Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  But Rand opposed the typically Russian attempts to synthesize fact and value through statist or supernatural means. In their efforts to combat the bifurcation of fact from value, Russian thinkers fell victim to monistic reductionism. Both Bolshevism and Russian orthodoxy aimed for a union that emphasized a different element of the polarity. For Rand, communism was a form of materialism that attempted to transcend the fact-value dichotomy by a monistic emphasis on the factual. Rand characterized communists as “mystics of muscle,” who saw all values as epiphenomena of material forces. They stressed a change in the material “base” as a means to the transformation of human values. Inevitably, the base could not be altered without the violent intervention of the secular, totalitarian state.

  By contrast, Rand interpreted religion as a form of spiritualism in which the fact-value distinction was resolved by a one-sided emphasis on spiritual values to the detriment of material reality. The religionists, or “mystics of spirit,” saw all things in the world as infused with intrinsic worth or divinity. Ultimately, their dogmatic definition of absolute values translated into an equally authoritarian statism of the theocratic form.

  Both the Bolsheviks and the Russian mystics were the paradigm for Rand’s rejection of materialism and idealism. Both perpetuated the bifurcation of existence and consciousness. In essence, the materialists “believe in existence without consciousness,” and idealists “in consciousness without existence.” In Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote: “Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind” (1027).

  The religionists had embraced a kind of intrinsicism. In epistemology, such intrinsicism emphasizes metaphysical essences grasped by intuitive revelation. In ethics, it sees the good as inherent in things or actions regardless of their context or consequences. Intrinsicism separates the concept of “value” from the valuer and his distinctive purposes. It sees the good as good “in, by, and of itself,” part of reality, and totally independent of consciousness. It tends toward dogmatism and authoritarianism.

  Not surprisingly, aspects of this intrinsicist approach to ethics were exemplified in the works of Lossky. Lossky saw facts and values as part of the same reality. For Lossky ([1917] 1928): “Values do not constitute a separate realm of their own, distinct from existence” (178). It was the goal of human beings to discover those absolute values which inhered in reality, as a means to a communion with God. Like Solovyov before him, and most Russian neo-idealists, Lossky proposed an ethic that was profoundly mystical and altruistic. Lossky believed that egoism entailed the human separation from the Kingdom of Harmony. As such, selfishness was the “primary evil, giving rise to all kinds of derivative evil” (Lossky 1951, 262). In this regard, Lossky echoed the central themes of Russian ethical thought. In the writings of Kireevsky, Khomyakov, Solovyov, and the Russian Symbolists, the notion of sobornost’ suggested the transcendence of conflict between the individual’s selfish interests and the common interests of society. In practice, such harmony could only be achieved by the individual’s self-subordination to the whole. This conciliar union allegedly preserved the individual’s uniqueness, while achieving an integrated totality. But whereas the religious philosophers sought a mystic organic unity, the Bolsheviks appropriated the communal sobornost’ in their legitimation of the One State.

  In Rand’s view, such individual subordination was typical of all altruistic doctrines. In both Russian religious and political thought, altruism—the creed of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and self-abnegation—served as a rationalization for the individual’s subjugation. By placing God, the Collective, or the State above the self, altruism aimed for a “culturally-induced selflessness.”3 Its goal was not benevolence or the relief of suffering.4 Rather, its purpose was to prey on peoples’ sense of guilt and inadequacy.5 The religionists had mastered the technique of guilt-manipulation by focusing on Original Sin. By positing an inherent human evil outside the province of choice, the religionists had perpetuated a Big Lie to serve their own authoritarian impulses (Atlas Shrugged, 1025).

  Rand argues that in the post-Renaissance world, such mystical concepts as Original Sin were being undermined by reason, science, and individualism. Yet instead of overturning medieval mysticism, Western civilization internalized a lethal contradiction. According to Rand, the West attempted to sustain a culture of reason on an altruistic and neo-mystic philosophic foundation. Rand argued that this contradiction was at the heart of Kant’s thought. In Kant’s system, there is a fatal split between fact and value. Reason is given domain over the material world, whereas faith is recognized as the master of the spiritual sphere. Kant separated reason from “the choice of the goals for which material achievements are to be used.” He provided a philosophical justification for the belief that human goals, actions, choices, and values could only be determined by faith.6 He secularized religious morality, fracturing the tie between self-interest and virtue. He argued that action could not be moral if performed from personal inclination (Peikoff 1970T, lecture 3). In the end, Kant’s deontology had rescued faith and the altruist ethic from the onslaught of reason.7

  Kant was certainly not the first philosopher to doubt the possibility of a rational morality of self-interest. Even before Hume questioned the likelihood of deriving an “ought” from an “is,” the history of philosophy was replete with attacks on ethical egoism. Peikoff (1972T, lecture 2) argues that even in the pagan, humanistic culture of ancient Greece, the Sophists had identified egoism with subjectivity and brutality. But in Western thought, strong egoistic themes were to be found in the works of Aristotle, Spinoza, and Nietzsche.8 Rand was most probably influenced by certain Aristotelian and Nietzschean themes in the creation of her own concept of egoism.

