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Ayn Rand’s lecture “Philosophy: Who Needs It” is a brief and compelling introduction to what philosophy is and why it is crucially important.[1] The title is not a question. But if you read it that way, Rand’s answer is: “Everyone.”
When I first read “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, I was already convinced of the importance of philosophy, but I found it such a useful summary that I began to give photocopies of it to friends, fellow students, and even one of my professors. Their reactions ranged from hearty agreement to indignation and disgust. But they all agreed that Rand’s opening is compelling:
Since I am a fiction writer, let us start with a short story. Suppose that you are an astronaut whose spaceship gets out of control and crashes on an unknown planet. When you regain consciousness and find that you are not hurt badly, the first three questions in your mind would be: Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do?
You see unfamiliar vegetation outside, and there is air to breathe; the sunlight seems paler than you remember it and colder. You turn to look at the sky, but stop. You are struck by a sudden feeling: if you don’t look, you won’t have to know that you are, perhaps, too far from the earth and no return is possible; so long as you don’t know it, you are free to believe what you wish—and you experience a foggy, pleasant, but somehow guilty, kind of hope.
You turn to your instruments: they may be damaged, you don’t know how seriously. But you stop, struck by a sudden fear: how can you trust these instruments? How can you be sure that they won’t mislead you? How can you know whether they will work in a different world? You turn away from the instruments.
Now you begin to wonder why you have no desire to do anything. It seems so much safer just to wait for something to turn up somehow; it is better, you tell yourself, not to rock the spaceship. Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.
You are never heard from again. (pp. 1–2)
Rand cautioned her audience not to dismiss this as science fiction, because in essence this is a realistic description of how “most men live their lives, here, on earth” (p. 2). “Where am I?” “How do I know it?” and “What should I do?” are the basic questions of philosophy, and Rand held that you can’t really live well without answers to them.
“Where am I?” can’t simply be answered by giving your street address. It is a metaphysical question: “[Metaphysics] studies the fundamental nature of existence, of man, and of man’s relationship to existence.” In effect, metaphysics answers that question with a map of the universe that includes a little “You are here” sign.
Rand continues: “As against the special sciences, which deal only with particular aspects, [metaphysics][2] deals with those aspects of the universe which pertain to everything that exists[…] [Metaphysics is] the study of existence as such or, in Aristotle’s words, of ‘being qua being’—the basic branch of philosophy” (pp. 2–3).
This is very much Aristotle’s account of metaphysics. The whole world can be parceled out to specific sciences. But if we step back and ask “What do all the parts of the world have in common?” and “How are we involved in them?” we have arrived at metaphysics.
Metaphysical questions include:
Are you in a universe which is ruled by natural laws and, therefore, is stable, firm, absolute—and knowable? Or are you in an incomprehensible chaos, a realm of inexplicable miracles, an unpredictable, unknowable flux, which your mind is impotent to grasp? Are the things you see around you real—or are they only an illusion? Do they exist independent of any observer—or are they created by the observer? Are they the object or the subject of man’s consciousness? Are they what they are—or can they be changed by a mere act of your consciousness, such as a wish? (p. 3)
“How do I know it?” is the root question of epistemology, the theory of knowledge. Its central questions include:
Does man acquire knowledge by a process of reason—or by sudden revelation from a supernatural power? Is reason a faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses—or is it fed by innate ideas, implanted in man’s mind before he was born? Is reason competent to perceive reality—or does man possess some other cognitive faculty which is superior to reason? Can man achieve certainty—or is he doomed to perpetual doubt? (pp. 3–4)
“What should I do?” is the root question of ethics, which deals with such problems as:
What is good or evil for man—and why? Should man’s primary concern be a quest for joy—or an escape from suffering? Should man hold self-fulfillment—or self-destruction—as the goal of his life? Should man pursue his values—or should he place the interests of others above his own? Should man seek happiness—or self-sacrifice? (p. 4)
Rand accepts the traditional division of philosophy into five branches: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics, and aesthetics (which she spells “esthetics”). Political philosophy “defines the principles of a proper social system” (p. 5). Rand confines aesthetics to what is usually called the philosophy of art, as if the aesthetic appreciation of nature and the human body do not exist. According to Rand, “Art deals with the needs—the refueling—of man’s consciousness” (p. 5).
Why does one need to answer philosophical questions? For Rand, philosophy is not a luxury for idle academics. It is a practical necessity for everyone: “In order to be able to deal with concrete, particular, real-life problems—i.e., in order to be able to live on earth” (p. 5).
