Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  To understand the causal antecedents of a specific emotion then, one must assess it within a complex conceptual context (Peikoff 1991b, 156–57). Rand’s Objectivism focuses on understanding this context in order to achieve an efficacious mind. She advocated the same epistemological precision for the introspective articulation of emotions as she did for the extrospective identification of existents. No emotion can be fully understood if it is abstracted from the context that gives it meaning. And no emotional response can be changed without a fundamental alteration of the cognitive context that generates it. The possibilities of self-deceit, evasion, repression, and rationalization are enormous in the introspective process. In Rand’s words:

  If men identified introspectively their inner states one tenth as correctly as they identify objective reality, we would be a race of ideal giants. I ascribe ninety-five percent or more of all psychological trouble and personal tragedies to the fact that in the realm of introspection we are on the level where savages were (or lower) in regard to extrospection. Men are not only not taught to introspect, they are actively discouraged from engaging in introspection, and yet their lives depend on it. Without that, nothing is possible to them, including [proper] concept-formation.13

  Since “we can be under the sway of forces we do not recognize or understand,” Nathaniel Branden affirms, only introspective self-monitoring can make possible genuine change and personal evolution.14 Because “we know far more than we are aware of knowing,” we must strive toward a fuller integration of the conscious and subconscious elements of mind (N. Branden 1983b, 165).

  On this basis, Objectivism rejects the principle of an essential antagonism between reason and emotion. Any conflict between these two spheres reveals a contradiction between two principles—one articulated, the other tacit and subconscious—that has manifested as an emotional response. The fact that a struggle can exist between reason and emotion does not make them interchangeable. Objectivism views the relationship between cognition and evaluation, thought and feeling, the conscious and the subconscious, as causal, even if it allows for reciprocal effects.15 In this relationship, evaluation emerges from cognition, feeling arises from cognitive contact with reality, and the subconscious stores elements derived from conscious awareness. Reason and emotion can be reconciled only if one initiates an introspective, therapeutic process that ultimately changes one’s underlying premises and the consequent emotions.16

  Though Rand’s theory moves toward the integration of reason and emotion, it nevertheless generates some tensions of its own. At times, Rand tended to evaluate reason and emotion somewhat monistically, purely from the vantage point of reason, paying less attention to the reciprocal effects of evaluation on cognition, feeling on thought, the subconscious on the conscious. It is as if the tension between these two spheres could be dissolved by viewing emotion as merely an unarticulated form of thought that is amenable to change. Rand ([1976] 1992T) once boasted that she had never experienced an emotion that clashed with her intellect for more than a day—suggesting that she was able to articulate and fully grasp every emotion she had ever experienced, and that it was relatively easy to identify and alter the context from which an “inappropriate” emotional response emanated. Her assertion has several implications: that in a clash between one’s reason and emotions, it is usually the premises behind one’s emotions that are in need of change, because the emotion is judged to be “inappropriate,” “irrational,” or “immoral.” Indeed, it is apparent from some of Rand’s early journal entries, that she did view certain desires as “immoral,” even if later published works by Rand and others have clearly stated that emotion in and of itself is nonmoral and nonrational.17

  BRANDEN’S CRITIQUE

  Nathaniel Branden has provided a much-needed reassessment of Rand’s view of the relationship between reason and emotion. Though he continues to accept many of the Objectivist formulations, since their break in 1968, Branden has argued persuasively that Rand’s fictional works in particular convey mixed messages to the reader. To weigh his evidence thoroughly would involve textual analysis and interpretation beyond the scope of the present study. But many other commentators have similarly perceived a bias against emotion in Rand’s philosophy, and their criticism extends beyond isolated passages in Rand’s novels to constitute a serious indictment of Objectivism. These criticisms must be examined as a fundamental challenge to my contention that Rand’s philosophy is inherently nondualistic.

  Branden (1989T) claims that in Rand’s fiction, her characters exhibit a tendency to disown or repress negative emotions. Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, for instance, repudiates his own pain throughout the novel. This device conveyed one of Rand’s themes—that pain is not a metaphysical necessity of life on earth. In her notes for Atlas Shrugged, outlining the nature of the novel’s protagonist, Rand reiterates this theme. She wrote that joy is present in Galt’s soul, “even when he suffers.” Indeed, “the worship of joy as against the worship of suffering” is what motivates Galt’s very being.18 But for Branden, Rand’s emphasis on undiluted joy even when the character is suffering suggests to many of her readers that negative emotions should be repressed rather than fully acknowledged, experienced, and ultimately transcended.

  Part of the problem, Branden argues, is that Rand’s characters are portrayed in such broad moral abstractions that no understanding of their developmental psychology is offered. We never grasp the process by which these characters learned to live the moral life. Significantly, Branden recognizes that Rand was a profoundly Russian novelist, whose characters were created as the embodiment of specific abstract principles. The psychological growth of her characters was of little interest to her. Like Dostoyevsky, Rand paid much greater attention to the dialectical interplay of ideas in the action of the novel.

