainhead is on self-actualization, on being your true self. Would you describe Rand’s ethics as being more an ethic of self-actualization than egoism?

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, if I know what’s good for me, I will, yes. That’s one of the points of our book. Maybe we didn’t underscore it enough, but sure. For a human being, say, whether it’s you or I or Vinay or Howard Roark, if you’re going to self-actualize, that means to live up to your potential as a rational being, a rational social being, to live well as the particular individual—the particular human individual—that you are. There are some other aspects of her ethics that are not fundamental but are still indispensable. There’s a difference between what you can’t do without and what is the foundation. Like in geometry, the foundation is the parallel postulate and the other axioms, but then you get down, several weeks later, to the Pythagorean theorem, and you say, well, how could we do geometry without the Pythagorean theorem? And yet, it’s not an axiom. It’s not fundamental. It’s just something that’s indispensable. So, I think one of the things that is indispensable to Rand’s ethics is egoism, even though she said it is not a fundamental issue.

Who benefits? That’s not the fundamental [issue]. The fundamental is that your individual life as a rational being is the most important value in your life, and every action you take should support it, not undercut it or neglect it. So, we could call it [egoism] a “corollary.” We could say egoism or “rational selfishness”—that was a term that they used also—is a corollary of self-actualization, life as man qua man. But you couldn’t really give a solid validation or support for rational selfishness if you didn’t have that basic support under it, which is self-actualization.

She also discusses another part that is indispensable. She took a firm stand against hedonism. She said morality should not be based on seeking pleasure. It’s not wrong to have pleasure and enjoyment, but if you aim at that, that can undercut your self-actualization, living by the pleasure motive. Both of these are vitally necessary conditions to be a fully self-actualized person. So, Rand’s ethics…we can describe her ethics as egoistic, we can also say it’s anti-hedonistic, but the best description of her ethics is self-actualization. What is in your best interest as a rational being who seeks to live well? It’s not false to say it’s egoistic, it’s not false to say it’s anti-hedonistic, any more than if somebody says, “Is Rand’s metaphysics atheistic?” Well, yes, but that’s not the core of it. Or what about her politics? Is it capitalist? Yes, but that’s not the core of it. The foundation idea in all these areas is the best way of describing them. Like her metaphysics is basically realist. There’s a real world there, and we have real knowledge of it. Her politics is basically individualistic: individual rights; and her ethics is also individualistic—some call it “self-perfectionism” or “self-actualization” or eudaimonism (the term that Aristotle used, and I think David Norton in his book, whatever the name of that book was).

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Personal Destinies or something like that.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thank you. Putting the focus on these other ideas, egoism or atheism or capitalism, just doesn’t get at the core of her philosophy, and it’s bound to be misleading. And I don’t like to mislead people.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Let’s continue here with Vinay. You discussed David Hume’s Is-Ought Gap. And can you briefly describe or explain what the Is-Ought Gap is and how you both got around this conundrum?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Okay, now as far as I know, Hume’s Is-Ought Gap has four names to it: Is-Ought Gap, Hume’s Fork, Hume’s Guillotine, and Hume’s Paradox. And there’s also a controversy over what Hume actually meant. Now, let me go through what I think he meant. He says moral philosophers often talk about things as they are, about facts. And then they switch suddenly, like a magician’s sleight of hand—the hat goes up, the rabbit is gone—and they shift to normative or prescriptive or ought-to-do statements. And that shouldn’t happen because we cannot derive “oughts” just from the “is.” They [the oughts] should be based on the “is”—the facts. So let’s say, as you know, lions need to hunt in order to survive. That’s a fact. Then we say, therefore, lions should hunt. Well, what’s the hidden “ought” in there? It is that lions should survive.

You can’t get around Hume’s paradox. You’ve got to build a bridge between the field of ought-to-do and the fields of facts.