Rand’s best argument for studying philosophy is that we don’t have a choice about whether or not we have a philosophy. This is because human beings are rational animals. We inevitably form concepts, adopt principles, and argue among ourselves. Thus it is inevitable that we will pick up philosophical ideas from our culture. Our only choice is what kind of philosophy we will have.
As a human being, you have no choice about the fact that you need a philosophy. Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
You might say, as many people do, that it is not easy always to act on abstract principles. No, it is not easy. But how much harder is it to have to act on them without knowing what they are? (p. 7)
If we don’t think about philosophy, we are in effect allowing other people to think for us:
The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them—from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. (p. 8)
As soon as you raise the question, “Is x really wise?” you are on your way to philosophy. Well, is it really wise to allow other people to answer fundamental questions for us without knowing who they are, what their agenda is, and what alternatives we might have? What if they were stupid, crazy, or evil? That’s no way to live your life or run your society. Therefore, you’ve got to make some time for philosophy.
This is a compelling argument for studying philosophy. I wish that Rand had left it at that. But Rand was not just trying to sell philosophy as such. She was selling her own philosophy of Objectivism. However, it is possible to have reservations about Rand’s particular philosophy while still finding her case for philosophy in general compelling.
Here are a few stumbling blocks I encountered.
First, the greatest impediment to educated people taking Rand seriously as a philosopher are not her own philosophical ideas, however controversial. They are her remarks on other philosophers. If you hand Rand to anyone with a solid education in the history of philosophy, their general reaction is stunned indignation, even disgust. When I gave “Philosophy: Who Needs It” to one of my undergraduate professors, he returned it with a line drawn under the following paragraphs and the marginal note, “This is where I stopped reading.”
You might claim—as most people do—that you have never been influenced by philosophy. I will ask you to check that claim. Have you ever thought or said the following? “Don’t be so sure—nobody can be certain of anything.” You got that notion from David Hume (and many, many others), even though you might never have heard of him. Or: “This may be good in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.” You got that from Plato. Or: “That was a rotten thing to do, but it’s only human, nobody is perfect in this world.” You got that from Augustine. Or: “It may be true for you, but it’s not true for me.” You got it from William James. Or: “I couldn’t help it! Nobody can help anything he does.” You got it from Hegel. Or: “I can’t prove it, but I feel that it’s true.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s logical, but logic has nothing to do with reality.” You got it from Kant. Or: “It’s evil, because it’s selfish.” You got it from Kant. Have you heard the modern activists say: “Act first, think afterward”? They got it from John Dewey.
Some people might answer: “Sure, I’ve said those things at different times, but I don’t have to believe that stuff all of the time. It may have been true yesterday, but it’s not true today.” They got it from Hegel. They might say: “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” They got it from a very little mind, Emerson. They might say: “But can’t one compromise and borrow different ideas from different philosophies according to the expediency of the moment?” They got it from Richard Nixon—who got it from William James. (pp. 6–7)
By the time Rand gets to Augustine, she abandons all pretence of fairness and accuracy and is simply engaged in parody. At best, these caricatures fail to take these thinkers and their arguments seriously, but, increasingly, they are simply distortions. The most plausible explanations for such distortions are ignorance or dishonesty. If the cause is dishonesty, then there is no reason to keep reading. If the cause is ignorance, that is somewhat forgivable when dealing with difficult thinkers. But to combine ignorance with arrogance and lack of self-awareness is sheer effrontery, which is disgusting. Basically, if you want to be taken seriously as a philosopher, you have to show that you take other philosophers seriously.
Of course, such behavior does not invalidate Rand’s basic case for philosophy. Nor does it imply that none of her own ideas are true. Nor is it entirely unheard of in the history of philosophy. Fichte and Schopenhauer, in particular, were known for their jaundiced and hysterical polemics against other thinkers. But it makes it easy to understand why educated and otherwise open-minded people might dismiss Rand as a waste of time.
In “Philosophy: Who Needs It”, Rand says that “The best way to study philosophy is to approach it as one approaches a detective story: follow every trail, clue, and implication, in order to discover who is a murderer and who is a hero.” (p. 10) In other words, Rand treats the history of philosophy as a crime novel, a novel with far more villains than heroes. Indeed, the only heroes in the story are Aristotle and Rand herself. Such a Manichean distortion is simply an intellectual failure.
