The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature

by Ayn Rand

  What I felt was a cold shudder. Whatever the root of his problems, this was the key; it was the symptom, not of amorality, but of a profound moral treason. To what and to whom can a man be willing to apologize for the best within him? And what can he expect of life after that?

  (Ultimately, what saved Mr. X was his commitment to reason; he held reason as an absolute, even if he did not know its full meaning and application; an absolute that survived through the hardest periods he had to endure in his struggle to regain his psychological health—to remark and release the soul he had spent his life negating. Due to his determined perseverance, he won his battle. Today—after quitting his job and taking many calculated risks—he is a brilliant success, in a career he loves, and on his way up to an ever-increasing range of achievement. He is still struggling with some remnants of his past errors. But, as a measure of his recovery and of the distance he has traveled, I would suggest that you reread my opening paragraph before I tell you that I saw a recent snapshot of him which caught him smiling, and of all the characters in Atlas Shrugged the one whom the quality of that smile would suit best is Francisco d’Anconia.)

  There are countless cases similar to this; this is merely the most dramatically obvious one in my experience and involves a man of unusual stature. But the same tragedy is repeated all around us, in many hidden, twisted forms—like a secret torture chamber in men’s souls, from which an unrecognizable cry reaches us occasionally and then is silenced again. The person, in such cases, is both “man the victim” and “man the killer.” And certain principles apply to them all.

  Man is a being of self-made soul—which means that his character is formed by his basic premises, particularly by his basic value-premises. In the crucial, formative years of his life—in childhood and adolescence—Romantic art is his major (and, today, his only) source of a moral sense of life. (In later years, Romantic art is often his only experience of it.)

  Please note that art is not his only source of morality, but of a moral sense of life. This requires careful differentiation.

  A “sense of life” is a preconceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. Morality is an abstract, conceptual code of values and principles.

  The process of a child’s development consists of acquiring knowledge, which requires the development of his capacity to grasp and deal with an ever-widening range of abstractions. This involves the growth of two interrelated but different chains of abstractions, two hierarchical structures of concepts, which should be integrated, but seldom are: the cognitive and the normative. The first deals with knowledge of the facts of reality—the second, with the evaluation of these facts. The first forms the epistemological foundation of science—the second, of morality and of art.

  In today’s culture, the development of a child’s cognitive abstractions is assisted to some minimal extent, even if ineptly, half-heartedly, with many hampering, crippling obstacles (such as anti-rational doctrines and influences which, today, are growing worse). But the development of a child’s normative abstractions is not merely left unaided, it is all but stifled and destroyed. The child whose valuing capacity survives the moral barbarism of his upbringing has to find his own way to preserve and develop his sense of values.

  Apart from its many other evils, conventional morality is not concerned with the formation of a child’s character. It does not teach or show him what kind of man he ought to be and why; it is concerned only with imposing a set of rules upon him—concrete, arbitrary, contradictory and, more often than not, incomprehensible rules, which are mainly prohibitions and duties. A child whose only notion of morality (i.e., of values) consists of such matters as: “Wash your ears!”—“Don’t be rude to Aunt Rosalie!”—“Do your homework!”—“Help papa to mow the lawn (or mama to wash the dishes)!”—faces the alternative of: either a passively amoral resignation, leading to a future of hopeless cynicism, or a blind rebellion. Observe that the more intelligent and independent a child, the more unruly he is in regard to such commandments. But, in either case, the child grows up with nothing but resentment and fear or contempt for the concept of morality which, to him, is only “a phantom scarecrow made of duty, of boredom, of punishment, of pain… a scarecrow standing in a barren field, waving a stick to chase away [his] pleasures…” (Atlas Shrugged).

  This type of upbringing is the best, not the worst, that an average child may be subjected to, in today’s culture. If parents attempt to inculcate a moral ideal of the kind contained in such admonitions as: “Don’t be selfish—give your best toys away to the children next door!” or if parents go “progressive” and teach a child to be guided by his whims—the damage to the child’s moral character may be irreparable.

  Where, then, can a child learn the concept of moral values and of a moral character in whose image he will shape his own soul? Where can he find the evidence, the material from which to develop a chain of normative abstractions? He is not likely to find a clue in the chaotic, bewildering, contradictory evidence offered by the adults in his day-by-day experience. He may like some adults and dislike others (and, often, dislike them all), but to abstract, identify and judge their moral characteristics is a task beyond his capacity. And such moral principles as he might be taught to recite are, to him, floating abstractions with no connection to reality.

  The major source and demonstration of moral values available to a child is Romantic art (particularly Romantic literature). What Romantic art offers him is not moral rules, not an explicit didactic message, but the image of a moral person—i.e., the concretized abstraction of a moral ideal. It offers a concrete, directly perceivable answer to the very abstract question which a child senses, but cannot yet conceptualize: What kind of person is moral and what kind of life does he lead?