Or, to gain happiness we must use reason. Therefore, we must use reason. But wait, there is another hidden “ought” there, which is: Do we want to be happy? Maybe not. That’s the way it actually plays out in practice. All that Hume is asking us to do is to make that bridge explicit, and we did so. It’s a bit like there are two fields, and you’ve got to build a bridge [between them]: the field of ought-to-do and the fields of facts. And the only way to connect them—because otherwise they’re like Kipling’s East and West, never the twain shall meet—the only way to connect them is to have a bridge. And our bridge is: We should want to make our lives meaningful. It is within us to do so, and there are substantial correlated benefits to mental and physical health and longevity. So, we made meaningfulness both our standard and our end goal in ethics. That’s our bridge. We make it explicit. You might remember Rand, for instance: she’s forced to commit to a different standard, man qua man, and a different end goal, which is arguably both survival and flourishing…and happiness. So you can’t get around the paradox, but you’ve got to acknowledge it. And like a fork [at its combined end], you say that’s the bridge I built. Be explicit.

 

Roger Bissell:

Can I just add a brief note to that? I’d like to do that. Vinay pointed out how Rand early in her thinking, maybe in “The Objectivist Ethics,” was talking about, without naming Hume, the Is/Ought Problem. And she wrote an essay fairly late in her career called “Causality versus Duty.” Instead of Hume’s problem, she was looking at Immanuel Kant who laid out these, well, you just should do this, period, commandments. No “if you want to,” or “if you need it” or whatever, just “you should.” I think she was so focused on dealing with that problem that maybe she didn’t realize that she had come around to Hume’s way of thinking. I really do think she made a move toward realizing that there are not just bald facts, but there are conditional facts, if you want x, then you have to do y. And do you want x? Well, if you do, then you have to do y. It’s just a simple…you plug facts in that…some are straight facts, some are conditionals, like an “if-then” statement. So, I really think she changed her thinking without realizing or without maybe some of us realizing how far she had turned.

 

Marco den Ouden

That’s an interesting thought. Roger, can you describe what you mean by a “full life” and why is this necessary for ethics?

 

Roger Bissell:

Sure. It’s more than just having a lot of food to eat at dinner. In Chapter 4 of the book, I talk about Aristotle and Aquinas and others, what they’ve identified as…I call them “levels of development.” But once you get rolling, as you’re a teenager and adult, you’re working on all of them together: the personal level, the interpersonal, and then the institutional level [which] is where we’re talking about the economy and the political system. We’re not just-lone wolf rational animals. We are social rational animals. We’re not Robinson Crusoe and all that. If you’re a hermit who sticks to yourself and you’re physically and mentally well-developed, but you are kind of socially dysfunctional and you don’t have any close ties to friends or family—or you’re not really very good at working with others in the economy or functioning in the community you live in—your life just isn’t as full as it can be. And that, by the way, is one reason why we included the chapter on politics in our book. If you’re going to have a fully humane and meaningful life, a life that’s fully self-actualized, a fully rational, individualist life, you have to be in a social context, I already underscored that, as long as you have somewhere to go, that not just “everything is totalitarian” slave societies, like in Orwell’s book 1984.

Obviously, you have to survive, but life is more, a lot more, than just not physically dying.

Each of those six stages is vital to your fullest life, to your maximum actualizing of yourself. Obviously, you have to survive, but life is more, a lot more, than just not physically dying. You have to thrive and develop and expand your mental and physical abilities and your vitality. That’s flourishing. And, there’s the issue of what do you do about other people? Well, you start in on that when you’re quite young, as you relate to Mama and Daddy and siblings and friends. That’s an ongoing process. As you work at becoming creative and productive and figuring out what you most want to do, you’re going to want to interact with and trade values with others. Some of them will be material and economic values, some of them will be social or spiritual and personal values.

I’ve used this metaphor of a nation. I don’t think I talked about it in the book, but the nation is born and it kind of takes roots, and then it grows and expands, and then it reaches out and trades with other nations economically and culturally. And this third level is what I call “generativity.” This term has been around for quite a while. I think Aquinas used it or something like it. And then there’s a term called “legacy,” and we’ve tossed this around quite a bit, too. I think we have two kinds of legacy. One is genetic legacy, which is where you have your own offspring or close relatives, like if you’re the doting uncle or aunt and you have your favorite nephews, and so on. However, not only the genetic legacy, but the non-genetic legacy (that Vinay wrote about in chapter 3), is like what have you created that you pass on to others after you’ve ended your career or you’ve died. So, generativity is like [creating] during or before you die, and then legacy is after. I like the fact that you have these two distinct concepts that are very closely related, but they cover distinct parts of your life.