There is no question that Rand was intelligent, but she was a better novelist than a philosopher. She could not read the history of philosophy objectively. Instead, she fictionalized everything, creating a vast pulp novel, peopled largely by power-mad pseudo-intellectual psychopaths. She especially had it in for Kant:
Today’s mawkish concern with and compassion for the feeble, the flawed, the suffering, the guilty, is a cover for the profoundly Kantian hatred of the innocent, the strong, the able, the successful, the virtuous, the confident, the happy. A philosophy out to destroy man’s mind is necessarily a philosophy of hatred for man, for man’s life, and for every human value. Hatred of the good for being the good, is the hallmark of the twentieth century. This is the enemy you are facing. (pp. 12–13)
Rand seems to understand philosophers like Kant and Hegel on the model of the Bolshevik ideologues who terrorized her throughout her youth, as well as Leftist pseudointellectuals like Harold Lasky. Genuinely great thinkers were beyond her. Even the philosophers she liked—Aristotle and Nietzsche—she scarcely understood.
A second impediment to taking Rand seriously is how heavily her arguments lean on mindreading and gaslighting. Early on in “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” she characterizes ordinary, unphilosophical people as “not very active, not very confident, not very happy—and they experience, at times, a causeless fear and an undefined guilt, which they cannot explain or get rid of” (p. 2).
Later, she says that a non-introspective man who follows his emotions is “blind on two fronts: blind to the world around him and to his own inner world, unable to grasp reality or his own motives, and he is in chronic terror of both” (p. 8).
Rand had a particularly jaundiced view of the hippies:
When men abandon reason, they find not only that their emotions cannot guide them, but that they can experience no emotions save one: terror. The spread of drug addiction among young people brought up on today’s intellectual fashions, demonstrates the unbearable inner state of men who are deprived of their means of cognition and who seek escape from reality—from the terror of their impotence to deal with existence. Observe these young people’s dread of independence and their frantic desire to “belong,” to attach themselves to some group, clique, or gang. (p. 9)
Rand seems to relish the thought that the people who disagree with her are suffering the torments of the damned. Obviously, though, her bleak view of ordinary people is exaggerated. America was not an open-air insane asylum.
One of my classmates, a man in his forties who had gone back to college, had some experience with a cult. He found this sort of rhetoric very familiar. Even though most people don’t experience extreme psychological distress, some do. Cults will often approach such people offering recognition of their suffering as well as explanations and solutions. Naturally, they are intrigued, because they feel visible and affirmed.
He also said that the flip side of claiming that you understand people’s emotions better than they do is gaslighting them so they don’t trust their own ability to read their feelings. And indeed, the very next sentence after Rand’s claim that non-introspective people live in “chronic terror” is: “Emotions are not tools of cognition.”
This statement is false even on Rand’s terms, since Rand recognizes that our emotions are based on judgments of reality. For instance, if we perceive a dangerous situation, we feel fear. But teaching people not to trust their emotions is necessary to turn them into followers of a leader.
I scoffed at this at the time, but there is no denying that Rand’s Objectivist movement had cult-like elements. It attracted alienated people, many of whom attempted to overhaul their identities: to remake themselves in the image of Rand and the heroes of her novels by reforming their thinking and “reprogramming” their emotions.
Nevertheless, none of these considerations invalidate Rand’s basic argument for the importance of philosophy.
Another impediment to taking Rand seriously is that she seems to be pushing a vastly oversimplified understanding of the role of philosophy in history and individual lives. This gets us into some deep metaphilosophical waters.
In his 1821 essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Rand would say that philosophers are the true unacknowledged legislators of the world. But in what way and to what extent is this true?
Rand believes that philosophy determines the course of history to the extent that she is willing to say things like:
Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default. For some two hundred years, under the influence of Immanuel Kant, the dominant trend of philosophy has been directed to a single goal: the destruction of man’s mind, of his confidence in the power of reason. (pp. 8–9)
Not all philosophies are evil, though too many of them are, particularly in modern history. On the other hand, at the root of every civilized achievement, such as science, technology, progress, freedom—at the root of every value we enjoy today, including the birth of this country—you will find the achievement of one man, who lived over two thousand years ago: Aristotle. (pp. 9–10)
One wonders if Rand would deny that inventions like the stirrup, the bow, and steel; the domestication of dogs, horses, and cattle; or events like the Germanic and Mongol invasions, the Black Death, and the discovery of America had any impact on world history. Or would she claim that they somehow derived from the thoughts of philosophers?
