Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  And yet traditional philosophy distinguishes the constitutive from the dispositional properties of an entity. Constitutive properties are part of the entity. They include such qualities as “weight” and “height.” Dispositional properties, on the other hand, refer to the entity’s capacity for action and interaction. For example, “fragility,” a dispositional quality, depends on a relationship between a breakable glass and a concrete floor.

  Rand was once asked the following question: if the glass’s fragility cannot be defined except in terms of its relations to another entity (i.e., the concrete floor), would the definition of the glass necessarily contain a reference to an entity other than itself? This would seem to imply that there is an interpenetration of two entities in which one enters into the definition of another. Does this not violate identity?

  Rand argued, in response, that traditional philosophy had created an “artificial dichotomy” between constitutive and dispositional properties. Rand begins by asking, “What is the nature of the entity?” She does not divide the entity into subcategories. Such qualities can be abstracted epistemologically once the nature of the entity has been determined. But the qualities themselves cannot be separated ontologically from the entity. By focusing on one group of properties to the exclusion of others, traditional philosophy attempts to edit reality by defining “what an entity is on a partial, selective basis.”

  Rand emphasizes the structure and nature of the entity as consequential to its form of action. The identity of the entity implies causality, that certain effects will occur in its interactions with other entities and with the world at large. The potential of an entity to act in a particular way is inherent in its composition and its physical and chemical properties. A dispositional property is one that belongs to a causal relationship. By distinguishing between constitutive and dispositional properties, traditional philosophy divorces the constituent elements of an entity from its potential for action. It simultaneously divorces the entity’s potentiality for action from its fundamental characteristics.49

  For Rand, all properties are constitutive of the entity. But no entity can “take an action which is not possible to it by its constituent nature…. [O]ne cannot claim causeless actions, or actions contrary to the nature of the interacting entities … actions cannot be inexplicable and causeless. If the cause lies in the nature of an entity, then it cannot do something other than what its nature makes possible” (“Appendix,” 288).

  Rand extended this analysis to her examination of the entity and its attributes: “An attribute is something which is not the entity itself. No one attribute constitutes the whole entity, but all of them together are the entity—not ‘possessed by’ but ‘are’ the entity” (276).

  The attributes name the same existential fact as the entity itself, from a different vantage point. The entity and its attributes are not two different things. Their relationship is not merely reciprocal, it is identical; “the attributes are the entity, or an entity is its attributes.”50 One cannot separate attributes from the entity and reify them as separate existents. Ontologically, each of an entity’s characteristics has the same status and is a part of the entity. Because we are not omniscient, we discover the properties of the entity through study, observation, and validation. Even though some of the entity’s aspects may be unknown to us presently, this does not mean that such characteristics are excluded from our conceptual identification of the existent. The existent is what it is independent of what people think or feel. Our conceptual designation is open-ended and contextual; it is expandable to include the known and the not-yet-known (Introduction, 98–99).

  Thus the entity cannot be isolated from its characteristics, nor can its characteristics be taken apart from its being.51 The entity’s attributes are indivisible. Further, just as there are no attributes or actions without entities, so there are no relationships apart from the entities that are in relation to one another.52 “Length,” for instance, does not exist in reality as a disembodied Platonic Form. It exists as an inseparable attribute of concrete, material entities. People establish units of length through abstraction, but this does not disconnect the concept of length from the entity that embodies it (“Appendix,” 278).

  Attributes are what can be separated mentally from the entity. “Parts” Rand defined somewhat more narrowly. A “part” is something that can be separated materially from the whole. In cutting off the legs from a table, for instance, the legs are parts that are no longer connected to the table top. Hence, the table is no longer what it once was.53 But Rand preserved the integrity of the whole. The entity is the “sum” of its characteristics. Rand does not mean “sum” in a literal fashion (“Appendix,” 265–66). A “sum” is an integrated sum. As Nathaniel Branden ([1969] 1979, 16) observes, the organism is “not an aggregate, but an integrate.” Hence, although the parts of someone can be viewed as separate and distinct, Rand admonishes us never to drop “the context that they are vital organs of a total entity which is a human being” (“Appendix,” 270).

  In rejecting the bifurcation of the entity and its attributes, Rand presents an integrated view that is also sensitive to the context within which an entity exists. Entities, like concepts and words, cannot be fully understood when disconnected from their context. Peikoff explains, for instance, that words and concepts are not external or “neutral” to the totality; they often take on the connotation of the context within which they are used.54 So, too, an entity must be understood in terms of its conditions of existence, which are partially comprised by the entity’s dynamic relationship to other entities. This principle is duplicated in Rand’s social analysis, wherein no single social problem can be resolved apart from related problems, or apart from the system which they jointly constitute—and perpetuate.

  THE METAPHYSICAL VERSUS THE MAN-MADE

  Rand’s simultaneous emphasis on the ontological priority of individual entities and the integrated nature of each entity has immediate implications for her social ontology. Rand did not use the term “social ontology.” But it characterizes her view of the nature of humanity, human action, and social institutions. For Rand, the person is an individual, human, being, with each of these factors essential to our understanding of his or her nature—not an abstraction but a real entity. As an entity, the person is an individual, a particular. And as a particular kind of entity, the person has a distinctive species identity—human. The bulk of Rand’s philosophy is an examination of what it means to be human.