And then, finally, what we get into in Chapter 6, I partly touch on it toward the end of Chapter 4, about the economy and what we call “polity.” (Well, “polity” was Aristotle’s term, but the community, I would say.) And as I think I said a couple of minutes ago, these areas are not hermetically sealed. It’s not like, well, “I’m going to work on this now.” They’re very interconnected, and by the time you’re an adult, you have your hands really full balancing all of these areas with each other, and there are going to be value conflicts. Part of what we hope to work on some more going forward is techniques or ways to balance your conflicting values or competing values and to work out value conflicts.

 

Marco den Ouden:

I think we’ll move on now to what I consider the centerpiece of the book. And that is what you call the Four Orders of Humaneness.

I think we’ll move on now to what I consider the centerpiece of the book. And that is what you call the Four Orders of Humaneness. Vinay, where did that concept come from? And can you explain briefly what the Four Orders of Humanness are?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Thank you for taking a deep interest in it. I had been thinking maybe for years about humanism and humaneness, and I concluded that Objectivism is in fact a form of humanism, and Roger convinced me libertarianism is, as well, of the same form, a form of humanism. On my early drafts of these four orders of humaneness, I had three and then expanded to four, but I received a lot of excellent feedback from Roger, so thank you, Roger, for that. What we have is, the first two orders are matters of principle and the next two orders are matters of practice. The first order of humane life is one in which we properly respect and take care of oneself, one’s own humanity, one’s passions and desires, being in touch with ourselves, of using our emotions as clues to cognition. So, a first order humane life resents being used by others. It doesn’t allow ourselves to become mental slaves or be bullied, etc. The second order of humane life accords other human beings the same dignity, respect, frankness, as one ought to accord oneself, as ends in themselves, deserving of not being lied to, of not being manipulated, neither masters nor slaves, neither guardians nor wards, neither mentors nor mentees, and mind you, even our wards or children deserve that same principle, meaning as ends in themselves. There are two exceptions. One I call a terrorism or Immanuel Kant exception. We don’t owe the truth to the terrorists. And, you can also surprise people with birthday parties, surprise birthdays or whatever; that’s sort of a mild exception to always speaking the truth.

I concluded that Objectivism is in fact a form of humanism.

Now, the third order of humaneness is practicing getting in touch with yourself, of being better at recognizing your own emotions, your passions, of forgiving oneself for past errors and developing the skill of introspection and making it better, making your self-assessment better and better. And the fourth order, humaneness, again, is practice of the second order of developing empathy, of being able to read other people well, because a lot of tragedy happens when we don’t. So, they are the four orders of humaneness. And in the fourth order, we’ve also got to realize that sometimes we have a large influential effect if we are seen as the powerful other, as the parent by a young child, or could have a halo effect of a celebrity, if we are one. I think none of us are, at the moment, so we won’t have that kind of halo effect. But those are the four orders.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Continuing on that theme, you discussed errors that people can make in their thinking, and you argued that these errors are often caused by violating one of the four orders of humaneness. In particular, you mentioned Viktor Frankl. He had the opportunity to, he got an American visa and had an opportunity to leave Austria. But he decided to stay with his family, and you argued that this was a mistake on his part. Can you elaborate on that?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar

When we analyze any decision, we have to say either we can take the full benefit of hindsight or we say, was the decision prudent when looking at it from that [earlier] timespot.

Sure, it’s a very difficult circumstance to analyze. First of all, when we analyze a decision, any decision, we have to say either the effects of the decision are past us, and we can take the full benefit of hindsight. Or we say, was the decision prudent when looking at it from that [earlier] timespot. You didn’t know then what was going to happen in the future. You might buy Microsoft shares and they go up and, well, it looks great, [but was it] right when you did it. So, let’s look at the facts as I know them. I present them as I know them. Before America entered the war in 1941, that’s when the opportunity arose for Viktor Frankl [to leave Austria] with his visa. And by that stage, Hitler had already annexed Austria. He did so in 1938. Viktor’s family was—all Jewish, his father, mother, brother, sister, and himself…three siblings. And they knew what was going to happen to Jews. So, what’s the possible response? One morally upright option could be to join the Austrian resistance. Everyone takes up arms and fights the Nazis. Not likely to succeed, except you might kill a few Nazis before you die. The other is to sit at home with guns until the dreaded knock comes on the door and then shoot. You’re dying in a shootout…maybe take a few Nazis down with you. Another option is to escape.

