The Bizarre Experience of Peikoff's "Life as the Standard of Value" Lecture - Moral realism as a neurotic symptom of our suffering
Actually written JUNE 9, 2023
When I listened to Peikoff’s lecture “Life as the Standard of Value”, I felt a bit like I had entered the Twilight Zone of ironic hypocrisy, which subsequently triggered a sense of woeful tragedy.
First let me tell you I really like this lecture and I totally respect and admire Peikoff for his having made it.
I think Peikoff did an excellent job pointing out the hazard of unwittingly falling under the spell of rationalism. (He even confesses to falling under rationalism’s spell in years past.) By “rationalism” here, I mean the assumption that definitions exhaust the actual identity of what they define. I’ll now explain this.
As a powerful example of this rationalist hazard, Peikoff recounted the dilemma of an actual student of Objectivism who could not understand how value could have a standard, precisely because there was nothing in Rand’s given definition of value that mentioned whether value could have a standard, or what that could even mean. (1:14:25) This student’s confusion was caused by their implicit rationalism. The confusion could have been avoided if only the student could have focused their mind on actual values, which includes all of the properties of values not mentioned in the definition. They could have then understood that values have a hierarchical chain, wherein many values only exist because their fulfillment is required in order to fulfill some other, more fundamental value. The more fundamental value in turn can exist as the prerequisite for some value even more fundamental, and so on, in a chain of such fundamentality. The value at the most fundamental end of the chain, which exists for the sake of no other value, serves as the ultimate standard for all the other values in the chain. But Rand’s definition of value does not mention any of this. We need to study actual values to figure all this out. (I’m also fairly certain that Rand herself did explain this chain of fundamentality in fairly close proximity to her definition, and that I guess the student just forgot.)
So anyway, here’s Peikoff brilliantly illustrating the hazards of rationalism, and in my own mind, I’m having two experiences.
1. I’m recalling how this all echoes the last part of my favorite piece of Peikoff writing where he rejects the analytic-synthetic dichotomy (the Objectivist way of rejecting it, not the Quinean way).
2. I’m also having that Twilight Zone sense of ironic hypocrisy wherein I feel like Peikoff is still somewhat guilty of such rationalism himself – even within this very lecture warning against it.
My mention of number 1 is just an indulgent opportunity for me to name-drop Quine and appear cool (or is it?).
Number 2 is what I really want to explain here. And to do so, I begin with one of my own personal experiences which, coincidentally, centers around Rand’s definition of value.
Rand defined value as that which one acts to gain and/or keep. I remember reading this definition decades ago and squirming in protest at how “behavioristic” and desire-evasive this definition was – and how wrong it is!
Ok. Maybe I’m over-reacting. I confess that it would be rationalistic of me to claim Rand’s definition is just wrong. Definitions are contextual. To produce a definition, we pick the characteristics of the thing we are defining based on how relevant and fundamental that characteristic is in the context at hand. We can produce many definitions for one single thing, wherein each definition is most useful in some specific differing context. In this way, the multiple definitions for a single thing can, but need not, overlap; but otherwise differ on what characteristics are mentioned. So Rand’s definition is not wrong. But, it speaks volumes of the context she’s built around value. And that context is void of desire. It reveals her intent to evade desire. Her definition of value is correct, but desire evasive.
Yet, I might also point out that Rand’s definition of value can be proven deceptive by counter example. As I introspect, I find it plausible that I can value something without acting to gain or keep it. I can value something without displaying the behavior Rand uses to define it. And perhaps this can be attributed to which things we actually mean by the word “value”. Rand’s definition seems to define the things that we value as value itself. Values are the very things about which we experience the feeling of value, but not that feeling. Whereas I think the feeling is the real thing meant by the word “value”. I think of value as the feeling, the wanting, the desire. To me, it seems bizarre to think of values as stuff that we behave a certain way about. I understand that the word value may often be used in referring to the stuff we value in such contexts as discussing economic theories. But I think even this “objects of behavior” way of using the word depends on the existence of the desire feelings we experience for such objects. A definition that did not recognize this dependency would be more deceptive than helpful, in my opinion. And that’s what I see in Rand’s definition: desire evasiveness. But is it a useful definition for those who are trying to support moral realism, which is itself desire-evasive.
So, while Peikoff’s lecture shows how rationalists can be mislead by Rand’s definition of value as regards how value can have a standard, it does nothing to address how Rand’s definition can mislead some rationalists as regards how values relate to the subjective experience of value on which Rand’s definition implicitly depends. Desire-evasive rationalists can conclude, by this definitive omission, that values have no necessary basis in any subjective experience, such as desire – and proceed to buy into moral realism which defines the moral “good” in a desire evasive way. (While moral realists do reference desire in order to claim that some desires are good, they also insist that the good itself is not a desire.)