Rand goes so far as to say that not just your thoughts, but also your feelings, derive from philosophical ideas:
Your subconscious is like a computer—more complex a computer than men can build—and its main function is the integration of your ideas. Who programs it? Your conscious mind. If you default, if you don’t reach any firm convictions, your subconscious is programmed by chance—and you deliver yourself into the power of ideas you do not know you have accepted. But one way or the other, your computer gives you print-outs, daily and hourly, in the form of emotions—which are lightning-like estimates of the things around you, calculated according to your values. If you programmed your computer by conscious thinking, you know the nature of your values and emotions. If you didn’t, you don’t[…] man’s values and emotions are determined by his fundamental view of life. The ultimate programmer of his subconscious is philosophy . . . (pp. 7–8)
Rand’s disciple Leonard Peikoff went so far as to claim in his essay “Philosophy and Psychology in History”[3] that philosophy is the ultimate explanation of both individual psychology and history, and that there is no explanation for philosophy except the psychologically unconditioned volition of geniuses. Thus for Rand, philosophers are the prime movers, programmers, or puppeteers of history, and the rest of us are merely dancing on their strings.
One wonders about the vast stretch of human history before philosophy first emerged in ancient Greece in the sixth century BC. Would Rand say that before philosophy came along, people had “implicit” philosophies? What does that mean, though? That they had philosophical ideas but didn’t know it? Or that they had another sort of belief system that could later be articulated in philosophical terms?
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Trial of Socrates here.
Rand deals in part with these questions in an earlier essay, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,”[4] where she discusses pre-philosophical worldviews and even individual character as one’s “sense of life.” Rand was deeply committed to the idea of the blank slate. She denied the existence of innate ideas and value judgments. Thus she claims that one’s sense of life, and indeed one’s very character as an individual, are constructed by categorizing experiences based on the emotions they evoke.
But where do these emotions come from? For Rand, emotions are based on value judgments, which she treats as ultimately philosophical. This means that a “sense of life” is actually based on philosophy. So the question remains: What comes before philosophy in history and in individual lives?
In “Philosophy: Who Needs It,” Rand seems to affirm that human history and even your own personality are, at bottom, just clouds of ideas. And if they aren’t, maybe they should be. Thus, Rand is very much a modern philosophical “foundationalist,” who thinks that everything non-philosophical should be dismantled and rebuilt on philosophical foundations.
But again, one need not share these views to think that Rand’s case for philosophy as such is compelling.
It is important to realize, moreover, that if your first reaction to Rand’s case for philosophy is to offer philosophical objections, her mission was accomplished.
Notes
[1] “Philosophy: Who Needs It” was Rand’s address to the Graduating Class of the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York on March 6, 1974. It was reprinted in Philosophy: Who Needs It, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: Signet, 1982).
[2] In the first two places where I inserted “metaphysics” in square brackets, Rand used “philosophy.” But she is speaking at an inappropriate level of generality. She is specifically describing metaphysics here.
[3] Leonard Peikoff, “Philosophy and Psychology in History,” The Objectivist Forum 6 (October 1985): 1–14.
[4] Ayn Rand, “Philosophy and Sense of Life,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, 2nd ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975).
30 comments
Greg, I really enjoyed this article. Of course I always perk up when you mention or reference Rand. She’s certainly had an influence on me, so much so, that I have tongue-in-check cited my appreciation of her as a shield against the charge of antisemitism (in the vein of “I have black friends!”). And I too have printed out some of her passages to hand out to friends. In my case is was Francisco’s Money Speech. Although certainly flawed, her tabula rasa view of man’s mind is a glaring example (as you mentioned), she had great insight into important aspects of human nature. You also mentioned her thoughts on human emotions. I leave you with the following quote, I’m sure your familiar with, that resonates with me.
“An emotion that clashes with your reason, an emotion that you cannot explain or control, is only the carcass of that stale thinking which you forbade your mind to revise.”
Thanks. That quote, though, is a reflection of her blank slatism and reduction of emotions to value judgments.
Note also that she has a prejudice in favor of discounting emotions for conscious convictions. But often one’s emotions are better guides than one’s conscious philosophical convictions.
When a white woman feels unconfortable at the sight of a black man or a troon standing in the elevator, but gets in anyway because she’s been taught not to be racist and to judge people as individuals, as Rand would have her do, her emotions are more valid than her reasoning.