  It was Nietzsche’s critique of altruism that made a huge impact on the Symbolists of the Russian Silver Age, and on Rand’s early intellectual development. Nietzsche had criticized altruism as a slave morality that sanctioned the dominance of the herd. In the altruist’s view, according to Nietzsche ([1886] 1966), “Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called evil; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the mediocrity of desires attains moral designations and honors” (114).

  By contrast, Nietzsche described a master morality in which all that was deemed evil by the altruist code became a source of virtue. He rejected abject selflessness and asceticism. He repudiated the altruist penchant to celebrate a nonexistent God by crucifying human beings. He aimed for the “transvaluation of values,” such that the virtues of the slave morality would be overturned by its vices, that is, by the virtues embodied in the master ethos.

  Though Nietzsche’s writings are open to widely divergent interpretations, there is much evidence to suggest that his tribute to human greatness, to a “blessed selfishness, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul” (Nietzsche [1883–85] 1905, 211) was rooted in his exposure to the works of classical antiquity. Walter Kaufmann argues persuasively that Nietzsche’s projection of the reverence of the “noble soul,” the very quotation that Rand placed in her introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, emerges from an Aristotelian base. Kaufmann cites sections of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics dealing with the “great-souled man.” As a lover of self, the “great-souled man” rarely asks for the assistance of others. He is a being of self-esteem, caring “more for the truth than for what people think.”9 Nietzsche appropriated these very themes in his own paean to individual excellence.10

  Rand drew from this Aristotelian and Nietzschean constellation. In one of her earliest journal entries, she wrote: “The true, highest selfishness, the exalted egoism, is the right to have one’s own theoretical values and then apply them to practic
al reality.” For Rand, ethics must begin from the self, not from society, the mass, the collective, “or any other form of selflessness.”11 Rand would come to see that an attack on “selfishness” was simultaneously an attack on the integrity of an individual’s self-esteem (Virtue of Selfishness, xi). She believed that her “most important job is the formulation of a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth.” Such an ethical achievement was a necessary aspect of Rand’s philosophical project, because it would affirm the possibility of a secular, moral existence free of religious imperatives and categorical altruistic duties.12

  Defending the need for morality against religious intrinsicism, Rand argued that a rational approach could not embrace the other, subjectivist side of the same dualistic coin. Her chief objection to “Nietzschean” egoism was its tendency to regard any action as good if it was intended to satisfy one’s own desires (Virtue of Selfishness, x). Rand’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s ethos as “subjectivist” may have taken root in her exposure to the Russian Symbolist movement. Despite their tendencies toward synthesis, the Symbolists had unabashedly embraced Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle, the orgiastic celebration of emotions, as far superior to Apollonian rationality. It was against this kind of Nietzschean subjectivism that Rand reacted with a fervent hostility. For Rand, while the intrinsicist endorses a view of the good as inhering in reality, external to human consciousness, the subjectivist argues that the good is the product of subjective feelings or desires, bearing “no relation to the facts of reality.”13

  Such subjectivism characterized most conventional theories of egoism. In Rand’s view, traditional altruist and egoist alternatives shared the same collectivist premise. Much like Marx, who repudiated “vulgar” idealists and “vulgar” materialists, Rand criticized many thinkers in the individualist tradition who merely substituted the sacrifice of the many for the self-sacrificial creeds they fought: “It is in their statements on morality that the individualist thinkers have floundered and lost their case. They had nothing better to offer than vulgar selfishness which consisted of sacrificing others to self. When I realized that that was only another form of collectivism—of living through others by ruling them—I had the key to The Fountainhead and to the character of Howard Roark.”14

  More than this, Rand had begun to articulate the basis of her own, unique understanding of the “virtue of selfishness.” For those who had formulated a concept of selfishness solely “in terms of sacrificing others to oneself,” there was an apparent “psychological confession about the nature of their own desires” (New Intellectual, 56). Rand excoriated such thinkers as “counterfeit” individualists, whose view of human survival oscillated between conquest and defeat, exploitation and submission.15 In Rand’s view: “The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to his ends.”16

  Despite this two-pronged rejection of conventional morality, several critics have argued that Rand’s definitions of altruism and egoism are “untenable and slanted.” O’Neill believes that Rand maintains “a totally artificial dichotomy between egoism and altruism.”17 Ellis (1968, 28) agrees that both altruism and selfishness are “taken to rigid and one-sided lengths” in Rand’s thought. And Barnes (1967) argues further that Rand’s “altruistic” villains frequently aim to satisfy their own welfare, while utilizing the veneer—or rationale—provided by the traditional ethos of self-sacrifice. Barnes believes that such a cynical use of altruism does not adequately define its essence as a moral doctrine (135).