  Within the present context, it should be mentioned briefly that Rand saw free will as one of humankind’s most distinctive characteristics. But the power of volition does not enable people to alter that which Rand described as the “metaphysically given.”55 Though people can rearrange the elements of reality to serve human needs, they cannot alter the laws of identity and causality. For Rand, there is no contradiction between inability and the fact of human volition. Rand reaffirmed Bacon’s insight that human beings cannot command nature unless they discover the properties of the elements they seek to control, as well as the rules by which volitional consciousness functions. Indeed, for human beings to initiate and direct the actions of consciousness, they must obey the rules of cognition. Though they are free to evade or subvert their own perceptions of reality, they cannot escape the existential consequences of such willful cognitive distortion.

  Rand made a crucial distinction between those elements in reality which are metaphysically given, and those objects, institutions, procedures, or rules of conduct made by human beings (33). She refers to this distinction as the “metaphysical versus the man-made”: “It is the metaphysically given that must be accepted: it cannot be changed. It is the man-made that must never be accepted uncritically: it must be judged, then accepted or rejected and changed when necessary. Man is not omniscient or infallible” (ibid.).

  In essence, Rand rejected those who reify human institutions as unalterable metaphysical facts. Such a practice preserves the status quo, while sancti
oning those injustices which happen to exist (Peikoff 1991b, 26). Although “the metaphysically given is, was, will be, and had to be,” Rand argued that “nothing made by man had to be: it was made by choice.”56

  Rand equated those who would uncritically accept the products of human action with those who would rebel against nature in an attempt to negate existence. In either case, people did not grasp the difference between what can be changed and what cannot.

  And yet by creating such a distinction between the metaphysical and the man-made, Rand seemed wholly ignorant of what Hayek called the unintended consequences of human action. In Hayek’s view, cultural traditions are largely the result of inarticulate social practices. Hayek argued that spontaneously emergent social institutions are the historical product of human interaction but not of deliberate design. The attempt to alter these evolved institutions by will is one of the hallmarks of utopianism. Those who seek to control the delicate fabric of social life ultimately destroy the very forces that generate order. Hayek condemned these utopians as “constructivist rationalists.” His critique of utopianism was simultaneously a powerful indictment of the efficacy and propriety of state planning. Ironically, Marx also recognized the tacit dimension in social reality. But unlike Hayek, Marx projected a future communist society in which people were no longer the playthings of history, but the conscious creators of their own destiny.57

  RAND VERSUS KANT

  Rand’s commitment to realism in philosophy penetrates to the root of her metaphysics. Objectivism begins with the axioms of existence, identity, and consciousness and proceeds to a defense of the primacy of existence in each of its ontological moments. Rand argued that most philosophies advocate either the primacy of existence or the primacy of consciousness.58 As Kelley (1986) explains:

  In Ayn Rand’s terms, it is a question of the primacy of consciousness versus the primacy of existence: do the objects of awareness depend on the subject for their existence or identity, or do the contents of consciousness depend on external objects? … Realists claim that the objects exist independently of the subject. Awareness is non-constitutive, the identification of things that exist and are what they are independently of the awareness of them. Idealists, on the other hand, claim that the object of cognition does depend on some constitutive activity of the subject—even if, with Kant, they allow that some independent noumenal realm also exists. (8, 27)

  In Rand’s view, Kant’s grand and far-reaching synthesis was the philosophy most responsible for promulgating the view that consciousness is ontologically prior to existence. Kant attacked objective reality and the efficacy of the mind on a metaphysical level. While a full discussion of Rand’s anti-Kantianism is beyond the scope of this book, it is valuable to briefly examine the similarities and differences between the two thinkers. Such an exploration provides additional evidence of Rand’s Russian intellectual roots.

  The late George Walsh, a distinguished Objectivist philosopher, criticizes Rand and other Objectivists for their wholesale rejection of Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology.59 Walsh argues persuasively that Rand exaggerated her differences with—and misinterpreted—some of Kant’s central positions in these basic fields of philosophy. It is Walsh’s view that both thinkers adhere to many of the same basic propositions.

  Kant accepted Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics as the study of being qua being. He asked whether metaphysical knowledge is possible and identified the solution of this problem as the aim of his Critique of Pure Reason. He divided metaphysics into ontology, which studies existing things and events separately, including whether every event has a cause, and cosmology, which studies the totality of existence, including whether the universe as such has a cause. Kant concluded that ontology is possible as knowledge since people can visualize causality between events. But cosmology is not possible as knowledge, because the universe as a whole cannot be treated as an entity. Viewing cosmology as knowledge leads to unwarranted conclusions in some cases and to outright contradictions or “antinomies” in others. The only legitimate function of cosmology is to “regulate” science in the direction of broader, more general theories. But for Kant, since no completely general theory can ever be attained, cosmology can never qualify as knowledge.

