Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Norman Barry (1986, 15) notes correctly that in Rand’s social theory, the Hayekian category of “unintended consequences” is virtually excluded. In my discussion of Rand’s social ontology, I noted that Rand had formulated only two basic categories: the metaphysical and the man-made. The metaphysically given elements of objective reality could not be altered, whereas man-made objects, institutions, traditions, and rules of conduct should never be accepted uncritically. But within the category of the man-made, Rand did not distinguish between those objects, institutions, or procedures which people intended to make, and those which were the unintended consequences of their actions.

  And yet, in recognizing that there are articulated and tacit dimensions of thought and action, Rand seems to have accepted the very distinction she did not explicitly endorse. For Rand, emotion is one such tacit component. No one intends to feel a certain emotion. A specific emotional response develops within the mind as an unintended by-product of habitual subconscious integrations. Traditions and customs are also the long-term byproducts and manifestations of habitual practices.

  Rand never belabored the issue of unintended consequences because it appeared somewhat obvious to her. As Binswanger argues: “Even at a very primitive state of knowledge one can observe that one’s actions have two very different kinds of consequences; those which are intended and those which one [sic] did not.” The intended consequences are those which one foresees or anticipates. The unintended results of human action are accidental by-products which were not the basis of the agent’s motivation.54

  Like Marx, Rand believed that an obsessive emphasis on unintended consequences came dangerously close to their reification as transhistorical constants.55 For Rand, every human institution and practice is ultimately capable of change. This is completely consistent with her view that emotions, habitual methods of awareness, and sense of life are equally open to modification—despite their resilience. However, Rand was not naive; she recognized that for most individuals the process of change was extremely difficult.

  Nevertheless, by not focusing extensively on unintended consequences, Rand neglected an aspect of social inquiry that was central to Hayek’s worldview. Hayek was influenced by the writings of both classical conservatives, like Burke, and the classical liberals of the Scottish Enlightenment. These thinkers opposed the notion that one can step outside the historical process and redesign the civil order from its first elements through the “infinite” powers of reason. Hayek inherited this legacy and propelled it to a deeper epistemological level.56 As he put it:

  The picture of man as a being who, thanks to his reason, can rise above the values of his civilization, in order to judge it from the outside or from a higher point of view, is an illusion. It simply must be understood that reason itself is part of civilization. All we can ever do is to confront one part with the other parts. Even this process leads to incessant movement, which may in the very long course of time change the whole. But sudden complete reconstruction of the whole is not possible at any stage of the process, because we must always use the material that is available, and which itself is the integrated product of a process of evolution.57

  Since we are unable to get a synoptic view as impersonal, detached social actors, we have it in our power to “tinker with parts of a given whole” but never to “entirely redesign it” (Hayek 1976, 25).

  It is within the larger totality—the cultural context—that Hayek situated the mind. He maintained that the mind is inscribed in a cultural setting. It is wrong to apply one-way causal notions to either. The mind and culture developed concurrently. They are internally related. “It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man created his culture,” argued Hayek (1981), “than that culture created his reason” (155). Nonetheless, many thinkers have represented Reason (“with a capital R”)58 as “the capping stone” of evolution that enabled human beings to design culture. But this concept of reason is highly abstract and rationalistic. It obscures the interpersonal, social process in which the reasoning individual both absorbs and transmits cultural values. Hayek stated, in almost Marxian fashion, that social theory must start “from [those] whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society” (6). Moreover, social interaction creates effects which are greater than any individual mind “can ever fully comprehend” (7).

  Hayek’s central objection to rationalism is that it obscures the internal relationship of mind and culture. The rationalist conception of reason sees the rational faculty as external to the culture from which it springs. This is an inherently dualistic approach to social reality. Hayek argued that the Cartesian rationalists, in particular, promoted this arrogant interpretation of reason’s power. He called these rationalist thinkers “naive” or “constructivistic.”59 They assume that institutions which benefit humanity have “in the past—and ought in the future to be invented in clear awareness of the desirable effects they produce” (85). Constructivism presumes that human beings can design (or “construct”) social institutions as if they were outside the context of history, using the infinite powers of Reason. Constructivism is the “fatal conceit” endangering the future of wealth, morals and peace.60 It is “an abuse of reason based on a misconception of its powers, and in the end leads to a destruction of that free interplay of many minds on which the growth of reason nourishes itself.”61

  Hayek contrasted constructivist rationalism with a legitimate alternative, which he called, “critical rationalism” (94). He believed that “reason properly used” is a faculty that acknowledges its own limited potential. Hayek criticized socialists precisely for their constructivist attempts to invert the structure of social order. Socialism embodies a mechanistic approach to human affairs; it sees social order as a form of arrangement and control. The central planners believe that they can gain access to all those facts which may facilitate social directioning (Hayek 1988, 66). But central planning requires knowledge of relative scarcities, information that cannot be disconnected from the context—the dynamic market process—that generates it.

