Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical
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Since this tacit dimension permeates nearly every facet of our personality, Branden argues that an individual’s sense of life, once formed, is “remarkably tenacious and resistant to change.” Indeed, even if the adult acquires a great deal of knowledge through observation and learning, his or her sense of life is liable to remain unaffected (N. Branden 1980, 99). Rand likewise observed that the great majority of people remain at the mercy of their tacit sense of life.32
Speaking as a philosopher, Rand denied that a person could be judged by his or her subconscious premises, since these premises cannot be known explicitly by the observer (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 12). Consciousness can be perceived and evaluated only by its “outward manifestations,” its expressions in action. The task of evaluating the subconscious is a psychological, rather than a philosophical, endeavor. Psychology regards the individual agent as a medical “subject,” to be evaluated according to standards of mental health and cognitive competence, not moral worth.
Nonetheless, a psychologistic element is evident in many of Rand’s commentaries.33 In addition, it has been observed that Rand psychologized and moralized in her own dealings with people.34 Rand was philosophically opposed to such practices, however. She stated: “Just as reasoning, to an irrational person, becomes rationalizing, and moral judgment becomes moralizing, so psychological theories become psychologizing.”35
Though Rand holds that a psychologist should not pass judgment on the “proper” or “improper” desires of the patient, it is clear that she has a definite conception of what is “proper” to human being. Mack and others are correct to note that her entire vision of the good colored her understanding of what is healthy and unhealthy in human emotional response. But for Rand, it is not the emotion per se that is immoral or irrational; it is the underlying judgment that must be assessed.36 Since only the conscious mind is subject to direct control, only conscious actions are subject to moral judgment.37 And only the guiding hand of reason can enable individuals to articulate their subconscious premises and achieve a more integrated union with their conscious beliefs and actions. When this integration occurs, it is, according to Rand, “the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience.” In Rand’s view:
The transition from guidance by a sense of life to guidance by a conscious philosophy takes many forms. For the rare exception, the rational child, it is a natural, absorbing, if difficult, process—the process of validating and, if necessary, correcting in conceptual terms what he had merely sensed about the nature of man’s existence, thus transforming a wordless feeling into a clearly verbalized knowledge, and laying a firm foundation, an intellectual roadbed, for the course of his life. The result is a fully integrated personality, a man whose mind and emotions are in harmony, whose sense of life matches his conscious convictions.38
Rand recognized that this articulation process was fundamentally therapeutic. Individuals who tend to guide their actions by subconscious and emotional factors must be trained to articulate conceptually their fundamental base. In a journal entry written in the 1950s, Rand clearly understood that one could not “simply forbid” such individuals from living by the guidance of their tacit minds. The individual must be taught to build “his conceptual files by a constant process of verbalizing and defining, teach[ing] him to analyze his emotional selector when he catches it in action.” The purpose of such a therapeutic process is to train individuals to discover the “deeper and deeper reasons” of their emotions, enabling them “to remove more ‘onion skins,’ and ultimately to reduce [their] emotional premises down to their philosophical primary base.”39
Rand emphasized, however, that such an articulation process does not mean that the subconscious mind ceases to function. An articulated philosophy does not supplant an inarticulate sense of life. A sense of life, like all subconscious mechanisms, continues to operate as an engine of automatization. But as individuals move toward the clearer articulation of their thoughts and emotions, they learn to derive value judgments conceptually, rather than as mere by-products of a subconscious sense of life. Rand recognized that for many people this articulation process remains dormant or stunted. In such cases, they may experience a clash between their conscious convictions and their “repressed, unidentified (or only partially identified) sense of life.” In a clash of this nature, an individual’s sense of life cannot be changed volitionally. It can be altered gradually only after a long, difficult process of “psychological retraining.”
But Rand also argued that it is not always necessary to change one’s sense of life, that sometimes the tacit dimension is more consistent with the facts of reality than an individual’s conscious convictions are. “Ironically enough,” states Rand, “it is man’s emotions, in such cases, that act as the avengers of his neglected or betrayed intellect.”40
Thus Rand’s philosophy does not tend toward a rational construction of feelings, but toward an integrated understanding of mind and of its constituted unity of reason and emotion. In such an organic unity, we grasp the cognitive basis of emotion, and the subconscious-emotive components of our understanding. In Rand’s view, it is neither possible nor desirable to conceptualize every experience, action, emotion, and thought. As Packer explains, mental health does not require the articulation of everything that is subconscious; it only requires that there be no obstacles to retrieving relevant information held subconsciously.41 Hence, the freely functioning subconscious can be enlisted in the service of awareness and creativity. Indeed, a “sense of life” governs the creative process and the response to art.42 Artistic creation itself rests on the ability of the subconscious to integrate everything relevant to a specific context defined by the creator. An act of inspiration is the product of an automatized subconscious integration triggered by an observation of a new fact in its relationship to established knowledge. Creators work “intuitively,” allowing their subconscious to integrate evidence that not even their conscious minds grasp immediately.43 As Nathaniel Branden argues:
Mind is more than immediate explicit awareness. It is a complex architecture of structures and processes. It includes more than the verbal, linear, analytic processes popularly if misleadingly described sometimes as “left-brain” activity. It includes the totality of mental life, including the subconscious, the intuitive, the symbolic, all that which sometimes is associated with the “right brain.” Mind is all that by means of which we reach out to and apprehend the world.44
None of these observations contradict Rand’s fundamental belief in the centrality of reason. Rather, they are entirely consistent with her expansive concept of consciousness.