  Like Kant, Rand accepted Aristotle’s definition of metaphysics as the study of being qua being. She implicitly acknowledged the conventional division of metaphysics into ontology and cosmology, but rejected cosmology as illegitimate. Whereas ontology or metaphysics can establish that there are entities which have natures, and that only finite concretes exist and interact causally, it is the job of science to study the specific nature of these entities, to discover what they are and the laws of their interaction. Cosmology extends to the whole universe the empirical laws that have been reached at any given moment. For Rand, as for Kant, such cosmological speculation can be defended only by an appeal to some sort of mystical insight. But whereas Rand categorically rejected such “mysticism,” Kant provided a defense of faith and intuition as the central means for dealing with fundamental noumena.

  This difference, however, does not constitute the central criticism that Rand leveled against Kant. According to Walsh, the principal—and least tenable—point of Rand’s critique was her mistaken assumption that Kant had disqualified the efficacy of consciousness precisely because the mind possessed identity. Rand ascribed to Kant the doctrine that knowledge is a “distortion” or “collective delusion.” She claimed that Kant derived this conclusion from the premise that the mind possesses a specific identity.

  Walsh argues, however, that Kant made no such argument. Kant contended that all knowledge falls necessarily under the forms of space, time, and the categories (which as knowledge are tied to space and time). These forms cannot be the properties or relations of things as they are in themselves, for, if they were, we would know them a posteriori, whereas in fact we know them a priori (Walsh, 14 October 1993C).

  For Kant, the mind, with its definite structure or identity, is the only source that originates the formal element in knowledge. This is not Kant’s basic premise, but his ultimate epistemological conclusion. Walsh argues that Rand has misinterpreted this aspect of Kant’s thought; Kant does not believe that the mind must have some identity or other, and that this identity, as such, distorts the objects of its knowledge. As a transcendental Idealist, Kant argues: “All objects of any experience possible to us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations which, in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings, or as a series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts.”60

  Kant provided a means of distinguishing objective truth from error. He distinguished illusions and delusions from “empirical reality” by systematically applying criteria of order and regular sequence. In Walsh’s opinion, Rand cannot dismiss Kant’s view that the mind imposes forms of space and time upon percepts without putting in serious question the validity of her own theories of perceptual relativity. As we shall see in Chapter 6, Rand believed that percepts come to us arrayed in forms, such as color, determined by the interaction of our sense organs with appropriate stimuli. How can Rand criticize Kant when her own view suggests that sensory “processing” does not in itself, grasp the “ultimate constituents of the universe,” even if these are the “causal primaries” behind our percepts? The only difference between the Randian and Kantian approaches is that for Rand, science may one day discover the properties of the “ultimate constituents,” whereas for Kant, such knowledge of things-in-themselves is impossible as such. In Walsh’s opinion, Rand’s critique of Kant’s epistemology as radically distortive, dualistic, and delusory ought to be qualified. For Walsh, even in Kant’s account of knowledge, “empirical reality,” once known, may indeed, be obeyed and commanded.

  Walsh submits that Rand’s misinterpretation of Kant rests on her misunderstanding of the term “appearance.” The word in German that Kant uses is Erscheinung which means “manifestation” or “showi
ng.” Kant ([1781/1787] 1933) warns us explicitly against confusing this with Schein, which means “sham” or “illusion” (B69). Rand’s chief predecessor in ignoring this warning is the nineteenth-century irrationalist and romanticist Arthur Schopenhauer, who praised Kant’s distinction between the “delusions” of phenomenal appearance and the unknowable noumenal realm: “Kant’s greatest contribution is the distinction between Erscheinung (appearance) and things-in-themselves … that the world presenting itself to the senses has no true being … and that the grasp of it is delusion rather than knowledge.”61 Rand’s interpretation is comparable, but whereas Schopenhauer praised Kant for this alleged doctrine, she condemned him.

  Yet in my view, it is far more likely that Rand’s anti-Kantianism was an outgrowth of her exposure to Russian thought, rather than with any possible acquaintance with Schopenhauer’s view. Whereas Schopenhauer celebrated the Kantian metaphysical distinctions, most Russian philosophers rejected Kant because they believed that he had detached the mind from reality. As I suggest, such thinkers as Solovyov, Chicherin, and Lossky were aiming for an integration of the traditional dichotomies perpetuated by Kant’s metaphysics. Chicherin, for instance, argued that in Kant’s system, pure concepts of reason are empty, and experience is blind. Kant’s view makes “metaphysics without experience … empty, and experience without metaphysics blind: in the first case we have the form without content, and in the second case, the content without understanding” (Lossky 1951, 135–36).

  Interestingly, Rand’s own view of the rationalist-empiricist distinction, and of Kant’s critical philosophy, is deeply reminiscent of Chicherin’s parody. For Rand, rationalists had embraced concepts divorced from reality, whereas empiricists had “clung to reality, by abandoning their mind” (New Intellectual, 30). Kant’s attempt to transcend this dichotomy failed miserably because his philosophy formalized the conflict. Rand writes: “His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and not others, therefore, his consciousness is not valid; man is blind, because he has eyes—deaf, because he has ears—deluded, because he has a mind—and the things he perceives do not exist, because he perceives them” (39).