Ayn Rand

[Burning Paradigm]

You could've lowered it down to any of the xxTJ types at most lol. Rand had almost zero Fe and was pretty Te heavy.

I say INTJ with very strong Te. She perceived the world and her philosophy with this abstract inner vision, this weird synthesis of weak and strong, one where the strong fueled the creative and productive engines of the world but were at the same time shackled by the weak. You could make a case for either Ni or Te here, but I see Ni > Te. While I think her fiction and philosophy (but I repeat myself) is lousy, personally, her writing seems very symbolism-heavy to me (e.g. Howard Roark as a vessel for her philosophy and vision of independent intelligence running the world in The Fountainhead). Her logic is subordinate to her vision rather than the other way around.
I go with 1w9 > 5w6 > 3w4 so/sp for her Enneagram.

 

[yeghor]

You could've lowered it down to any of the xxTJ types at most lol. Rand had almost zero Fe and was pretty Te heavy.

I say INTJ with very strong Te. She perceived the world and her philosophy with this abstract inner vision, this weird synthesis of weak and strong, one where the strong fueled the creative engines of the world but were at the same time shackled by the weak. You could make a case for either Ni or Te here, but I see Ni > Te. While I think her fiction and philosophy (but I repeat myself) is lousy, personally, her writing seems very symbolism-heavy to me (e.g. Howard Roark as a vessel for her philosophy and vision of independent intelligence running the world in The Fountainhead). Her logic is subordinate to her vision rather than the other way around.
I go with 1w9 > 5w6 > 3w4 so/sp for her Enneagram.

Then why does she outright reject intuition and only upholds sensory knowledge?

In epistemology, she considered all knowledge to be based on sense perception, the validity of which she considered axiomatic, and reason, which she described as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses". She rejected all claims of non-perceptual or a priori knowledge, including "'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing'". In her Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, Rand presented a theory of concept formation and rejected the analytic–synthetic dichotomy.

She is also clearly an individualist who is against government, usually placed by others close to right-wing libertarianism (individualism) on the political spectrum. Js are collectivist whereas Ps are libertarian.

In both cases, intuition and J-type does not make sense for her.

 

[Burning Paradigm]

Then why does she outright reject intuition and only upholds sensory knowledge?

She is also clearly an individualist who is against government, usually placed by others close to right-wing libertarianism (individualism) on the political spectrum. Js are collectivist whereas Ps are libertarian.

In both cases, intuition and J-type does not make sense for her.

That is a very strong assumption there. Also, how does she "outright" reject intuition?

 

[yeghor]

That is a very strong assumption there. Also, how does she "outright" reject intuition?

"She rejected all claims of non-perceptual or a priori knowledge, including "'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing'"."

EDIT: Ps are spontaneous and do not like being regulated, Js are the opposite, they like structure and regulations. That translates as Ps being libertarians/individualists and Js being authoritarians/collectivisits.

 

[Burning Paradigm]

"She rejected all claims of non-perceptual or a priori knowledge, including "'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing'"."

EDIT: Ps are spontaneous and do not like being regulated, Js are the opposite, they like structure and regulations. That translates as Ps being libertarians/individualists and Js being authoritarians/collectivisits.

Vernacular "intuition" is different from Jungian intuition. This is obviously referring to intuition in the sense of just a gut feeling without taking in any information. That doesn't discount being a Jungian intuitive. Jungian intuition is more about pattern-seeking and synthesizing information in a big-picture, abstract sense. It is still contingent on how one takes in information.

Also, for someone who supposedly rejected non-perceptual knowledge, she was aggressively idealistic. Compare her to someone like Aristotle, who was more matter-of-fact and detached even when talking about things like poetry and rhetoric. This is Barbara Branden, her former acolyte: "[Her work] is both angry and exaltedly idealistic, a tortured hymn to integrity. In it one sees the union of attitudes so marked in Ayn: the union of passionate idealism with a profound scorn for those who are only idealists, who renounce the responsibility of translating their ideals into action and reality."