  It is not abstract principles that a child learns from Romantic art, but the precondition and the incentive for the later understanding of such principles: the emotional experience of admiration for man’s highest potential, the experience of looking up to a hero—a view of life motivated and dominated by values, a life in which man’s choices are practicable, effective and crucially important—that is, a moral sense of life.

  While his home environment taught him to associate morality with pain, Romantic art teaches him to associate it with pleasure—an inspiring pleasure which is his own, profoundly personal discovery.

  The translation of this sense of life into adult, conceptual terms would, if unimpeded, follow the growth of the child’s knowledge—and the two basic elements of his soul, the cognitive and normative, would develop together in serenely harmonious integration. The ideal which, at the age of seven, was personified by a cowboy, may become a detective at twelve, and a philosopher at twenty—as the child’s interests progress from comic strips to mystery stories to the great sunlit universe of Romantic literature, art and music.

  But whatever his age, morality is a normative science—i.e., a science that projects a value-goal to be achieved by a series of steps, of choices—and it cannot be practiced without a clear vision of the goal, without a concretized image of the ideal to be reached. If man is to gain and keep a moral stature, he needs an image of the ideal, from the first thinking day of his life to the last.

  In the translation of that ideal into conscious, philosophical terms and into his actual practice, a child needs intellectual assistance or, at least, a chance to find his own way. In today’s culture, he is given neither. The battering which his precarious, unformed, barely glimpsed moral sense of life receives from parents, teachers, adult “authorities” and little second-hander goons of his own generation, is so intense and so evil that only the toughest hero can withstand it—so evil that of the many sins of adults toward children, this is the one for which they would deserve to burn in hell, if such a place existed.

  Every form of punishment—from outright prohibition to threats to anger to condemnation to crass indifference to mockery—is unleashed against
a child at the first signs of his Romanticism (which means: at the first signs of his emerging sense of moral values). “Life is not like that!” and “Come down to earth!” are the catchphrases which best summarize the motives of the attackers, as well as the view of life and of this earth which they seek to inculcate.

  The child who withstands it and damns the attackers, not himself and his values, is a rare exception. The child who merely suppresses his values, avoids communication and withdraws into a lonely private universe, is almost as rare. In most cases, the child represses his values and gives up. He gives up the entire realm of valuing, of value choices and judgments—without knowing that what he is surrendering is morality.

  The surrender is extorted by a long, almost imperceptible process, a constant, ubiquitous pressure which the child absorbs and accepts by degrees. His spirit is not broken at one sudden blow: it is bled to death in thousands of small scratches.

  The most devastating part of this process is the fact that a child’s moral sense is destroyed, not only by means of such weaknesses or flaws as he might have developed, but by means of his barely emerging virtues. An intelligent child is aware that he does not know what adult life is like, that he has an enormous amount to learn and is anxiously eager to learn it. An ambitious child is incoherently determined to make something important of himself and his life. So when he hears such threats as “Wait till you grow up!” and “You’ll never get anywhere with those childish notions!” it is his virtues that are turned against him: his intelligence, his ambition and whatever respect he might feel for the knowledge and judgment of his elders.

  Thus the foundation of a lethal dichotomy is laid in his consciousness: the practical versus the moral, with the unstated, preconceptual implication that practicality requires the betrayal of one’s values, the renunciation of ideals.

  His rationality is turned against him by means of a similar dichotomy: reason versus emotion. His Romantic sense of life is only a sense, an incoherent emotion which he can neither communicate nor explain nor defend. It is an intense, yet fragile emotion, painfully vulnerable to any sarcastic allegation, since he is unable to identify its real meaning.

  It is easy to convince a child, and particularly an adolescent, that his desire to emulate Buck Rogers is ridiculous: he knows that it isn’t exactly Buck Rogers he has in mind and yet, simultaneously, it is—he feels caught in an inner contradiction—and this confirms his desolately embarrassing feeling that he is being ridiculous.

  Thus the adults—whose foremost moral obligation toward a child, at this stage of his development, is to help him understand that what he loves is an abstraction, to help him break through into the conceptual realm—accomplish the exact opposite. They stunt his conceptual capacity, they cripple his normative abstractions, they stifle his moral ambition, i.e., his desire for virtue, i.e., his self-esteem. They arrest his value-development on a primitively literal, concrete-bound level: they convince him that to be like Buck Rogers means to wear a space helmet and blast armies of Martians with a disintegrator-gun, and that he’d better give up such notions if he ever expects to make a respectable living. And they finish him off with such gems of argumentation as: “Buck Rogers—ha-ha!—never gets any colds in the head. Do you know any real people who never get them? Why, you had one last week. So don’t you go on imagining that you’re better than the rest of us!”

