As I have suggested, there is evidence that such intolerance was endemic to the organized Objectivist movement. In a bizarre twist, many “students of Objectivism” deified their charismatic leader and embraced a messianic cultism not much different from that exhibited by the extremist Russian cultural and political movements of Rand’s youth. Moreover, Rand and many of her followers allegedly engaged in destructive moralizing and psychologizing. Some observers have remarked that it was a great irony that a so-called individualist philosophy had driven many of its followers into despair and emotional repression.50 At least one book has been written about the tyranny of an “Objectivist” psychotherapist who attempted to assist one of his patients in her struggle for greater autonomy—only to intimidate and sexually abuse the woman in the process (Plasil 1985). This is especially significant even if the psychotherapist himself was not actually a genuine Objectivist. Since the uprooting of “bad” premises requires a psychotherapeutic process in Rand’s approach, it is easy to imagine how an emphasis on philosophical reeducation, emotional articulation, and derepression could dissolve into an authoritarian nightmare. Ellis argues that under such circumstances, Objectivist ideological “training” would be insufficient. Ellis (1968, 16) believes that the unobstructed consciousness of the New Intellectual is an illusory notion requiring the “biological reconstruction” of the human species.
Would an Objectivist notion of “mental health,” for instance, be but another construction of the medical profession designed to control the nonconformists? Would the victory of Objectivism involve a quasi-Maoist cultural revolution? Is such a totalitarian tendency inherent in any philosophy that proposes a totalistic transformation? Is there an identity between methodological totalitarianism and political totalitarianism?
Rand never answered any of these crucial questions directly. What must be emphasized here, however, is that Rand’s proposed cultural renaissance is not equivalent to a state-directed Maoist cultural revolution. Such a renaissance would seek to undermine statism, not bolster it. It would not be a tool of the state. It would lead to a cultural “counterhegemony,” to use a Gramscian phrase. By overturning the antirational premises of culture in each of its forms, it would create a broad context and necessary base for political change.
Once achieved, it is doubtful that an Objectivist society would use a form of psychological “conditioning” to control its citizens. Given Rand’s profound individualism and antistatism, she adamantly opposed the state’s involvement in medicine and mental health. Both Branden and Rand applauded the libertarian psychiatrist, Thomas Szasz, who fought against the involuntary institutionalization of mental patients. Psychiatry, stripped of its incestuous ties to the state, would be far less lethal.51 Rand suggests that an Objectivist society would not seek to reproduce these repressive structures in the new age of freedom. It would leave people free to be irrational, even as it would deny them the structural means to violate the rights of others. More important, the Objectivist society would leave rational people free to discover and earn their own contextually objective values.
The central issue here is whether Rand’s vision of a totalistic revolution would necessarily translate into another form of totalitarianism. Like many classical liberals, Popper ([1962] 1971, 133–34) has argued persuasively against any philosophy that seeks to collapse the “critical dualism” between “facts and standards.” He states that without this dualism, there is a tendency to “identify present might and right,” or “future might and right.” Those who claim to have discovered an objective ethos attempt to impose it on other people. Moreover, such an attempt is an inevitable by-product of any “grandiose philosophic system,” because such a system seeks to remake the totality in its own image.
Popper believed that Marx was the last, great philosophic system-builder. He hoped that Marx’s totality would never be replaced “by another Great System” seeking to achieve “monolithic social ends” (393). Such systems spell “the death of freedom: of the freedom of thought, of the free search for truth, and with it, of the rationality and the dignity of man” (396).
Popper’s identity of methodological and political totalitarianism is a stem warning, one that Rand would have respected. As I suggest in Chapter 9, Rand’s repudiation of theocratic and secular collectivism was based on her belief that each had collapsed the dualism of facts and values by monistically emphasizing one sphere over another. Rand did not identify an a-contextual “intrinsic” or “social” good, nor did she seek to impose a vision of the good on an unsuspecting populace. The good was an aspect of reality in relation to man. It had to be defined within a specific context and related to the specific purposes of an individual beneficiary. Most of the great philosophic system-builders attacked the ontological priority of individuals and attempted to achieve a notion of the good that was unrelated to reason or reality. In Rand’s view, it was Aristotle who laid the foundation for a genuinely rational alternative based upon the primacy of existence and the necessity of reason. Rand believed that Objectivism would complete the Aristotelian revolution.