You know, I’ve never read it as a comment on the blank slate theory of the mind. I read it as a description of cognitive dissonance. And I do agree that the quote presents emotions as value judgements (there are other quotations of hers that make this point even more explicitly). I do believe emotions are our minds’ reflexive response to situations which do reveal our value judgments. As everyone knows, if we hold conflicting assumptions (and many times we’re not conscious that we do) that will of course cause a feeling of discomfort. And this feeling should be a warning to us that we should reexamine our assumptions to find the contradiction, as she loved to say.
And you’re absolutely right, many times a normie’s gut reaction is more trustworthy than his programing. I guess I have a bit more of a charitable interpretation of Rand. In your example, I don’t think that Rand would have the white woman necessarily ignore her emotions (i.e. mental reflex) and get in the elevator with the black man automatically. Rand would ask that since she’s conflicted, she reexamine her premises. And if she does so honestly, she’d drop the programing and follow her instincts and wait for another elevator or choose another seat on the bus.
To be a bit contrarian, I’d ask “Do dogs need philosophy? Do chimpanzees? If not, then it may not be true that it’s needed ‘in order to be able to live on earth’. After all, they seem to have decent lives. And to bring it closer to home, are some humans closer to dogs and chimpanzees than they are to a Plato or Kant? Do you need philosophy if you have an IQ of 70 and basically just follow your instincts and desires? Could it even be understood by such a person? Perhaps philosophy is not, in fact, for everyone, though everyone is welcome to try…”
I expect the “non-introspective man who follows his emotions” is not “in chronic terror”, but only occasional terror and mostly floats on the waves of fortune, being only rarely submerged by them. It may not be the best way to live, but it’s a common one, and it’s possibly the only one available to some swaths of humanity.
Rand believed that animals have instinctual “wisdom,” as it were. But man is born tabula rasa and thus must acquire wisdom. I don’t think we are born tabula rasa, of course, but we are the kinds of creatures who have questions about the universe, knowledge, and life that animals can’t conceive. So there is something unfinished about man: our first nature is incomplete, so we require a second nature that includes things like culture, language, and philosophy.
This was great! , love Ayn Rand. She’s so redolent of twentieth century late progressivism to me. How can I be a Jew-hater if I like ayn rand and Isaac Asimov? Even if objectivism has cult like features, at least it’s mostly orientated towards positive goals and values, so it can’t be particularly harmful. It’s not a bad world view for young people starting out, even if it has its flaws. Sort of like a safe training wheels philosophy.
Hmm…I rather think philosophy is bad for mankind, as all its roads lead to nihilism and falling birth rates. Sort of like nietzshe’s arc in Greek culture from the spontaneous to the dialectical, but writ large. That’s not to say that philosophy is bad or that we shouldn’t do it, it’s spontaneous, an inevitability for the most intelligent humans to philosophize. Not everyone should be a philosopher, it’s for an elect.
To me metaphysics and epistemology are solved, and the answer was scientific materialism. Any further discussion is arguing with creationists. Those topics are only read by students of history of philosophy, similar to phlogiston and epicycles in science. The focus of contemporary, living philosophy should be ethics, esthetics, and political philosophy. And these are rich topics. Interestingly, eastern, Confucian philosophy only ever dealt with these topics and never had a significant metaphysical component.
DarkPlato: September 22, 2025 This was great! , love Ayn Rand. She’s so redolent of twentieth century late progressivism to me. How can I be a Jew-hater if I like ayn rand…?
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DP, as a lover of Ayn Rand as you say you are, you cannot logically be a Jew-hater and a White loyalist. The two, in your case are mutually exclusive.
Rand. as a Jewess of her race sucked as a philosoper for White loyalists..
As a man of my race I refer to our great racial philosopher, William Pierce, when it comes to matters concerning the Soviet Jewess, Ms. Rand. See Pierce’s “Deliberate Deception” at nationalvanguard.org
...One [ADV] listener criticized last week’s broadcast because I referred to Ayn Rand as a “Soviet Jewess” who preached a religion of selfishness. He wrote to me that that was like saying that Ayn Rand was a believer in both communism and in self-reliance and individualism at the same time, and that didn’t make sense.