Now, pile on top of this the ironic fact that Peikoff recognizes, thanks to the insight of his wife, Cynthia, how emotion can be an effective tool to help us avoid rationalism (1:27:08). That’s right: emotion. Emotions can motivate you to pay attention to the actual things that definitions define – make you pay attention to the properties of things which are omitted from definitions. (Well, this is the case, I suppose, only when we do in fact have emotions about the things in question.)
This seems totally valid to me. I rebelled against Rand’s definition of value because I had emotions about value that defied, or at least went beyond, Rand’s definition.
And so, I would find it ironic if Peikoff promoted the desire-evasiveness of moral realism while admitting that emotion can help us avoid the sort of rationalism that I associate with that very desire-evasiveness. You can imagine just how sharp that irony felt to me knowing that Peikoff does indeed support moral realism while listening to him caution against digesting Rand’s definition of value as a rationalist would; and recommending using emotion to avoid that very rationalist error. And Peikoff does exactly this at 1:31:58 ! I’m not implying that moral realists are hypocrites when they appreciate emotions and desire. I’ll only say that at a gut level, they seem like such hypocrites to me, personally. Much more analysis would be required to argue for (or against) that hypocrisy. However, I’d like to entertain the idea for the sake of some further interesting speculation.
Cynthia and Leonard Peokoff speculated that the degree to which we process ideas in a rationalist way differentiated between the two major genders. Men do it way more than women. Something about this speculation prompted me to revisit an essay by Nel Noddings called “A Woman’s Answer to Job”, wherein Noddings makes a similar point regarding the relief of suffering, but without discussing rationalism per se. Men try to relieve suffering with ideas, by rationalizing various excuses for it (such as finding “meaning” in it/for it). Women try to relieve suffering directly at the emotional level, by increasing their interpersonal connection with the sufferer and trying to reduce the cause of that suffering. In terms of morality, a man might tell a sufferer, “Your suffering hurts, but it serves a morally good purpose.”. While a woman might say, “To hell with morally good purposes. What can I do to stop the pain?”.
All this associates rationalism with a disconnection from desires. And more, it suggests that the disconnection often takes the form of moralism, of moral realism. If this happens to be true, can we see the prevalence of moralism as a symptom of widespread, sustained suffering?
Likewise, going back to Rand’s desire-evasive definition for value; if my rebellion against Rand’s definition is valid, and her definition is desire-evasive precisely to support moral realism, these facts would support my world view – that sense that we’re all frail and helpless beings who adopt ideologies, either valid or neurotic, to cope with sustained widespread suffering. It would indeed be a symptom of that suffering - the depth of that frailty, the ubiquity of that long, drawn out misery. To face desire is to face the chronic frustration of desire that is our suffering. So we don’t face it. We need another reward for living, one that compensates our painful frustrations. We need morality so we can measure our lives in terms of desire-void goals and feel our lives are thus redeemed.
As I “sense” the totality of humanity expressing their moralities, I likewise sense the torturous misery behind the moralities, the panicked gasping for rationalizations to insulate themselves from their own suffering and the suffering they inflict on one another.
The more real this all seems to me, the more I feel like crying. Tears swell up as I type this.
There’s a little anarchist poster on my wall – a person about to break some metal restraining chains with a hammer. The words read “Nothing less than Total Bliss”. I don’t see anarchism as the way to achieve that bliss (I see bliss causing anarchism, not anarchism causing bliss), but that poster stirs my emotions in moments like this – shit I wish for that bliss. That bliss may be the only cure for our neurotic dependence on moralism or, more precisely, the cure for the suffering for which neurotic dependence on moralism is hopefully a temporary coping method. (Again, moral realism may be true, yet at least partially utilized to evade and compensate for traumatically frustrated desire - neurotically.)
I want humanity to achieve that total bliss - the kind of bliss that invites us to revel in our desires ‘cause they’re gratified, instead of evade them ‘cause they’re frustrated.
Shit. I need to go for my nightly walk now. I feel the need to find a secluded spot and cry a bit.
…
I’m back from my walk. I did begin a bit teary-eyed, but my inner critic (a “messenger from Konrad”*) reminded me that this was likely just more of my self-righteous futile compassion theater bullshit.
Now I look at the little anarchist poster and all that comes up is the voice of Clare Grogan (of Altered Images) singing “I am a poster on your wall”. [In the song “Dead Pop Stars”.]
And later I’m back to being all weepy ‘cause I’m listening to Cat Power’s “Cross Bones Style”.
Anyway, here’s a link to that Peikoff lecture that impresses me so much: “Life As the Standard of Value by Leonard Peikoff”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XV30iiQlqMA
*Konrad is my imaginary alternate persona who opposes my metaphysical realism. I've written a few fantasy dialogs between Konrad and myself. Here is one of them in this blog:
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