Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (25 page)

Rand believed that such
rationalism
had been duplicated many times throughout the history of philosophy. Later empiricists were correct to repudiate this approach. However, Rand argued that Thales, Plato, and the ancient cosmologists were, in fact, “arrested empiricists” because they had formed conclusions about “the ultimate constituents of the universe” by “taking partial knowledge as omniscience.”
¹²
The cosmologists had projected
epistemological
conclusions into their metaphysical foundations. But if the rationalists were “arrested empiricists” for reifying their current state of knowledge, then empiricists displayed a “Hegelian or Rationalistic” tendency to dogmatize their empirical conclusions. Both alternatives depend on the same fundamental error. They

advance conditions for what that primary has to be.… You cannot say philosophically what conditions you will ascribe to that which is not known. We cannot know by what means we will grasp something not known today.… And yet in making any kind of conclusions about the ultimate stuff of the universe, you are necessarily committing that error. You are prescribing conditions of what something not known to you now has to be. (“Appendix,” 292–93)

In Rand’s rejection of cosmology, then, there is an important grasp of the origins of
dualism
in the history of Western thought. Rand argues that the inclusion of cosmology in the body of
philosophy
necessarily generated antinomic tensions. Cosmology contributed to the belief that the universe could be defined in terms of two separate spheres of reality. This led to the development of reductionistic, monistic alternatives in which one sphere is emphasized to the detriment of the other. In her journal, Rand wrote: “‘
Cosmology
’
has to be thrown out of philosophy.
When this is done, the
conflict between ‘rationalism’ and ‘
empiricism
’ will be wiped out—or rather, the error that permitted the nonsense of such a conflict will be wiped out.”
¹³

Rationalists and idealists, empiricists and materialists have traditionally embraced one polar principle over another. Each has sought to identify the primary “stuff” of the world. Rationalists identify the basic substance as spiritual or ideal; empiricists, as atomistic and material. The former view matter as a manifestation of the spirit, whereas the latter see
consciousness
as a pure epiphenomenon of material elements. The former affirm the identity of consciousness, but reject the material basis of reality, and the latter accept the reality of the body, of the physical world in general, but doubt the ontological integrity of the mind. Such traditions cut “man” in two,

“Setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other.… They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man’s nature.” (
Atlas Shrugged
, 1026)

Both Rand and Peikoff argue that in the history of philosophy, it was the
Pythagoreans
who first conceptualized this dualism in their distinction between this world and the world of numbers. Their orphic cults taught that the body was the tomb of the soul. Plato absorbed this Pythagorean legacy and distinguished between the world of particulars and the world of universals or Forms.
¹⁴
Augustine
christianized this dualism and argued that there was an incommensurability between this world and the next (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 7). It was not until
Aquinas
resurrected Aristotelianism that philosophers began seeing existence as singular, albeit one in which there was a natural, hierarchic totality ascending to God (lecture 8).

Rand contended, however, that at the birth of modern philosophy, dualism reared its ugly head in a more sophisticated form with
Descartes
, who saw the physical world and human consciousness as two distinct, unrelated spheres. By beginning with the metaphysical assumption that the spiritual and the physical are independent of each other Cartesian philosophy creates the problem of
mind-body
interaction.
¹⁵

By banishing cosmology from the realm of metaphysics, Rand sought to provide a highly delimited, ontological foundation for
philosophy
. For Rand,
whatever
the “ultimate stuff” of the universe is, it will have
identity
—it will be something definite. To this extent,
ontology
is metascientific. Rand seeks the reconciliation of philosophy and
science
. Philosophy cannot depend on
a changing physics for its ontological foundations. Rand argues, however, that genuine science
must
depend on philosophy to validate its modes of inquiry.

But the
relationship
between philosophy and science is
not
one of logical dependence. It is
not
a strictly causal relationship. It is an internal relationship in which there is some reciprocity between elements, even though the
relation
is fundamentally skewed toward the primary element.
¹⁶
This
asymmetric internality
preserves both hierarchy and interdependence, and prevents vicious circularity. As Harry Binswanger (1990) explains:

Some empirical content is and must be contained in philosophical theories. On the other hand, philosophical theories should not be subject to the rise and fall of purely scientific hypotheses, since those hypotheses may come to be rejected in the light of new evidence. Moreover, since science builds upon basic philosophical principles (e.g., the basic axioms, the law of
causality
, the principles of logic), there is the danger of employing circular reasoning in using science to support philosophical conclusions. (174)

Since knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, all of the principles of philosophy and science must ultimately depend on observation and inference. Even though Rand’s metaphysical axioms can be grasped implicitly by the mind of the infant and the adult alike, they are conceptually identified as primary facts of reality, embracing the entire field of human awareness. As such, the axiomatic
concepts
serve as the foundation of ontology,
epistemology
, logic, objectivity, and science itself.

Rand’s metaphysic then is both highly abstract and extremely narrow. It is summed up in the axiomatic propositions of identity and causality. For Rand, “Philosophy tells us only
that
things have natures, but
what
these natures are is the job of specific sciences. The rest of philosophy’s task is to tell us the rules by which to discover the specific natures.”
¹⁷

Thus it is not the task of philosophy to validate the theory of natural selection or to hypothesize about the evolutionary origins of
consciousness
(Peikoff 1980T, lecture 8). Philosophy is concerned with the broad nature of
existence
. It must leave to
science
the assessment of the ultimate nature of life, the ultimate relationship between matter and consciousness, mind and body. Even if Rand assumed an organic
unity
of elements within the totality of a single universe, she refused to reflect on the basis of the interrelationships of these elements. Such cosmological speculation depends on an imaginary
omniscient
standpoint. As Peikoff emphasizes, Rand’s
Objectivism
makes a distinction between metaphysics and fantasy.
¹⁸
There can
be no purely deductive attempt to reveal the ultimate substances of reality (Peikoff 1972T, lecture 10).

