Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (5 page)

Comparison promotes confrontation and communication not merely between those who celebrate Rand and those who criticize her but also between the traditions that are being engaged. As
Richard Bernstein
(1971) puts it, “The provincialism that is so fashionable among ‘true believers’ of different philosophic orientations can blind us to a serious, sympathetic understanding of other philosophers who are working in different idioms” (4). The dialogue that may result can help us to comprehend not only the perspectives of those we oppose but the implications of our own beliefs as well.

For many reasons, such a dialogue has been slow to develop with
Objectivism
. Nathaniel Branden, Barbara Branden, and David Kelley all suggest that the Objectivist
movement
of the 1960s fostered a cult-like reverence toward Rand. Ironically, a movement dedicated to freedom and individual autonomy engendered disputes over ideological purity.
²⁷
Some devout followers attempted to model themselves on Rand’s fictional characters. If John Galt, the protagonist of
Atlas Shrugged
,
smoked cigarettes, this behavior was to be emulated. If Rand’s heroines had a penchant for rough and explosive sex, this was also to be admired.
²⁸
Many of Rand’s disciples accepted each of her pronouncements as if they were intrinsic to the system of Objectivism. If Rand equated horror movies with depravity, or argued against electing a woman president on principle, or expressed distaste for the music of Beethoven, the works of
Shakespeare
, or the paintings of the Impressionists, or abhorred the practice of homosexuality, or disliked facial hair,
²⁹
her personal, aesthetic, and sexual preferences were elevated to the status of dogma.

Kelley (1990) writes that many of Rand’s followers failed to distinguish between the ideas essential to her philosophy and those that were not. For Kelley, Rand offers “the foundation and outline of a system” within which different interpretations are likely to develop (61).

Nevertheless, one cannot simply dismiss the authoritarian, sometimes downright foolish, aspects of the organized Objectivist movement. That these aspects exposed Rand’s philosophy to ridicule and caricature cannot be denied. Of course, from the vantage point of intellectual history, Rand has no monopoly on folly. Of greater importance, however, is the charge that
authoritarianism
is inevitable in any grand system of philosophy. Since Rand posits a cultural revolution as necessary to the establishment of a genuinely free society, she seems to mimic the totalistic approach of
the
Marxists
. In the twentieth century, Marxist ideology linked its organic, integrative methodology with its sanction of the total state. Hence, it is legitimate to examine the connection between what
Karl Popper
has called political and methodological
totalitarianism
. According to Popper ([1962] 1971), the totalistic attempts by Hegel and Marx to transcend the
dualism
of
facts
and standards underlies the inexorable totalitarianism of their worldviews. Popper argues that the fact-value distinction is a necessary one, for it bars people from attempting to enforce their own normative prescriptions on society as if these values were divinely dictated. Popper’s “open society” is liberal and capitalist; it opposes totalistic central planning, but sanctions limited social engineering.

And yet by identifying
dialectics
with
Marxism
and dualism with
capitalism
, Popper agrees with Marx. Marx argued that dualism was both
essential
and
historically specific
to the capitalist mode of production. For Marx, capitalism both reflected and generated the dualities in the modem world. His historical project points toward a communist society that would transcend these dualities and the capitalist system on which they depend.

Rand proposes a resolution transcending the Popperian and Marxian alternatives. She links her defense of capitalism to a strong, dialectical sensibility. Her vision of the free society rejects traditional antinomies, but embraces the morality and practicality of the capitalist system. Given the collapse of Marxism as a theoretical paradigm and political force, Rand’s alternative is particularly compelling. In many ways, it redeems the integrity of dialectics as a radical method by rescuing it from its mystical, collectivist, and statist incarnations.

DIALECTICS AND DUALISM

Yet Rand would have been the first to deny her status as a “dialectical” thinker. Rand’s own view of “
dialectics
” was based on her experiences in the Soviet Union. In Rand’s mind, the very word “
dialectics
” must have raised a “red flag” of sorts. In 1959, she saw
Nikita Khrushchev
on American television. As she later recounted, he recited “the credo of dialectic
materialism
in the exact words and tone in which I had heard it recited at exams, in my college days, by students at the University of
Leningrad
.”
³⁰
This credo was branded into the minds of students as an ideological tool of Soviet repression. Barbara Branden (1986) writes that Rand “understood the theory of
dialectical materialism
—and had on her body and spirit the scars of its practice” (42). For Rand, “dialectics” was pure
Heraclitean
nonsense; it was the view “that
contradictions
are the law of reality, that A is non-A.”
³¹
In this
sense, Rand, like
Popper
, interprets dialectics as an endorsement of
logical
contradiction, embodying a view of the universe based on nonidentity.
³²

Certainly dialectical language at times obscures a strictly logical understanding of contradiction and
identity
. Some writers are guilty of claiming that dialectical “logic” transcends the so-called formal, static, or one-dimensional logic of
Aristotle
.
³³
The question is, in part, one of semantics. Unless I clarify my own understanding of “dialectics,” I am vulnerable to at least two
criticisms
: (1) that in reconstructing Objectivism, I utilize categories and distinctions foreign to Rand’s own system (Kelley, 20 August 1989C); and (2) that, in focusing on “dialectics” as a key component of the Objectivist approach, I have linked Rand to her Russian predecessors on the basis of a nonessential characteristic (Kelley in Kelley 1993T).

