Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  DIALECTICS AND DUALISM

  Yet Rand would have been the first to deny her status as a “dialectical” thinker. Rand’s own view of “dialectics” was based on her experiences in the Soviet Union. In Rand’s mind, the very word “dialectics” must have raised a “red flag” of sorts. In 1959, she saw Nikita Khrushchev on American television. As she later recounted, he recited “the credo of dialectic materialism in the exact words and tone in which I had heard it recited at exams, in my college days, by students at the University of Leningrad.”30 This credo was branded into the minds of students as an ideological tool of Soviet repression. Barbara Branden (1986) writes that Rand “understood the theory of dialectical materialism—and had on her body and spirit the scars of its practice” (42). For Rand, “dialectics” was pure Heraclitean nonsense; it was the view “that contradictions are the law of reality, that A is non-A.”31 In this sense, Rand, like Popper, interprets dialectics as an endorsement of logical contradiction, embodying a view of the universe based on nonidentity.32

  Certainly dialectical language at times obscures a strictly logical understanding of contradiction and identity. Some writers are guilty of claiming that dialectical “logic” transcends the so-called formal, static, or one-dimensional logic of Aristotle.33 The question is, in part, one of semantics. Unless I clarify my own understanding of “dialectics,” I am vulnerable to at least two criticisms: (1) that in reconstructing Objectivism, I utilize categories and distinctions foreign to Rand’s own system (Kelley, 20 August 1989C); and (2) that, in focusing on “dialectics” as a key component of the Objectivist approach, I have linked Rand to her Russian predecessors on the basis of a nonessential characteristic (Kelley in Kelley 1993T).

  I reject both criticisms as follows:

  Throughout the history of philosophy the term “dialectics” has been used in many different senses. Aristotle recognized dialectic and rhetoric as counterparts of each other; for him, rhetoric was the art of public speaking, or the “faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion,” whereas dialectic was the art of logical discussion and argumentation.34 In dialectic, the interlocutor proceeds from accepted (or specific) propositions and argues toward a more basic (or general) conclusion.35 Although mastery of this dialectic technique was the hallmark of Socratic and Platonic philosophy, Aristotle argued that it was insufficient for establishing scientific truth.36 Nevertheless, he valued the dialectic because it demanded the study of questions from multiple vantage points. It is for this reason, perhaps, that Marx, Engels, and Lenin recognized Aristotle as the father of dialectical inquiry. Engels, in fact, called Aristotle “the Hegel of the ancient world,” who “had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought.”37 And Lenin argued that within Aristotle lies “the living germs of dialectics and inquiries about it.”38

  More than two thousand years after Aristotle’s death, Hegel developed a conception of dialectics as an ontological and historical process. Hegel’s dialectical method affirms the impossibility of logical contradiction and focuses instead on relational “contradictions” or paradoxes revealed in the dynamism of history. For Hegel, opposing concepts could be identified as merely partial views whose apparent contradictions could be transcended by exhibiting them as internally related within a larger whole. From pairs of opposing theses, elements of truth could be extracted and integrated into a third position.39 Other philosophers saw this form of dialectics as a triadic movement in which the conflict of “thesis” and “antithesis” is resolved through “synthesis.”40 Dialectical materialists placed this process on an economic foundation and used it as the basis for a philosophy of history.

  The best way to understand the dialectical impulse is to view it as a technique to overcome formal dualism and monistic reductionism. Dualism attempts to distinguish two mutually exclusive spheres, though it often leads theorists to emphasize one sphere to the detriment of another. Thus one can differentiate between genuine philosophical dualists, who see two coequal principles at work, and philosophical monists, who accept the dichotomies defined by dualists and reduce one polarity to an epiphenomenon of the other.41 Wolf Heydebrand (1981) explains that these dualistic forms can be found in nearly every branch of philosophy: in ontology, in the radical separation of body and mind, or matter and consciousness; in epistemology, in the radical separation of the real object and the datum present to the knowing mind; in ethics, in the radical distinction between good and evil (92).

  Dialectical method is neither dualistic nor monistic. A thinker who employs a dialectical method embraces neither a pole nor the middle of a duality of extremes. Rather, the dialectical method anchors the thinker to both camps. The dialectical thinker refuses to recognize these camps as mutually exclusive or exhaustive.42 He or she strives to uncover the common roots of apparent opposites. He or she presents an integrated alternative that examines the premises at the base of an opposition as a means to its transcendence. In some cases, the transcendence of opposing points of view provides a justification for rejecting both alternatives as false. In other cases, the dialectical thinker attempts to clarify the genuinely integral relationship between spheres that are ordinarily kept separate and distinct.43

  In Rand’s work, this transcendence of opposites is manifest in every branch of philosophy. Rand’s revolt against formal dualism is illustrated in her rejection of such “false alternatives” as materialism and idealism, intrinsicism and subjectivism, rationalism and empiricism. Rand was fond of using what Thorslev has called a “Both-And” formulation in her critique of dualism.44 Typically, Rand argues that Both X And Y share a common premise, Z. Her characteristic expression is: “Just as X depends upon Z, so too does Y depend upon Z.” Moreover, Rand always views the polarities as “mutually” or “reciprocally reinforcing,” “two sides of the same coin.” This is not merely an expository technique. Rand was the first to admit that a writer’s style is a product of his or her “psycho-epistemology” or method of awareness.45 By her own suggestion, one can infer that such an expository style reflects a genuinely dialectical methodology.

  It must be emphasized, however, that Rand does not literally construct a synthesis out of the debris of false alternatives. Rather, she aims to transcend the limitations that, she believes, traditional dichotomies embody. In some instances, Rand sees each of the opposing points of view as being half-right and half-wrong. Consequently, at times, her resolution contains elements from each of the two rejected positions.

  Rand’s dialectical approach is also illustrated in her recognition of such integral relationships as that between mind and body, reason and emotion, fact and value, theory and practice. For Rand, these factors are distinctions within an organic unity. Neither can be fully understood in the absence of the other, since each is an inseparable aspect of a wider totality.

  It is this emphasis on the totality that is essential to the dialectical mode of inquiry. Dialectics is not merely a repudiation of formal dualism. It is a method that preserves the analytical integrity of the whole. Although it recommends study of the whole from the vantage point of any part, it eschews reification, that is, it avoids the abstraction of a part from the whole and its illegitimate conceptualization as a whole unto itself. The dialectical method recognizes that what is separable in thought is not separable in reality.

  Moreover, dialectics requires the examination of the whole both systemically (or “synchronically”) and historically (or “diachronically”). From a synchronic perspective, it grasps the parts as systemically interrelated, as both constituting the whole, and constituted by it. For example, a dialectical thinker would not disconnect any single theoretical issue, such as the problem of free will, from its broader philosophic context. He or she would necessarily examine a host of connected issues, including the efficacy of consciousness, the nature of causality, and the reciprocal relationships between epistemology, ethics, and politics.

  Diachronically, dialectics grasps that any system emerg
es over time, that it has a past, a present, and a future. Frequently, the dialectical thinker examines the dynamic tensions within a system, the internal conflicts or “contradictions” that require resolution. He or she refuses to disconnect factors, events, problems, and issues from one another or from the system they jointly constitute. He or she views social problems not discretely but in terms of the root systemic conditions they both reflect and sustain.

  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