How David Kelley won me to "Open Objectivism" 25 years ago

My own happiness and values, the work I did and the people I loved, gave meaning to my life. But if you should ask whether or not I had any significance in the world, in its destiny, I would say that I had the intellectual honesty, at age 17, to see the greatness of "Atlas Shrugged"--and that 25 years ago, in New York City, I attended a meeting called by my friend, David Kelley, to announce his dramatic public break from an Objectivism taken by Leonard Peikoff down a road toward closed, doctrinaire conformity, retreat from debate and challenge, and tests of loyalty. I already had agreed to serve as a trustee of the new "Institute of Objectivist Studies," and I did so for some 20 years, but that evening in a hotel on Lexington Avenue, the audience excited and inspired in a way I rarely have seen, I heard not a rousing campaign speech for a new "party," but what surely was one of the most rigorously philosophical, uncompromisingly intellectual presentations of fundamental issues that ever blessed a movement's "schism."

To listen to David's speech again, after 25 years, brings a smile. What speaker, for what new "party" or movement, ever won cheer after cheer from his audience with discussion of Intrinsicism and Subjectivism versus Objectivism in epistemology? What speaker ever quietly told his restive, excited listeners, in a Manhattan hotel meeting room: What we are meeting about, tonight, is a disagreement about the nature of objectivity?

Forgive me for injecting this : It was glorious from the start! The audience that packed the room was made up of refugees, exiles, from the the philosophy and movement that they had risked so much, faced so much ostracism to support--refugees who had been told that they had failed the loyalty test. And to them, David Kelley said: I, too, was tempted to walk away and leave Objectivism to its terminal dogmatic slumbers--but the ideas are too important to me, and to the world, and I cared for too many people who had invested too much in the vision of Ayn Rand.

As I listen, again, to his almost hour-long exposition of the conflict defined by Leonard Peikoff's "ex-communication" of him, and David's systematic response, I realize--as perhaps I did not realize, then, in the excitement of the occasion--that that evening David defined "open Objectivism" in terms and exacting standards are those of today's Atlas Society. To do so, he ranged over the history of philosophy and its great movements--Platonism and Aristotelianism--that shaped the evolution of 2000 years of Western civilization. He defined what made a philosophy specific and complete, so that we understood that if Objectivism was to become more than the "ideas of Ayn Rand," become one of the few philosophical movements that have carried their thrust and impact through centuries of restatement--Objectivism must become not "the ideas of Ayn Rand" but certain essentials that define what makes Objectivism original, what it contributes that is new to the world of ideas--a philosophy that joins the main currents of thought, identifiable in many guises, for centuries to come.

David's exposition of those innovative essentials amounted to an intellectual tribute to Ayn Rand, highlighting her originality and importance, and, in doing so, what interrelated system of ideas defines "who is an Objectivist"--but leaves a world of interpretations and applications to be tested and accepted or rejected by Objectivist thinkers.

Looming over the audience that evening was the sense that we were meeting, now, without so many who once were our friends and colleagues, and perhaps never again would be, and the question: What could have so separated us from them, who seemed to share every idea?

What had infected Objectivism for so long, David said, what had tainted the fellowship of wonder and delight at Ayn Rand's ideas--the discovery all of us cherished as the most important moment of our lives--was a kind "tribalism." That, of course, is another of Ayn Rand's brilliant explanatory concepts. Most of us felt that Objectivism defined our direction in life, what was true, but for some Ayn Rand herself had become their standard and ideal. To them, she came to represent what we must believe.

I admit that I smiled at this, too. I had felt it. I received the very first issue of the "Objectivist Newsletter," and every issue thereafter, through the "Objectivist" and the "Ayn Rand Letter." But the most surprising part of following Ayn Rand's ideas, month by month, was that she endlessly surprised us. We thought that we understood her ideas, her principles and her system, and that, now, it was clear how we must judge issues that arose. Except that, again and again, she surprised us. On accepting federal college scholarships (sure, it's your money or the money of your parents), on competing governments (what happens when you and I fight and your government comes to save you and mine comes to save mine?), and a woman as president of the United States. Every issue had some surprise for those who knew her philosophy but had forgotten that above all we must look at reality.

David Kelley's "campaign" for his new "party" was a philosophical exposition, logical step by step, giving fair recognition to attacks on him, answering them. It was an evening when we became exponents of a philosophy of reason. The price we paid was to relinquish the sense of superiority and security we had cherished as paid-up Objectivists. We no longer belonged to the tribe. For some, as W.H. Auden wrote--no, let me say, only, for myself--"We wandered lost upon the mountains of our choice. Freedom was so wild."

But, by the end of that historical evening, that had changed, for me. I knew with far greater exactitude what I believed, what was "Objectivism," and why it represented a great philosophical revolution. And I knew that in years to come I would be discovering, identifying and defining, what Objectivism implied in every area that concerned me.

I could accept, I think, that I was an "open Objectivist," but that is not the way I put it, not in my own mind. For so long, I had learned my Objectivism with others, some who became officers and directors of the Ayn Rand Institute, and that I never have seen again, and they had challenged me, again and again, if I knew "what Ayn Rand said."

Now, although Ayn Rand, her ideas, and her novels were whatever was left, in me, of "worship"--of reverence for truth and the good--I was on my own. Now, it was real: my mind, my responsibility, and my relationship--unmediated--to reality. Did David Kelley "give" that to me that evening in New York City?

No, that would not be true. David did for me, that evening, what John Galt did. Do you remember? In Atlas Shrugged? Someone asked Galt how he had brought them out on strike the great heroes of capitalism? Do you recall how he replied?

"I told them that they were right."