Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Rand’s teacher, Lossky, was the chief Russian translator of Kant’s works. He too had criticized Kant’s contention that true being (things-in-themselves) transcends consciousness and remains forever unknowable. Lossky sought to defend the realist proposition that people could know true reality through an epistemological coordination of subject and object. In this process, the real existents and objects of the world are subjected to a cognitive activity that is metaphysically passive and noncreative. Lossky rejected Kant’s belief that the mind imposes structures on reality. Such Kantian subjectivism subordinates reality to knowledge, or existence to consciousness. It resolves phenomena in subjective processes that are detached from the real world and distortive of objective reality (Lossky [1906] 1919, 402–3).

  Furthermore, Lossky criticized Kant for invalidating metaphysics as a science. Since Kant held that the mind perceives things not as they are but “as they seem to me,” he institutionalized a war not only on metaphysics, but on the very ability of the mind to grasp the nature of reality.62

  Though there is no evidence that Rand studied Kant formally while at the university, it is conceivable that her earliest exposure to Kant’s ideas occurred in her encounters with the celebrated Lossky. Her distinguished teacher was among the foremost Russian scholars of German philosophy. Lossky’s rejection of Kantianism was essential to his ideal-realist project. It is entirely possible that Rand absorbed inadvertently a Russian bias against Kant.

  6

  KNOWING

  In conjunction with her view that philosophy is not a deductive system, Rand based her theory of knowledge on observation and induction.1 Rand refused to rewrite reality; she rejected any attempt to force facts into a preconceived conceptual scheme.2 She constructed an epistemological theory that drew from her understanding of the history of knowledge, mathematics, and science and of the nature of language (Peikoff 1980T, lecture 9). She realized that epistemology is the crucial element of any philosophical system, because it articulates the very methods by which people can know reality (Peikoff 1987T, lecture 6). Rand wrote in her journal: “Philosophy is primarily epistemology—the science of the means, the rules, and the methods of human knowledge.”3 Hence, her system of thought could not be complete without a fully developed epistemological foundation.

  REJECTING EPISTEMOLOGICAL DUALISM

  Rand’s epistemology is a species of philosophical realism. And yet Rand was deeply critical of traditional realist and idealist perspectives. In attempting to bridge the seemingly insurmountable gap between reality and consciousness, classical realists and idealists often totalized one realm while suppressing the other. Rand rejected this dualistic antagonism at its root. She argued that like every existent in reality, consciousness has an identity. But for Rand, there can be no conflict between a this-worldly, natural human faculty and the reality it perceives.

  Rand’s attack on traditional realism and idealism was certainly not the only one of its kind. Thinkers as diverse as Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Heidegger, Husserl, and Wittgenstein also rejected both realist “objectivism” and idealist “subjectivism.” Many of these thinkers criticized the Platonic realist conception of knowledge because it separated concepts from human life. But they were equally displeased with contemporary subjectivist alternatives, which emphasized the primacy of the cogito.4

  Recognizing that classical realism was often characterized as an “objectivist” formulation, Rand was compelled to distinguish her own Objectivist epistemology from the traditional view. She eventually developed the term “intrinsicism” to describe the classical realist perspective.5 According to Rand, intrinsicism was the defining characteristic of both extreme and moderate realism. These realists had regarded “the referents of concepts as intrinsic, i.e., as ‘universals’ inherent in things (either as archetypes or as metaphysical essences), as special existents unrelated to man’s consciousness—to be perceived by man directly, like any other kind of concrete existents, but perceived by some non-sensory or extra-sensory means” (Introduction, 53).

  The realists attempted to preserve the primacy of existence by denying the identity of consciousness. They converted concepts into perceptual concretes that could only be absorbed by the mind through intuition or other supernatural means (ibid.). This was pure mysticism in Rand’s view. Rand defined mysticism in epistemological terms, as “the acceptance of allegations without evidence or proof, either apart from or against the evidence of one’s senses and one’s reason.”6 Rand argued that at the base of traditional realism was this paradoxical commitment to mystic revelation, a belief that the mind was an ineffable substance, attaining “true” knowledge through direct contemplation of the world.7

  It is no accident that Rand was able to identify this intrinsicist paradox. Her earliest encounter with the realist-mystic integration was in the teachings of her philosophy professor, Lossky. For Rand, Lossky’s thought must have provided a perfect embodiment of the virtues and vices of traditional realism. Deeply influenced by both Plato and Aristotle, Lossky had argued that God was “the primary and all-embracing intrinsic value.” Hence, each substantival agent created by God was endowed with intrinsic, enabling qualities that could be actualized in the real world. For Lossky (1951, 258), being, love, beauty, truth, and freedom were among the “absolute intrinsic values” constituting God’s organic whole.

  Just as Lossky’s mystical premises were readily apparent, so too were the realist elements of his philosophy. It was Lossky’s aim “to investigate … the process of knowledge … in man as a knowing subject.”8 For Lossky ([1906] 1919, 413), the mind was engaged in the “modest activity of discriminating and comparing” the elements of reality. This limited cognitive function regarded “the whole material of knowledge as given in immediate experience.” Lossky regarded his own realism as profoundly empirical in its orientation. He argued that cognitive activity was “least of all creative, but based more than any other activity upon data passively received.” This metaphysical passivity and radical noncreativity was a “most important condition for the acquisition of an adequate knowledge of the world.”

