Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (8 page)

THE SILVER AGE

In the post-Solovyovian period, Russian philosophy entered a
Silver Age
. But the Silver Age was much more than a philosophical renaissance. It was an era of
cultural
flourishing that had begun in the final decade of the nineteenth century and had culminated by 1924, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Silver Age was the historical context of Rand’s formative years. It was marked by a burst of creativity in the
literary
arts,
coupled with a renewed interest in
religion
, mysticism, and the occult. Artists and philosophers reacted strongly against positivism and materialism, examining the nature of freedom, art, beauty, truth, and the dignity of the individual. They precipitated a revolution of the spirit, heralding the radical changes that were to consume Russian society.

THE INFLUENCE OF NIETZSCHE IN RUSSIA

The Russian
Symbolists
constituted one of the most important cultural movements of the age.
¹³
Writers such as Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Andrey Bely, Aleksandr Blok, and Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to transcend the polarity in
Russian culture
between Westernizers and Slavophiles. Paradoxically, they embraced the Christian messianism of the Slavophiles and Solovyovian mysticism, while simultaneously absorbing the Dionysian aspects of
Nietzsche’s
philosophy. They challenged both materialism
and
asceticism, positivism
and
rationalism, Marxists
and
czarist authoritarians. As nihilists, emotionalists, and subjectivists they were hostile toward reason and science. They rejected urbanization and industrialization, and envisioned a new anarchic culture of freedom, love, and
sobornost
’.
¹⁴

Central to the Symbolist movement was the absorption of key Nietzschean themes. The Symbolists answered Nietzsche’s critique of
Christianity
by cultivating a new religious morality of cultural creativity, Promethean individuality, and sexual pleasure.
¹⁵
Symbolist artists aimed to embody the characteristics of Nietzschean supermen and to achieve a transformation of values by integrating Christian mysticism and Dionysian revelry.
¹⁶

Like Nietzsche, the Symbolists rejected dualistic interpretations of the world. In Nietzsche’s view, as in Hegel’s, one cannot isolate the elements of opposition, which are often “insidiously related, tied to, and involved” with one another ([1886] 1966, 10). For Nietzsche, as for Hegel, historical evolution develops through such opposition. But Nietzsche refused to embrace monistic
idealism
.
Monism
merely emphasizes one aspect of a dualist distinction at the expense of the other. Nietzsche aimed to transcend the very language of duality.

One of the distinctions that
Nietzsche
attempted to transcend was the opposition of
good
and
evil
. These
ethical
constructs are problematic, in Nietzsche’s view, because their meaning is deeply dependent on the moral system in which they are expressed. The Christian “slave morality” views
altruistic
self-sacrifice as the good. According to Nietzsche, it achieves submission and conformity by appealing to resentment, guilt, jealousy, and envy. However, the achievement of human mediocrity is not the ethical goal
of “
master
morality.” Instead of appealing to the herd mentality of the mob, master morality elevates self-responsibility and nobility as an ethical ideal, stamping out the weak and uncreative elements of humanity.

Like his distinction between master morality and slave morality, Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the
Apollonian
and Dionysian duality also made a deep impact upon the Russian Symbolists. The Symbolists embraced the Dionysian principle as a corrective for the excessive rationalism of Western philosophy. Rosenthal argues that the Apollonian-Dionysian
dualism
gave the Symbolists “a conceptual framework for esthetic and psychological reflection and fueled their opposition to positivism and utilitarianism, sanctioning their demand that the needs of the inner man (the soul or the psyche) be heard. The Dionysian became a symbol of interrelated esthetic, psychological and religious impulses.”
¹⁷

For Nietzsche,
Apollo
and
Dionysus
embodied opposing metaphysical principles. In 1969, Rand would reiterate this Nietzschean symbolism in her assessment of
New Left
counterculture. In Rand’s view, Nietzsche had used the symbols of Greek tragedy to express a false dichotomy between
reason
and
emotion
. But Rand saw Nietzsche’s archetypes as appropriate symbols for what happens when reason and emotion
are
disconnected. Apollo embodies individuation and is “the symbol of beauty, order, wisdom, efficacy … —i.e., the symbol of reason.” By contrast, Dionysus’s drunkenness is characterized by a loss of self, “wild, primeval feelings, orgiastic joy, the dark, the savage, the unintelligible element in man—i.e., the symbol of emotion.”
¹⁸
Though Nietzsche saw power in the integration of Apollo and Dionysus, he embraced the superiority of the uninhibited, unfettered Dionysian impulse.