 

[yeghor]

Vernacular "intuition" is different from Jungian intuition. This is obviously referring to intuition in the sense of just a gut feeling without taking in any information. That doesn't discount being a Jungian intuitive. Jungian intuition is more about pattern-seeking and synthesizing information in a big-picture, abstract sense. It is still contingent on how one takes in information.

Also, for someone who supposedly rejected non-perceptual knowledge, she was aggressively idealistic. Compare her to someone like Aristotle, who was more matter-of-fact and detached even when talking about things like poetry and rhetoric. This is Barbara Branden, her former acolyte: "[Her work] is both angry and exaltedly idealistic, a tortured hymn to integrity. In it one sees the union of attitudes so marked in Ayn: the union of passionate idealism with a profound scorn for those who are only idealists, who renounce the responsibility of translating their ideals into action and reality."

I cannot find where she referred to her views on intuition. However I think intuition is just intuition. I agree that intuition notices patterns in the external world, however another thing it does is that it extrapolates that pattern into "what ifs". It is akin to imagination and based on perceived patterns, it imagines a theory about something that is not readily available in the external world or evident to the senses, which still needs to be verified against external facts to check if the theory or assumption is true.

Still reading into her "Objectivism" philosophy but it sounds like she favored facts over imagined possibilities (intuition) and was a realist. That would suggest her thinking faculties trumped over her intuitive faculties. I do not think she is a sensor so, T>N with low S is only possible in ENTJ or INTP.

She is defined as an individualist and she is not a business tycoon or regulationist like an ENTJ, I would still go for INTP. Need to read more into her work though.

Objectivism rejects belief in anything alleged to transcend existence. Rand argued that consciousness is "the faculty of perceiving that which exists". As she put it, "to be conscious is to be conscious of something", that is consciousness itself cannot be distinguished or conceptualized except in relation to an independent reality. "It cannot be aware only of itself—there is no 'itself' until it is aware of something. "Thus, Objectivism posits that the mind does not create reality, but rather, it is a means of discovering reality.

Expressed differently, existence has "primacy" over consciousness, which must conform to it. Any other type of argument Rand termed "the primacy of consciousness", including any variant of metaphysical subjectivism or theism. Rand defined "reason" as "the faculty that identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses".

Existence has primacy over consciousness both epistemologically and metaphysically (with the latter explaining the former): epistemologically, because consciousness has to be aware of a distinct object before it can be aware of itself; metaphysically, because consciousness is a response to its objects and so cannot precede them—thus ruling out metaphysical theories like theism and idealism that, in Rand’s view, make existence dependent on consciousness.

Rand wrote "The fundamental concept of method, the one on which all the others depend, is logic. The distinguishing characteristic of logic (the art of non-contradictory identification) indicates the nature of the actions (actions of consciousness required to achieve a correct identification) and their goal (knowledge)

According to Rand, attaining knowledge beyond what is given by perception requires both volition (or the exercise of free will) and performing a specific method of validation by observation, concept-formation, and the application of inductive and deductive reasoning. For example, a belief in dragons, however sincere, does not mean that reality includes dragons. A process of proof identifying the basis in reality of a claimed item of knowledge is necessary to establish its truth.

EDIT: I imagine intuition like this:

Imagine a large room where only a part in the centre is illuminated. We can only perceive what objects exist in illuminated area. That constitutes sensory information/knowledge available.

An intuitive person based on the patterns perceived can imagine/intuit what other objects there may be in the dark parts of the room and at what locations, and the important part is because it is in the dominant position, cannot let go of that intuition and feels compelled to go in the dark and check it for himself if the intuition is true. It is more like a conviction than a fact.

To sensors, that kind of a person will appear as a lunatic because he/she is seeing things that are not there. Thinking dominant types OTOH would still check if the intuition is logical before going in the dark, probably they would move more cautiously into the dark until a direct connection to the objects in the dark becomes available. So intuition is closer to metaphysics whereas thinking is to realism.

