Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical

by Sciabarra, Chris

  Rand argued that throughout human history this need was served by religion. The necessity for a comprehensive understanding of existence led even the most primitive peoples to embrace some form of religious belief.37 And yet no form of faith or mystic revelation could take the place of rationally dictated principles. Although religion attempted to fulfill this need, its very methods and many of its teachings undercut the ability of people to live and act in a moral and rational manner.38 Rand’s rejection of religion is not a repudiation of ethics. It is an affirmation of a supremely secular need that people have to make their lives knowable, understandable, and efficacious. It is the nature of this “will to efficacy” which must be examined in greater depth.

  THE WILL TO EFFICACY

  In both her ethics and her epistemology, Rand preserved the centrality of reason because she saw it as an individual’s chief means for achieving efficacy. Such efficacy is essential to human survival. But it is also internally related to an individual’s self-concept. By preserving the ability to think and the will to understand, the individual achieves the self-esteem necessary for psychological and existential well-being (N. Branden [1969] 1979, 117).

  In his early essays while he was associated with Rand, Nathaniel Branden explains that to the extent that individuals are committed to the goal of awareness, their mental operations will tend toward cognitive efficacy. To the extent that they fail in this commitment, they will achieve cognitive inefficacy (111–12). Efficacy is the conviction that one is capable of producing the desired effects in one’s actions. A consistent ability to translate thought into action leads to a sense of cognitive control over one’s life that is essential to living. Whereas Nietzsche spoke of the “will to power,” Objectivism aims to legitimate and affirm what Branden has called, the will to efficacy (123). Psycho-epistemologically, Rand’s Objectivism reverses the Cartesian cogito. It begins with the fact of existence and defends the necessity of the conscious apprehension of both internal and external reality. In effect, Rand argued: “I am, therefore I will think” (B. Branden 1962T, lecture 10). Branden too emphasizes that we, as volitional beings, must engage in a consistent practice of awareness. We must grasp the cognitive roots of our emotions and the somatic-emotive contexts that condition our understanding. To the extent that our awareness is unobstructed, we will tend to achieve, in action, the goals that we have rationally sought and emotionally desired.

  An unobstructed awareness is achieved through both a generalized or “metaphysical” efficacy and a specific or “particularized” efficacy. Metaphysical efficacy, Branden explains, pertains to a person’s fundamental relationship to reality. The degree of a person’s metaphysical efficacy is a reflection of the reality-oriented nature of that person’s process of awareness. Particularized efficacy, by contrast, refers to a person’s ability to achieve desired results through the mastery of specific practices. Such efficacy can only be affirmed through the expansion of knowledge and skills. The relationship between metaphysical and particularized efficacy is reciprocal.39 Specific achievements will fuel a person’s feeling of basic cognitive self-control, and such fundamental efficacy will promote the further mastery of practical skills.

  Both Rand and Branden might be subject to the criticism that their belief in the human need for psycho-epistemological competence is specific to Western culture. Both of these thinkers recognize that “the individual” and “the self” are phenomena that have existed for thousands of years, though it was not until the development of industry and the rise of capitalism that such concepts were explicitly articulated. Yet, Rand would have agreed with Branden (1992) that the need for cognitive efficacy

  is not the product of a particular cultural “value bias.” There is no society on earth, no society even conceivable, whose members do not face the challenges of fulfilling their needs—who do not face the challenges of appropriate adaptation to nature and to the world of human beings. The idea of efficacy in this fundamental sense (which includes competence in human relationships) is not a “Western artifact.” … We delude ourselves if we imagine there is any culture or society in which we will not have to face the challenge of making ourselves appropriate to life. (19–20)

  It might be said that the need for cognitive efficacy is a part of the identity of the human species. But the kinds of social practices that affect human efficacy are a reflection of the culture within which people develop and thrive. Culturally specific political institutions, the family, the school, and the workplace will encourage, reinforce, or, alternatively, thwart the development of the efficacious mind. Branden argues that in our society, there are dysfunctional families, dysfunctional schools, and dysfunctional organizations.40 One might say that Rand’s critique of statism, which I explore in Part 3, is an examination of a dysfunctional social formation that places institutional obstacles in the path of human efficacy, values, and life itself.

  If “efficacy” is the ability to achieve the effects one desires, then “inefficacy” is its opposite. Does the Objectivist notion of efficacy imply that people are inefficacious if they are unable to actualize their intentions? Is Rand’s understanding of efficacious action excessively rationalistic?

  RATIONALISM AND EMPIRICISM

  Since Rand’s project stresses the efficacy and centrality of reason, several critics have placed her in the rationalist tradition.41 In order to assess the validity of this criticism, it is essential first to explore the extent to which Rand separated herself from both rationalism and empiricism. In this regard, Rand reaffirmed the nondualistic intellectual tendencies of her Russian predecessors.42

  For Rand, the genuinely philosophical mind is critically objective; it requires an active, passionate, engaged commitment to the pursuit of truth and knowledge as “of crucial, personal, selfish importance” to each human actor.43 Rand’s indictment of rationalism and empiricism is, in many ways, a component of her broader critique of “the unphilosophical mind.” The unphilosophical mind is representative of contemporary, antirational culture. It consists of an “indiscriminate mixture of floating abstractions and momentary concretes, without the ability (or the need) to tie the first to reality, and the second to principles.”44 While Rand’s repudiation of rationalism centers on its penchant for glorifying floating abstractions, her rejection of empiricism focuses on its essentially anti-conceptual character.