Now, his brother and sister did try to escape. The sister succeeded. She crossed over into Italy, eventually got a visa to Australia and lived a life in Melbourne. The brother didn’t succeed. He was caught and [a bit later] put to death in some camp. He and his parents were taken to concentration camps. Viktor and his mother were held in Auschwitz, and his father was sent to another concentration camp. And what the Nazis always did was to separate the families. So, they [the prisoners] had no idea what had happened to the other person. [So,] Frankl was moved again to another concentration camp. He spent three years in these camps, where he said, right at the outset, 90% of people were killed because they were deemed not big enough to do the work or strong enough to do the kind of work they put them through. Of the remaining 10%, another 9 out of 10 of them eventually died of starvation or disease and stuff like that. So, your chance of recovery or survival was 1%, and miraculously, he did so.

When he made the decision to not use the American visa, a synagogue had been destroyed by the Nazis. His father went there, found a stone, brought it home. And Viktor looked at the stone, and said, what does the stone say? And it had just the Hebrew letter, I think it was the letter five. The [Jewish] fifth commandment says, “Honor thy father and mother, and your days shall be long upon the land.” And Viktor took that as a divine sign [and decided to stay back in Austria], and it worked out well for him in a sense. I mean, the father and mother did die, the brother did die, the sister succeeded because she made a different decision. And looking at Viktor’s decision, he could have gone to America as a highly influential professor. And perhaps as America entered the war, he had better chances then of rescuing his parents. That’s why I think it was wrong.

 

Marco den Ouden:

It’s an interesting thought and I know that I don’t entirely agree with you, but we won’t get into that at this time. One of the interesting aspects of your book is that you digress and analyze the Ayn Rand/Nathaniel Branden split as one of these errors of thought. I’d like to hear from both of you on this. Vinay, how would you analyze that split from the Four Orders perspective?

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Nathaniel had absorbed this theory of sexuality, he had introjected all of what Rand said, unconditionally.

Thank you. Again, as in the Frankl case, let’s start with the assumed set of facts. My source for that is Barbara Branden’s book, which is controversial among some people. And like Frankl, you have to look at the decision and what happened at that point in time. Fortuitously, Frankl’s book became a bestseller later because of that concentration camp experience in which he would have died. So, the facts as I know them were: Rand was around 50 and she’d finished The Fountainhead, she was writing Atlas Shrugged, she was drawn intellectually to Nathaniel Branden, at that time 25 years younger than her and a budding psychologist, and she had a theory of sexuality which basically meant that if you saw your highest values in a man, if you’re a woman, and vice versa, you are bound to be sexually attracted to them. And so, she believed in not just a mentor-mentee relationship between her and Nathaniel, but [that] they ought to have a romantic and sexual relationship, which they began, and it was on and off for roughly 13 years. And one of the last things she said to Barbara when the relationship broke, and I’ll quote, “If you ever,” she’s addressing Nathaniel, “if you ever for even a moment had been the man you pretended to be, you would value me romantically above any woman on earth, even if I were 80 and in a wheelchair. You would be blind to any other women.” I think that Nathaniel had absorbed this theory of sexuality, he had introjected all of what Rand said, unconditionally. She had the halo effect. He thought at that time probably every word of Objectivism is true. He therefore suffered guilt. But when Rand had put the affair on hold because of her own depression, he had started another affair, anyway. So, he failed at the third order of humaneness to understand oneself completely, to reconcile the fact that his emotions were not in accordance with Rand’s theory, therefore the theory was probably wrong rather than he was wrong. And Rand, on her part, I think, failed at the fourth order because she was a genius, but she failed to understand—one, was her halo effect; and two, what was actually going on for that many years with Nathaniel.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Roger, can you add to that by sort of discussing what you think are the consequences of that split on the Objectivist movement? What were the repercussions of the split?

