Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (6 page)

The dialectical thinker seeks not merely to understand the system, but to alter it fundamentally. Hence, a dialectical analysis is both critical and revolutionary in its implications. A dialectical thinker would not analyze a specific racial conflict, for example, without examining a host of historically constituted epistemic, ethical, psychological, cultural, political, and economic factors that both generate
racism
and perpetuate it. In such a view, it is the system that permits racism that must be transcended.

The
dialectical
sensibility is readily apparent in every aspect of
Rand
’s project, in her
literary
credo, philosophic approach, and
social
analysis.

From a literary standpoint, Rand recognized her own novels as organic wholes in which every event and character expresses the central theme. Moreover, her fiction was integral to the evolution of her grand philosophic synthesis.

Philosophically, Rand recognized
Objectivism
as a coherent, integrated
system
of thought, such that each branch could not be taken in isolation from the others. Her theories provide a basis for both critical analysis and revolutionary social transformation.

And from the perspective of
social theory
, Rand’s analysis of contemporary society was multidimensional and fully integrative. Rand focused on relationships of power, examining their historical genesis and their long-term deleterious effects on the stability and cohesiveness of the social order. She refused to view societal problems as separate from one another, and proposed a resolution that was comprehensive and fundamentally radical in its implications.

Thus Rand’s dialectical method was dynamic, relational, and
contextual
. It was dynamic because it viewed specific factors in terms of their movement over time. It was relational because it traced the interrelations between and among factors. It was contextual because it related these factors to their wider context. In a strictly formal sense, such a method has been employed to various degrees by thinkers as diverse as
Aristotle
, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Solovyov,
Lossky
, and those in the hermeneutic and analytic traditions.
⁴⁶

I did not discover any historical evidence that would suggest that Rand was influenced methodologically or substantively by modem hermeneutic or analytic philosophers. Indeed, in her lifetime, Rand did not read much formal
philosophy
except while she attended the University of Leningrad. There she would have been exposed to many thinkers in the Russian dialectical tradition, the most prominent of whom was N. O. Lossky. It was Lossky who first engaged Rand in the serious study of
philosophy
. And it was under Lossky’s tutelage that Rand was most probably introduced to a formal, dialectical method of thinking, even if she did not characterize it as such.

Significantly, it was Lossky who introduced Rand to the work of Aristotle. If Aristotle was the father of dialectical inquiry, as Marx, Lenin, and Engels maintained, then Rand was profoundly correct to view her own system as the heir to Aristotelianism. Ultimately, it might be said that her debt to Aristotle concerns
both
the form
and
the content of her thought.

Nevertheless, if it is true that Rand and her Russian predecessors shared a
dialectical
revolt against formal dualism, it would be very difficult to
dismiss such an affinity as pure coincidence. One could infer legitimately, and independently of Rand’s own explicit self-descriptions, that there are important connections between her thought and the ideas and methods of her Russian teachers. In the context of any other thinker in intellectual
history
, such a claim seems innocuous. That someone
might be influenced
by his or her teachers is a rather uncontroversial thesis. Yet when placed within the context of Rand scholarship, this thesis has been criticized by some who believe that the mere consideration of Rand’s possible predecessors constitutes an assault on her originality.
⁴⁷

I strongly disagree with such sentiment. By placing Rand’s thought in its proper historical and intellectual context, we can better appreciate its most distinctive characteristics. Although I cannot substantiate all of my historical claims beyond
any
reasonable doubt, I believe that herein I offer the best explanation yet published for the origins of Rand’s unique approach to philosophic and social analysis.

I must reject also the
criticism
that I have reconstructed Rand’s
Objectivism
by utilizing categories and distinctions foreign to it. True, my terminology sometimes differs from Rand’s own, but this does not erase the fact that
dialectics
is her essential mode of inquiry. And even though she formulated most of her philosophical contributions relatively late in life,
⁴⁸
her dialectical sensibility informed her earliest writings. On many methodological and substantive issues, Rand’s approach converges with the Russian synthesis and with other dialectical traditions as well.

In addition, I must reject the criticism that I have linked Rand to her Russian ancestors on the basis of a characteristic that is “nonessential” to Objectivism. Although it is certainly true that the use of dialectical method is not distinctive to Rand’s approach, one could argue too, that the
content
of Rand’s Objectivism
taken in its separable parts,
is not distinctive either.
⁴⁹
Other thinkers have defended comparable doctrines of epistemological realism, ethical egoism, individual rights, and libertarian political theory. What must be recognized here is that Rand’s use of dialectical method was as essential to her historic formulation of Objectivist principles, as was her original synthesis in the realm of content. In constructing a philosophy, every philosopher develops a certain content through the use of a specific method.
In the seamless conjunction of a realist-individualist-libertarian content with a
radical
, dialectical method, Rand forged a new system of thought worthy of comprehensive, scholarly examination.
In many significant ways, she was fully justified to characterize herself as a veritable “radical for
capitalism
.”
⁵⁰

This is not to deny the dialectical savvy of other non-Marxist social thinkers.
⁵¹
But Rand’s perspective is unique—both in its historical roots and in its political implications. Rand proposed a fully integrated defense
of capitalism and of the constituent epistemological, psychological, ethical, social, cultural, political, and historical conditions required for its emergence and survival.

Nietzsche once observed that some
writers
are prone to muddy the waters to make them appear deep.
⁵²
One can easily read the work of Ayn Rand and emerge with a clear sense of her polemical abilities. As an artist and an essayist, Rand painted in broad strokes. In her exposition of Objectivism, she traced connections between seemingly unrelated events, institutions, and cultural forces as if these links were self-evident. Underlying her “popular” style and stark presentation was a mode of analysis based on the conviction that all social phenomena are interrelated.