  In Rand’s view, the inability of post-Renaissance philosophy to solve the problem of universals ultimately led to the development of two schools of thought: “those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge of the world from concepts, which come from inside his head and are not derived from the perception of physical facts (the Rationalists)—and those who claimed that man obtains his knowledge from experience, which was held to mean: by direct perception of immediate facts, with no recourse to concepts (the Empiricists).”45

  This division between rationalists and empiricists was a reflection of the mind-body dualism deeply ingrained in Western philosophy. Each tradition embodied a distortion; each was half-right and half-wrong. For Rand, knowledge was the product of a conceptual integration of the facts of reality. It could not be achieved by severing concepts from percepts, thought from reality, or abstractions from concretes.

  Rand’s analysis of rationalism and empiricism is not restricted to their post-Renaissance historical incarnations. Rand maintained that both rationalism and empiricism are employed as methods of inquiry by contemporary social scientists. Such modes of investigation must lead inevitably to a fragmentation of knowledge.

  Both Rand and Peikoff argue that rationalism begins with a truth: human awareness is distinctively conceptual. But by cutting concepts from their perceptual roots, rationalists base their analyses on floating abstractions. From these dogmatic, acontextual premises, rationalists typically engage in deduction as the means to knowledge. They claim that to achieve certainty, one must be fully comprehensive. Such a proposition, however, translates into a version of strict organicity; rationali
sts cannot explain anything without knowing everything. They exhibit an almost neurotic compulsiveness for systematization and order. Paradoxically, in their quest for totalistic knowledge, they are led toward more concrete-bound methods of inquiry. Rationalism is the basis of compartmentalization in modern social science. The desire for absolute specialization is the desire to know everything about minutiae. The tinier the fragment, the greater the potential for more “complete” knowledge of it. Each discipline becomes fractured from the totality. “Full” knowledge of the abstracted part is achieved, but the context and conditions from which the part emerges, is ignored. Rationalists are left with the study of disconnected concretes, mirroring their empiricist counterparts (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 7).

  Peikoff emphasizes further that rationalism, by celebrating reason, embodies an abiding contempt for emotions. Rationalists equate feelings with subjectivism. They believe that feelings must be ruthlessly suppressed in the quest for objective knowledge.46 As such, rationalism becomes a rationalization for emotional repression that can only distort the objectivity it seeks to achieve (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 10).

  Empiricism, by contrast, begins not with floating rationalistic abstractions, but with the “hard” facts of reality. Empiricists adopt an inductive, observational method, which Rand agreed is the necessary foundation for all knowledge. But empiricists are suspicious of abstraction. They reject the rationalist-organicist tendency toward synthesis. They reject axioms and are frequently philosophical skeptics, atomists, subjectivists, and emotionalists. Their approach is at root anti-conceptual; it focuses on the perceptual, historical, statistical, or psychometric (lecture 8). Rand argued that the anti-conceptual mentality of the empiricist

  treats the first-level abstractions, the concepts of physical existents, as if they were percepts, and is unable to rise much further, unable to integrate new knowledge or to identify its own experience—a mentality that has not discovered the process of conceptualization in conscious terms, has not learned to adopt it as an active, continuous, self-initiated policy, and is left arrested on a concrete-bound level, dealing only with the given, with the concerns of the immediate moment, day or year, anxiously sensing an abyss of the unknowable on all sides. (Introduction, 76)

  Such a mentality is unable to make clear, conceptual distinctions between thought and emotion, cognition and evaluation, observation and imagination, essential and nonessential characteristics, object and subject, existence and consciousness.47 It tends to “accept consequences while ignoring their causes.” It regards as self-evident the complex products of thought, while not comprehending their preconditions and interrelations.48

  In her journals in the 1950s, Rand speculated on the psycho-epistemological factors that might predispose an individual to what she later termed “anti-conceptual” methods. She initially characterized such anti-conceptualism as a form of “‘memory-storing’ epistemology.” She maintained that someone who “thinks” by such methods does not store “conceptual conclusions and evaluations in his subconscious.” Rather, he or she “stores concrete memories plus an emotional estimate” of their meaning. “Concrete events” and “automatic emotional reactions” coalesce to form a “montage” of “unanalyzed ‘gestalts’” within the individual’s mind. Such “thinking” short-circuits the individual’s ability to fully perceive and understand reality:

  Since man needs a system of symbols to deal with the enormous complexity of his experiences, since he has to condense and simplify every new event by means of its essentials, since he cannot treat every new event as if it were an undifferentiated, unprecedented first in a baby’s blank consciousness, but must integrate (or at least relate) it to the context of his past knowledge, this method substitutes an emotion for the perception and selection of an essential.49