  But none of these commentators recognize Rand’s critique of altruism as a simultaneous rejection of conventional egoism. Inherent in traditional ethics was an interpenetration of sacrificial credos, a duality involving both giving and taking. As Robert Greenwood (1974) explains: “A person who is expectant, even in the pragmatic sense, and counts on receiving the unearned, may be said to countenance altruism, to practice it passively, as it were, in the transactional sense, as receiver, not giver” (46).

  Rand’s resolution, by contrast, seeks to transcend one-sided “giving” and one-sided “taking.” She argued that such distortions are not proof of human immorality, but of the kinds of moralities that people have been taught. In Rand’s view, people have tacitly obeyed these cultural and moral ideals. They have divided themselves into masters and slaves, while being united by their reciprocal dependency.18 She proposed to transcend such dualism by looking once again at the fact-value distinction. She did not envision the absorption of all values into facts, or all facts into values. She argued instead that values are a kind of fact emerging from an objective relation between existence and human consciousness. Just as she preserved the internality of existence and consciousness, so she preserved the internality of fact and value. In both cases, she emphasized the primacy of existence and the primacy of fact, which leads to the necessity for values. As she put it:

  The objective theory holds that the good is neither an attribute of “things in themselves” nor of man’s emotional states, but an evaluation of the facts of reality by man’s consciousness according to a rational standard of value. (Rational, in this context, means: derived from the facts of reality and validated by a process of reason.) The objective theory holds that the good is an aspect of reality in relation to man—and that it must be discovered, not invented, by man.19

  Values cannot be separated from the valuer and the valuer’s purposes. Conventional ethics fracture the relationship between “actor and beneficiary.” Rand sought to unite these elements, reasserting the “right to a moral existence.” She argued that only morality can serve as a guide to the achievement of one’s ultimate goals. For Rand, we “must be the beneficiary of [our] own moral actions,” because it is only through such principles that we can survive and flourish as human beings (Virtue of Selfishness, viii–x).

  LIFE AND VALUE

  At the foundation of her ethical system, Rand remained true to her dialectical roots. She traced an internal relationship between life and value, such that neither phenomenon is possible in the absence of the other. The pursuit of values is not possible without the context provided by life, which is both the existential basis—and the ultimate value—constituting the relationship.

  While preparing Atlas Shrugged, Rand wrote in her journal, that we are born as abstractions with our reason serving as our guide. Our lives are a process in which we concretize and create our selves through our own efforts. For Rand, life and self-preservation were synonymous. Since everything in the universe has identity, a person’s nature encompasses capacities and needs that are specific to the human character. To perform the activity of living as human beings, we must pursue our own self-preservation by the means distinctly available to us. The individual must live consciously, Rand explained, since “the essence and tool of his life is his mind.”20 Thus, an epistemological insight serves as the departure for ethical theory.

  Rand argued that in the history of normative philosophy the primary question of ethics has usually been: What values ought one to pursue? But for Rand, to begin ethical inquiry with this question is to commit the fallacy of reification. Rand explained that most philosophers have taken the existence of ethics for granted, reifying the historically given codes of morality, but never considering their existential foundation.21

  Ethicists cannot debate the value alternatives without asking a more fundamental question: Why are values necessary for human existence? Rand began her investigation by exploring the epistemological roots of the concept of “value.” She defined a value as “that which one acts to gain and/or keep.” The concept itself is not axiomatic; it is both relational and contextual. It requires an answer to the twofold question “of value to whom and for what?” The concept “presupposes an entity capable of acting to achieve a goal in the face of an alternative. Where no alternative exists, no goals and no values are possible.”

  The basic alternative that every living organism must fac
e is its own existence or nonexistence. The sustenance of life requires activity on the part of the organism. Life as such “is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action.… It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.”22

  In this formulation, Rand traced the internal relations between three conceptual couplings: life and value, life and action, value and action. Just as life and value entail each other, so too do life and action. Binswanger explains that the relationship between life and action is reciprocal. Not only is the survival of life contingent upon the action of an organism, but action is itself conditional upon life; “A dead organism cannot act.”23 This same reciprocal dependency is noted between the categories of value and human action. As Nathaniel Branden ([1969] 1979) argues: “Value and action imply and necessitate each other” (26). The achievement and maintenance of a value requires a specific course of action, while the motive and purpose behind a consciously initiated action is the achievement and maintenance of a value.

  The specific actions and goals an organism must undertake to achieve the sustenance of its own life are determined by the specific kind of entity that the organism is. Plants, animals, and human beings have distinct needs dictated by their distinct identities. The ultimate context—and goal—that conditions the needs and actions of the entity is the entity’s life. Just as existence cannot be validated by reference to anything beyond itself, neither can life be sustained by reference to a standard that transcends it. Since life is not the means to a supernatural realm, it is the means to its own end. It is “an end in itself.” Life “makes the existence of values possible.” It is an ultimate value because people must act to gain and keep it by a process that only life makes viable. In Rand’s view: “Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself: a value gained and kept by a constant process of action. Epistemologically, the concept of ‘value’ is genetically dependent upon and derived from the antecedent concept of ‘life.’ To speak of ‘value’ as apart from ‘life’ is worse than a contradiction in terms.”24