 

Roger Bissell:

Well, actually, I’d like to trace or add a little bit to what Vinay said leading up to the split, and then, the aftermath, okay? Now, I have to preface this. I never met Ayn Rand personally, and I only met Nathaniel in the late nineties, long after all this. I read both Nathaniel’s autobiography and Barbara’s biography of Rand, and I also read James Valliant’s edited version of Rand’s private journals during this time. So, I’ve kind of got both sides. I’ve read a lot of analysis, and this is my own personal take after reflecting on all that material. And like I said, I didn’t know them personally. This is second or third hand, right? The cause was a combination of naivete and hubris. And I say naïve…[despite] Nathaniel Branden being a young psychologist, they didn’t understand psychological dynamics of when you’re married to somebody else, and you’re trying to have this relationship, what’s going to happen? What kind of damage will it do? I think there was a failure of honesty and self-awareness, too. And that gets into the orders of humaneness that Vinay was talking about. I think, also, they were not only attracted to each other intellectually, but I think they were, if I may say so, sexually frustrated. I think Nathaniel and Barbara both revealed that they weren’t having a really great romantic relationship in their marriage, and, also, I think Rand was not totally fulfilled in her marriage, and so I think they were both looking for something, and during that period of their lives, they found it in each other. I think the age gap wasn’t as significant at that point as it later turned out to be. It was a big mistake. I think once it cooled down, they should have let it go, but Rand decided she was going to press really hard to get it going once everything was back on a good, even keel, emotionally, for her.

Branden really blew it. He failed from the standpoint of courage. He failed from the standpoint of honesty.

She was doing essays and lectures and feeling more optimistic, and she didn’t understand why it wasn’t appropriate or emotionally viable—the orders of humaneness come in here again—and Branden really blew it. He failed from the standpoint of courage. He failed from the standpoint of honesty. He tried to extricate himself by covering up his true feelings for the other woman who became his next wife, and also, his lack of romantic feelings [for Rand]. He said, oh, he wanted to feel those feelings. Well, he didn’t want to feel those feelings, so he was lying. I think that’s why the breakup was inevitable, [and, perhaps,] the breakup of the movement [as well]. The movement was centered around those two people. and if they couldn’t hold it together, then it was going to crash.

Now, for consequences, I don’t think it was an unmitigated disaster. In the early days before the split, there was a lot of intellectual bullying going on. There was something like a cancel culture that was going on in Rand’s circle. And after the split, there were a large number of those who were really more loyal to Nathaniel Branden, who went with him, and left that toxic environment. So, I think there was quite a bit of good that was done. But on the other hand, all this intellectual synergy that Rand and Branden and the others had…that really broke apart, and the creative output of the movement also declined. Except for Leonard Peikoff’s very prolific work with his lectures, I don’t think there was much of significance that came out of the movement over the next two decades or so.

There was something like a cancel culture that was going on in Rand’s circle.

And then David Kelley split off around 1990. He initiated Open Objectivism, and even [after] that I don’t think there was a significant increase in dynamic progress, and I think that’s still true today. Rand said, not long before she died, that her philosophy was not complete, and it wouldn’t be complete before she died, and there’d be plenty of work for others to do. Well, that sounds great. Yes, dial me in on that. I want to help. But the keepers of the flame, the Ayn Rand Institute, declared in 1990: there shall be no new Objectivism, period, not even filling in gaps that they all knew were there. And this was . . . she passed in 1982 . . . and 1990 was when they declared Objectivism is closed. So now here we are, what, almost 25 years [actually, almost 35 years] after Open Objectivism started, and I don’t think anything new has been officially added to what Kelley in 1990 called a “young philosophy.”