Actually, my reference to Ayn Rand as a “Soviet Jewess” was intended to mean only that she was a Jewess from the Soviet Union, not that she was an apostle of communism. Unlike many of her fellow Jews at the time, she did not preach communism. She was, however, an apostle not only of selfishness but also of other destructive ideas preached by nearly all of her fellow Jews, such as the idea that race doesn’t matter. In her book The Virtue of Selfishness, after railing vehemently and at length against what she called “collectivism,” she wrote, and I quote, “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” Furthermore, Ayn Rand’s brand of selfishness was a far cry from the sort of self-reliance and individual responsibility in which I believe. The atomistic sort of selfishness she preached was intended — again I say intended — to sever a person from his racial roots, to kill his feeling for his race, to lead him to put his personal interests above his responsibilities to his race as a whole, and, in fact, to abjure his racial responsibilities altogether. And this was deliberate….
Read more, DP, about the anti-White Soviet Jewess that you say you love, at the link.
I know, there are negative things about her, for example didn’t she come out very strongly pro Zionist at some point? Nobody’s perfect, but I believe she actually makes some pretty strong counter Semitic points in her books at a sub textual level. For example, I think the character Ellsworth Tuey from Fountainhead actually satirizes a certain strain of Jewish behavior.
edit: there used to be this interesting article on Richard Spencer’s old Altright webzine called “the strange bloodlust of ayn Rand”. I can’t seem to find it online though. Could somebody use the way back machine?
“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.”
Rand was opposed to racism, was she. How about this, from a Ford Hall Forum lecture, 1974:
“The Arabs are one of the least developed cultures. They are typically nomads. [I don’t think this is accurate.] Their culture is primitive, and they resent Israel because it’s the sole beachhead of modern science and civilization on their continent. When you have civilized men fighting savages, you support the civilized men, no matter who they are. Israel is a mixed economy inclined toward socialism. But when it comes to the power of the mind—the development of industry in that wasted desert continent—versus savages who don’t want to use their minds, then if one cares about the future of civilization, don’t wait for the government to do something. Give whatever you can. This is the first time I’ve contributed to a public cause: helping Israel in an emergency.”
Thank heaven we’ve got her kind to care about the future of civilization.
In regard to the sound bites not being the best summaries of the philosophers in question, it’s indeed reductive. Still, those unschooled in philosophy will be unfamiliar with their complete lines of argumentation. Instead, they’ll pick up compressed lines like that and not know where they came from.
It’s not just reductive. It is also false. The Emerson quote is a case in point. He says “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” Adding “foolish” changes everything, right?
Ayn Rand is such an enigma. She clearly gets so much so wrong, but with her there is always that lonely nugget of gold at the bottom of the manure pile. I once had a ongoing disagreement with a standard conservative Hillsdale professor who said that there is zero reason for anybody to read her. I tried to explain that, despite all her flaws as a novelist (and they are many) and thinker, she had roused millions of young people out of their liberal “dogmatic slumbers” by using compelling fictional stories to explain the value of self-interest versus unthinking leftist collectivism. She gave many young people a deeper understanding that one must look beyond knee-jerk reactions to human activity.
As far as philosophy goes, mankind is forever doomed to wrestle with essential questions that can never be fully answered empirically. (Hopefully the Tech Bros won’t turn us into deterministic automatons that never ask these questions). Philosophy is our “technology” for dealing with those questions. It took many millennia to develop that technology to its present form, but surely some part of mankind was wrestling with questions about “what is good” and “what is existence” before that, albeit in primitive fashion.They just couldn’t have an ongoing discussion that improved their thoughts without writing.
She’s rolling over in her grave over your “dogmatic slumbers”. lol Man, she hated Kant.
Thanks for that, Roland. I was not aware of her contempt for Kant–definitely an lol. I guess this is a case of “even a blind pig sniffs out the occasional truffle.”
Hey, I have a general ayn rand query for you scholars. Do the great philosophers show up as characters in rand’s novels? I recall a scene in Fountainhead (was it?), where she goes to see an old philosophy professor who now works at a fast food restaurant and she says, “ it was the best hamburger she had ever eaten.” Was he supposed to be Spinoza, “whatsoever you do let it be done well?”
You are thinking of Hugh Akston, the hamburger sandwich wizard in Atlas Shrugged. Rand patterned his thinking after Aristotle, but in her notes she also mentioned Ortega y Gasset as a possible model, although she may have abandoned that, because the character in the novel does not resemble Ortega in any way I am aware of.
OK, at first I thought it was Atlas shrug, but I had so little memory of that book that I couldn’t believe I would recall it. Really fun essay by the way.
maybe she just interpreted it as a trait of all philosophers that they are aristocratic in whatever context they find themselves.
I have to say libertarianism gives socialism a run for its money for the title of most childish philosophy.