  Moreover, Lossky had reacted against subjectivists and Kantians for their attempts to conflate the mode of awareness and the content of the mind.9 He had opposed the skeptics whose claims “that ‘there is no truth’” were contradicted “by that very statement,” since one could not maintain “the truth of the non-existence of any truth” without vicious circularity (Lossky [1917] 1928, 177). And though Lossky insisted on the metaphysical passivity of cognition, he also recognized that the mind could be creative in many of its epistemological activities. Extreme originality could be illustrated in the human ability to choose appropriate methods of investigation, and to reconstruct the world in the imagination (Lossky [1906] 1919, 413).

  Although Rand would have agreed with the essential thrust of Lossky’s view, it is clear that she would have adamantly rejected the other aspects of his epistemology as profoundly “intrinsicist” and “mysticist.” For Lossky, all the objects of the universe, both real and ideal, are given to the mind by “direct contemplation.”10 Lossky seems to suggest that perceptual concretes and conceptual abstractions are equally accessible to the mind by such contemplative activity. The mind grasps the existential reality of universals as if by ineffable osmosis. True Reason is expressed in

  the complete unity of the universe which renders it possible for the individual both to represent to himself cosmic purposes and to apprehend intuitively the contents not only of his own life but of other lives in the world. Such unity can only be possible if the ground of the world be a super-individual Reason that coordinates with one another all the various aspects of the life of the universe. (Lossky [1906] 1919, 412)

  Thus in her primary contact with Lossky, Rand would have been exposed to a seemingly inseparable link between traditional realism and mysticism. And since Lossky was the first to instruct Rand on the contributions of Plato and Aristotle, it is possible that Rand
’s own interpretation of both extreme and moderate realism was influenced by his perspective. These factors may have enabled Rand to discover a remarkable ambiguity in the realist tradition: that realists so thoroughly committed to the existence of an objective reality were deeply imbued with mysticism at their epistemic core.

  It is no great surprise, then, that nominalists and conceptualists alike would reject the realist perspective and its mystical elements. But the nominalists and conceptualists who repudiated realist “objectivism,” had merely substituted an equally one-dimensional subjectivism in its place. Rand argues: “The nominalist and the conceptualist schools regard concepts as subjective, i.e., as products of man’s consciousness, unrelated to the facts of reality as mere ‘names’ or notions arbitrarily assigned to arbitrary groupings of concretes on the ground of vague, inexplicable resemblances” (Introduction, 53).

  In a sense, these subjectivists attempt to counteract the mysticism of intrinsicist epistemology by emphasizing the primacy of consciousness. By totalizing the subjective and suppressing the objective, the subjectivists view concepts and mental integrations as arbitrary and unrelated to reality (53–54). Whereas intrinsicism culminates in mysticism, subjectivism engenders skepticism. For Rand, these antagonists in the history of philosophy had merely embraced two different sides of the same dualistic coin:

  Men have been taught either that knowledge is impossible (skepticism) or that it is available without effort (mysticism). These two positions appear to be antagonists, but are, in fact, two variants on the same theme, two sides of the same fraudulent coin: the attempt to escape the responsibility of rational cognition and the absolutism of reality—the attempt to assert the primacy of consciousness over existence. (79)

  While intrinsicists claim to uphold the absolutism of reality, they ultimately rely upon mystic revelation, an epistemic union with the supernatural that assists them in the intuitive grasp of existents. Subjectivism rejects such mysticism. But subjectivists embrace the primacy of their own consciousness as partially or wholly constitutive of reality itself.

  Interestingly, this was precisely the charge leveled against subjectivism by Rand’s teacher. For Lossky, the fact that a person was conscious suggested three interacting moments: the self, the object (or content of the mind), and the relation of “having” between the self and the content. The self is conscious, and the content is that which the self is conscious of. Kant perpetuated the view “that the contents of consciousness must necessarily be mental states of the individual,” rather than something derived from objective reality. For Lossky, a fact is ontologically real. When it is grasped by the knowing subject as part of the content of judgment, it is logically necessary.11

  For Rand, as for Lossky, Kant’s subjectivist approach was to be repudiated. Both Rand and Lossky would have agreed that Kant’s system invalidated the objectivity of human perception. Both Rand and Lossky rejected such distinctions as analytic and synthetic, logical and experiential, necessary and contingent, a priori and a posteriori.12 But Rand went beyond the intrinsicist critique of her teacher. For Lossky, the objective content of judgment is not a fully processed, human form of perceived reality, but reality itself. Ontology and logic nearly collapse. Rand argues, by contrast, that Kant’s distinction between things-in-themselves and things-as-they-are-perceived perpetuates a gulf between reality and consciousness. Whereas Lossky as an intrinsicist believed that we grasp “things-in-themselves,” Kant maintained, in Rand’s view, that we only grasp things as they appear to our consciousness, which imposes a structure on reality. Rand rejected both alternatives. For Rand, there is nothing in the world that can be discussed as “reality in itself,” if by such a designation is meant that we can somehow grasp reality external to a human perspective. Similarly, even if there were an omniscient being, that being would still perceive reality by divine methods of perception from which he, she, or it could not escape.