  The problem, according to Branden, is that many Objectivists attempt to realize in their own lives the abstractions presented in Rand’s novels, without understanding that it is very difficult to change one’s emotional responses by changing the underlying thinking. In many cases, major areas of childhood repression must be confronted before an individual can alter his emotional responses (N. Branden [1971] 1978, 45, 51). None of Rand’s characters face such psychological obstacles.

  In fairness to Rand, however, it must be stated that one of her most memorable characters, Hank Rearden in Atlas Shrugged, experiences internal conflicts between his consciously accepted convictions and his inarticulate emotions. In the area of sexual psychology, for instance, Rearden responds to Dagny Taggart, Rand’s heroine, with a fervor that “should” be reserved for his wife. But through a process of articulation, Rearden realizes that his emotions are speaking to him, telling him something that his conscious thoughts have obscured. Rearden’s initial guilt emerges from a conflict between the irrational societal values he has been taught and the rational value premises that he has internalized inadvertently. Rearden begins to realize that his wife does not share his sense of life, and that his seemingly inexplicable sexual responses toward Dagny are an outgrowth of their mutual values. Rearden struggles to understand this and many other ideational conflicts throughout the novel. His integration of these lessons into the fabric of his existence is one of the most insightful portraits of psychological growth in all of Rand’s fiction. It also presents evidence that Rand was not entirely ignorant of the “language of emotions” as sometimes superior to the articulated “language of thought.”

  Nevertheless, Rearden seems to be the exception to the rule. Most of Rand’s “ideal” characters are beyond further psychological development.19 Galt, for instance, is presented as a fully integrated individual, with a great willingness to experience joy and an equally strong impulse to repudiate pain, anger, and fear. Branden suggests that Galt is the exemplary representative of a “very powerful bias against emotions” in Rand’s novels. Branden acknowledges that he shared in this error in his early years, and “perpetuated it,” encouraging his Objectivist students “to fea
r their own emotions, to distrust themselves.”20

  Rand seemed to hold that certain emotions are “inappropriate” to a rational psychology. According to Branden, she tended to blur the distinction between “reason” and the “reasonable.” Branden differentiates between the rational process per se and that which any person or group of people regards as “reasonable” in a given instance. Reason is the faculty of awareness peculiar to human beings. That which is “reasonable” is culturally and historically specific. Rand often dismissed her critics as “mystics” and “irrationalists” without comprehending that they were operating with a different model of the “reasonable,” not exhibiting a bias against reason as such (N. Branden 1982T).

  The temptation to equate our particular model of reality with “reason” is so powerful that we are very prone to dismiss as “irrational” or “anti-scientific” any line of thought, any speculation, or even any data that our model cannot accommodate.… A clash between mind and emotions is a clash between two judgments, one of which is conscious, the other of which might not be. We do not follow the voice of emotion or feeling unthinkingly; rather, we try to understand what it may be telling us. (N. Branden 1983b, 217–18)

  Branden argues that Rand did not pay significant attention to “the voice of emotion.” One of his most important post-Randian works, The Disowned Self (N. Branden [1971] 1978), is largely an attempt to redress this balance. In this regard, Branden appears to move away from his earlier view that Rand was “a master of motivational psychology,”21 who had provided a definitive synthesis of reason and emotion. In some ways, Branden seems to have moved closer to Rand’s early critics, such as Hazel Barnes and Albert Ellis.22 Barnes (1967) charged that Objectivism regarded “feelings … with utmost disdain” (130), lacking any appreciation for how “emotions must come to the aid of reason in all fully conscious and significant living” (137). Ellis argued that the Objectivist ideal of the “unbreached mind” was a fantasy. The human ability to alter emotions is not limitless, in Ellis’s view. Such alteration is far more difficult than a mere cerebral dissection of the emotive sequence (Ellis 1968, 16).

  Eric Mack has also criticized Rand’s “promulgation view of proper desires.” Unlike Barnes and Ellis, Mack was deeply influenced by Rand. But Mack rejects Rand’s suggestion that “appropriate” emotions should be rooted in rational judgments, and that emotions springing from “nonrational judgments” are antithetical to the objective interests of the agent. For Mack, most desires do not result from rational judgment. Like Ellis, Mack argues that reason has a strictly limited capacity to modify the “rich fabric of desires and interests” motivating human action. Mack argues that Rand’s promulgation theory seems to contradict the actions of her own fictional characters, who never attempt to deduce their values and desires from the rule of reason. And yet, for Mack, this is precisely what Rand’s theory of emotions seems to require.23

  Barbara Branden (1986) has voiced a similar objection to Rand’s understanding of the relationship between reason and emotion. She is critical of Rand’s attempt to reduce emotions to “a set of intellectual conclusions that we may then accept or reject according to their rationality.… We are not omniscient, not about the world outside us, and not about the vast complexity of our own mental content and processes” (195).