Rand’s philosophical system combined an emphasis on methodological totality with a commitment to individualist libertarianism. Since Rand never lost sight of the totality or the context, her individualism never dissolved into atomism. But her repudiation of sobornost’ was not a repudiation of the concept of community. Even as she revolted against the Russian sobornost’ in its mystical and Marxist incarnations, she sustained a belief in a conflict-free society of individuals united by their common love for the same values. Rand achieved a dialectical Aufhebung—a sublation of dualities that simultaneously abolished and absorbed, transcended and preserved elements of the Russian communitarian vision. In this respect, Rand’s philosophic project is infused with a communitarian impulse; a communitarianism that is neither mystical nor statist, but founded on the moral autonomy of the individual.
The integration of individual and social harmony in Rand’s thought has been noted by a number of commentators, including Tibor Machan, Douglas Den Uyl, and Antony Flew. Machan notes correctly that in Rand’s moral vision, “both aspects of each individual’s life,” “humanity and individuality,” are conjoined “equally and inseparably.”52 Den Uyl notes further that in Rand’s ideal society, much like in Plato’s Republic, the soul of the city is in harmony with the soul of the individual.53 For Flew, Rand was “like Marx” in her belief “that human nature and the human condition are such as to make possible a conflict-free utopia.”54 Each of these commentators has pinpointed significant communitarian themes in the Randian project.
In Rand’s view, the integrated, rational individual, living in a fully free society, will not experience any inherent conflicts with other people. This does not mean that all people will have the same personal tastes, opinions, desires, or thoughts. But it does mean that if people live consciously and rationally, they will recognize no inherent conflicts between one another. This is a controversial contention in Objectivism that merits a study of its own.
Rand argued that genuinely integrated human beings do not detach their emotions from their thinking, nor do they detach their thinking from reality. Reality-based awareness means that people will not seek or desire the attainment of a contradiction. Rational persons pursue goals that are appropriate to the context of their knowledge. They do not divide their short-and long-run interests. They do not seek goals without considering the means of their achievement. They accept the responsibility of considering the interests and lives of other human beings. They accept that their decisions and actions will have consequences on the lives of others. They recognize that nothing in life can be achieved without effort.
Within the context of a free society, in which social relations are nonexploitative, Rand argued that there is no inherent conflict between two people seeking the same job, or the same romantic partner. If employers make decisions based on rational criteria, they will choose the most capable person for a given job. Persons not chos
en have not been sacrificed. They will not be psychologically damaged by the rejection, and will have ample opportunity to search for other jobs for which they will be qualified. Likewise, in spiritual matters, a rational person who enters into a relationship with one individual does not sacrifice the interests of others who are not so engaged. Rand argued: “Love is not a static quantity to be divided, but an unlimited response to be earned.” The love of one friend does not compromise the love of another friend. And a rational individual who chooses one romantic partner rather than another, makes that choice not on a comparative basis, but within the context of his or her own interests and happiness. Rand observed: “The ‘loser’ could not have had what the ‘winner’ has earned.”55
What must be stressed is that such decisions are nonsacrificial only among rational people living in a free society. In a free society, it is possible to avoid those who are irrational. Rand emphasized that none of these observations pertain to human relations “in a nonfree society.” Under statism, “no pursuit of any interests is possible to anyone; nothing is possible but gradual and general destruction” (56).
Here, the validity of Rand’s formulations is not at issue. But it is difficult to grasp the Randian ideal if only because today’s world is composed of many different types of people, many—if not most—of whom are not rational. This observation, however, only underscores the extraordinary radicalism of Rand’s project. Rand envisions a society that banishes the master-slave duality on every level of human discourse—in personal, cultural, and structural relations among individuals.
