Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (9 page)
The vision of the world as an organic whole was not restricted to the religious Russian philosophers. Naturalists such as
V. Karpov
and
K. Starynkevich
saw each organism as connected to a whole. In analyzing a beehive, a forest, or a marsh, these thinkers viewed
all
life as part of an organic unity on earth stretching even into the cosmos (330). Other organicist visions were proposed by
Gustav G. Shpet
and
Alexey F. Losev
, who combined Hegelian and Husserlian insights to defend dialectical phenomenology and philosophical realism (Zenkovsky 1953, 834).
RUSSIAN MARXISM
Most significant of all the nonreligious
organicist
conceptions however, was Russian
Marxism
.
30
The Russian Marxist intellectual movement drew from the messianic tradition of the
Slavophiles
, putting forth a secularized, proletarianized version of
sobornost
’.
31
This ideological amalgam had inherent problems of internal consistency but it did not depart from any of the essential organicist and antidualist characteristics of Russian
philosophy
.
Part of the reason for the fundamental agreement of Marxism with its Russian counterparts is their common philosophical roots.
Marx
, like many Russian thinkers, was influenced by
Leibniz
,
Spinoza
, and
Hegel
.
Bertell Ollman
(1993) argues that these thinkers shared a belief “that the
relations
that come together to make up the whole get expressed in what are taken to be its parts. Each part is viewed as incorporating in what it is all its relations with other parts up to and including everything that comes into the whole” (35). Leibniz, Spinoza, and Hegel had differing conceptions of the parts. For Leibniz, the parts were monads. For Spinoza, the parts were modes. For Hegel, the parts were ideas. But the logical form of the relation between the parts and the whole was the same (ibid.).
Marx inherited this
dialectical
tradition. But he transcended the tendency to dissolve all things into their relations. As Sidney
Hook
observes, Hegel had embraced a strict organicity, in which “all of existence becomes relevant in considering the nature of any part of it.” Thus, “piecemeal knowledge is impossible; since if everything must be known before anything can be known, nothing can be
adequately
known” (Hook [1936] 1950, 53). For Hegel,
Truth
is indeed the Whole; error emerges in the one-sided abstraction of any single part from the totality.
Although Marx accepted the spirit of Hegel’s dictum, he departed from strict organicity in several significant ways. Marx argued that no whole could be studied from a synoptic vantage point. The totality is studied through the abstracted parts. Marx varied the scope of his abstractions by altering the relational
units
, the perspective, and the level of generality. By focusing on the mutual determination of structure and function, Marx concretized knowledge of the whole. As Ollman (1979) argues, Marx refused to separate “events from their conditions, people from their real alternatives and human potential, social problems from one another, and the present from the past and the future” (126). Marx viewed each part of the totality as a cluster of relations. Each part is in organic conjunction with every other part such that each expresses the sum of its interrelations. The conditions of each thing’s existence are taken to be part of what it is (Ollman 1976, 15–16). Ollman (1993) explains further that the Marxian
dialectic
replaces
“the common sense notion of ‘thing,’ as something which
has
a
history
and
has
external connections to other things, with notions of ‘process,’ which
contains
its history and possible futures, and ‘relation,’ which
contains
as part of what it is its ties with other relations” (11).
This emphasis on internal relations was equally important to the Russian Marxists. But Marxist
scholarship
in Russia underwent several transformations. From the earliest moments of the Bolshevik
Revolution
,
Marxism
was hardening into a state ideology that legitimated repression and dictatorship. During the
Silver Age
, however, Marxist thought was being supplemented in a variety of ways. Such thinkers as Berdyaev,
Bulgakov
, and Struve integrated Marxism with Kantian ethics.
32
The Nietzsche-an Marxists explored the provocative synthesis of quasi-individualist and socialist ideas. And
Lenin
utilized a naive realist epistemology to answer Machian neo-Kantians, as well as more popular revisionist and positivist interpreters of Marx. By the following decade, professional scholars had probed the limited editions of Marx’s
Grundrisse
, which appeared in the Soviet Union as early as 1939 and 1941 in two successive volumes published by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.
33
Throughout this period, however, the entrenchment of Stalinist dogmatism ultimately quelled all theoretical debate and dissent.
Though Lenin’s writings suffered at times from simplistic diatribe, his influence on Russian Marxism made a significant impact during the Silver Age. Despite Lenin’s failure to develop his realist perspective adequately, his polemics were extremely effective in shaping the character of Marxist ideology.
34
Lenin began with a realist ontology. He saw objective conditions as prior to consciousness. He asserted the primacy of the material world and the objectivity of space and time. He wrote in
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
that “things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us.” Epistemologically, he adopted a reflection theory of knowledge. He disputed the Kantian distinction between the phenomenon and the noumenal thing-in-itself. “The only difference,” in Lenin’s view, “is between what is known and what is not known.”
35
Like
Plekhanov
, the father of Russian
Marxism
, Lenin rejected
dualism
, since it failed to grasp the internal relatedness of mind and matter. Lenin recognized the supreme importance of the Hegelian
dialectic
to Marx’s method. His writings feature scathing attacks on
subjectivists
and empiricists who divorced cognition from the object. He believed that the reduction of the world to pure sense perception led inexorably to a subjectivist, solipsistic idealism. Like Nietzsche, he condemned such
empiricism
as a
philosophy
of immaculate perception.
36
But Lenin rejected
rationalism
as
equally one-sided, and proposed a resolution of the age-old dichotomies. His attempt at an organic synthesis was entirely within the tradition of Russian philosophy.
