“Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man’s genetic lineage - the notion that a man’s intellectual and characterological traits are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry. Which means, in practice, that a man is to be judged, not by his own character and actions, but by the characters and actions of a collective of ancestors…

Just as there is no such thing as a collective or racial mind, so there is no such thing as a collective or racial achievement. There are only individual minds and individual achievements - and a culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiated masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.”

If only individuals exist, Ayn, then neither is there any such thing as a nation, or a species, or a gas, or a metal, or a disease, or anything else that we give a name to in order to identify individuals by their shared characteristics. Thus Objectivism = nominalism. But it’s difficult to posit the Natural Law on which her ethic so desperately depends if there are no universals. Yet one may note that Ayn, not the most accomplished logician we’ve encountered, posits above the existence of a collective known as ‘man.’ But if only individuals have any existence or significance, then it will be difficult for us to ascribe any meaning to the term man. Thus, in order to avoid the reality of race (or any other collective), Ayn must avoid the use of nouns. I’d say that is reductio ad absurdum.

Comments:

This is a nice, swift take down. “Ayn Rand = Nominalist” neatly destroys her entire philosophy. I’ve been trying to think of a way to do just that for some time now and I’ve been unsuccessful on account of not going about it the right way.