Philosophy, then, begins with the knowledge of everything-in-general. It begins with that which exists. Physics, by contrast, requires greater particularity. Like all theories, the hypotheses of physics may change with the growing context of knowledge. Even the
Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle
leaves Rand undaunted. For Rand, the inability to predict a subatomic event does not prove that
causality
does not apply to subatomic particles. Our current inability to measure the simultaneous position and momentum of subatomic particles does not show that in reality such events are causeless.
Epistemological
ignorance does not disprove
ontology
. In Rand’s view, scientific explanation (or the lack thereof) does not erase the reality it seeks to explain.
¹⁹

Thus Rand’s Objectivism accommodates all scientific theories.
²⁰
Furthermore, although Rand criticized some of the epistemic foundations of contemporary “pseudo-science,”
²¹
she did not feel threatened by the nearly anarchic variation within modern theoretical science. As
Tibor Machan
(1992) notes, Rand’s Objectivism is based on “an open-minded ontological pluralism, and an (almost) anything goes, (almost) Feyerabendian, laissez-faire attitude toward the methods of empirical investigation” (53).

AXIOMATIC
CONCEPTS

For Rand, ontology must begin with much more basic, prescientific, fundamental propositions about existence,
axioms
that can be grasped even implicitly by primitive peoples (“Appendix,” 247–48). Rejecting cosmology, Rand argues that reality is what it is independent of what people think or feel and that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving and understanding reality. As her protagonist John Galt exclaims in
Atlas Shrugged
:
“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists” (1015).

Existence
and
consciousness
are axioms at the base of knowledge. Such axioms are contained in every fact, perception, observation, statement, proof, explanation, and utterance of any human being, whether it is formally acknowledged or not. An axiom is not a meaningless tautology; it identifies “a primary fact of reality, which cannot be analyzed, i.e., reduced to other facts or broken into component parts” (
Introduction
, 55). An axiom is so fundamental that even those who refuse to recognize its veracity
must “accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it” (
Atlas Shrugged
, 1040).

By articulating the axioms of existence and
consciousness
, Rand did not embrace a
dualistic
perspective on reality.
²²
She merely identified the foundations that lie at the base of all philosophical inquiry. As Peikoff (1991b) explains, these axioms “cannot be sundered. There is no consciousness without existence and no knowledge of existence without consciousness” (149–50). And yet, as a philosophical realist, Rand emphasized the primary axiom of existence. She affirms the
primacy
of existence. In a sense, existence and consciousness are internally, but asymmetrically related.

Existence exists; it does not depend upon consciousness and would continue to exist if every last form of conscious life were obliterated from the universe. The universe simply is; there is nothing outside, prior to, or at the culmination of existence. Existence cannot be derived from any prior certainty of consciousness, nor is it the product of divine will. There is no first cause or teleological design. There is only existence as such.

By contrast, consciousness is radically dependent on existence for its contents. It is metaphysically passive and, as Kelley (1986) explains, “radically noncreative” (27). This metaphysical passivity does not imply epistemological passivity. People are capable of
creativity
; they are able to selectively reorganize the mind’s contents and to project imagination. The radical noncreativity of consciousness refers to the fact that the mind does not create or constitute the objects it perceives. They exist independent of consciousness. Consciousness as such is purely
relational
, and what it relates to is objective reality. In Rand’s view, “A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something” (
Atlas Shrugged
, 1015). Every phenomenon of consciousness derives from an awareness of existence. Rand writes:

Some object, i.e., some
content
, is involved in every state of awareness. Extrospection is a process of cognition directed outward—a process of apprehending some existent(s) of the external world. Introspection is a process of cognition directed inward—a process of apprehending one’s own psychological actions in regard to some existent(s) of the external world, such actions as thinking, feeling, reminiscing, etc. It is only in
relation
to the external world that the various actions of a consciousness can be experienced, grasped, defined or communicated. Awareness is awareness of something. A content-less state of consciousness is a contradiction in terms.
²³

Rand’s emphasis on the primacy of
existence
is equally a recognition of the fundamentality of
ontology
in the hierarchy of philosophy. In this regard, Rand may have learned much from her Marxist professors at Petrograd University, who emphasized the primacy of existence over
consciousness
. The “
objectivist
” strain in
Marxism
was particularly apparent in the Leninist worldview, which dominated early Soviet intellectual life. Rand’s metaphysic echoes the Marxist preoccupation with “the world as it is,” what
Scott Meikle
(1985) has described as “the recognition of the primacy of ontology over
epistemology
” (174).

Marx also rejected cosmology and endorsed the ontological view of
logic
. He writes:

Who begot the first man, and nature as a whole? I can only answer you: Your question is itself a product of
abstraction
. Ask yourself how you arrived at that question. Ask yourself whether your question is not posed from a standpoint to which I cannot reply, because it’s wrongly put.… When you ask about the creation of nature and man, you are abstracting, in so doing, from man and nature. You postulate them as
non-existent
, and yet you want me to prove them to you as
existing.
Now I say to you: give up your abstraction and you will also give up your question. Or if you want to hold on to your abstraction, then be consistent, and if you think of man and nature as
nonexistent
, then think of yourself as non-existent, for you too are surely nature and man. Don’t think, don’t ask me, for as soon as you think and ask, your
abstraction
from the existence of nature and man has no meaning. Or are you such an egoist that you conceive everything as nothing, and yet want yourself to exist?
²⁴