EXPANDED EXPLANATION

The WHY and HOW OF IT ALL

Since this is my arm of the Galaxy, I run it my way. I do so for reasons that I have touched on earlier.

I do not call myself an (upper-case O) Objectivist referring to Miss Rand's philosophical system. "Objectism" is a philosohical technical term and therefore ought not be used as the name of a specific philosophy or philosophical system as it can cause confusion. There are three precedents in electronic music. In the 1970's major acts, particularly keyboard players used to split the signal of their instrument mixer and send the lower frequencies, 20-800 through an amplifier tuned to reproduce those frequencies and send the rest to a "high freuqency" amplifier. This was known as bi-amp'ing and the setup was called a biamp. Well some company came along and called itself Biamp. A more obvious case was commited by Roldand Musical Instruemnts in the 1990's. When they releast their digital imitation Hammond (such are called "clonewhee"; for the tonewheel sound generating system that Hammond used, or, if they are poor imitators, "wanna-B"s for the classic Hammond B-3), they called it the VK-7 Combo Organ. The combo organ was the analog portable organ that was famous in the 1960's, being emblematic of the "Go-go" and "pschedelic" music of the '64-69 timeframe and not even related to the Hammond. A more egregious case was when Yamaha copyrighted (and was allowed to get away with it) "FM synthesis". "FM" is short for Frequency Modulation", A kind of synthesis engine that predated the DX-7 by about 4 years and was present on the chip used by Sequential Circuits in the pre-digital days. As you see, these are attempts to claim for themselves something that is either a technical or common term predating their use of it by as much as two and a half decades. I suspect that Miss Rand used the name for matters of copyrighting material and as verbal shorthand. Besides which the philosphical material she produced is, in fact, in line with the strictest philsophical doctrine of objectivism: the Primacy of Existince, the Sole Knowetic Propriety of Reason and Moral Absolutism.

Randism (taken from a comment of mine c1977) is a member of the Aristotelian family of philosophy. So too is straight-up Aristotelianism and Thomism. Thomism, named for St. Thomas Aquinas, is the Catholic branch of Aristotelianism. There are other various and sundry philosophies that claim to be Aristotelian. Now, All Aristotelian philosophical systems are objkectivist since they all have as part of their Metaphysics, that the world exists apart from and prior to our understanding, wishes and feelings about it. To use a generric/techical term for a specific member of a family incurs into the Fallacy of the Substitution of the Part for the Whole, which we call "The Fallacy of the Frozen Abstraction" since it "freezes" the larger concept to mean itself. I've been advised by some to use "metaphysical objectivism" for the generic. I consider the passing but fair as it still runs the risk of a nasty nick from Occam's Razor aka The Law of Parsimony aka KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) by multiplying terms)

My precedents for this comes from three places:

  1. A simplified text on philosphy that described objectivism as the doctrine of the a priori existence of the esternal world, which was written before Miss Rand used the term as she did.
  2. My attendance at Providence Collage where I learned about other Aristotelian philosphical systems that predated ours by many centuries. In fact, I do not recall Miss Rand's system being called "Objectivism" save in very limited usage in generic philosophy studies.
  3. My studies of logic and reasoning which predate my introduction to the work of Miss Rand.
As you go through the world here, You will find that I am the closest in philosophy to the Rand Ideal. mostly because I've got it pared down to it's essentials. My approach is orthopractic rather than orthodoctic. That is. I focus on mental behavior rather than specific tenets and principles. I leave that to others. In some cases I am not competent to do so, it's already been done and would be repetitive on my part and in others that is out of my baileywick. It is well-done by others and I cannot do everything. I would like to have other writers here but that does not seem to be happening. Even the tenets and principles are aimed at promoting the mental behavior. Beyond that, I have concluded that the specific tenets and principles that are not specific to the mental behavior follow as a necessary, unavoidable consequnece of the appropriate mental behavior at the appropriate level. Thus, The dominance of Reason in practical philosophy will lead to an ethics of Egosim will lead to a political system based on individual rights, liberty and limited government will lead to laissez-faire capitlaism (which is quite different from the bastardized "corporate capitalism", "anarcho-capitalism", or the various and sundray "-capitalisms" that you hear about). Capitalism will not work under other conditions. Egoism without Reason becomes an ethical free-for-all with no principles and is usually some form of self-absorbedness which is the exact opposite of any objectivist philosophy. Ayn Rand described herself as being for "epistemological law and order" Well, Space Patrol is the interplanetary police force: the Hawaii Five-0 of Outer Space.

