Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (13 page)

According to
Rorty
, the externalist orientation “holds that none of a thing’s properties are essential to it (and thus, a fortiori, that no relations are internal to it). This view is put forward by those who make a firm distinction between the thing itself and a description of it.” The externalists argue that although certain properties of the thing enable us to describe it, the absence of these properties does not mean that the thing is no longer the same. Such a proposition is “trivial” or “misleading,” according to the externalists. For in one sense, the alteration of one single aspect of a thing makes it different from what it once was. But in another sense, the modification of a single element would merely change our description of the thing. The externalists argue that “there are an infinity of equally correct descriptions, and nothing in the thing itself determines which of these is
the
description.” The externalists assert that the specification of “essential properties” is thus a nominal exercise and completely arbitrary (Rorty 1967, 125). Thus, to say that “I am a young, American male of Greek and Sicilian descent” is merely to describe what I am. I could have provided an equivalently correct description by saying that I was a man in my thirties, with several birthmarks on my face, working at an American college, and living in Brooklyn, New York. Or I could have said that I was 5′7½″, 145 pounds, with a size 8½ shoe. The point is that I can provide endless self-descriptions and not one of them is truer than any other. To say that one attribute is more “essential” than any other attribute is to place an arbitrarily privileged distinction on one to the exclusion of others.

But common sense tells us that some things are more important than others. If I were to remove one tiny birthmark from my face, this would have less of an effect on my essential “personhood” than, say, a sex-change operation. What is the something in “maleness” that is more significant to my self than “birthmark-ness”? Would a new “female” appearance alter any of the fundamental “me”? Externalism does not deny that there is this thing called me, but it rejects the claim that there is anything about “me” that we can consider more
essential
than any other thing. Hence, it views the designation of essence as a purely linguistic, nominal, and arbitrary exercise.

Curiously, both the internalist and the externalist deny Aristotle’s distinction between essence and accident. The externalists claim that the characterization of a thing’s “essence” is a purely conventional practice, and the internalists also argue that the distinction between “essential” and “nonessential” is arbitrary. They believe that every thing has an intrinsic nature, which is
organic
and integrated. Though the internalists accept that essence-accident distinctions are inevitable in a world of imperfect knowledge, they seem to imply that such division is ontologically illegitimate, for
every
aspect is as important as every other.
³³
By extension, the internalists also seem to imply that there
can
be a world of perfect knowledge.

This helps us to focus on one of the fundamental problems inherent in the most extreme form of internalism: a problem of
individuation
arising from excessive integration. In
Hegel
and
Blanshard
, as in Lossky, there is a tendency toward strict organicity.
³⁴
Every part of the totality must be considered when assessing the significance of any other part. Expanding the discussion beyond the mere consideration of an object’s relational properties, Blanshard argues, for instance, that every object has a certain shape, and that this shape is the result of two factors: the object’s nature
and
its interaction with other objects.
³⁵
Blanshard ([1962] 1964) writes that a thing’s “ultimate elements are engaged in manifold interactions, by way of attraction and repulsion, with things around it, and these almost certainly determine its shape down to the last detail. This particular shape, like this degree of malleability, is not externally related to its other characters; they are bound up with these causally and therefore … necessarily” (481).

Although Blanshard recognizes that different entities have parts that are “more obviously interdependent” than others, still he claims that no element is external to the totality. A thing is what it is by virtue of “lines of demarcation—causal, logical, or both—running out into an illimitable universe” (485). Thus, the thing is affected in varying degrees by its
relations
, “no matter how external they may seem.” Since “everything is related in
some
way to everything else, no knowledge will reveal completely the nature of any term until it has exhausted that term’s relations to everything else”
(Blanshard 1940, 2:452). This would suggest that
everything
must be known before anything can be analyzed.

To transcend this problem, both
Hegel
and
Lossky
hypothesized an Absolute standpoint, whereby the
Truth
lies in a Metaphysical Whole as grasped by an omniscient consciousness. In such a whole, all relations are internal and simultaneous. The main problem for such an internalist orientation is
individuation
: trying to abstract and define the nature of an individual entity such that it is not dissolved in the relationships that it embodies. It is this dilemma of individuation that prompted Lossky to assert the ontological priority of concrete particulars within the whole. He calls his system
concrete
ideal-realism
and sees both Hegel and
Aristotle
as his philosophic forebears. He argues that relations are not disembodied; just as no object is external to its relations, relations have no existence except between objects. Lossky ([1917] 1928) explains: “Relations are not independent; they cannot exist on their own account, apart from the elements they relate” (37). And yet if each thing is constituted by a cluster of relations, and the relations themselves can be extended to include the
organic
whole itself, we are still faced with an unresolved individuation problem.

Externalists such as
Thomas Nagel
and
A. J. Ayer
reject internalist o rganicism because they correctly perceive that it fails to resolve this issue of individuation. Nagel argues further that any search for the real “nature” or “essence” of a thing is incoherent. As
Rorty
(1967) explained it, Blanshard’s “essence” of X depends on a metaphysical “X-as-known-by-an-ideal-knower,” that is, a Being who can grasp all of the relational interactions between and among all of the constituent properties of the totality (129). The externalists reject organic internalism because such a system ultimately depends on omniscience as a standard of certainty.