I reject both criticisms as follows:

Throughout the
history
of philosophy the term “dialectics” has been used in many different senses. Aristotle recognized dialectic and
rhetoric
as counterparts of each other; for him, rhetoric was the art of public speaking, or the “faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” whereas dialectic was the art of logical discussion and argumentation.
³⁴
In dialectic, the interlocutor proceeds from accepted (or specific) propositions and argues toward a more basic (or general) conclusion.
³⁵
Although mastery of this dialectic technique was the hallmark of Socratic and Platonic philosophy, Aristotle argued that it was insufficient for establishing scientific truth.
³⁶
Nevertheless, he valued the dialectic because it demanded the study of questions from multiple vantage points. It is for this reason, perhaps, that
Marx
,
Engels
, and Lenin recognized Aristotle as the father of dialectical inquiry. Engels, in fact, called Aristotle “the Hegel of the ancient world,” who “had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.”
³⁷
And Lenin argued that within Aristotle lies “the living germs of dialectics
and inquiries
about it.”
³⁸

More than two thousand years after Aristotle’s death, Hegel developed a conception of
dialectics
as an ontological and historical process. Hegel’s dialectical method affirms the impossibility of logical contradiction and focuses instead on
relational
“contradictions” or paradoxes revealed in the dynamism of
history
. For Hegel, opposing concepts could be identified as merely partial views whose apparent contradictions could be transcended by exhibiting them as internally related within a larger whole. From pairs of opposing theses, elements of truth could be extracted and integrated into a third position.
³⁹
Other philosophers saw this form of dialectics as a triadic movement in which the conflict of “thesis” and “antithesis” is resolved through “
synthesis
.”
⁴⁰
Dialectical materialists
placed this process
on an economic foundation and used it as the basis for a philosophy of history.

The best way to understand the dialectical impulse is to view it as a technique to overcome formal
dualism
and monistic reductionism. Dualism attempts to distinguish two mutually exclusive spheres, though it often leads theorists to emphasize one sphere to the detriment of another. Thus one can differentiate between genuine philosophical dualists, who see two coequal principles at work, and philosophical monists, who accept the dichotomies defined by dualists and reduce one polarity to an epiphenomenon of the other.
⁴¹
Wolf Heydebrand
(1981) explains that these dualistic forms can be found in nearly every branch of philosophy: in ontology, in the radical separation of body and mind, or matter and consciousness; in epistemology, in the radical separation of the real object and the datum present to the knowing mind; in ethics, in the radical distinction between good and evil (92).

Dialectical method is neither dualistic nor monistic. A thinker who employs a dialectical method embraces neither a pole nor the middle of a duality of extremes. Rather, the dialectical method anchors the thinker to both camps. The dialectical thinker refuses to recognize these camps as mutually exclusive or exhaustive.
⁴²
He or she strives to uncover the common roots of apparent opposites. He or she presents an integrated alternative that examines the premises at the base of an opposition as a means to its
transcendence
. In some cases, the transcendence of opposing points of view provides a justification for rejecting
both
alternatives as false. In other cases, the dialectical thinker attempts to clarify the genuinely integral relationship between spheres that are ordinarily kept separate and distinct.
⁴³

In Rand’s work, this transcendence of opposites is manifest in every branch of philosophy. Rand’s revolt against formal dualism is illustrated in her rejection of such “
false alternatives
” as
materialism
and idealism, intrinsicism and subjectivism, rationalism and empiricism. Rand was fond of using what
Thorslev
has called a “Both-And” formulation in her critique of dualism.
⁴⁴
Typically, Rand argues that Both
X
And
Y
share a common premise,
Z
. Her characteristic expression is: “Just as
X
depends upon
Z
, so too does
Y
depend upon
Z
.” Moreover, Rand always views the polarities as “mutually” or “reciprocally reinforcing,” “two sides of the same coin.” This is not merely an expository technique. Rand was the first to admit that a writer’s style is a product of his or her “psycho-epistemology” or method of awareness.
⁴⁵
By her own suggestion, one can infer that such an expository style reflects a genuinely dialectical methodology.

It must be emphasized, however, that Rand does not literally
construct
a synthesis out of the debris of false alternatives. Rather, she aims to
transcend
the limitations that, she believes, traditional dichotomies embody. In some instances, Rand sees each of the opposing points of view as being half-right and half-wrong. Consequently, at times, her resolution contains elements from each of the two rejected positions.

Rand’s dialectical approach is also illustrated in her recognition of such integral relationships as that between mind and body, reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice. For Rand, these factors are distinctions within an organic unity. Neither can be fully understood in the absence of the other, since each is an inseparable aspect of a wider totality.

It is this emphasis on the totality that is essential to the dialectical mode of inquiry.
Dialectics
is not merely a repudiation of formal dualism. It is a method that preserves the analytical integrity of the whole. Although it recommends study of the whole from the vantage point of any part, it eschews
reification
, that is, it avoids the abstraction of a part from the whole and its illegitimate conceptualization as a whole unto itself. The dialectical method recognizes that what is separable in thought is not separable in reality.

Moreover, dialectics requires the examination of the whole both
systemically
(or “synchronically”) and historically (or “diachronically”). From a synchronic perspective, it grasps the parts as
systemically
interrelated, as both constituting the whole, and constituted by it. For example, a dialectical thinker would not disconnect any single theoretical issue, such as the problem of free will, from its broader philosophic context. He or she would necessarily examine a host of connected issues, including the efficacy of consciousness, the nature of causality, and the reciprocal relationships between epistemology, ethics, and politics.

Diachronically, dialectics grasps that any system emerges over time, that it has a past, a present, and a future. Frequently, the dialectical thinker examines the dynamic tensions within a system, the internal conflicts or “
contradiction
s” that require resolution. He or she refuses to disconnect factors, events, problems, and issues from one another or from the system they jointly constitute. He or she views social problems not discretely but in terms of the root systemic conditions they both reflect and sustain.