For Rand, the social world is necessary to human flourishing. People naturally seek and give visibility to those whom they love and with whom they communicate. Independence breeds benevolence. Individuality breeds sociality. Those who are not afraid to show their excitement, passion, and integrity will encourage others to do the same. As Nathaniel Branden (1983b) explains, to honor the self is to provide the foundation for a community of individuals who honor one another: “Individualism is not the adversary of community but its most vital pillar” (143).
In the Objectivist society, voluntary, mutually beneficial relations among autonomous individuals is indispensable to the achievement of a genuinely human community. Rand wrote: “National unity, like love, is not a primary, but a consequence and must come voluntarily or not at all.” One does not engender communal benevolence by forcing people into social relations they seek to avoid. The predatory use of force creates and perpetuates social fragmentation and dualism. Politically, the doctrine of individual rights is the only moral vehicle for peaceful “human coexistence,” because it bars physical force from social relations. It sanctions a plethora of voluntary material and spiritual exchanges by which people earn the values that sustain their lives.56 “Universal” brotherhood is not achieved on the sole basis of species identity or even kinship ties, but on the basis “of holding the same values.”57 Despite her differences with modern communitarian critics of liberalism, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Rand recognizes similarly that a free society is not merely a voluntary association of disparate individuals; it is a “community of values” that is the necessary ingredient “of any successful relationship among living beings.”58
I close this chapter—and this book—with one final, lengthy passage written by Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher. It is from The Fountainhead. It portrays, in a single instant of time, the Randian ideal of the human community. On trial for destroying a public housing project, Howard Roark takes the oath. As he prepares for his self-defense, Roark stands before his peers:
He stood by the steps of the witness stand. The audience looked at him. They felt he had no chance. They could drop the nameless resentment, the sense of insecurity which he aroused in most people. And so, for the first time, they could see him as he was: a man totally innocent of fear.
The fear of which they thought was not the normal kind, not a response to a tangible danger, but the chronic, unconfessed fear in which they all lived. They remembered the misery of the moments when, in loneliness, a man thinks of the bright words he could have said, but had not found, and hates those who robbed him of his courage. The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one’s own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name—fear—need—dependence—hatred?
Roark stood before them as each man stands in the innocence of his own mind. But Roark stood like that before a hostile crowd—and they knew suddenly that no hatred was possible to him. For the flash of an instant, they grasped the manner of his consciousness. Each asked himself: do I need anyone’s approval?—does it matter?—am I tied? And for that instant, each man was free—free enough to feel benevolence for every other man in the room. (678–79)
Ultimately, it is this exalted moment of human benevolence that Rand’s project seeks to universalize.
EPILOGUE
Some of you may know the story of the four travelers who on a moonless night chanced upon an elephant and came away separately convinced that it was very like a snake, a leaf, a wall, a rope. Not one could persuade any other to change his mind, for each had touched a different part. Not one could resolve their differences for none of them knew the entire elephant.
The moral of the story is not the inevitability of subjectivism. Rather, it is a lesson in the fallacy of reification. Each traveler abstracted a part of the whole and reified that part into a separate entity, which was identified as the totality. Reification is possible because no one—and no human being—can achieve a synoptic vantage point on the whole. Our definition of what is essential depends on a specific context.
I have approached Ayn Rand’s legacy in a self-consciously one-sided fashion, with an emphasis on its historical roots. I do not have the intellectual hubris to propose that my perspective is the only legitimate vantage point on Objectivism. But as scholarship on Rand’s thought progresses, different perspectives will necessarily bring into focus aspects formerly obscured from view.
The importance of Objectivism then, in this context, does not lie merely in its repudiation of formal dualism or its insistence on the primacy of existence. Objectivism is a seamless conjunction of method and content—of a dialectical method and a realist-egoist-individualist-libertarian content. This synthesis is Rand’s most important contribution to twentieth-century radical social theory.