 

[FemMecha]

I remember having a discussion with an INTP about Ayn Rand's premises - For example: A=A, that an object is what it is observed to be. We discussed the example of a tree, because in her view a tree is a concrete object with trunk, branches, leaves, etc. But that is only a tree viewed in one fragment of time. A tree is a process of birth, growth, and decay. It is every bit as much the dead rotting log as it is a seed in the earth, to the sapling, to the large tree, to the interconnectedness of all trees. Everything in existence is a process. Any existing observable, measurable object is simply a fragment of a process viewed in a moment of time. Everything concrete observed and measured in reality has changed to some degree once the observation is made. Everything is dynamic, in constant change, in motion, in process. I don't see a clear sense of this in her writing.

Her writings on art are quite perfunctory and valuing only representational art in a similar vein to the views of the totalitarian regimes of the time. Here is a quick quotes:

Ayn Rand's Theory of Art
Jillian Steinhauer writes:
Here are some things that Rand says are not art (from all artistic fields, not just visual):
Any and all abstract art
Photography
American Indian artifacts and other examples of “craft”
Anything by John Cage, who has “schizoid tendencies reflected in his work”
Anything by Merce Cunningham
The fiction of James Joyce, with its “elaborately contrived inaccessibility”
Anything by Samuel Beckett
“The inscrutable postmodernist ‘poetry’ of John Ashbery”

My impression is that her subtexted definition is art is: Human expressions that she can understand. Her entire philosophy has nothing to do with being objective. I think the accurate designation for her writings is "egoism".

 

[yeghor]

I remember having a discussion with an INTP about Ayn Rand's premises - For example: A=A, that an object is what it is observed to be. We discussed the example of a tree, because in her view a tree is a concrete object with trunk, branches, leaves, etc. But that is only a tree viewed in one fragment of time. A tree is a process of birth, growth, and decay. It is every bit as much the dead rotting log as it is a seed in the earth, to the sapling, to the large tree, to the interconnectedness of all trees. Everything in existence is a process. Any existing observable, measurable object is simply a fragment of a process viewed in a moment of time. Everything concrete observed and measured in reality has changed to some degree once the observation is made. Everything is dynamic, in constant change, in motion, in process. I don't see a clear sense of this in her writing.

Her writings on art are quite perfunctory and valuing only representational art in a similar vein to the views of the totalitarian regimes of the time. Here is a quick quotes:

Ayn Rand's Theory of Art
Jillian Steinhauer writes:
Here are some things that Rand says are not art (from all artistic fields, not just visual):
Any and all abstract art
Photography
American Indian artifacts and other examples of “craft”
Anything by John Cage, who has “schizoid tendencies reflected in his work”
Anything by Merce Cunningham
The fiction of James Joyce, with its “elaborately contrived inaccessibility”
Anything by Samuel Beckett
“The inscrutable postmodernist ‘poetry’ of John Ashbery”

My impression is that her subtexted definition is art is: Human expressions that she can understand. Her entire philosophy has nothing to do with being objective. I think the accurate designation for her writings is "egoism".

I can see why you typed her as ESTJ as she seems to have a very concrete view of the world and very factual one. However several of her views does not match with ESTJs as given below (note: She was advocating egotism based on rationalism and individualism, and with voluntary cooperation between individuals without using force. In the text below she is identified with anarcho-capitalism, which would not not fit with any of the J types btw)

Rand opposed racism and any legal application of racism. She considered affirmative action to be an example of legal racism. Rand advocated the right to legal abortion. Rand believed capital punishment is morally justified as retribution against a murderer, but dangerous due to the risk of mistakenly executing innocent people and facilitating state murder. She therefore said she opposed capital punishment "on epistemological, not moral, grounds".

She opposed involuntary military conscription. She opposed any form of censorship, including legal restrictions on pornography, opinion or worship, famously quipping; "In the transition to statism, every infringement of human rights has begun with a given right's least attractive practitioners".

