Ayn Rand the Hegelian vs. Schelling, Goethe, and Gödel
Philosophy of Art and Mathematics with Whitehead and Russell Caught in the Crossfire
Over the past few days, I have come to the conclusion that yes, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is in direct opposition to Schelling’s due to the fact Ayn Rand, despite her denunciations of Hegel, is a Hegelian. She fled the USSR and wanted to rebuke Hegel to take down Marx, yet despite this, all of her methods are clearly identical to Hegelianism, and so is her particular aesthetic, other than in my opinion her infamous interest in art deco architecture. Her interest in having a hero to look up to is Hegelian and her interest in traditional realism (which I would not equate with representational art per se) are outgrowths of the Hegelianism she was indoctrinated into while in the Soviet Union. She tried to oppose Marx yet ended up promoting a hyper-Hegelianism, bringing back Napoleon himself in her efforts to undo Stalin’s claims that Napoleon was replaced by himself in the then-current dialectical model of the USSR. Since Schelling during his lifetime declared himself the anti-Hegel, of course I would find such a diametric opposition between Ayn Rand’s philosophy and Schelling’s.
This also highlights why Ayn Rand absolutely never can be an individualist philosopher like Emerson and Nietzsche: Hegel is likely the least individualist philosopher on the planet, while Emerson, Nietzsche, and Goethe are three people who are generally somewhat aligned, since Emerson read Goethe and was heavily influenced by him to the point of taking essentially his entire aesthetic philosophy from him, and Nietzsche was essentially writing a peculiar interpretation of Emerson and increasingly of Goethe over time. Goethe was Schelling’s mentor directly and they worked on the Naturphilosophie together, among other things, which is how I came to really learn who Schelling was in the first place. I also later learned that, in addition to having come up with what I consider the first modern formulation of a theory of evolution (despite the fact it was very deliberately anti-empirical, it was indeed the direct inspiration for Darwin and predated Lamarck, and Darwin credits it) Schelling also came up with the idea of the unconscious itself and was therefore the proto-psychoanalyst. With the opposition between Schelling and Hegel, one is indeed forced to choose between Ayn Rand, Hitler, and Stalin on the one hand and Darwin, Freud, and Jung on the other, which also points out just how facetious any claims on Hitler’s behalf to being inspired by real philosophers actually were. It’s not even only Darwin, Freud, and Jung, but Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas who are “Schellingians,” for Schelling was also the first one to have said that psychology can all be derived from myths.
Did Goethe and Schelling Endorse Species Evolution.pdf (uchicago.edu)
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling - Wikipedia
Schelling is in my opinion very well one of the most underrated philosophers of all time, even if you can’t pull the hipster “you’ve probably never heard of him” card, because most people have probably heard the name in passing but don’t understand the real significance. Not even someone like Žižek in my opinion gets the real significance across, because Žižek talks about Schelling in the context of the development of Hegel’s thought, but seems to completely miss the vast significance of Schelling’s thought itself. He also seems to miss that Schelling was the anti-Hegel anyway, which I think points to a general lack of understanding of Schelling’s thought.
said in one of my old posts which is currently my highest-rated that the real mistake in the university system was to separate the humanities and STEM and I think there’s nothing that points to that so much as the Naturphilosophie itself, and now the fact that even Žižek who gets paid lavishly to travel and speak about German idealism doesn’t seem to understand Schelling because he doesn’t understand the scientific aspects of Schelling’s work, which are the key to understanding how Schelling thought.In the words of Wikipedia, Schelling’s thought often seemed inconsistent and “evolved,” but this is because Schelling pioneered evolutionary thought itself, and anyone who doesn’t understand that won’t understand Schelling at all. The fact Ayn Rand hates Kant and is a Hegelian is also probably evidence that yes, Schelling is a better corrective to the problems in Kant than Hegel was and Hegel was basically a faker capitalizing on Kant’s popularity. Ayn Rand also popularized the idea that to be wrong is to be evil, which allows her to call anyone she disagrees with who’s influential worse than Hitler, when that’s obviously garbage when you put it that way, it’s only people who know they’re wrong but still want to stay wrong who are evil, not simply people who are wrong, which is why, no, Kant is not worse than Hitler even if in my opinion he was clearly wrong about many things. I think even people who would self-describe as “Kantians” would admit that, they just have an interest in the things Kant had an interest in, namely, “the moral law within and the starry sky above,” and followed Kant’s general method of thinking, rather than agreeing with him on all points, when even Kant didn’t agree with Kant at all points since he changed his thinking over time too, whereas those aren’t the particular issues that interest me so much, what Schelling talked about with evolution, the unconscious, and the whole Naturphilosophie interests me far more.