37
The appeal of Russian Marxism, however, had little to do with Lenin’s critique of dualism. The Russian Marxists had strategically merged Western dialectical categories of explanation with the indigenous concept of
sobornost
’. They secularized the concept, and aimed not for Oneness in the mystic body of Christ, but for a collective
unity
that was One with the Proletariat.
Evgeny Ivanovich Zamiatin
warned that this would lead to the establishment of the One
State
. Ultimately, the voluntarist
sobornost
’ had been replaced by the Bolsheviks’ administrative machinery for massive statist repression.
By 1919–20, anti-Bolshevik writings enjoyed limited circulation throughout Russia. One of these works,
We
,
written by Zamiatin,
38
depicted a
totalitarian
society in which peoples’ names were replaced by numbers, and the distinction between public and private life was all but obliterated, except for two hours a day when the “mighty uni-personal organism” was allowed to disintegrate “into separate cells.”
39
Each morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the very same minute and the very same second we, in our millions, arise as one. At the very same hour we monomillionedly begin work—and, when we finish it, we do so monomillionedly. And, merging into but one body with multimillioned hands, at the very second designated by The Tables of Hourly Commandments we bring our spoons up to our mouths; at the very same second, likewise, we set out for a walk, or go to an auditorium, or the Hall of Taylor Exercise, or retire to sleep. (177)
The One State forbade romantic love and the free conduct of
sexual
life, for
isn’t it an absurdity that the State … could allow sexual life without any control whatsoever? Anybody, any time, and as much as one wanted to.… Completely unscientifically, like brutes. And, like brutes, they bred offspring gropingly. Isn’t it laughable—to know horticulture, poultry culture, pisciculture … and yet be unable to reach the last rung of this logical ladder: child culture. (178)
Like Zamiatin, Rand rejected the One State. In the 1930s, having escaped to America, she would author a number of anticollectivist writings of her own, including the “semi-
autobiographical
” novel,
We the Living
, and a futuristic novelette called
Anthem
. These works would portray Rand’s
rejection of the intellectual trends during America’s so-called Red Decade, when many writers and artists embraced the promise of
collectivism
(B. Branden 1986, 95). But Rand’s early works can also be read as a passionate reaction against the dominant philosophic and cultural trends of the
Silver Age
. Rand would reject the
Slavophile
and Symbolist denigration of
reason
and their cultic commitment to the dissolution of self in a collective whole. She would reject the
neo-Idealist
defense of religion. She would reject
Russian
Marxism as a legitimating ideology for the newly emerging totalitarian state.
In her rejection of Russian mysticism, altruism, collectivism, and
statism
, Rand began to identify a philosophic conjunction that was not as apparent to others of her generation. Perhaps this unity was clearer to Rand because she had lived in a laboratory that had enabled her to make such grand inductive generalizations.
But in repudiating these traditions, Rand had absorbed the tendency toward
synthesis
so prevalent in
Russian philosophy
. Wherever the young Alissa Rosenbaum had turned, she would have encountered a nondualistic, formal commitment to the
dialectic
. This mode of inquiry was apparent in Nietzsche’s philosophy, which had influenced the philosophic and cultural movements of the Silver Age. It was also prevalent in the works of the
Slavophiles
, Solovyov and his successors, the Symbolists, the Russian Marxists, and the neo-Idealists of the religious renaissance. And the most important philosopher of this neo-Idealist tradition was Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky, Rand’s teacher.
No study of Rand’s Objectivism would be complete without a consideration of the life and thought of N. O.
Lossky
, her
philosophy
professor at Petrograd University. The relationship between these two is of paramount historical importance because it was probably Lossky who introduced Rand to
dialectical
methods of analysis.
It has been said that Rand read little philosophy in her mature years. But as a student at the university, she would have been required to study many philosophic texts in depth. It is very likely that at no time in her life did Rand
read
as much philosophy and
literature
as she did while being
educated
in Russia. Hence, one cannot discount Lossky’s impact: as Rand’s first philosophy teacher, he laid the basis for a highly integrated view of the philosophic disciplines.
In his lectures, Lossky presented broad methodological tools with which to analyze the contributions of important thinkers in intellectual history. According to Rand, Lossky introduced her to the thought of
Plato
and
Aristotle
. Since Rand paid homage to Aristotle as her philosophical forefather, this first encounter with his work was of prime significance to her intellectual development. It is quite possible too that Rand’s interpretation of Aristotle may have taken root in Lossky’s.
It is nearly impossible to establish with certainty that Rand actually studied
Lossky
’s writings. But Lossky’s conception of the history and method of philosophy—his intuitivist epistemology and organicist ontology—permeated his lectures and seminars. He was famous for teaching several Petrograd courses that explicitly reflected his antimaterialist and
anti-Marxist orientation. And in the years before Rand entered the university, he published two of the most important works of his career,
The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge
and
The World as an Organic Whole
.
It is very likely that she would have been presented with significant Losskyian themes within the context of the course she attended.
AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE
Nicholas Onufrievich Lossky was born in the village of Kreslavka in Vitebsk, a province west of Moscow, on 6 December 1870. He was
educated
at the classical gymnasium in Vitebsk, but was expelled for his socialistic and atheistic beliefs.
1
Continuing his studies in Switzerland, Lossky returned to Russia in 1889 and entered St. Petersburg University two years later. Lossky graduated from the college of History and Philology and the college of Natural Science. His mentor at the university was the distinguished Kantian philosopher,
Aleksandr Ivanovich Vvedensky
. It was through his interactions with Vvedensky that Lossky developed a passion for philosophy. Eventually, Lossky became privatdocent of philosophy and delved deeply into the thought of Vladimir
Solovyov
.
2