Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  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 Apollonian; 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. S
uch 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 Aufhebung 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).

  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 H
egelian 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