Rand’s story is an allegory for being born, and the astronaut chooses a life of “reaction” to events rather than a life of “interaction,” a decision most people choose. 🙃
Far in the distance, you see some sort of living creatures approaching; you don’t know whether they are human, but they walk on two feet. They, you decide, will tell you what to do.
The moral of the story is that, if you will not take charge of your life—someone else will. That is why you need philosophy to give meaning to your existence. 🙃
Excellent article, Greg. I always appreciate your lucid style.
Someone in the peanut gallery may now accuse you of undermining White nationalism for writing an article about Jewess without refuting her every point – indeed lauding her main point about the necessity and importance of philosophy – and not concluding that she is a loathsome cockroach. I was accused of such for having some non-negative things to say about some Austrian school economists who were Jews.
Anyway, at root and despite her anti-communism, I believe Rand was a leftist of a different variety because of her extreme individualism and her belief in and advocacy of tabula rasa. The latter in particular is a common denominator of all forms of leftism, including transhumanism.
There are far too many people who want to gas the messenger. But truth is truth, wherever you find it.
Rand is good at satirizing Bolshevism in We the Living and brilliant at depicting cultural Bolshevism in The Fountainhead and the mixed economy/liberal democracy in Atlas Shrugged. In effect, she makes great consequentialist arguments against all forms of the Left in her novels.
But yes, her blank slatism and individualism make her a Leftist. Also, her individualism is perfectly in tune with one diaspora Jewish strategy of upward mobility: preach individualism to the goyim and practice collectivism with Jews. It is telling that Rand’s inner circle was almost entirely Jewish and that they referred to themselves as the collective.
Sorry, NO REFUNDS.
Greg Johnson: September 23, 2025… But yes, her blank slatism and individualism make her a Leftist. Also, her individualism is perfectly in tune with one diaspora Jewish strategy of upward mobility: preach individualism to the goyim and practice collectivism with Jews. It is telling that Rand’s inner circle was almost entirely Jewish and that they referred to themselves as the collective.
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Before I had learned anything about the Soviet Jewess Rand, Gary Cooper’s role in the movie The Fountainhead appealed to me — an uncompromising, idealistic visionary, fighting conformity in his profession, based loosely on Frank Lloyd Wright, who I’ve admired since studying architecture, enrolled as a student in the School of Design at NCSU back in the 1970s.
Rand’s Jewish collective against goyim is the answer to, “What is the JQ”
Will, did the NA men or Dr. Pierce have any admiration for or opinions about Savitri Devi? Born and died in the same years as ayn rosenbaum (905-1982), I have all her works and still remain fascinated by her passionate defiance against our enemies and devastating storytelling of witnessing the post-war horrors traveling through Germany in 1949. I appreciate and admire her celibacy, concern for animals, monk-like reverence for the NS cause to the death, and refusing miscegenation while living in India with a comrade (her husband, both spying for The Axis). In the Savitri archives site, it says Matt Koehl was given her ashes. I know she would’ve wept tears of joy at knowing her funeral wreath was draped in the ceremonial sash worn by the Fuhrer.
Uncle Semantic: September 23, 2025 Will, did the NA men or Dr. Pierce have any admiration for or opinions about Savitri Devi?… I have all her works and still remain fascinated by her passionate defiance against our enemies and devastating storytelling of witnessing the post-war horrors traveling through Germany in 1949… In the Savitri archives site, it says Matt Koehl was given her ashes….
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Yes, Koehl’s group, New Order, successor to Rockwell’s group, possesses Devi’s ashes.
“Savitri Devi Archive” at nationalvanguard.org seems to be a dead link now.
Pierce translated parts of Devi’s The Lightning and the Sun in an early issue of Rockwell’s ideological journal, National Socialist World as NSW‘s editor, I believe in a 1966 issue. He continued his relationship with her and she inscribed a copy of one of her books to him. We publish and sell one of her books:
“The Lightning and the Sun by Savitri Devi (abridged); edited by William Pierce” at cosmotheistchurch.org
A classic philosophical work about the historical inevitability of cultural decay and rebirth, written by one of Adolf Hitler’s most devoted admirers. Savitri Devi couches her arguments in metaphor, using “lightning” to refer to forces of destruction and “sun” to refer to building in accordance with Nature’s eternal laws. Both are necessary, says Devi, since to build the pure and new one must first sweep away the rotting debris of the corrupt old order. The author examines in detail the lives of three figures from history: Akhnaton, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler. She argues that we are at the end of a cycle of history in which corruption and lies prevail over honor and truth, and that the time is ripe for the storm of violence that will precede the next golden age.