  The preceding criticisms raise many interesting issues. First, all of these critics seem to agree that Rand tended to regard the distinction between these two spheres primarily from the vantage point of reason. Though her characterization of Rearden offers evidence that she understood the epistemic role of emotions, in most cases, she assumes that the conflict can be resolved solely through rational deliberation. In addition, several critics are uncomfortable with the implication that certain emotions and desires are “proper,” whereas others are “improper.” This was a far more religious way of thinking than Rand realized.24

  Rand’s successors have moved beyond the monistic implications of some of her early writings without contradicting her initial formulations. They have integrated new insights into the body of Objectivism, embracing a more explicitly nondualistic, non-monistic interpretation of the relationship between reason and emotion. In the remainder of this chapter, I will outline these developments and show that Rand’s own understanding of the distinction was far more complex than might appear at first glance. What emerges is an integrated view of reason and emotion that has startling and revolutionary implications for Rand’s project.

  THE CONSCIOUS AND THE SUBCONSCIOUS

  Two concepts are especially significant in Objectivist philosophical psychology: “sense of life” and “psycho-epistemology.” Both pertain to the interaction between the conscious and the subconscious mind.

  As early as 1947, Rand regarded the “subconscious” as an automatic integrator of the mind’s contents, which themselves were derived from the individual’s perceptions of reality.25 In 1970, Rand analyzed the connection between these mental processes more thoroughly. In her essay, “The Comprachicos,” she argued that the conscious mind registers and perceives relationships between experiences. The subconscious stores these conscious observations and integrates the connections. The subconscious thus meets the requirements of the “crow epistemology.” Since human beings cannot deal with the totality of knowledge in a single frame of consciousness, their minds automatize that knowledge and make it available as it is needed. A mind’s efficiency in processing the elements of reality largely depends on how well integrated, automatized, and unrepressed this subconscious context is.

  From a very early age, children begin to self-program their minds. Childhood “experiences, observations and sub-verbal conclusions” determine and shape the course of this cognitive development. In assessing a child’s cognitive skills, neither the content of the mind nor the mind’s methods of functioning can be evaluated in isolation from the other. The methods of acquiring and processing knowledge cannot be fully understood apart from the content of the mind. And the content of the mind cannot be fully appreciated by abstracting it from the process—the particular methods of awareness—that make it possible (Peikoff 1985T, lecture 1). According to Rand, “the interaction of content and method establishes a certain reciprocity: the method of acquiring knowledge affects its content, which affects the further development of the method, and so on.”26 Rand therefore placed great emphasis on the social context within which children develop their cognitive skills. The significant adults in a child’s world, the methods of education, and the culture itself “can accelerate or hamper, retard and, perhaps, destroy the development of his conceptual faculty” (195).

  Thus, how an individual deals with the facts of reality is a function of the interaction between the content and the methods of his or her consciousness. The content is not always articulated, however. The subconscious integrates the mind’s contents and serves as the repository of an inarticulate “sense of life.” In her earliest published discussion of this concept, Rand defined a “sense of life” as “a pre-conceptual equivalent of metaphysics, an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character.”27

  In their initial dealings with the world, children begin to form generalized impressions about the nature of reality, of the self, and of others. Growing up in loving households, children might form a benevolent sense of life, see themselves as worthy of affection, and be able to both give and receive love. Children who are victims of abuse, on the other hand, might form a malevolent sense of life, be distrustful of people, and be handicapped by a poor self-image. The range of subconscious integrations between these two extremes is enormous.

  A sense of life, then, is formed by a tacit process of emotional abstraction. The subconscious classifies things and events, people and places, all of the contents of the mind, “according to the emotions they invoke [sic]” (27). Relationships are established by subconscious associations and emotional connotations
. These subconscious integrations become the emotional equivalent of what Rand characterizes as “metaphysical value-judgments” (28). Such judgments pertain to the general nature of being. They are what Edith Packer has called “core evaluations” of the self, the world, and other people.28

  A sense of life is not a logically derived emotional sum. In fact, no emotions are “deduced” through rational deliberation. Rand does not present a promulgation theory of the origins of emotion. True, she holds that emotions are the result of conscious contact with the world. But they are not the product of explicit or deliberate deduction. A sense of life is formed from the earliest moments of childhood as an unintended consequence or by-product of the child’s contact with reality.

  For Rand, a sense of life is essentially the form in which most people hold their “philosophy.” It is an “unidentified philosophy” for most people, but serves as a kind of philosophy nonetheless. A child’s sense of life will affect its value choices, actions, emotional responses, and, especially, its conscious convictions. As children grow into adulthood, their sense of life continues to deeply influence their approach to living.29 Rand and Nathaniel Branden explain that a person’s sense of life is rarely explicitly articulated. In our relationships with others, our sense of life is communicated tacitly by our manner “of moving, talking, smiling,”30 our ways “of standing, of moving, of expressing emotions, of reacting to events … by the things said and by the things not said, by the explanations it is not necessary to give, by sudden, unexpected signs of mutual understanding.”31