Some critics, including economists and political philosophers such as Murray Rothbard, David D. Friedman, Roy Childs, Norman P. Barry, and Chandran Kukathas, have argued that Objectivist ethics are consistent with anarcho-capitalism instead of minarchism.

Her views on art below suggests she wanted art to match reality with some romanticization allowed. That sounds like she did not want reality to be distorted but sugarcoated just a bit. Sounds a bit like she was unappreciative of N. I would say ESTJ myself but still, that conflicts with her political views above.

The artist's function, by contrast, is specifically to interpret the world and present it as he re-envisions it, using particular concrete elements to capture a deeper, more universal truth. An artwork must therefore be accessible to comprehension at the level of perception. It must be recognizably representative of something.

A painting that presents a figure or scene is art. Paint splotches are not. A composition of recognizable tones is music. Random noise is not. A fictional narrative of sufficient length is a novel. A collection of sentences with no narrative structure is not. So it goes for every form of art: It must present something accessible to the senses, in the ways appropriate to connecting with those senses as forms of awareness.

Ayn Rand envisioned a school of art called "Romantic Realism." Romantic realist artists would, like Rand, combine a commitment to presenting believable scenes set in something like the real world with the ideals of a new romanticism, one that shaped scenes, melodies, and stories to present the essentially heroic character of man. In her own novels, Rand developed a style of "slanted realism" that wrapped rich characters around plots centered on key principles and ideas. Thus the world of her novels is not merely a report of the world as it is, but as it "might and could be.

The type of artists she did not like seem to be typed as INFPs or INTPs yet I am not sure.

I did not like Joyce or Beckett myself that much either. Ulysess felt like a transcript of a fast paced convoluted dialogue between characters and was tiring, felt too thich in sensory information to me.

Beckett, I only read Waiting for Godot, felt like a boring dialogue between two guys.

Joyce's and Beckett's poems to me do not come across as nourishing or touching. I like Bukowski's poems better for instance.

Can Joyce or Beckett instead be sensor types?

Lastly she is likened to Nietzche sometimes. I did not like Thus spoke Zarathustra either, it felt like ramblings of a madmen. Don't know what to make of it and how it connects to Rand.

 

[yeghor]

She did not consider emotion and non-sensory knowledge as proper sources of knowledge.

She wanted unregulated capitalism.

She wanted a minimalist state apparatus tasked with judicial and regulatory functions to settle disputes between entities.

She only believed in individuals' rights rather than rights of groups.

She believed every individual should prioritize their own well-being yet should not resort to force in the process and respect other individuals' rights.

This still sounds like IxTP to me. She comes across as more cerebral then action-oriented to me, so I would say INTP instead of ISTP.


Rand on Sources of Knowledge

• Rand rejected "feeling" as sources of knowledge. Rand acknowledged the importance of emotion for human beings, but she maintained that emotions are a consequence of the conscious or subconscious ideas that a person already accepts, not a means of achieving awareness of reality. "Emotions are not tools of cognition." The primary virtue in Objectivist ethics is rationality, as Rand meant it "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action".
  
• Rand also rejected all forms of faith or mysticism, terms that she used synonymously. She defined faith as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and reason...Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.' Reliance on revelation is like reliance on a Ouija board; it bypasses the need to show how it connects its results to reality. Faith, for Rand, is not a "short-cut" to knowledge, but a "short-circuit" destroying it.
  
• Rand rejected the traditional rationalist/empiricist dichotomy, arguing that it embodies a false alternative: conceptually-based knowledge independent of perception (rationalism) versus perceptually-based knowledge independent of concepts (empiricism).Rand argued that neither is possible because the senses provide the material of knowledge while conceptual processing is also needed to establish knowable propositions. (NOTE: Rationalism is Ti, Empiricism is Te, so she embraces both.)