  Rand maintained that the subject’s means of perception are not a disqualifying element in the grasp of the object (“Appendix,” 193–94). The means of perception and the process of cognition do not invalidate or subjectify the reality that is perceived. Rand argued that the Kantian credo “is a revolt, not only against being conscious, but against being alive,” since every aspect of life involves processing. There is no such thing as “unprocessed knowledge,” for this would imply that people could acquire information about the real world without cognitive means. For Rand, every living organism must process the physical and mental elements that sustain it. Our modes of breathing, eating, and knowing are the human means of processing and appropriating elements in objective reality. Rand states:

  No one would argue (at least, not yet) that since man’s body has to process the food he eats, no objective rules of proper nutrition can ever be discovered—that “true nutrition” has to consist of absorbing some ineffable substance without the participation of a digestive system, but since man is incapable of “true feeding,” nutrition is a subjective matter open to his whim, and it is merely a social convention that forbids him to eat poisonous mushrooms. (Introduction, 81–82)

  Hence, just as it is illegitimate to subjectify the digestive process, it is equally incorrect to view perception and cognition as subjective.

  Rand explained that in the history of philosophy, the dominance of one polar position ultimately created conditions for the resurgence of its alleged opposite. But intrinsicism and subjectivism, mysticism and skepticism, differ only “in the form of their inner contradiction.”13 The intrinsicist subverts the human mode of awareness in an effort to preserve the objectivity of the mind’s contents; the subjectivist denies the objectivity of the mind’s contents in an effort to preserve the human mode of awareness. Neither school grasps the identity of human consciousness or the objective nature of concept formation. Each school totalizes a different polar principle while suppressing its opposite. Each school is the mirror image of its adversary. Rand explains:

  Philosophically, the mystic is usually an exponent of the intrinsic (revealed) school of epistemology; the skeptic is usually an advocate of epistemological subjectivism. But, psychologically, the mystic is a subjectivist who uses intrinsicism as a means to claim the primacy of his consciousness over that of others. The skeptic is a disillusioned intrinsicist who, having failed to find automatic supernatural guidance, seeks a substitute in the collective subjectivism of others. (Introduction, 79)

  Rand’s critique of intrinsicism and subjectivism illustrates a highly dialectical exposition, a style common to such thinkers as Aristotle, Marx, and many Russian philosophers, including Solovyov and Lossky. Rand conceptualized not one, but two, false alternatives that share a common error. She viewed these antinomies as embodying inner contradictions that must be transcended simultaneously. She recognized an interpenetration between intrinsicism and subjectivism in that each duplicates the psycho-philosophical tendencies of the other. Each school of thought, in its partiality and one-sidedness, perpetuates a distorted view of human consciousness. In both cases, Rand argued, the identity of the mind has not been fully understood or appreciated.

  It is not quite accurate to say that Rand actually constructed her resolution out of the debris of these false alternatives. To be sure, Rand affirmed and repudiated half of each tradition, preserving only those aspects essential to a genuinely “objective” alternative. But her “Objectivist” resolution is not merely an amalgam of its predecessors; rather, it seeks to transcend their inherent limitations. For Rand, genuine objectivity cannot be validated without grasping that every human attribute and faculty, including mind and body, is subject to the law of identity. If people are to acquire knowledge of the world, they must discover proper human methods of cognition. As she put it: “Just as man’s physical existence was liberated when he grasped the principle that ‘nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed,’ so his consciousness will be liberated when he grasps that nature, to be apprehended, must be obeyed—that the rules of cognition mu
st be derived from the nature of existence and the nature, the identity of his cognitive faculty” (ibid.).

  PERCEPTION

  Rand considered consciousness axiomatic. But she understood the term “consciousness” in several different, though interrelated, ways. Consciousness is not only a faculty of awareness, the faculty of perceiving that which exists. Consciousness is also a state of awareness. It is a vital organ or attribute of specific living entities. Consciousness is a process of awareness marked by two essential aspects: differentiation and integration (Introduction, 5). The human form of consciousness is a repository of multiple constituents, all of which are inseparably linked: perception, volition, focus, reason, abstraction, and conception. Moreover, for Rand, the mind is the ego, the self, the I.14

  Hence, though Rand characterizes consciousness as metaphysically passive—that is, as nonconstitutive in the perception of reality—she views the mind as epistemologically active. Consciousness involves three distinct and interactive levels of awareness: sensation, perception, and conception. Each of these levels is a relation between consciousness and existence. There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. Every aspect and process of consciousness has a physical, material component.15 Rand continues in the grand tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas; she argues that consciousness operates under conditions of materiality and sensuous corporeality.16