I know that sounds like I’m gloom and doom, oh, “the decline and fall of Objectivism,” but I’m afraid that’s kind of in slow motion what we’re seeing. Objectivism was…one of the selling points to me was not only is it true, it’s a really good perspective on life and the world, but it’s also a wonderful tool, a powerful engine for intellectual progress, moral and social progress. But I think that was its potential. And instead, because of the closed policies, the closed mindedness, the gatekeeper mentalities, and so on, the philosophy has been kept sequestered, almost like the virgin up in the turret of the castle, and we will keep it pure at all costs. And over the last 20 or 30 years, look how much incredible boost to thinking and to communication that we’ve gotten from the computer and the internet. But despite that—you could think, well, maybe that would save the movement, but I, I still see it’s gradually kind of fading and I thank Vinay for this point, Nathaniel Branden once called it “a movement of young souls.” Well, that was us 40, 50 years ago. Guess what? Now I think this movement is withering away. It’s kind of an inverted pyramid of Baby Boomers, and what’s going to happen when we’re gone. I wish it weren’t true. I desperately wish that we were just on the verge of a new Golden Age, and we’re going to see stunning breakthroughs, intellectual and technological breakthroughs, by people who have been thoroughly steeped in these Objectivist ideas. But I don’t see it, and because of that, I am very sad.

 

Marco den Ouden:

I think that Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, adds to the Objectivist corpus. Whether the hardliners agree with it or not.

It’s an interesting perspective. I’m not sure I agree with you on that, that the movement is withering away. Rand’s books continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands every year, and I think she will in the future be recognized as one of the great writers of all time. Also, I think that your book here, Modernizing Aristotle’s Ethics, adds to the Objectivist corpus. Whether Peikoff and the hardline, closed Objectivist people agree with it or not, I think it’s an important contribution to the Open Objectivist movement.

 

Roger Bissell:

Thank you.

 

Marco den Ouden:

I’d like to continue, or conclude, actually…the book primarily is on ethics. All of the chapters except one deal with ethics, but your last chapter, you diverge a bit and you go into politics. Why did you decide to go into politics? Let’s start with Vinay on that one.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Firstly, thank you, Marco. Roger ended the last question saying, “I’m really sad,” and then you made him smile and laugh. So, you’re very good at the fourth order of humaneness. We went into politics, from my perspective, wanting to show that all politics, every government policy, has an implied ethical framework, whether we make it explicit or not, like getting around Hume’s Fork. And it’s not surprising [that] in our politics, we came out very heavily in favor of free speech and free markets. I want to bring one other aspect which Roger emphasized in his talk today, as well as in the book, that we are social animals. And in terms of us being social, when we define values, we have some extended definitions that differ from Rand’s. One of them is [a definition] of universal potential values. Universal potential values recognize that we are rational social animals who live in societies, that material abundance is only possible by division of labor, and [that] the state of medicine, science, health, and technological progress would be in dire straits without a systematic, legally enforceable organization of division of labor and protection of individual rights including property.

We say universal potential values are ones that nudge any society toward a higher state of humanism and/or knowledge.

So, what are the universal potential values? We say universal potential values are ones that nudge any society toward a higher state of humanism and/or knowledge. So, if we increase the world’s real knowledge in any field, however slight, we influence other individual minds to lead or consider leading humane meaningful lives, or we add to the world’s reservoir of Romanticist art, or plead for victims of injustice, or fight for humaneness in any institution, because again, as Roger points out, we cannot flourish by ourselves living in a forest like Henry David Thoreau, or on an island like Robinson Crusoe. In the entire history of mankind since the fable came out, there have been very few real Robinson Crusoes who chose to live on an island by themselves, and even then, they came back in a few years. So, I think that’s all from me and why we chose to extend into politics.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Roger, would you like to add to that?

 

Roger Bissell:

Sure. Well, this is going to agree quite a bit with what Vinay said. I think you can’t present an ethics for living well strictly in personal terms or even in personal and social terms. If you want to live well, I maintain you can’t live well in the fullest sense without taking part in a division of labor economy and at least to some extent on the local level of the political structure. If we’re able bodied, we cannot live as unproductive parasites, living off the generosity of others or the forced labor of others. Just as important, we can’t live with our heads in the sand. We can’t be oblivious to threats to our personal liberty. We can’t rely on the elected officials to do the job alone. We’re going to be the ultimate check and balance if the government is doing something wrong or just being generally incompetent. And if we’re asleep at the switch and we don’t exercise what Jefferson called “eternal vigilance,” then we’ll share the blame if the country descends into tyranny.