Thus far I have explored Rand’s conception of the interrelationship between mental content and method primarily from the vantage point of content. In this aspect of her analysis, Rand focuses on the automatized content of the subconscious as expressed in the individual’s sense of life. But Rand’s investigation goes further. She is also concerned with the automatized, habitual methods of consciousness. “Psycho-epistemology” pertains to the interrelationship between content and method from the vantage point of method. In her earliest published statement on this topic, Rand identified “psycho-epistemology” as “a man’s method of using his consciousness” (New Intellectual, 21). Nathaniel Branden ([1969] 1979, 98 n. 29) states that Rand was the first philosopher to use this term in print. The concept itself was originated by Barbara Branden, who in the 1950s persuaded Rand of its importance. In later years, Rand expanded her understanding of the concept “psycho-epistemology” as “the study of man’s cognitive processes from the aspect of the interaction between man’s conscious mind and the automatic functions of his subconscious.”45
Nathaniel Branden’s articles on “psycho-epistemology” from the early 1960s suggest that the study of cognitive methods entails an examination of the relationship between the volitional and nonvolitional aspects of consciousness. By examining the link between “the conscious, goal-setting, self-regulatory operations of the mind, and t
he subconscious, automatic operations,” Rand and Branden sought to understand how certain habitual methods of awareness could internalize errors that would distort cognitive functioning.46 Psycho-epistemology seeks to discover—and correct—these errors by articulating the methods people use to process the content of their minds (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 6). And yet Objectivism recognizes that a person’s habitual method of awareness is just as difficult to change as a person’s sense of life. Peikoff (1983T, lecture 12) observes, for instance, that the older a person is, the more likely it is that his or her psycho-epistemology will remain entrenched.
Nathaniel Branden argues that there are three basic cognitive habits. These alternative habits are often practiced by children in what Rand describes as “a continuum of degrees” between two extremes.47 As children grow, they learn to activate and sustain different levels of focus. The clarity of this focus will deeply affect the clarity of their mental contents. Next, children learn to perform independent acts of analysis in assessing the validity of any issue. Their acceptance of an idea’s truth or falsity can result from critical inquiry or from uncritical passivity. Finally, children must learn to distinguish between the functions of their reason and the functions of their emotions. They learn to direct their consciousnesses by making explicit, logical deductions and inductive generalizations (N. Branden [1969] 1979, 112). But they can also learn to attend to their subconscious emotions in such a way that their emotions serve as psycho-epistemological aids. This Brandenian insight serves as the springboard for a far more dialectical interpretation of the reason-emotion distinction.
PSYCHOLOGICAL INTEGRATION
Having briefly discussed Rand’s concepts of “sense of life” and “psychoepistemology,” we can now return to a more informed discussion of the relationship between reason and emotion. As I have suggested, Rand was certainly aware of the possibility that an individual’s inarticulate, emotional, and subconscious mechanisms could be more consistent with the facts of reality than an individual’s conscious convictions. Even if she tended to focus on the side of reason, she would have agreed with Nathaniel Branden (1971b) that “reason and emotion must function in integrated harmony, or distortions result in both spheres” (8). Whereas Rand and Peikoff emphasize the dictum, “Think, and you shall feel” (Peikoff 1991b, 229), Branden (1983b) argues that we must also “feel deeply … to think clearly.” Branden rejects any “notion that thinking and feeling are opposed functions and that each entails the denial of the other” (159). In this belief, he reaffirms the essence of Rand’s nondualistic view. He transcends any emphasis on reason alone. He proclaims that as integrated organisms, individual persons who become disconnected from the reality of emotional experience cannot preserve the clarity of their thinking. For Branden ([1971] 1978, 7), just as an abdication of thought will result in emotional privation, so too, a denial of feeling will result in intellectual impoverishment.