As for validity of terms. "[uper-case O]bjectivism, for me, is a valid but archaic term, more useful for historical than current reasons but is acceptable for the sub-family of Aristotelian philosphy founded and named by Miss Rand. "Randism" and "Randite" are my sub-category and limited to what I have described here. Other things you may come across are "Randian" which covers everything from what I hold to up to persons who seem to be of the opinion that Objectivism was each little thing that Rand had to say. Another term is Neo-Objectivism". On this matter, I regard myself as conservative maihnstream. "Mainstream" in that I am about as close as it gets to what Rand had in mind and "conservative" in that I stick pretty close to the basics If you can do it in one afternoon, it's gotta be pretty spare, right?. Two ohter terms I would be willing to go by are "Randian objectivist" and "Randite objectivist". However "Randite" subsumes objectivist.

It must be stated that there is a difference between the philosophy of Ayn Rand and the wisdom of Ayn Rand. I cover the former in "Randism in One Afternoon". For some of the latter go and play with "QUOTATIONS OF CHAIRMAN AYN". If you confuse the two then you will not appreciate the depth and scope of the person who was Ayn Rand nor the eloquent simplicity and truth of the philosophy that she founded and cannot grasp her material with full intelligence. As with Aristotle she made mistakes, but then she never cleaimed to be omniscient or infallible, she never even claimed to be smart or sharp and disdained such claims made on her behalf. One area of disagreement I have with her is the validity of Cosmology which she said "should be thrown out of philosophy" and as her reason. cites some classical work or other with which she was at odds. While true, I think she made the error of Substitution of the Part for the Whole, which she identifies as "The Fallacy of the Frozen Abstraction" (In this case "freezing" the spacific work with which she found flaw or fault for the whole of Cosmology). Metaphysics without Csomology is attempting to generate a view of the world without accounting for time as represented by a succession of events linked by one being the result of or contingent on the previous one(s). This would freeze the world to the present. "Cause and Effect" is Cosmological, not an Ontological doctrine. Without Cause and Effect. the epistemological concept of "logic" is not linked to the external world and what is left is a kind of Heracletean moment-to-moment validity of Identity. When you use Cause and Effect reasoning. you are projectinog Ontological ideas over time. That is Cosmology.

Yet another aspect of Ayn Rand is the (em)persona. The way she approached things, her sense of life, her use of futuristic ideas, her style of expression and the personal factors that made her interesting as a person and coupled with the other two, as a phenomenon. In persona she was a small nuke and a lover of cats, computers, science, tap dance and of all things, Charlie's Angels, as well as US slang (which she learned to use very well; to the point where she could use it to discuss philosophy). Come to think of it, if you omit tap dance, which I find marginally attracting and Angels, which I found OK but a bit mundane,what you end up with, in persona, is me (lemme see; "Dzey desseve vhat-ever dza commandoes do to dzem: And I hawp dzey do it!"*: Hmmm, works for me).: Well, I did like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. which I found exotic, futuristic and sort of cute while she disliked it as "Bootleg Romanticism". However we were born two generations apart and she did like James Bond, Mickey Spillane and three that I liked: The Avengers, The Untouchables and Perry Mason.

"Randites" are certainly objekctivists. In fact, probably the epitome of such, which is how I suspect Miss Rand was thinking when she named us. In that sense the two publications The Objectivist Newletter and The Objectivist were aptly named. Whether or not you agree with her conclusions as expressed in these pubs, the method they showcased, was, indeed objectivism of the highest order.

Please understand. I cannot speak for Miss Rand, or anyone else; only about them.

*From her 1978 address at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston when asked about the onging terrorist hijacking of an airliner.