Rand on Morality

• Rand's explanation of values presents the proposition that an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being—it is for his life and his self-interest that an individual ought to obey a moral code. Ethical egoism is a corollary of setting man's life as the moral standard. Rand believed that rational egoism is the logical consequence of humans following evidence to its logical conclusion. The only alternative would be that they live without orientation to reality. Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshiping "selfishness-without-a-self". She said that the former is good, and the latter bad, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.
  
• For Rand, all of the principal virtues are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival: rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics". The essence of Objectivist ethics is summarized by the oath her Atlas Shrugged character John Galt adhered to: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
  
• The fundamental right is the right to life. Its major derivatives are the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness." "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." These rights are specifically understood to be rights to action, not to specific results or objects, and the obligations created by rights are negative in nature: each individual must refrain from violating the rights of others.

Rand on Regulations

• Objectivists reject alternative notions of rights, such as positive rights, collective rights, or animal rights. Objectivism claims that the only social system which fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism, specifically what Rand described as "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism". Objectivism regards capitalism as the social system which is most beneficial to the poor, but does not consider this its primary justification. Rather, it is the only moral social system. Objectivism maintains that only societies seeking to establish freedom (or free nations) have a right to self-determination.
  
• Objectivism describes government as "the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws"; thus, government is both legitimate and critically important in order to protect individual rights.
  
• Rand opposed anarchism because she considered that putting police and courts on the market is an inherent miscarriage of justice. Objectivism claims that the proper functions of a government are "the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws", the executive, and legislatures. Furthermore, in protecting individual rights, the government is acting as an agent of its citizens and "has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens" and it must act in an impartial manner according to specific, objectively defined laws.
  
• Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis are moral because she considered all property as fundamentally intellectual. Furthermore, the value of a commercial product derives in part from the necessary work of its inventors. However, Rand considered limits on patents and copyrights as important and said that if they were granted in perpetuity, it would necessarily result in de facto collectivism.

 

[Lark]

She did not consider emotion and non-sensory knowledge as proper sources of knowledge.

She wanted unregulated capitalism.

She wanted a minimalist state apparatus tasked with judicial and regulatory functions to settle disputes between entities.

She only believed in individuals' rights rather than rights of groups.

She believed every individual should prioritize their own well-being yet should not resort to force in the process and respect other individuals' rights.

This still sounds like IxTP to me. She comes across as more cerebral then action-oriented to me, so I would say INTP instead of ISTP.


Rand on Sources of Knowledge

• Rand rejected "feeling" as sources of knowledge. Rand acknowledged the importance of emotion for human beings, but she maintained that emotions are a consequence of the conscious or subconscious ideas that a person already accepts, not a means of achieving awareness of reality. "Emotions are not tools of cognition." The primary virtue in Objectivist ethics is rationality, as Rand meant it "the recognition and acceptance of reason as one's only source of knowledge, one's only judge of values and one's only guide to action".
  
• Rand also rejected all forms of faith or mysticism, terms that she used synonymously. She defined faith as "the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one's senses and reason...Mysticism is the claim to some non-sensory, non-rational, non-definable, non-identifiable means of knowledge, such as 'instinct,' 'intuition,' 'revelation,' or any form of 'just knowing.' Reliance on revelation is like reliance on a Ouija board; it bypasses the need to show how it connects its results to reality. Faith, for Rand, is not a "short-cut" to knowledge, but a "short-circuit" destroying it.
  
• Rand rejected the traditional rationalist/empiricist dichotomy, arguing that it embodies a false alternative: conceptually-based knowledge independent of perception (rationalism) versus perceptually-based knowledge independent of concepts (empiricism).Rand argued that neither is possible because the senses provide the material of knowledge while conceptual processing is also needed to establish knowable propositions. (NOTE: Rationalism is Ti, Empiricism is Te, so she embraces both.)