Think of Dagny [the heroine of Atlas Shrugged] when she had burned out totally and she went to live in the woods.

So, there is an old bumper-sticker slogan, “Don’t blame me. I voted.” Well, this is a much more profound principle. Don’t blame me. I engaged with the culture. I engaged with society. Think of Dagny [the heroine of Atlas Shrugged] when she had burned out totally and she went to live in the woods, and she needed to recharge, partly. But she thought, I just can’t stand this anymore, what they’re doing to the world and to my business. But once she started feeling like herself again, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had to do something. And it wasn’t just being purposeful and active, but also, I think she wanted to be back engaging with whatever few productive, rational, moral people there were. And so, she couldn’t do that living off in the woods. That’s kind of why I use that little metaphor. I like the Thoreau reference, too. Now, I discussed some of that in Chapter 4, and then Vinay and I really went through it thoroughly in our final chapter. So, there is a good connection between Chapters 4 and 6 on this point, and I do hope readers will grab onto it.

 

Marco den Ouden:

I’d like to thank you both. Do either of you have a last word before we conclude the show?

 

Roger Bissell:

I know Vinay does.

 

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Greta Thunberg committed to a mission and that lifted her out of depression. But it’s a wrong mission, objectively speaking.

Oh…just to add at the end to what Roger said, we have commandments as well, but there are only three secular commandments, and they’re not divine. They’re just “I driving me” (Jaynesian phrase for being autonomous, self-driven) in the Jaynesian sense. One, construct a meaning for your life and commit to it. Test it objectively using the principles in the book. And when you test it subjectively, [ask] is this the thing of all the humane things, of all the mission things, that I can do [best]. Is that bringing out my passion? You should be passionate about it, but [also] test it objectively, which, for instance, Greta Thunberg doesn’t. She’s committed and that lifted her out of depression. She’s committed to a mission, but it’s a wrong mission, objectively speaking. The second commandment is to strive to be humane in all four orders, commit to the principles of the first two orders, so you won’t go wrong in the first two, and try to improve your introspection and your ability to understand others. And third is to self-actualize, developing our seven key faculties that we speak about—rationality, introspection, tenacity, capacity for joy, goodwill and empathy, wisdom, and resilience. Develop that in accordance with your mission, and that’s your self-actualization. That’s all from me.

 

Roger Bissell:

It’s the meaning of life and the meaning of your life.

Sure. I’ll put a cap on it here. I’ll try to do it in 90 seconds. I hope we don’t run out of tape. Ha, ha. The humane part of what we’re aiming at, I would summarize it as one part Apollo and one part Jesus. Know thyself. That was the Delphic Oracle at the Temple of Apollo. And know the others who matter to you. And respect thy neighbor as thyself. There’s the Jesus part. Identify what’s going on in your thoughts and feelings and behavior. Don’t sweep them under the rug, and the same for the other people you deal with. Don’t abuse others and yourself, and don’t allow others to abuse you—and when it’s appropriate, try to encourage them not to abuse themselves. The meaningfulness part I think is one part Ayn Rand; and he might be uncomfortable with this, but I think Vinay Kolhatkar is a big part of my understanding of this, there’s Deep Meaning, to identify what life and the world are all about, what they mean to you, what’s important to you about them in a very broad way. And then there’s your core personal meaning, what you want your life to mean, to amount to, your central purpose, your mission in life. So, it’s the meaning of life and the meaning of your life. And I think that pretty well summarizes for me what we were trying to do in the book.

 

Marco den Ouden:

Well, on that note, I’d like to just conclude by saying that this is an excellent book, and if you have the opportunity to buy it, it’s a bit expensive at this moment, but there’s going to be a paperback edition out in July, which should be at a lower price. And I highly recommend the book, and I encourage everybody to go and get a copy. And on that note, thank you both for being here, and thank you to our audience for listening. And a good evening to you, or a good morning, whatever the time may be. Okay. Thank you.

Roger Bissell:

Thank you so much.

Vinay Kolhatkar:

Marco, thank you.
 
 

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