Issues of individuation and omniscience are not inherent in externalism. The externalist orientation claims to oppose the internalism of the Idealists with a hard-boiled philosophic
realism
. Things are what they are and cannot be defined in terms of their
relations
to anything else. A thing has an
identity
and its nature cannot “be constituted by the nature of the system to which it belongs” (Copleston 1966, 405). But the externalist argues that there is a sharp dichotomy between what an entity really
is,
something which cannot be known completely, and our linguistic descriptions of what an entity is, something which is entirely arbitrary. The externalist perpetuates the Kantian distinction between a noumenal and phenomenal world, necessity and contingency, analysis and synthesis. The externalist’s “realism” dissolves into a crude, dualistic, and
atomistic
perspective on reality. Its fundamental problem is a lack of integration, owing to excessive
differentiation
. Every
thing is self-subsistent and logically independent of every other thing.
³⁶
Relations and systems are arbitrary constructs of the mind.

It is for this reason that
Lossky
rejected externalism as a vestige of Kantian
dualism
.
Kant
argued that relations are added to the data of our senses by the constructive activity of the mind. The subject creates or constructs the object and its relations. But according to Lossky ([1917] 1928), the mind contemplates relations that exist in the world. The relations we conceive “presuppose relations that obtain within organic being” (24). They are “objective elements which can be
perceived”
(33). They exist “in the very nature of the object” (34).

As an organic internalist, Lossky denied both dualism and
atomism
. Like Blanshard and other internalists, Lossky saw an intimate connection between the necessary and the contingent, the analytic and the synthetic, the causal and the logical. Human knowledge cannot be bifurcated because reality is an integral whole.

Within this organic totality, the elements can enter into opposition and conflict with one another, but they are still interconnected and interrelated by virtue of their presence within a systemic context.
Organicism
recognizes the interaction of elements as more than “the mere sum of two actions of which the first follows the second as a response.” The nature of interaction lies in the fact that it involves the “
simultaneous
determination” of two or more elements, such that “there is no meaning in drawing a distinction between the agent and the patient” (5–6). Lossky recognized metaphysical
plurality
in the world, but refused to view the world’s many elements as independent of the whole. Each of the mechanical elements of the system is conditioned by the totality itself (6–7).

Lossky argued further that “not a single knowable element” of the totality “exists on its own account, apart from a necessary relation to other elements.” Every object of knowledge has distinguishable aspects, but none of these can be grasped in isolation from the total context. Metaphysical plurality does not discount the importance of causal connections and internal relations (11–12).

Thus the elements of the whole may be separated in one respect, but “in another respect they have the same basis and belong to the same whole. Their very separateness necessarily demands that in some other respect they should be united and interdependent” (13). Those who subscribe to the
inorganic
, mechanistic, and atomistic perspective conceive of atoms as independent of one another. Yet the atoms themselves belong to one universe in which they interact. The “single whole space” of the universe constitutes “the one all-embracing basis” that is common to all of its constituent
elements. Hence the position and movement of an atom is relative within the broader context of the whole.

Lossky
argued that not even the atomist can deny the essentially organic structure of the world. For even in the atomist’s denial is the retention of wholeness with every judgment made. Every philosophical theory presumes the idea of a whole that constitutes and is constituted by its elements. Thus the idea of an organic “whole lies at the root of every judgement we make concerning any object whatsoever” (8). If we deny such an organic, relational structure to reality, we forfeit the conditions that make the world knowable.

Lossky’s
organicism
and intemalism proliferate throughout his works, even in his less than fully developed aesthetics. Though Lossky lacked a formalized philosophy of
art
, he viewed each work of art as a totality, “the successive parts of which exist in consequence and for the sake of one another as well as of the whole: the parts of such a whole are not only a means but also an end for one another” (159–60). In this regard, Lossky appropriated a notable Aristotelian theme. In
De Poetica,
Aristotle wrote:

The truth is that, just as in the other imitative arts one imitation is always of one thing, so in poetry the story, as an imitation of action, must represent one action, a complete whole, with its several incidents so closely connected that the transposal or withdrawal of any one of them will disjoin and dislocate the whole. For that which makes no perceptible difference by its presence or absence is no real part of the whole.
³⁷

Lossky ([1917] 1928) expresses this same organicist sentiment with regard to musical composition: A piece of music is a complex whole in which its constituent elements form an organic unity. Each part is in harmony with the other, and all parts exist for the whole (48).

And yet, despite the ultimate necessity of holding an organic view on all ontological,
epistemological
, and aesthetic issues, Lossky is compelled to explain the prevalence of inorganic and atomistic conceptions. If organicism and internalism are true of reality and of knowledge, then why do fragmented perspectives endure?

Lossky
argued that since knowledge requires comparison,
differentiation
, and analysis, it can disintegrate into atomistic elements. Like all entities on earth, humans are beings of finite capabilities. At any given moment, they focus on “some one part of the world” and
abstract
this part from the whole in a particular respect. Since knowledge expands with the addition of information, they can conclude falsely “that knowledge consists
in
constructing
in our minds a complex whole out of
independent
elements.” This is the Kantian error which fails to discriminate “our acts of knowing from that which is known.” Such a mistake must inevitably “ascribe the characteristic of fragmentariness to the objects of knowledge and to the whole knowable world” (15).

Lossky believed, however, that the analysis that is performed by the mind yields a partial and incomplete picture of the whole. Lossky was unable to attain a fully integrative and organic view without the infusion of mystical elements. As a
religious
philosopher, Lossky hypothesized that an Absolute “being whose powers of attention and discrimination were infinite would be capable of contemplating everything at the same time, both as connected with and as distinguished from everything” (16). Such an omniscient being would be incapable of error, but He would be able to see the organic whole “in its differentiated aspect at once, without being broken up in time” (ibid.).