Rand on Morality

• Rand's explanation of values presents the proposition that an individual's primary moral obligation is to achieve his own well-being—it is for his life and his self-interest that an individual ought to obey a moral code. Ethical egoism is a corollary of setting man's life as the moral standard. Rand believed that rational egoism is the logical consequence of humans following evidence to its logical conclusion. The only alternative would be that they live without orientation to reality. Rand repudiated the equation of rational selfishness with hedonistic or whim-worshiping "selfishness-without-a-self". She said that the former is good, and the latter bad, and that there is a fundamental difference between them.
  
• For Rand, all of the principal virtues are applications of the role of reason as man's basic tool of survival: rationality, honesty, justice, independence, integrity, productiveness, and pride—each of which she explains in some detail in "The Objectivist Ethics". The essence of Objectivist ethics is summarized by the oath her Atlas Shrugged character John Galt adhered to: "I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
  
• The fundamental right is the right to life. Its major derivatives are the right to liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness." "A 'right' is a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context." These rights are specifically understood to be rights to action, not to specific results or objects, and the obligations created by rights are negative in nature: each individual must refrain from violating the rights of others.

Rand on Regulations

• Objectivists reject alternative notions of rights, such as positive rights, collective rights, or animal rights. Objectivism claims that the only social system which fully recognizes individual rights is capitalism, specifically what Rand described as "full, pure, uncontrolled, unregulated laissez-faire capitalism". Objectivism regards capitalism as the social system which is most beneficial to the poor, but does not consider this its primary justification. Rather, it is the only moral social system. Objectivism maintains that only societies seeking to establish freedom (or free nations) have a right to self-determination.
  
• Objectivism describes government as "the means of placing the retaliatory use of physical force under objective control—i.e., under objectively defined laws"; thus, government is both legitimate and critically important in order to protect individual rights.
  
• Rand opposed anarchism because she considered that putting police and courts on the market is an inherent miscarriage of justice. Objectivism claims that the proper functions of a government are "the police, to protect men from criminals—the armed services, to protect men from foreign invaders—the law courts, to settle disputes among men according to objective laws", the executive, and legislatures. Furthermore, in protecting individual rights, the government is acting as an agent of its citizens and "has no rights except the rights delegated to it by the citizens" and it must act in an impartial manner according to specific, objectively defined laws.
  
• Rand argued that limited intellectual property monopolies being granted to certain inventors and artists on a first-to-file basis are moral because she considered all property as fundamentally intellectual. Furthermore, the value of a commercial product derives in part from the necessary work of its inventors. However, Rand considered limits on patents and copyrights as important and said that if they were granted in perpetuity, it would necessarily result in de facto collectivism.

Did she use the phrase "Would you Kindly..." much?

 

[yeghor]

Did she use the phrase "Would you Kindly..." much?

So Frank Fontaine installs the trigger word in Jack's mind. Frank is a crime lord, ESTP maybe.

Andrew Ryan learns about it and make Jack kill him (Andrew). Andrew is an industrialst, ENTJ maybe.

So which one was inspired after Rand?

 

[Lark]

So Frank Fontaine installs the trigger word in Jack's mind. Frank is a crime lord, ESTP maybe.

Andrew Ryan learns about it and make Jack kill him (Andrew). Andrew is an industrialst, ENTJ maybe.

So which one was inspired after Rand?

All of them, the whole project.

 

[yeghor]

4. Criticisms of Rand’s Ethics

Rand, Ayn | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

From the broadly defined conservative right, the main criticisms are

(a) that Rand’s metaphysical naturalism involves an atheism that undercuts religious metaphysics,

(b) that her strong emphasis upon empirical data and reason undercut epistemologies based on faith and tradition, and

(c) that her normative individualism undercuts the commands of duty, obligation and selflessness that are necessary for achieving social values.


From the left, again defined broadly, the main criticisms are

(a) that Rand’s individualism atomistically isolates each of us from genuine society,

(b) that her advocacy of free markets enables strong-versus-weak exploitation, and in left-postmodern critique

(c) that her philosophical fundamentals commit her to an untenable foundationalism and absolutism.