Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Second, and more important, Rand was moving toward a nondualistic philosophical framework. While she was exploring the philosophic identity of religion and communism, she was also beginning to see that both forces perpetuated a social dualism that forced the individual to choose between two sides of the same false coin.

  In the religious realm, the fraud was obvious to Rand. For instance, in 1934 she wrote a play, Ideal, which depicted religion as causing hypocrisy and opposing integrity. Religion, for Rand, divorces ideals from life on earth, by viewing “this world [as] of no consequence.” An evangelist in Ideal proclaims: “Whatever beauty [the world] offers us is here only that we may sacrifice it—for the greater beauty beyond.”24 Religion tells people that beauty is unreachable and that nobility emerges from the sacrifice, not the achievement, of values.25 It condemns people for not achieving unreachable ideals, ideals they do not really wish to attain because their very realization would demand self-annihilation.

  This recognition of religion as a source of social dualism reappears in Rand’s journal entries during this same period. Rand argued that religion engenders a metaphysical split between this world and the next, between human existence on earth and an illusory life after death.26 In Rand’s view, religion declares war on the human ability to think, and it is consequently “the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.” It fragments living and thinking, and sees “ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability of living and thinking quite differently, in other words eliminating thinking from your actual life” (2).

  It is for this reason that Rand saw “Faith as the worst curse of mankind, as the exact antithesis and enemy of thought.” But at this point in her intellectual development, Rand was not certain about why people have abdicated the use of logical reasoning in the governance of their lives. She asked if reason is impossible to individuals, or if individuals have merely been taught that it is futile. If people have been taught such, then “the teacher is the church.” Rand hoped “to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.”27

  Just as religion was a source of social dualism, so too was statism. The theme of We the Living, according to Rand, was the “individual against the State” (New Intellectual, 60). Rand did not believe that there was a necessary incompatibility between the individual and all forms of government. She was not an anarchist; she rejected neither government per se, nor truly human social relationships. What she opposed was statism in all its incarnations.

  Communism both constituted and perpetuated a social dichotomy between the individual and the masses. Under communism, the masses are collectively organized by the coercive state. In such a system, the individual has no alternative but conflict with the society at large. Hence, it is quite possible that in the early edition of the novel, Kira’s call to sacrifice the masses for the sake of the few is the only alternative she can advocate within the context of communism, which sacrifices the few for the sake of the many. Just as religion pits thinking against living, communism pits the individual against the community. Within this context, Kira is forced to choose between two poles of a deadly duality. When she is able to remove herself briefly from this context, she exclaims that indeed, she does not wish to fight for or against the people. She wants only “to be left alone.”

  Like Rand, Kira lived in a society which had no developed concept of the individual. The Russian language does not even have a word for “privacy.”28 This peculiarity of Russian might have motivated Rand to write, several years later, in The Fountainhead: “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy” (684). Russian religious and political culture did not recognize the sphere of the private. Kira knew that it was “an old and ugly fact that the masses exist and make their existence felt.” But under communism, “they make it felt with particular ugliness” (We the Living, 49). She protests to Andrei, that it is “a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven, and then not to dream of it, but to demand it” (107).

  Hence, Kira may not be expressing a Nietzschean contempt for the masses, as much as she is expressing a desire to break free of a system that crushes the individual under the weight of an undifferentiated collective. It is a system that compels Kira to see the world dualistically, in terms of herself versus everyone else. Soviet communism had appropriated the essence of Russian sobornost’, the fusion of the individual and the collective whole. But instead of preserving the uniqueness and privacy of its members, it sought to annihilate their individual identities. For Rand, communism is a system that defeats “the living” by robbing them of the very qualities that make them human. It institutionalizes a war of the masses against the solitary person.

  After she wrote We the Living, Rand knew that she had more work to do. By 1934, she began to view her writing as part of a broader project. In her own words, “These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master philosophy—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has been said.”29

  She intended that her journals would be only for her own use and did not worry if her thoughts appeared “disjointed.” Despite her humility in characterizing herself as “an amateur philosopher,” Rand’s musings are much more articulate and self-conscious than she intimates.

  Rand hoped that once her ideas were fully developed, she would be able to present them as a “Mathematics of Philosophy.” She aimed to “arrange the whole in a logical system, proceeding from a few axioms in a succession of logical theorems” (7). But it was clear to her that such a project would take time and effort.