Rand argued that the New Left counterculture exhibited this Dionysian loss of self. Though Rand sympathized with the New Left’s rejection of the Establishment, she condemned its flagrant irrationalism, its drug-induced emotionalism, and its anti-industrialism. Perhaps Rand had recognized in the New Left the elements that she had observed in the Russian Symbolist movement of her youth. Rand may have appreciated some of the Nietzschean undertones of Symbolism; she cites
Aleksandr Blok
as one of her favorite poets.
¹⁹
But Rand was quick to recognize the antirational, antiself, and anticapitalist components of the Dionysian principle. Ultimately, her rejection of Dionysian subjectivism would separate her from Nietzsche and his “counterfeit”
individualism
.

As for Aleksandr Blok, he was the dominant literary figure in the St. Petersburg of Rand’s youth. Educated at St. Petersburg University in the Juridical and Philological colleges (
fakul
’
tety
), he emerged as the supreme Russian Symbolist poet of his generation.
²⁰
He gave regular readings of his
poetry at the university until his death in 1921. Like his fellow Symbolists Ivanov and Bely, Blok conjoined fierce Dionysian imagery with Solovyovian
Christian
mysticism, putting forth an image of “a Nietzscheanized Christ, a Christ-
Dionysus
archetype.”
²¹
Blok envisioned an anarchistic
sobornost
’ unifying all believers in the mystical body of Christ.
²²
He aimed to resolve the tension between individualism and social cohesion, between culture and
civilization
.

Blok argued that there was an inherent contradiction between culture and civilization. Culture, in his view, is Dionysian; it is spontaneous, creative, organic, and whole. Civilization is
Apollo
nian; it is mechanical, abstract, rational, and materialistic. Blok opposed bourgeois society because it fragmented culture and civilization and gave one-dimensional emphasis to the Apollonian principle. Ultimately, Blok envisioned a society that integrated Apollonian structure and Dionysian process.

Envisioning a similar
transcendence
was
Dmitri Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky
. Merezhkovsky was a prolific Symbolist writer who argued that the highest unity would be achieved through the
sex
act, since each body is interpenetrated and expressive of all other bodies. Merezhkovsky’s rejection of the split between men and women led him to embrace the androgyne, or man-woman, as the ideal
personality
. Each man and each woman would freely express both the masculine
and
the feminine characteristics they each embody. Merezhkovsky aimed not for the artificial merging of two selves but for an organic and indivisible sexual whole within each human being. His aesthetic sought to synthesize the polarities of the external world that reflected the splits within him (Rosenthal 1975, 36). To bridge the gap between real and ideal, Merezhkovsky embraced a form of mysticism that “absorbed all dichotomies, softened the hard edges of reality into a beautiful and harmonious unity” (226).

Though some Symbolists opposed the Bolshevik Revolution and its Marxist materialism, their attempt to reconcile Nietzsche with Russian mysticism had contributed to the erosion of the old values and institutions. The Symbolists had uncovered a dimension in Nietzsche’s thought that served their cultic and collectivist desires to liberate the instincts and transcend the self. Their attacks on Christian slave morality would ultimately reinforce the atheism of their Bolshevik rivals.
²³

The impact of Nietzschean
philosophy
on Russian Symbolism was significant. But Nietzsche’s thought also influenced the
Marxism
of the
Silver Age
. The interpenetration of Nietzschean and Marxist thought was facilitated by their common Hegelian roots. Four important Nietzschean Marxists of the period were
Stanislav Volsky
,
Anatoly V. Lunacharsky
,
Aleksandr A. Bogdanov
, and
Vladimir A. Bazarov
. Even Maxim Gorky, the father of
Socialist Realism
, underwent a Nietzschean phase.

The
Nietzschean
Marxists stressed the individual’s free will, desire, and creativity. They rejected Kant’s deontological ethics and viewed the proletariat as beyond good and evil. As George Kline (1969) explains, “The
Nietzschean
collectivists maintained that under
socialism
individuals would
freely
desire to subordinate their individual creativity to the creativity of the collective” (171).