Another point that has really stood out to me is Ayn Rand is an explicit logicist, whereas Hegel was an implicit logicist. Refuting logicism is what Kurt Gödel did to Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell when he proved the infamous incompleteness theorem. Bertrand Russell’s motivation to prove logicism was to disprove Kant’s synthetic a priori. Therefore, it seems that when Gödel disproved Russell’s and Whitehead’s logicism, he essentially affirmed Kant’s synthetic a priori. Philosophy of mathematics is not a topic most people will hear often, for the obvious reason that there’s generally not much of a reason to discuss it unless someone just wants to make themselves look like the biggest nerd possible while probably also distancing themselves from the likes of someone like fictional character Sheldon Cooper who would probably have complete disdain for philosophy, like Stephen Hawking claimed to have complete disdain for philosophy. However, I do think it really ties into the idea of overall worldviews because if your worldview implies a certain conception of mathematics that’s incorrect then that’s also evidence your worldview is incorrect. Then, it’s not at all surprising that Hegel, inventor of the Hegelian dialectic and therefore essentially Big Brother saying “War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength,” would end his story by trying to get Winston to say that 2+2 = 5 or, more recently, Jean-Luc Picard to say there are five lights.
After Russell and Whitehead realized logicism was incorrect, they largely seem to have embarked on a post-mathematical project of sorts despite having been the arch-mathematicians. For a while this caused me to attribute an anti-mathematical sentiment to them and start indulging in Ayn Rand’s logic to call them worse than Hitler just like Kant. After I realized Ayn Rand is a garbage excuse for a human being, I changed my mind on this and decided that, althought Russell and Whitehead’s having apparently just given up on mathematics isn’t something I’m overly sympathetic to, unlike many people who are influenced by them, they didn’t actually run around railing against mathematics, they just happened to unfortunately create a bunch of excuses for people who really didn’t want to do mathematics, which is understandable even if it’s not something I agree with. Ayn Rand is the only one who, much like Anakin in Star Wars, says that if you’re not with her then you’re her enemy, and I think this is a lesson we can all learn from in the “Schellingian” method of using myth as the basis of psychology. I think a post-logicist mathematics must be rooted in category theory, even if this would also spell out drastic changes for analytic philosophy, which is where I think a lot of the real resistance comes from. When I was first getting advised in the mathematics department, my advisor who was a mathematics professor herself was telling me to take a logic course in the philosophy department which wasn’t required, and I politely declined that offer.
When I looked up objectivism and dialectics to find pictures for this article that actually encompass ideas instead of just juxtaposing Ayn Rand’s bad teeth to Hegel’s sagging chin, none of which explains anything about their thought, many of the pictures I found were from a source explaining dialectics in light of logicism, the latter of which was proven false by Gödel. The page I found is linked below. Notice the fact that “critical realism” and “objectivism” essentially seem like exact synonyms.
DIALECTIC Pulse of Freedom (utah.edu)
From the first article I linked, you can also see that Ayn Rand’s philosophy is also largely about logicism, while Hegel’s is implicitly logicistic:
Dialectical method was the approach taken by Plato in his dialogues. They featured Socrates engaged in discussion with others where different answers were offered to a question with the idea that, through discussion, one ultimately could come up with some semblance of truth.
Indeed, some Russian philosophers, as well as Marx, Lenin and Engels, considered Aristotle as an essentially dialectical thinker.
The most significant modern exponent of dialectics is Hegel who argued that seemingly opposing ideas can be transcended through dialectical thinking.