  In effect, Rand believed that this “emotional” approach to knowledge was the psycho-epistemological root of anti-conceptualist empiricism and its modern social science derivatives: pragmatist and positivist methodologies. Such approaches view facts as “single and discrete,” unrelated to each other or to the context from which they arise (New Intellectual, 43–44). By tearing an idea from its context and treating it as “a self-sufficient, independent item,” the anti-conceptual mentality fractures the connection between concept and context (Peikoff 1976T, lecture 5). It exhibits passivity with regard to the formation of concepts and fundamental principles. It focuses on the “empiric element in experience,” and “treats abstractions as if they were perceptual concretes.”50

  Ultimately, empiricism, like rationalism, fuels the contemporary tendency toward compartmentalization. By collecting endless hard data within a narrowly defined subdiscipline, empiricists engage in specialization without integration (Peikoff 1983T, lecture 9). Thus the methods of empiricism and rationalism interpenetrate such that each school achieves similar analytical distortions (Peikoff 1980T, lecture 2). They make radical thinking and radical solutions impossible because they disconnect events from issues, social problems from their antecedent historical conditions, and political policies from their inexorable consequences.

  Moreover, both rationalism and empiricism adhere to an infallibilist fallacy.51 In their quest for dogmatic absolutes, the rationalists feign omniscience. In their battle against dogmatic absolutes, the empiricists claim that certainty is impossible. Both of these schools accept omniscience and infallibility as the standards for knowledge. The rationalists “pretend to have it,” and the empiricists “bemoan their lack of it.” But as Peikoff explains, the very notion of omniscience must be discarded. Knowledge and certainty are contextual. There is no validity to an absolute, acontextual truth.52 As Rand explained it: “Man is neither infallible nor omniscient; if he were, a discipline such as epistemology—the theory of knowledge—would not be necessary nor possible: his knowledge would be automatic, unquestionable and total” (Introduction, 78).

  Rand was not the first philosopher to question the rationalist-empiricist dichotomy (Machan 1971, 104). Hollinger argues persuasively that Rand’s critique bears some similarity to those of Nietzsche and Husserl.53 Even Sartre (1963) laments “the separation of theory and practice which [has] resulted in transforming the latter into an empiricism without principles; the former into a pure, fixed knowledge” (22). But the most readily available parallels can be drawn between Rand and her Russian predecessors. As I suggested in Chapter 1, the rejection of rationalism and empiricism was central to Solovyov’s philosophy. Solovyov argued that the empiricists, in their emphasis on sensualism, reduced the world to simple and subjective sensory data. Rationalists, by contrast, viewed the world strictly in terms of concepts and ideas. These traditions dichotomized experience and reason, practice and theory, and achieved distorted partiality. Although Solovyov embraced a mystic resolution, his antidualism greatly influenced the development of Russian philosophic thought. The most important twentieth-century Russian adherent to this approach was Lossky.

  As we have seen, Lossky’s first major work in epistemology rejected the rationalist-empiricist distinction. For Lossky, rationalism and empiricism led to the fragmentation of an indissoluble unity between subject and object. Both empiricism and rationalism dissolve into a form of subjectivism. In empiricism, sensory data is ultimately subjective sensory data. In rationalism, reality dissolves into the subjective processes of cognition. Lossky ([1906] 1919) hoped to achieve a coordination of subject and object by transcending the negative and absorbing the positive aspects of these false alternatives:

  In relation to the older ways of thought, our theory is chiefly characterised by the fact that it rejects their negations, but preserves their positive contentions, and seeks to supplement the latter by new truths. It would not, then, overthrow the old systems, but aim rather at bringing them to life again in a new form; it would free them from their old exclusiveness, and so prepare a way for their reconciliation and union. (402)

  Though her resolution differed considerably from Lossky’s “epistemologic
al coordination,” Rand reproduced the dialectical form of her teacher’s critique. She recognized in empiricism and rationalism the same partiality that she saw in subjectivism and intrinsicism. In each of these interconnected polarities, there is one-sidedness and distortion. The Objectivist alternative repudiates the common infallibilist premise of both its opponents, while reuniting previously bifurcated categories. Rand’s Objectivism preserves the indissoluble connection between percepts and concepts, experience and logic, emotion and reason. It seeks to end the compartmentalization of the social sciences and the atomistic fragmentation of knowledge, aiming for an organic view of society that is both critical and revolutionary.

  RAND AND HAYEK

  Given Rand’s antipathy to rationalism especially, it is extremely valuable to compare her views to those of Hayek. There are two reasons for this comparison: First, it helps to place Rand closer to the nonrationalistic tradition of libertarian thought of which Hayek is a part, and second, it helps to elucidate the full implications of Rand’s critique for the issue of human efficacy.

  Though Rand and Hayek are opposed on many philosophical and social questions, they generally agree on the desirability of a free market. But Hayek’s hostility toward central planning was an outgrowth of his opposition to “constructivist” rationalism. According to Hayek, state interventionism attempted to override the unintended consequences of human action by subordinating the spontaneous order of free exchange to an abstract social construction.