Stanislav Volsky argued that bourgeois society alienated the individual. Genuine
individualism
would not emerge until socialism was achieved. In the new society, “
All
obligatory norms … will eventually disappear” (172). Lunacharsky, Bogdanov, and Bazarov shared the same concern for the free individual. Like their
philosophic
predecessors, however, they embraced a Russian
sobornost
’ in which the individual is liberated through his dissolution “in an impersonal social collective” (177). These thinkers espoused a humanist religion in their early years and were known, appropriately, as the “
God
-builders.” Elevating human strength and potential to God-like status, they argued that in socialism, “man” would be the master of his own fate. Though
Lenin
rejected their secular religion, they had fully incorporated the Nietzschean-Dionysian principle of self-transcending collectivism into the corpus of their thought.
²⁴

NEO-IDEALISM
AND THE RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE

Nietzsche’s influence extended also to the Russian religious renaissance of the
neo-Idealists
. But it is more likely that the neo-Idealists absorbed Nietzschean and existentialist ideas from
Dostoyevsky
.
Mihajlo Mihajlov
suggests that Dostoyevsky had, in fact, made an impact on Nietzsche himself. Nietzsche’s notes and drafts in the winter of 1886–87 constantly refer to Dostoyevsky. Nietzsche also wrote abstracts of several of Dostoyevsky’s works.
²⁵

The neo-Idealists praised Dostoyevsky for his dialectical literary method. Each of Dostoyevsky’s characters embodies particular ideas. In their interplay, collisions, and encounters, certain of these ideas emerge victorious (Copleston 1986, 142). It is this literary method that deeply influenced Rand.
²⁶

Though traces of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche may be found in the work of the
neo-Idealists
, it is also true that the ideas of these two seminal thinkers were preserved in the
Russian
tradition of philosophical
synthesis
. Such thinkers as Kozlov,
Shestov
,
Bulgakov
, Berdyaev,
Florensky
,
Frank
, and Lossky had all been influenced by the thought of Kant, Fichte,
Schelling
, Hegel, and
Solovyov
. Many of the neo-Idealists studied in Germany, working in the seminars of philosophers who represented the Freiburg and Marburg schools of Transcendental
Idealism
. Most of them strove to overcome Kant’s phenomenalism by
attempting to link the knowing subject and the world in an organic unity.
²⁷
They followed Hegel in seeking the identity of thought and being.

The neo-Idealists had attempted to provide a genuine philosophical basis for
religion
. They began not with religious presuppositions, but with some of the more advanced ontological and epistemological theories of their day. They had accepted Solovyov’s critique of Western positivism and rationalism and his intuitivist theory of knowledge. In the words of Father Pavel Florensky, they grasped that “Truth as a living wholeness” could emerge only through the direct rational
intuition
of the objects of the external world. Florensky affirmed that the essence of religious experience was
love
, “because love means that an entity passes from the isolated separateness of A into the other, non-A, establishes its consubstantiality with it and consequently finds itself, i.e., A, in it” (Lossky 1951, 179–80).

The neo-Idealists included in their number two genuinely original, systematic intuitivists, Semyon Frank and N. O. Lossky. I discuss Lossky’s thought in
Chapter 2
. At this point, it is valuable to examine some of the contributions of Frank, who was Lossky’s colleague at St. Petersburg University from 1912 to 1915. By 1921, Frank took the position of Chair of
Philosophy
at Moscow University.
²⁸

Like Lossky, Frank called his philosophical system “
ideal-realism
,” symbolic of his attempt to integrate apparent opposites. Rather than embracing a dualistic vision, Frank saw three levels of existence: the physical world of objects, the spiritual world of ideas, and an unobservable, mysterious sphere in which both the material and the spiritual were fully united.
²⁹
True to the Hegelian tradition, Frank presented this vision of the world as a “metalogical unity.” He argued that this unity encompasses both A and not-A. It does not violate the law of contradiction; the law is “simply inapplicable to it” (Lossky 1951, 267). In this organic whole, both unity and plurality are subsumed. Frank preserved the Hegelian A
ufhebung
by advocating an “
antinomic monodualism.
” He argued that in negation, we both destroy and preserve “the connection between distinct, differentiated entities, and thus ascend to the universal ‘yea,’ to the all-embracing acceptance of being, including the negative relation as well as that which is negated” (271).