  By contrast, Hayek saw capitalism as an extended order of human cooperation, an emergent, spontaneous product of social interaction. What makes the market so unappealing to the socialist is that most of its institutions are not the product of explicit design. Socialists reject the “anarchy” of capitalism because it appears both “unreasonable” and “unscientific” (ibid.).

  For Hayek, there are aspects of social reality which are not subject to direct control. There are many unintended consequences that arise from the process of social interaction. These consequences are not a sign of human inefficacy; they are a natural, social product. Constructivism requires people to step outside the social and historical process, grasping its modus operandi through a synoptic identification of the totality. This attempt at omniscience is an abuse of reason, according to Hayek, because it fails to grasp the actual structure of knowledge, which includes both articulate and inarticulate components.

  The constructivist rationalists embrace what Hayek (1973) describes as a “synoptic delusion” (14). A synoptic delusion represents a false belief that one can consciously design a new society as if one had possession of holistic knowledge. Holistic knowledge involves grasping the complex interrelations of the society which are necessarily constituted by both articulate and tacit social practices. Such knowledge ultimately requires omniscience. Omniscience, in turn, implies human infallibility. This infallibility would even have to extend to knowledge of the structure and processes of one’s own mind. Hayek stated: “There will always be some rules governing a mind which that mind in its then prevailing state cannot communicate, and that, if it ever were to acquire the capacity of communicating these rules, this would presuppose that it had acquired further higher rules which make the communication of the former possible but which themselves will still be incommunicable.”62 Hayek believed that the idea of a mind explaining itself is a logical contradiction. Its impossibility should help
us curb our intellectual hubris.63 Human fallibility and the inherent contextual limits of knowledge are then the strongest factors militating against a fully imposed or designed rationalist order. The attempted imposition of order dislocates the very processes that make order possible.

  Clearly, there are enormous differences between the Randian and Hayekian perspectives. But it is possible to see some significant parallels between them. On an immediate level, Rand would have agreed with Hayek that one cannot explain the rules of mental operation by a process of infinite regress. Moreover, as Binswanger (1989T, lecture 1) argues, we cannot use our own minds to step outside of and judge those very minds. There is no such thing as a “supraconscious” that enables one to “stand above” oneself.

  But far more important, Rand and her intellectual allies would have agreed with Hayek’s assessment of the historical roots of constructivist rationalism. Hayek argued that just as the Western concept of rationality is the product of both Enlightenment thought and market capitalism, so constructivism is an inappropriate extension of the Enlightenment faith in Reason.64 Though Rand celebrated the Enlightenment’s contribution to the secular defense of liberty, she also argued that the Enlightenment perpetuated a fallacious view of reason.65

  This critique of Enlightenment rationalism was not peculiar to Rand or Hayek. Thinkers in the hermeneutic and Frankfurt school traditions have all exhibited a similar tendency to criticize the “instrumentalist” view of reason at the heart of Enlightenment thought. John Caputo (1988) explains that these thinkers aimed to redefine reason

  in a more reasonable way and to rescue it from the Enlightenment distortion of rationality. For the Enlightenment subjected reason to the impossible ideal of unconditioned rationality and absolute indubi-tability, and then, in the hope of meeting such impossible standards, turned reason over to the rule of a rigorous method and systematicity.… [W]e have learned to stop blaming reason for the failure to meet these standards and to start blaming the Enlightenment. (5)

  This is precisely the crux of both Rand’s and Hayek’s critique. The failure of rationalism was not a failure of reason. By ascribing to human beings the attributes of an omniscient deity, and then condemning human reason for not fulfilling this ideal, rationalists attack the genuine legitimacy of human cognition. Rand argued that this destructive pattern is reproduced by the advocates of altruism, who erect an impossible, self-abnegating standard of morality and then indict humanity for not being able to live up to it.

  Whereas Hayek concentrated on the social and cultural context of the capacity to reason, Rand focused on the identity of the rational faculty. By ascribing to human beings an infallibility that is, in fact, unattainable, rationalists disconnect the will to efficacy from any realistic understanding of its meaning.

  But the will to efficacy is not simply a capacity to produce a desired effect. It is the conviction that one is competent in principle to think and act. Although such efficacy is expressed in particularized skills, it is not confined to skill. Nathaniel Branden ([1969] 1979) writes: “It is applicable to, and expressible in, every form of rational endeavor” (128). But efficacy is not a purely cerebral experience. Rand’s expansive concept of consciousness translates into an equally expansive notion of what it means to be efficacious. Genuine efficacy results from a fully integrated constellation of reason, emotions, values, actions, conscious convictions, and subconscious sense of life, with no dichotomy presumed between any of the constituent elements. In Chapter 9 I explore the Objectivist conviction that labor—productive work—is central to the achievement of such efficacy because it “is the distinctively human mode of action and survival” (129). Productive work expands our particularized efficacy, our replication and knowledge of skills, our understanding of tasks, our ability to grasp principles of action.