  In her journals, Rand dealt critically with the writings of other thinkers, such as Albert Jay Nock, H. L. Mencken, Peter Kropotkin, and José Ortega y Gasset. Having rejected both religion and communism, both the worship of God and the idolatry of the collective, Rand wanted to grasp why people allowed themselves to obey standards set by others. Reading Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses, she was perplexed by the actions of “the mass man.” Mass men are not those who obeyed their own standards. Rather, they submit to the dictates of others. They are not genuine individuals, in Rand’s view. Since they lack internally generated ideals, they cannot be free. Rand believed that no human quality such as freedom could be “disconnected from its content.” She asked: “Isn’t there a terrible mistake of abstraction here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said, ‘not freedom from what, but freedom for what’?”30

  For Rand, the “mistake of abstraction” is the social division of ideals and action, theory and practice, morality and practicality. No human value can be separated from the conditions that make its achievement possible. Rand was developing a view of the individual that included not merely negative notions of freedom, but positive notions of autonomy and self-responsibility. Autonomy demands that individuals achieve values by their own effort, not by a mystical alliance with God or a selfless union with the collective. The person who attains values and power by pandering to the masses is to be rejected as “a slave to those masses.” A genuine selfishness, an “exalted egoism,” demands that the individual achieve his or her “own theoretical values and then apply them to practical reality,” for it is one’s “actual living” that must take priority “over all other considerations.”31

  Seeing “history as a deadly battle of the mass and the individual” (8), Rand was poised to begin working on a mammoth literary project whose “first purpose … is a defense of egoism in its real meaning.”32 Her working title for the book was Second-Hand Lives. Ultimately, it would be called The Fountainhead.

  THE FOUNTAINHEAD

  In 1935, Rand began to outline the plot and characters of the book that would be her first, genuine commercial success. In these early outlines, Rand continues in her quest for a nondualistic, integrate
d view of human being.

  The Fountainhead follows the exploits of Howard Roark, Rand’s first, fully formed “ideal man.”33 Roark is a brilliant architect, a man of integrity expelled from school for his unwillingness to conform to traditional architectural styles. One of Roark’s classmates is Peter Keating, a man who always relied on Roark’s assistance to complete school projects. While Roark is destitute and looking for work, Keating becomes a professional success by manipulating those around him, and by imitating old and tired architectural standards. He lives a “second-hand” life, in which “the source of his actions is scattered in every other living person” (Fountainhead, 607).

  Throughout the novel, we meet other characters, such as Dominique Francon, Gail Wynand, and Ellsworth Toohey. Dominique is Roark’s beloved, and one of the more bizarre characters in the novel. She separates herself from the things that she grows to love, including Roark. She is convinced that no man of integrity can succeed in a world ruled by the mob. Wynand, the most tragic figure in Rand’s fiction, is a newspaper magnate who boasts that he has the power to mold the tastes of the masses. His belief that everyone can be corrupted is challenged by his encounters with Roark. Toohey, a critic writing for Wynand’s newspaper, is an arch collectivist. He organizes public protests against Roark’s “arrogant” architectural stylings. Through Toohey’s intervention, Roark is prevented from winning many important building contracts.

  But Roark continues his struggle to create buildings in a distinctive and brilliantly imaginative style. In the final sequences of the novel, the ambitious Peter Keating seeks to exploit Roark’s expertise to secure a lucrative contract for the design of a public housing project. Knowing that he will never get the opportunity to implement some of his most cost-effective plans for housing, Roark agrees to submit designs for the project—in Keating’s name—on the condition that the blueprints not be altered. Toohey senses that these plans are not Keating’s creation; he recognizes Roark’s impeccable technique. When the plans are altered significantly and distorted, and the project is built, Roark is outraged. He dynamites the public housing project, is arrested, and brought to trial.

  During the trial, Wynand, now Roark’s friend, decides to embark on a press campaign to build support for the indicted architect. For the first time in his life, Wynand finds the strength to stand for a principle not dictated by the masses. To his grief, he discovers that he cannot alter public opinion. He faces the realization that he has created a vast business empire by pandering to the tastes of the mob; he is its slave and not its master.

  Roark defends himself in court by enunciating the principles of individualism. He asserts that the authorities had no right to alter his plans. In one of Rand’s characteristically romantic endings, Roark is vindicated of criminal charges. He agrees to rebuild the project according to his own specifications. The novel concludes with Howard Roark triumphant.

  Though The Fountainhead is fiction, in it Rand articulates a far more integrated—and specifically Randian—view of human existence than she had presented in any previous book. Yet in her portrayal of Howard Roark, the influence of Nietzsche can still be detected.34 Rand had wanted to place a quotation from Nietzsche at the beginning of The Fountainhead when it was first issued in 1943, but she removed the passage before the manuscript went to publication. In 1968, she quoted it in the introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Fountainhead. She explained that despite her profound disagreement with Nietzsche’s metaphysics and epistemology, she remained impressed by his ability to project man’s greatness in beautifully poetic and emotional terms. She quoted from Beyond Good and Evil, in which Nietzsche celebrates the “fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not to he found, and perhaps also, is not to be lost. The noble soul has reverence for itself.”35

  In her outlines of 26 December 1935, Rand had this same imagery in mind when she described Howard Roark as “the noble soul par excellence.” Rand stated that Roark is “man as man should be. The self-sufficient, self-confident, the end of ends, the reason unto himself, the joy of living personified.… A man who is what he should be.”36 At this time, Rand did not provide a full philosophical articulation of what human beings “should be.” But she did present, in fictional form, her own understanding of the nature of the genuine individualist as distinguished from the mass man. For Rand, the individualist transcends dualism, whereas the mass man is split between the dictates of his own conscience and the demands of society. Ultimately, the mass man, or “second-hander,” abdicates his own soul.