My discussion of Rand’s ideas and the ideas of those whom she has influenced is much less colorful. I do not intend to muddy the waters of Ayn Rand’s crystalline ocean by reconstructing her words in the style of academic jargon; rather, I hope to show just how deep that ocean actually is.

PART ONE

THE PROCESS OF BECOMING

1

SYNTHESIS IN RUSSIAN CULTURE

In her autobiography
The Italics Are Mine
(1992), Nina
Berberova
, one of the most important writers in twentieth-century Russian
literature
, describes a struggle that is at once profoundly personal and profoundly suggestive of the Russian character. She describes “one of the most important themes of [her] inner life,” as she aims for the “fusing of opposites” in her very being:

All
dualism
is painful for me, all splitting or bisecting contrary to my nature.… My whole life has been the reconciliation within myself of the old dichotomy.… [D]iverse and often contrasting traits fuse in me. Long ago I stopped thinking of myself as being composed of two halves. I feel physically, that a
seam
, not a
cut
, passes through me, that I myself am a seam, that with this seam, while I am alive, something has united in me, something has been soldered, that I am one of many examples in nature of soldering, unification, fusion, harmonization, that I am not living in vain, but there is sense in that I am as I am, an example of
synthesis
in a world of antitheses. (23–24, 36)

No theme has been more central to the history of Russian thought than this struggle against dualism. It emerges from a desire to transcend the dichotomies that fragment human existence: spirit versus flesh, reason versus emotion, the moral versus the practical. This yearning to achieve synthesis in the human condition was fully absorbed by Ayn Rand and became one of the earmarks of her
Objectivist
philosophy.

Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum,
¹
in St. Petersburg on 2 February 1905, during the
Silver Age
of
Russian
cultural history. Though she later attributed much of Russia’s cultural brilliance to its Westernized elements, she reveled in the beauty of the epoch:

As a child, I saw a glimpse of the pre–World War I world, the last afterglow of the most radiant
cultural
atmosphere in human history (achieved not by Russian, but by Western culture). So powerful a fire does not die at once: even under the Soviet regime, in my college years, such works as Hugo’s
Ruy Blas
and
Schiller
’s
Don Carlos
were included in theatrical repertories, not as historical revivals, but as part of the contemporary esthetic scene.
²

Rand’s recollection reflects her abiding contempt for the specifically “Russian” aspects of the culture. By emphasizing the achievements of the period as distinctly “Western,” Rand disowned the Slavic mysticism and collectivism that she considered characteristic of the Russian psyche. This fact is crucial to our understanding of Rand’s early intellectual development. It helps us to grasp why Rand could never admit that she was a child of her Russian past. For Rand,
Russian culture
meant
hatred for the individual and the rational mind. Russian thought stressed
emotion
and intuition, not logic and
reason
; it rejected
individualism
and embraced communal organicism as expressed in the concept of
sobornost
’ (conciliarity);
³
it was antimaterialist and, above all, anticapitalist. Each aspect of this Russian totality was a natural extension of the other. In Rand’s view, the rejection of reason required the renunciation of individual freedom, material wealth, and capitalism. When Rand tied her defense of the free market to her celebration of the free mind, she was establishing an inseparable link between reason, freedom, individualism, and capitalism, all elements that were absent from the
Russian culture
that she despised.
⁴

Tatyana Tolstaya
(1991) echoes much of Rand’s own view of the constituent elements in the Russian psyche:

In Russia, in contrast to the West, reason has traditionally been seen as a source of destruction, emotion (the soul) as one of creation. How many scornful pages have great Russian writers dedicated to Western pragmatism, materialism, rationalism! They mocked the English with their machines, the Germans with their order and precision, the French with their logic, and finally the Americans with their love of money. As a result, in Russia we have neither machines, nor order, nor logic, nor money. (6)

It was perhaps in reaction to this Russian hostility toward reason and individualism that the mature Rand seemed to overemphasize the rational and individuating aspects of human nature.
⁵
But inherent in Rand’s view is an integration of reason and emotion, individual and
community
. By explicitly rejecting conventional rationalism and atomistic individualism, Rand implicitly affirms important elements in the Russian critique of “Western”
dualism
.

This is not to say that the struggle against dualism is an exclusively Russian project. To distinguish between Russian and Western culture does not imply that each is hermetically sealed from the other. The history of
Russian philosophy
is replete with intermingling between Russian and European, especially German, thought. What has emerged, especially since the time of Peter the Great, is a complex amalgam of multiethnic and Western influences. Many Russian thinkers in fact were schooled in European universities; they absorbed the integrated constructions of such Western philosophers as Aristotle, Leibniz, Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, among others.
⁶

THE
CHARACTER
OF RUSSIAN PHILOSOPHY

One of the most startling characteristics of Russian philosophy has been its nonacademic, noninstitutional orientation (Edie, Scanlan, and Zeldin 1965, ix). Until the end of the nineteenth century, most creative Russian thinkers worked outside the university. Even
Vladimir Solovyov
, the father of systematic Russian philosophy, withdrew from
academia
at an early point in his life, because of serious disputes with government authorities (Kline 1967, 258).

Russian thought has always been human-centered, intimately connected to the
literary
arts, and immoderately passionate (ibid.). In fact, most of the great Russian thinkers—Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky,
Pasternak
,
Gogol
, Blok, Bely, and Solovyov—were literary artists and social critics, whose zeal was partially responsible for their exclusion from academic life.