Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (67 page)

Rand did not believe that every single individual must accept a specific philosophic idea in order for it to qualify as a dominant trend. In any given historical period, there will be many philosophic cross-currents. But intellectual life, expressed in the normative, aesthetic, political, and economic sciences, will ultimately constitute a dominant philosophic paradigm. The key to comprehending the logic of
history
is to render explicit the dominant paradigm implicit in a variety of cultural forms. History, in Rand’s view, is “not an unintelligible chaos ruled by chance” but something that can be comprehended, predicted, and shaped.
⁹

Peikoff maintains that one of the prime
reasons
for Rand’s majoring in history was her conviction that it was impossible to develop theories about the human species unless one could distinguish historically specific fashions from transhistorical elements. In Rand’s view, the study of history is a prerequisite to all theoretical developments in the humanities. It is the laboratory and workshop of the social sciences; it is where the theorist discovers the role of basic factors in human evolution (Peikoff 1985T, lecture 4).

This view of history as a comprehensible, predictable, and malleable process is central to the Marxist historiography to which Rand was exposed while at Petrograd University. In contrast to the Marxist materialists, Rand argued that historical prediction is possible because each “society’s existential conditions are preceded and determined by the ascendancy of a certain philosophy” among the intellectuals and purveyors of culture (
New Intellectual
, 28). The historical events of a given period will derive from the ascendant philosophy of the preceding age. Just as an individual’s actions are the consequence of past thoughts, so too, a society’s history is a logical unfolding of the philosophical premises it has internalized.

The primacy of philosophy in history derives from the centrality of reason in individual life. Rand constantly repeated the phrase: “Check your premises.” It was the title of her column in
The Objectivist Newsletter
and appeared in countless forms throughout her writings.
Rationality
involves a process of both internal and external
articulation
. To check one’s premises is to articulate the causal antecedents of one’s ideas, feelings, and actions. The integrated individual does not experience any conflict between these spheres. He or she sets into motion a process in which each is brought into harmony with the other.

But by placing emphasis on the primary choice “to think or not to think,” Rand avoided vicious circularity in the relations between thought, feeling, and
action
. It is our ability to
think
that separates us from other living organisms. If we must eat in order to think, even if we must be willing to
feel
in order to think clearly, it is thinking that constitutes our distinctive mode of survival. The
human
production of goods and the
human
experience of
emotions
are ultimately related to—and derived from—this primary
human
cognitive choice.
¹⁰

This
epistemological
principle is instantly related to Rand’s theory of
history
. Since we must think in order live, the
content
of our thought is deeply significant to our
individual
survival; it will direct our emotions and our actions. And since every act of
material
and cultural production ultimately derives from the human ability to think, the
content
of a historical period’s dominant philosophic trends—internalized by the majority of people—will be just as deeply significant to their
social
survival.

Thus, in both individual and social spheres, Rand attempted to render explicit the implicit. In her theory of history, she sought to understand the philosophical roots of social policies, ideological doctrines, and the broad emotional atmosphere of contemporary culture (
New Intellectual
, 28). Just as she admonished us to check our premises, so she checked the premises of her own society. She refused to reify the tacit dimensions of
consciousness
or culture. She wished to inspire people to analyze their own mixed premises, and the mixed premises of the culture in which they live. She sought to push the individual and the social spheres toward a nondualistic resolution in which Tiers 1 through 3 become an integrated, rational totality.

Just as
philosophy
“is a necessity for a rational being,”
¹¹
providing the individual with an essential, comprehensive view of existence, so too, does it serve an essential function in the life—and death—of a given society. She wrote: “There is only one power that determines the course of history, just as it determines the course of every individual life: the power of man’s rational faculty
—the power of ideas.
If you know a man’s convictions, you can predict his actions. If you understand the dominant philosophy of a society, you can predict its course. But convictions and philosophy are matters open to man’s choice.”
¹²

Given that Rand was a deeply
dialectical
thinker, such a formulation seems oddly one-dimensional. Rand seemed to embrace a philosophic version of determinism that mirrors the vulgar materialist view that “the material mode of existence” is the “primary agent” in
history
. Yet both Marx and
Engels
understood the difficulties involved in identifying a singular cause within a dialectical totality. Though Engels was later accused of “revisionism,” he argued persuasively in the 1890s that vulgar economism
was not Marx’s historiograpical credo. Engels recognized that he and Marx were “partly to blame” for the predominance of an economistic interpretation of Marx’s historical method. But, he explained: “We had to emphasize the main principle
vis-à-vis
our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other factors involved in the interaction.”
¹³

The key word here is “interaction.” Sophisticated Marxist methodology incorporates a thoroughly organic understanding of historical causality, which traces the reciprocal interconnections between economic and non-economic factors. Marx gave priority to the material mode of existence because it is production, in his view, that is most responsible for the sustenance of human life. In Marx’s view,
productive
labor “is a necessary condition, independent of all forms of society, for the existence of the human race; it is an eternal nature-imposed necessity, without which there can be … no life” (
Capital
, 1:42–43). Engels argued however, that Marx did not intend for this material emphasis to become “an excuse for
not
studying history.”
¹⁴
Political, ideological, philosophical, religious, racial, literary, artistic, legal, and other factors may all play a part in the human drama. All of these factors “react upon one another and also upon the economic base,” but it is this base of material existence that “in the last resort,” “in the last instance,” must assert its primacy.
¹⁵

Rand did not respond to this materialist conception by embracing a reified notion of the Idea as a causal agent in world history. She accepted Marx’s view that production is necessary to human sustenance, but she believed that
thinking
is the essential root of human production and survival. Hence, it is thinking, the
ideas
that people accept and practice in their daily lives, that is the primary causal factor in human historical development. And if certain philosophic ideas lead to specific historical consequences, Rand argued nonetheless that “there is no such thing as historical determinism,” for ultimately, ideas are formulated and accepted
volitionally.
People do not have to be subject to forces beyond their understanding or control.
¹⁶
For Rand, the articulation of mixed premises is an activity of critical praxis, because it makes people more
conscious
of tacitly accepted principles, even as it pushes them toward action by
conscious
conviction.