  Rand’s recognition of these interrelationships provides a basis for comprehending the nature and guiding purpose of the constructivist rationalism that both she and Hayek condemned. Such rationalism fractures the constituent elements of consciousness, and abstracts reason from its integrated context. Rationalism attempts to satisfy the human need for efficacy by a one-sided emphasis on Reason, not human reason, but an abstract, narrow, disconnected, and unintegrated conception of reason.

  Rationalism emerges from an error of abstraction, an isolated focus on the apparently limitless capacity of the human rational faculty. In proposing an all-powerful Reason with no limits, rationalists project a Reason with no identity. The rationalist sees the capacity to know as infinite, in the sense that the knowledge of one fact presupposes that a person can attain knowledge of a second fact, a third fact, etc. This knowledge series can be (potentially) extended to infinity. But Rand observed that infinity is only a mathematical or methodological concept; it is not valid as a concept pertaining to human epistemological potential.66 People are neither immortal nor omniscient. At any point in time, a person’s actual capacity and knowledge is both finite and contextual. Rationalism collapses the distinction between potential knowledge and actuality. It deifies the human ability to know and embraces a concept of reason that is epistemologically invalid.

  We think within a definite structure. Our senses perceive real things and processes in the universe, and our rational faculty apprehends their structural and logical interrelationships. We achieve the cognitive efficacy that is requisite to survival by acting in accordance with the laws of logic to produce the desired effects. All of natural science is an attempt to systematize our knowledge of consistent and predictable relationships. Science charts certain courses of action initiated by particular entities with distinctive natures, producing specific effects. But as Hayek emphasized, and as Rand would not have denied, one person’s attempt to generate a desired effect is tempered by the reality of other people who are engaging in similar actions. The result is often a product that no one intended. To a rationalist, this is incompatible with our need for predictability and certainty. The rationalist wishes to create a social laboratory in which people are made to act with the same predictability as the law of gravity.

  Such rationalism is rooted in a deep psycho-epistemological fear. As Branden emphasizes, people can develop a fear of the risks of acting on their own fallible judgments. This is a fear not of action per se, but of action in a universe in which success is not always guaranteed.67 There are two diametrically opposed ways in which we can respond to this fact of fallibility. There are innumerable variations in behavior between these two extremes. We can accept the possibility that we might make mistakes. We can accept that there will be many unintended consequences to our actions. Or we can revolt against this fact. We might seek to escape from the responsibility of thinking and acting (N. Branden 1980, 100). Alternatively, as Packer (1986T) suggests, we might be neurotically obsessed with planning and structuring every minute detail of our existences in a compulsive and misbegotten effort to conquer life’s uncertainties. If we do that, we have replaced our will to efficacy with an illusory quest for omniscience.

  In Rand’s view, the rationalist assault on reason has “two interacting aspects” that must be examined. The primary aspect is individual since, ultimately, it is the individual who must choose “to think or not to think.” Hence, any doctrine that attacks the mind’s efficacy must be judged by its effects on our willingness or ability to raise the focus of our awareness. Rationalism subverts an individual’s psycho-epistemology because it proposes a standard that no one can live up to. Those who accept this doctrine live in perpetual guilt for their alleged failures.

  But Rand recognized that there was a second interacting aspect that needed to be explored. This “contributory cause” is always social. The “social environment can offer incentives or impediments; it can make the exercise of one’s rational faculty easier or harder; it can encourage thinking and penalize evasion or vice versa.” For Rand, contemporary statist society “is ruled by evasion—by entrenched, institutionalized evasion—while reason is an outcast and almost an
outlaw.”68

  What makes Rand’s analysis so powerful is her ability to trace the effects of a philosophic doctrine on many different levels of generality. For Rand, rationalism was but one particular form of epistemological perversion with negative consequences for values, culture, education, politics, and human relationships.

  9

  ETHICS AND HUMAN SURVIVAL

  Rand’s ethics is a direct application of her theory of knowledge. In her emphasis on the centrality of reason, Rand enunciates both an epistemological and normative principle. If reason is how we gain knowledge, it is simultaneously how we (as human beings) survive. That is, we should use our rational faculty if we choose to live. In Rand’s ethics, life, as an ultimate value, cannot be separated from reason, purpose, and self-esteem.

  The issues involved in Rand’s ethical theories are enormous, complex, and controversial. Indeed, no other aspect of Rand’s thought has received as much scholarly attention as her defense of egoism.1 Rand herself believed that in addition to her theories of concept formation and politics, her ethics were among her most important philosophic contributions (in Peikoff 1976T, lecture 8). It is impossible to convey the depth of Rand’s ethics here. Once again, I focus chiefly on the nondualistic elements of Rand’s approach.

  BEYOND FACT AND VALUE

  As we have seen, Rand’s emphasis on reason cannot be fully understood without appreciating her antipathy toward Russian mysticism. Most Russian religious philosophers had elevated faith and revelation to a status equal—or superior—to reason. But Russian philosophy was distinctive, in both its religious and Marxist incarnations, for its rejection of the Western-positivist separation of fact and value.2 Rand’s repudiation of this very distinction is a reflection of her Russian roots.