You might enjoy this Devi essay from 1957: “Paul of Tarsus, or Christianity and Jewry” at nationalvanguard.org
by Savitri Devi (pictured)
IF THERE is a single fact which anyone who seriously studies the history of Christianity cannot help but be struck by, it is the almost complete absence of documents regarding the man whose name this great international religion bears — Jesus Christ. We know of him only what is told to us in the New Testament gospels, that is, practically nothing; for these books, though prolix in their descriptions of miraculous facts relating to him, do not give any information about his person and, in particular, about his origins….
Read more at the link
While I have really valued philosophy for years (for reasons that perhaps others don’t) *and* I highly value White nationalism, attempting to blend these two together, in a way which would be naturally cohesive and beneficial, may be the death of both my personal growth and productivity, via endless analysis paralysis.
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We pro-Whites need philosophy because we are surrounded by skillfully packaged false philosophy that is bad for us, as Kevin MacDonald documented in his Culture of Critique books. We can be victims of this racially poisonous false philosophy or we can find our way to better philosophy that would be healthy for us as a race. We do not have the option to be neutral.
I’ve always looked at philosophy and theology/religion for basic survival tips for navigating life on earth. Being raised Catholic, at age 7, it was expected that I should cherish and respect participation in the ritual of eating the (literal) body of an ancient man. (For those who might not know, Catholics believe that the consecrated communion wafer is not simply a symbol of “Jesus’s body”, but *is* his actual body, thanks to the modern miracle of transubstantiation which occurs every Sunday during mass.)
To my young mind, this was very cannibalistic, and participation in this seemed like a very un-examined practice for many people. My older sister, at that time, was a strict vegetarian, yet she would say, “Amen” and participate in consuming a body. I couldn’t understand why so many wanted to participate in this, content with the fact that doing so, had been labeled sacramental and very honorable.
I’ve always tried to make sense of things. And this has always been a huge struggle. So many, otherwise educated and highly intelligent, people kept up major lies and misconceptions on a daily basis. Why?? I needed to understand what our purpose was. I couldn’t “choose a career” like so many feminist teachers wanted me to (even in elementary school – & I’m not exaggerating here), until I could understand what was true. I had no personal interests above trying to make sense of things, so I could prioritize, based on what was needed.
What obligation did we have, if any, to ungrateful and rude people? And why? Certain highly relevant topics like race-relations were completely off-limits. I craved knowing what was the point of living. I had to understand this. Philosophy, more than theology, helped me with this. I also felt a strong obligation to figure this out before bringing any children into this world. And this was all back before I understood the deliberate worldwide genocide of White people. And now, once again, I’m more concerned with pure survival than lofty ideals.
Who needs philosophy? We Whites do. We have proved it across millennia. We do not all need it as individuals, if only because a lot of us are too young for it, but as a race we build civilizations and societies that feel the need for it and that practice it.
In the killing of Iryna Zarutska, she was of the race that needs philosophy, and all the other people present were not. They have a certain innate practical wisdom that allows them to dominate their environment and make life impossible for us, so that we are the ones that lose the Darwinian contest. Practically speaking, that’s all they need.
“Man,” always and everywhere essentially the same, regardless of race or of any other genetic features, is a mistake or a lie. The intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual needs of “Man,” always and everywhere essentially the same regardless of genetic differences, are fiction.
Refreshing critique and a nicely flowing essay on its own. Something I could have used when 17 or 18 and intuiting that Rand was right (or OUGHT to be right!) in some specifics but is grossly inept, in a bull-in-chinashop way, when she arrogates to herself the power of handing down didactic dicta on the whole philosophical shop. Her rhetoric is often fun but quickly turns disappointing when the neophyte realizes she’s blowing a lot of smoke.
Side point about Harold Laski [sic]. I read somewhere that he was the model for Ellsworth Toohey. Possibly. Yet the film version of The Fountainhead, in which Rand had considerable input (getting both Gary Cooper and a Patricia Neal playing an idealized Ayn Rand avatar), gives us a Toohey done up like Sumner Welles! Cannot be accidental. But WHY Sumner Welles? Because I suppose she saw him as the quintessentially suave, degenerate-toff intellectual. (Though he wasn’t a Toohey at all, exactly; merely a One Worlder. And nothing like Laski.)
Pensee of the moment!
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