This, on the surface, seems very un-Randian. As Sciabarra puts it, “All too often, Rand’s philosophy is presented as a deductive formulation from first principles. This approach prevails in the work of both her followers and detractors. Objectivism is defined in a logically derivative manner.” (9)
Sciabarra doesn’t deny “that such a relational structure exists within Objectivism as a formal totality.” But “Rand reflects the very Hegelian Aufhebung she ridiculed as a violation of the law of identity. In her intellectual evolution, Rand both absorbed and abolished, preserved and transcended, the elements of her Russian past.” Aufhebung is usually translated as sublation—“In sublation, a term or concept is both preserved and changed through its dialectical interplay with another term or concept.” (Wikipedia)
While Rand expressly paid homage to Aristotle as the greatest of philosophers for his logical analysis and explication of the law of identity, the Russian philosopher Ivan Kireevsky argued Hegel’s system was “as Aristotle himself would have constructed, if he had been born in our time.” (quoted in Sciabarra, 26)
Sciabarra writes: “She (Rand) was an artist, social critic, and nonacademic philosopher who constructed a broad synthesis in her battle against the traditional antinomies in Western thought: mind versus body, fact versus value, theory versus practice, reason versus emotion, rationalism versus empiricism, idealism versus materialism, and so on.” (9)
Rand rejected a dualistic approach to such issues and advocated an integrated, holistic approach. A prime example is the issue of rationalism versus empiricism. Rand rejected both, characterizing the two sides as “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world by deducing it exclusively from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists). To put it more simply: those who joined the [mystics] by abandoning reality—and those who clung to reality, by abandoning their mind.” (For the New Intellectual 30) Her epistemology looked to integrate aspects of both, reality and concepts, into a unified whole, in Hegelian terms, a synthesis if you will.
Rand’s outward opposition to dialectics, notes Sciabarra, was based on her interpretation of “dialectics as an endorsement of logical contradiction, embodying a view of the universe based on nonidentity.” (14) But, he argues, the issue is a semantic one. And so he explains his own understanding of dialectics to counter possible objections to his thesis:
“Hegel’s dialectical method,” he writes, “affirms the impossibility (emphasis added) of logical contradiction and focuses instead on relational ‘contradictions’ or paradoxes revealed in the dynamism of history. For Hegel, opposing concepts could be identified as merely partial views whose apparent contradictions could be transcended by exhibiting them as internally related within a larger whole. From pairs of opposing theses, elements of truth could be extracted and integrated into a third position.” (14)
Ayn Rand, essentially, reinvented Hegel, who is likely the worst philosopher in the entier Western canon and obviously the glorifier of totalitarianism seeing as he called Napoleon the world-soul incarnate, due to the fact she was taught some Hegel where she grew up in Russia, but completely misunderstood Hegel and only thought she was objecting to him. Althought Ayn Rand is not a philosopher I think one really needs to take particularly seriously in the sense of respecting her as a person or thinking that her philosophy is particularly well thought-out, her influence must be taken seriously, so Ayn Rand as a person can be a case study in essentially a particular kind of psychopathology and the reasoning behind it.
I have long thought that the future of mathematics lies predominantly in category theory and my learning of the history and philosophy behind it is making why clear. Category theory seems to be the alternative to logicism that does not require us to abandon mathematical rigor. Once when I was talking to the same advisor who wanted me to take a course in philosophical logic for no reason other than it was her personal interest and she was hoping I would share it and also want to pay my time and money to take the course, I said that category theory comes from topology and she “corrected” me by saying that topology is a specific instance of category theory. Both of these statements are true: category theory was created by generalizating from algebraic topology to other fields.
Goethe said that the study of form is the study of change. This itself seems like a summary of the entire field of topology, which is about what kinds of deformations a surface can undergo and be the same surface. However, Goethe was discussing the field of morphology, which he invented, and the field of morphology still cannot be described in terms of topology, though I think this is an important goal. I think the main way to explain the field of morphology will be via neural networks, because I am under the impression neural networks are just what the brain actually does even if the ones in computers aren’t the same as the ones actually in the brain thus far, and I don’t think making them the same should be that highly-prioritized of a goal for the reason I don’t think AI needs to constitute an entire conscious mind so to speak, since the conscious mind, I think, is just an amalgamation of unconscious processes like Michael Levin says, so it’s better to just create the specific process you want, such as images or speech, rather than create an entire conscious mind and bring up those issues just to get a process, unless of course your actual endgoal is to be a surrogate parent to a robot.