If Marx emphasized material causality in his historical method as a response to his Idealist adversaries, Rand came to prominence at a time when many sociologists and historians projected an image of the individual as a puppet of material forces.
¹⁷
Rand’s emphasis on the power of ideas may appear as a one-dimensional response to this “oversocialized” conception of humanity, but such a characterization would suggest that she was ignorant of the reciprocal forces in historical development. This is most definitely not the case.

For Rand,
ideas
are not disembodied causal agents. Ideas are part of a wider totality; their genesis cannot be completely abstracted from a certain material, historical, and psychological context. First, Rand repudiated those who would dichotomize ideas and material goods. Such a distinction

is a product of the mystics’ mind-body dichotomy, which holds that ideas belong to some higher, “spiritual” dimension of reality, while goods belong to an inferior, material dimension: this earth. But, in reality, there is only one reality; man is an integrated entity of mind and body, and neither can survive without the other. Man’s mind (his
ideas
) is as crucially necessary to the production of goods as the translation into a material form (into speech or print) is to the development of ideas.
¹⁸

Second, Rand recognized that every idea emerges within a historical context. She argued that her own ethical theories could never have been fully articulated in preindustrial, precapitalist historical periods. Just as the first glimmerings of a rational
philosophy
emerged in Athenian society, with its “comparative degree of political freedom” (
New Intellectual
, 22), so too, the completion of the Aristotelian project was not possible until the Industrial Revolution demonstrated definitively the efficacy and practicality of
reason
. Based on this understanding, Rand was less judgmental of altruistic ethical and political conceptions that were fashionable in premodern cultures. For example, the anti-wealth views of St.
Ambrose
, who lived in the fourth century, are “explicable, if not justifiable” within the context of his culture, which lacked an appropriate philosophical understanding of the role of property in human life. Rand was not as generous to those who adopted the Ambrosean credo in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
¹⁹
But she was extremely realistic about the progressive acceptance of a rational philosophy; she rejected the ahistorical view that people would simply read Aristotle or Aquinas or her own works and become true believers.
²⁰

Aside from her recognition of the importance of an appropriate context of knowledge and culture, Rand also acknowledged that the development of ideas required a certain psychological predisposition on the part of the innovator. Peikoff argues that frequently there is a close relationship between the philosophy and the
psychology
of the theorist. A person with a benevolent, positive outlook on life would be less apt to author a philosophic system with death and pain as its standard than a person with a malevolent sense of life.

Peikoff has examined the relationship between philosophy and psychology in
history
, and concludes that ultimately, the distinction is one between
an explicit conscious conviction and an implicit idea. Since Objectivism roots psychological factors, such as emotions, the subconscious, and sense of life, in certain consciously or tacitly accepted ideas, Peikoff argues that it is the absorption of certain implicit philosophic premises that will shape the individual’s psychology. Thereafter, the development of philosophical and psychological factors will be concurrent.
²¹
The acceptance of a philosophy that sanctions obedience and authority gives rise to a psychology of dependence. The psychology of dependence requires such a philosophy. Philosophy, in this context, is not a mere rationalization of the relations of dependence; it is a causal antecedent. Philosophy will not determine the specific applications of an idea, the speed of their dissemination and proliferation into the
culture
, or the various consequences of progressive acceptance of a given principle. Rather, philosophy provides the broad context that predisposes a culture to accept as normal those relations which may be patently
irrational
(Peikoff 1991b, 452).

It is on this basis that Peikoff rejects the argument that
Hitler
, for instance, used altruistic slogans as a cover-up for his brutality. In the Objectivist view, altruism
is
brutality. When Hitler advocated the sacrifice of the individual to the Volk, he was being true to his altruistic roots. Had the
Nazis
used the notion of individual rights to justify their policies of genocide, they could never have succeeded. Peikoff does “not believe that hypocrisy is a factor in history.”
²²
The Attilas and the Witch Doctors have practiced what they have preached; the critical role of philosophy lies in
comprehending
the essence of their ideas in order to transcend them.
²³

“WHAT CAN ONE DO?”

Because Rand was a radical social thinker, she faced the difficulty of trying to chart a moral course of action for those who lived in an antirational, immoral culture. Every one of her major fictional characters—from Kira Argounova to Equality 7–2521 to Howard Roark to John Galt—accepts the Herculean task of trying to live a
rational
life in an irrational
society
. Ultimately, it is only Galt who removes himself from a collapsing social order, eventually retiring to the mountains of Colorado, and founding a “
utopia
of greed” based on individualist and capitalist precepts.
²⁴
Yet most of Rand’s characters—and many of her followers—were deeply alienated from the culture in which they lived.
²⁵