  The individualist, symbolized in the character of Roark, was not a spiritual abstraction disconnected from material reality. Rand presented Roark as a fully integrated being of mind and body. She matched Roark’s integrity of spirit with a consummate physical strength. Roark’s egoism is not boastful, conceited, or ostentatious. In her outline of 9 February 1936, she wrote that Roark is “natural” in his selfishness. “He has the quiet, complete, irrevocable calm of an iron conviction. No dramatics, no hysteria.” This spiritual tranquility is matched by Roark’s “tall, slender, somewhat angular” appearance. His passionate sensuality is captured in the hardness of his muscles. He walks swiftly, with ease, “as if movement requires no effort whatever, a body to which movement is as natural as immobility, without a definite line to divide them, a light, flowing, lazy ease of motion, an energy so complete that it assumes the ease of laziness.”37

  Roark is the exact opposite of the mass man, for “he was born without the ability to consider others.” This does not mean that Roark is incapable of social relationships, or that he would trample on the rights of others to achieve his goals. For Rand, Roark’s egoism entailed a cohesion of self. Roark is not a solipsist or a brute. His self is the focal point of responsibility, decision making, and value. It is Roark’s own happiness that is his “basic, primary consideration.” Roark owes nothing to others, nor does he seek to impose obligations on them. As a Randian hero, Roark is an atheist. He was “born without any ‘religious brain center.’” His intransigent mind “does not understand or even conceive of the instinct for bowing and submission. His whole capacity for reverence is centered on himself” (699).

  By contrast, Rand portrays most of the other characters in The Fountainhead as variations of the mass man. Keating, like so many other secondary characters in the novel, tries to achieve greatness as defined by others. He is the “perfect example of a selfless man who is a ruthless, unprincipled egotist—in the accepted meaning of the word.” He is vain and greedy, a “mob man at heart,” who sacrifices everything for the sake of a professional success that lacks personal significance. Keating “has no self and, therefore, cannot have any ethics.” He exists in an empty shell, never achieving the full distinction of what an individual “should be.”

  Whereas Keating attempts to live through others by submitting to social conventions, Wynand attempts to rule others by forcing them to submit to his dictates. But as a publishing magnate, Wynand “rules the mob only as long as he says what the mob wants him to say.” The Fountainhead depicts what happens when Wynand attempts to stand on principles that are genuinely his own. For Rand, Wynand is “a man who could have been.”

  By contrast, Toohey achieves distinction by extolling humanitarian causes and glorifying collectivism. He is unable to attain values through productive effort and can only achieve greatness in the eyes of others by crushing and ridiculing the heroic. Rand describes him as “a man who never could be—and knows it” (698). Toohey seeks domination by diminishing the value of all things so as to reflect his own inferiority.38

  Continuing the use of Nietzschean imagery in her notes, Rand explains that Toohey’s character has “an insane will to power, a lust for superiority that can be expressed only through others” (700). Toohey is a parody of this Nietzschean will to power; he exhibits a superior intellect and force of personality entirely directed toward the inversion and obliteration of valu
es.39 But Rand also uses Toohey to subtly celebrate Nietzsche in her finished novel. Nietzsche becomes a persistent target of Toohey’s derision. For instance, in one of his newspaper columns denouncing Roark’s architectural design of the Enright House, Toohey states: “It is not our function—paraphrasing a philosopher whom we do not like [Nietzsche]—to be a fly swatter, but when a fly acquires delusions of grandeur, the best of us must stoop to do a little job of extermination.”40

  When a photograph of Roark appears in The Banner, Toohey mocks Rand’s protagonist for his exalted expression of admiration toward the Enright House that he has created. With obvious Nietzschean overtones, Toohey writes, in the newspaper caption below the photo, “Are you happy, Mr. Superman?” (343).

  More important than all of these subtle allusions to Nietzsche is Rand’s portrait of Toohey. Through Toohey’s character, Rand presents the thesis “that only mental control over others is true control.” Toohey seeks primarily, a spiritual communism, in which each individual is spiritually subordinated “to the mass in every way conceivable.” He hopes to achieve social domination through “the tremendous power of numbers.” Stressing the metaphysical equality of all men as a means of obliterating any “consideration given to the content of their character,” Toohey is a genuine mass man. For Toohey, individuals are valuable only in relation to the masses they serve. Voicing contempt for his betters “because they are better,”41 Toohey encapsulates all that is evil in modern politics.