My impression, which at this point is just conjecture no matter how sound I think it is since it needs to undergo proper scientific review, is that how the brain works is that there are waves which bounce around between different parts of it, which means the brain is a neural network even if computers use different kinds of neural networks than the brain. The fact both can be described as neural networks despite their differences is itself a sort of application of category theory. However, the idea that there are nodes and information bounces around and this causes the development of the network over time is even specifically a form of topology involving continuities and discontinuities in actual space. It is interesting that the particular form of rationality that encompasses potentially everything, which is category theory and not formal logic, would be encoded in the very structure of the brain, and additionally, this would be a strong rebuttal of the idea that the brain is a Turing machine or that everything can be described in terms of lambda calculus in the first place, because those are logicist systems and the halting problem affects them. I’ve generally been inclined to view lambda calculus and the equivalent Turing machines as essentially logicist, because they are Boolean, and even though no one really describes them as logicist because people aren’t thinking about this, this is true. If logicism is false due to Gödel this is why people should abandon Turing machines as the basis of both brains and computers and find something else (by which I mean category theory,) and I think this is also related to how Alexander von Humboldt described language, as infinite use of finite means. Logicism needs infinite means because logicism can only just say true or false about any statement you make, but language is finite means and can still arrive at any conclusion in a finite amount of steps instead of an infinite amount of steps.
This is also why I’m not worried about AI, despite the fact I think it’s possible on current computers. The worst anyone would do with AI by basing it on humans in my opinion is make something that thinks exactly the same as humans, and all these attempts to make AIs that are better than humans will never work because there are fundamental constraints stopping people from creating these purely instructive models. Language requires a selective model, but no one working in AI even knows how to make a selective model, much less one that’s even better than human cognition in the first place, much less one that can improve itself indefinitely. Humans don’t have language because we’re so smart, we’re so smart because we have language, and any improvement would be something discrete, a category shift, not simply improving on the hardware gradually.
Why did language evolve? – Philosophy of Linguistics (wordpress.com)
The Generative Grammar of the Immune System – Philosophy of Linguistics (wordpress.com)
Has ChatGPT refuted Noam Chomsky? – Philosophy of Linguistics (wordpress.com)
Then, it’s only fitting that the Randroids, as a natural consequence of their philosophy, would freak out about an all-powerful AI that I think simply isn’t possible. Let the nightmares claw at the people who are promoting a philosophy that I think really is likely worse than Hitler, they just deserve it, and sin is its own punishment.
Meanwhile I do think followers of Whitehead and Russell who claim mathematics is not all that useful and then sometimes cite Goethe need to cut that out. Mathematics may not be not the end-all and be-all, which is putting the cart before the horse, but it’s still better to have a cart rather than to say we don’t need a cart at all just because someone put it before the horse. Or to use more clichés, don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.
eoht.info/page/Goethe and mathematics
I will discuss category theory in the context of Schelling’s thought a lot more, particularly in another essay I had planned, “The Reenchantment of Fiction,” which itself was basically just writing a draft of “Shakespeare for Supermen,” based on Goethe’s essay on Shakespeare that I wanted to comment on when I was working on my own version of a Bildungsroman for myself since I noticed there is a general dearth of Bildungsromane in the modern world which probably has a lot to do with the widely-observed failure of the kids to want to grow up. I wanted to grow up but had no idea how so I just started making up my own, and that inspired a lot of other things, like basically all my literary analysis at this point even though I’m not a professional literary critic, never set out to become one, and am still not setting out to become one. That drove me to find a way to analyze literature in terms other than just looking at how old, influential, or popular it is, or how many awards it won, and that plus my research on biological evolution caused me to take up a particular interest in Schelling, which in turn caused me to essentially uniformly hate Ayn Rand instead of having mixed opinions of her. In modern American culture it’s not so popular to uniformly hate Ayn Rand, so I hope people can understand why exactly I intellectually oppose her on such a fundamental level now. I don’t want to live in Harrison Bergeron either, but if anything, Ayn Rand accidentally gets closer to that than Goethe, who Nietzsche declared as one of his ideal supermen, or his protegé Schelling, because Ayn Rand is a Hegelian, and was hypocritically and hilariously a welfare queen as well.