The Randian project overturns traditional assumptions about the relationship between dialectical method and specific political content. In contemporary intellectual history, the dialectic has been identified almost exclusively with the Hegelian and Marxian traditions. In 1919, for instance, the philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács actually declared that the dialectic is Marxism, and that even if research disproved each and every one of Marx’s individual theses, that would not detract from the veracity of his method. Just as Marx identified capitalism with dualism, Lukács identified Marxism with the dialectic. And as we have seen, liberal thinkers such as Karl Popper would agree. For Popper, what saves capitalism from tyranny is its dependence on a “critical dualism” between facts and standards. Whereas Lukács sees the dialectic as the means by which theory becomes “a vehicle of revolution,”1 Popper sees it as the methodological moment of political totalitarianism.
Based on this identification of Marxism with dialectics, it may seem odd to view Objectivism partially in terms of its dialectical sensibility. Either Lukács’s identification is incorrect, or Ayn Rand was a Marxist. The former is far more likely. Rand affirmed the dialectical connection between critique and revolution, but her revolutionary credo is thoroughly non-Marxist. Marx did not have a monopoly on the dialectic. Aspects of this approach have been employed by many diverse thinkers, including Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Lossky, and as I have documented, Ayn Rand. Peikoff recognizes correctly that such a relational view is not distinctive to Objectivism, even though it is a hallmark of the philosophy.2
; By articulating the methodological elements of Objectivism, I have discovered a host of provocative intellectual links that previously went unnoticed. We can now view Objectivism in historical terms—not only as an heir to Aristotelianism, as Rand would have had it, but as a by-product of her Russian past. Objectivism is as much defined by what Rand accepted from the Russian cultural milieu as by what she rejected.
What Rand accepted was the dialectical revolt against formal dualism. This dialectical method was at the heart of the Russian tendency toward synthesis. Such a tendency was endemic to Russian culture; it was expressed not only in the articulated statements of her teachers, but in the very intellectual air she breathed.
What Rand rejected was the mystical and statist content of Russian philosophy and culture. On this basis, Rand built a philosophical edifice that was simultaneously integrated and secular, dialectical and capitalist. In Rand’s project, there is reciprocity in the interaction between content and method. Her method of processing the data of the world affected the content of her theories, while the content affected the further development of the method. In its critical, negative aspects, Rand’s Objectivism is a grand revolt against formal dualism in each of the major branches of philosophy and in each of the institutions of modern statism. In its revolutionary, positive aspects, Rand’s Objectivism is a grand projection of the ideal person and the ideal society—the autonomous, integrated individual and the benevolent human community. Neither moment can be abstracted from the other. Both constitute the historic essence of Objectivism.
I characterize my approach as “hermeneutical” because the investigation of Objectivism should not merely reproduce Rand’s words, but produce further implications that neither Rand, nor her followers, nor her critics, nor I had foreseen. This proposition goes beyond Rand’s admission that the elaboration of her philosophy was a task that no one individual could finish in a lifetime (Rand [1976] 1992T). It goes beyond the validity of any of Rand’s philosophic formulations or critical commentary. It relates specifically to the task of Rand scholarship. In my own research, I have found that there is so much serious scholarly work that still needs to be done. In literary studies, an investigation is needed of the relationship between Nietzsche and Rand; the use of symbolism and mythological imagery in the Randian novel; and, Rand’s literary method and its relationship to nineteenth-century Russian literature. In philosophy, social theory, and intellectual history, an exploration of the parallels and distinctions between Objectivism and contemporary philosophies (e.g., phenomenology, pragmatism, existentialism, and so on) with regard to such ontological and epistemological issues as the nature of being, relations, consciousness, thinking, and acting; the convergence of psychology and ethics in Objectivist theory; the links between Aristotelian, Nietzschean, and Objectivist ethics; the intellectual relationship between Rand and other twentieth-century individualists, such as Isabel Paterson and Ludwig von Mises; and, the political and cultural impact of Rand’s thought.
Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical Page 50