  Their motive is obvious. If they actually regarded Romanticism as an “impractical fantasy,” they would feel nothing but a friendly or indifferent amusement—not the passionate resentment and uncontrollable rage which they do feel and exhibit.

  While the child is thus driven to fear, mistrust and repress his own emotions, he cannot avoid observing the hysterical violence of the adults’ emotions unleashed against him in this and other issues. He concludes, subconsciously, that all emotions as such are dangerous, that they are the irrational, unpredictably destructive element in people, which can descend upon him at any moment in some terrifying way for some incomprehensible purpose. This is the brick before last in the wall of repression which he erects to bury his own emotions. The last is his desperate pride misdirected into a decision such as: “I’ll never let them hurt me again!” The way never to be hurt, he decides, is never to feel anything.

  But an emotional repression cannot be complete; when all other emotions are stifled, a single one takes over: fear.

  The element of fear was involved in the process of the child’s moral destruction from the start. His victimized virtues were not the only cause; his faults were active as well: fear of others, particularly of adults, fear of independence, of responsibility, of loneliness—as well as self-doubt and the desire to be accepted, to “belong.” But it is the involvement of his virtues that makes his position so tragic and, later, so hard to correct.

  As he grows up, his amorality is reinforced and reaffirmed. His intelligence prevents him from accepting any of the current schools of morality: the mystical, the social or the subjective. An eager young mind, seeking the guidance of reason, cannot take the supernatural seriously and is impervious to mysticism. It does not take him long to perceive the contradictions and the sickeningly self-abasing hypocrisy of the social school of morality. But the worst influence of all, for him, is the subjective school.

  He is too intelligent and too honorable (in his own twisted, tortured way) not to know that the subjective means the arbitrary, the irrational, the blindly emotional. These are the elements which he has come to associate with people’s attitudes in moral issues, and to dread. When formal philosophy tells him that morality, by its very nature, is closed to reason and can be nothing but a matter of subjective choice, this is the kiss or seal of death on his moral development. His conscious conviction now unites with his subconscious feeling that value choices come from the mindless element in people and are a dangerous, unknowable, unpredictable enemy. His conscious decision is: not to get involved in moral issues; its subconscious meaning is: not to value anything (or worse: not to value anything too much, not to hold any irreplaceable, nonexpendable values).

  From this to the policy of a moral coward existentially and to an overwhelming sense of guilt psychologically, is not a very long step for an intelligent man. The result is a man such as I described.

  Let it be said to his credit that he was unable to “adjust” to his inner contradictions—and that it was precisely his early professional success that broke him psychologically: it exposed his value-vacuum, his lack of personal purpose and thus the self-abnegating futility of his work.

  He knew—even though not in fully conscious terms—that he was achieving the opposite of his original, pre-conceptual goals and motives. Instead of leading a rational (i.e., reason-guided and reason-motivated) life, he was gradually becoming a moody, subjectivist whim-worshiper, acting on the range of the moment, particularly in his personal relationships—by default of any firmly defined values. Instead of reaching independence from the irrationality of others, he was being forced—by the same default—either into actual second-handness or into an equivalent code of behavior, into blind dependence on and compliance with the value-systems of others, into a state of abject conformity. Instead of pleasure, the glimpse of any higher value or nobler experience brought him pain, guilt, terror—and prompted him, not to seize it and fight for it, but to escape, to evade, to betray it (or to apologize for it) in order to placate the standards of the conventional men whom he despised. Instead of “man the victim.” as he had largely been, he was becoming “man the killer.”

  The clearest evidence of it was provided by his attitude toward Romantic art. A man’s treason to his art values is not the primary cause of his neurosis (it is a contributory cause), but it becomes one of its most revealing symptoms.

  This last is of particular importance to the man who seeks to solve his psychological problems. The chaos of his personal relationships and values may, at first, be too complex for him to untangle. But Romantic art offers him a clear, luminous,
impersonal abstraction—and thus a clear, objective test of his inner state, a clue available to his conscious mind.

  If he finds himself fearing, evading and negating the highest experience possible to man, a state of unclouded exaltation, he can know that he is in profound trouble and that his only alternatives are: either to check his value-premises from scratch, from the start, from the repressed, forgotten, betrayed figure of his particular Buck Rogers, and painfully to reconstruct his broken chain of normative abstractions—or to become completely the kind of monster he is in those moments when, with an obsequious giggle, he tells some fat Babbitt that exaltation is impractical.

  Just as Romantic art is a man’s first glimpse of a moral sense of life, so it is his last hold on it, his last lifeline.

  Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man’s soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. The task of providing that fire with a motor and a direction belongs to philosophy.

  (March 1965)

  10. Introduction to Ninety-Three[1]