Branden examines the cognitive distortions that follow from the severing of reason and emotion. An individual who is alienated from his or her inner experiences rationalizes rather than thinks. Rand too recognized this danger. She had argued: “Rationalization is … a process of providing one’s emotions with a false identity, of giving them spurious explanations and justifications—in order to hide one’s motives, not just from others, but primarily from oneself.” She acknowledged that in any attempt to subvert one’s emotional processes, one risked hampering, distorting, and ultimately, destroying the efficacy of cognition. By rationalizing, individuals become disconnected from the reality of their inner experience.48
In a journal entry from the 1950s, Rand grasped too that the process of articulating emotions cannot be rushed; an individual who attempts such articulation must initiate and sustain it gradually and volitionally. Individuals cannot achieve emotional self-awareness by memorizing “formulas and dogmas which [they do] not fully understand.”49 Branden has called this a process not of “rationalizing,” but of “intellectualizing.” In “intellectualizing,” individuals respond to personal problems by spouting floating abstractions with no relevance to the concrete issues of their own lives. Both rationalizing and intellectualizing pervert the purpose of thought, which is the apprehension of reality. By cutting their thought processes off from both external and internal reality, individuals sabotage their capacity to experience the full range of their emotions. Thus, for Branden, intellectualizers are just as dissociated from their inner emotional experience as the most fervent “whim-worshipers” who indulge in a few disconnected feelings (N. Branden [1971] 1978, 7, 24–25). Intellectualizers repress their emotions and escape into the realm of the abstract, undermining their awareness of both inner experience and external reality. “Whim-worshipers,” equally threatened by their own inner states, escape into the realm of random emotionalism. In both cases, repression and emotional self-indulgence are a means of undercutting objectivity and separating the conscious from the subconscious aspects of the mind.50 Having bifurcated reason and emotion, cognition and evaluation, an individual has no recourse but to engage in blind action. Branden ([1971] 1978) observes: “In all such instances, the motive is avoidance—avoidance of some aspect of reality” (4–5).
In Branden’s view: “Awareness moves freely in both directions—or it moves freely in neither.” The integration of reason and emotion is simultaneously a means to the union of mind and body. As persons struggle toward psychological maturity, they begin with the knowledge that the body is part but not all of the self. All too often, however, as a person’s consciousness evolves toward a more comprehensive sense of self, the mind may become disconnected from the body. Many people begin to view their own bodies not as an aspect of the self but as a nonself. Branden argues that such alienation from the physical is simultaneously alienation from the emotional, because it is through the body that one’s emotions are felt. Every emotion has both a spiritual and a somatic component. Hence, estrangement from emotion is, by extension, estrangement from the body. By cutting themselves off from the data that the body provides, many people damage their ability to integrate thought and emotion. Seeing a clash between their thoughts and feelings, they view reason as a means of conquering threatening emotional signals. In an effort to preserve the autonomy of their own minds, they continue to subvert the integrity of their emotional mechanism, and by consequence, they cripple the very rational faculty they wish to sustain. Like Wilhelm Reich before him, Branden argues that “unblocking the body—unblocking feelings—is unblocking consciousness.” Our autonomy demands the inseparable union of the physical and the spiritual, the emotive and the cerebral; “it involves our entire being.”51
Rand was fully aware of this mind-body unity. She recognized that even bodily sensations provide people with “an automatic form of knowledge” based upon the natural pleasure-pain mechanisms of the organism.52 She also maintained: “Cognitive processes affect man’s emotions which affect his body, and the influence is reciprocal.”53 But she did not examine this reciprocal interaction at length.
By contrast, Branden analyzes the elements of the mind-body connection, viewing the issues developmentally. He focuses on how parents “teach” their children to “disown” their feelings. Examining a variety of deadening family situations and relationships, Branden (1992) maintains that “most of us are children of dysfunctional families.” He examines how parents can create severe obstacles to the child’s cognitive and emotive development (3). In such circumstances, children may unwittingly adopt defense techniques that numb their awareness of unacceptable or painful impulses, feelings, ideas, and memories. As they mature, they may genuinely seek to dissolve their unarticulated guilt, fear, anger, and internal conflicts. But such emotional repression cannot be merely commanded out of existence by sustained logical reasoning. No amount of persistent analysis can overturn the wreckage brought about by long-term cognitive and emotional subversion. Branden argues that in such cases, the individual must first practice the art of “owning” his emo
tions, of bringing the aspects of his inner experiences into full awareness. Whereas lifelong evasion and repression engender cognitive disintegration, the removal of obstacles to the experience of one’s emotions reignites the mind’s integrative processes (N. Branden [1971] 1978, 42, 87, 102–3). Thus, for Branden: “Therapeutic understanding represents an integration of intellect and emotion, cognition and experience, thought and feeling—not either/or, but always both together” (109).
Many of Branden’s post-Randian writings center on the techniques he has developed to aid the self-disclosure of “unrecognized attitudes and patterns.” Branden (1983a, 131) uses a sentence-completion method, in which the individual subject spontaneously completes a sentence stem presented to him or her by a qualified therapist. While an assessment of these techniques is beyond the scope of the present study, I believe that Branden has provided Objectivism with the equivalent of a “depth hermeneutics” similar in spirit to that pioneered by Jürgen Habermas.54 Habermas focused on the process by which the individual could be liberated from “distorted communication.” He utilized Freudian psychoanalysis as a means of transcending distortions in communicative interaction brought about by self-deceit and interpersonal manipulation. As Thomas McCarthy (1978) has observed, Habermas’s “depth hermeneutics” aims to translate “what is unconscious into what is conscious,” igniting “a process of reflection, a reappropriation of a lost portion of the self” (200). This therapeutic process is as important to Habermas’s project as it is to Objectivism. The full implications of this parallel will be explored in Chapter 11.