Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (11 page)

According to
Aristotle
, every particular thing and being in the world is the result of the combination of matter and form.… Abstraction
being made of these definite characteristics of concrete things, matter is conceived of as the
possibility
of any one of these forms or characteristics.… Aristotle was a naturalist who never lost sight of living reality … [forming] abstractions without separating from living reality that which is abstracted from it, but merely mentally emphasizing it for the sake of observing it more carefully against the whole background of real existence. (193–94)

By tracing his own position to the “concrete
ideal-realism
” of Aristotle,
Lossky
suggested that the classical Greek thinker was a forerunner of the intuitivist perspective. This is not to say that Lossky’s
epistemology
is essentially Aristotelian. In later years, Lossky claimed that he shared the Aristotelian realist view that people directly apprehend their own mental states
and
the objects in the external world. But for Lossky, this realist tradition fails because it accepts the Aristotelian distinction between form and matter. Lossky (1957) explained that in the Aristotelian epistemology,

Man can cognize objects of the external world because human reason is the potential form of all objects which becomes actual when those objects are perceived.… When a man perceives a stone, the form of the stone is present in his mind, but he does not become a stone because only the form, and not the matter, of the stone enters his mind. Since, however, the form is the essence of an object, we may say that in a certain sense knowledge of an object implies the
identity
between the thought and the object of thought. This identity is but partial, because only the essence of an object, and not its existence, is present in the human mind. (38)

This is not sufficient, in
Lossky’s
view, because in Aristotle’s
realism
, the mind grasps
only
the metaphysical essence but not the existence of the object. In Lossky’s intuitivism, the “conditions of direct
perception
” allow for the immanent presence of the object “in the knowing subject’s consciousness” (42). It is this insistence on direct
intuition
that also leads Lossky to reject the “causal theory of perception,” which states that “the action of external objects upon the sense organs and through them on the cortex is the
cause
that produces in the subject’s mind the contents of sense perception.” Although the causal theory assumes that there
are
external objects, it inevitably regards everything in human consciousness as “mental and
subjective
.”
¹⁵
Rejecting the causal theory as subjectivist, and Aristotle’s theory as insufficiently intuitivist, Lossky (1955) argued that genuinely “direct intuition” preserves the objectivity of the existents it perceives; the
mind processes information through an “immediate contemplation of reality” (139). We perceive existents
as they exist,
not as distorted copies.

Rand would have applauded her teacher’s rejection of the subjectivist theory, but she would have viewed Lossky’s approach as nonobjective and “intrinsicist.”
¹⁶
Rand argued that although the subjectivists view concepts as products of consciousness apart from existence, the intrinsicists view concepts as intuitively grasped products of reality apart from any “distortions” of consciousness. For Rand, the subjectivists attempt to circumvent reality, and the intrinsicists try to circumvent the
identity
of consciousness. Rand would have argued that Lossky had merely embraced
intrinsicism
as a means of fighting subjectivism, and that neither approach is genuinely
objective.

But for Lossky, objectivity is preserved through direct intuition in which the metaphysical existence of the object is “given to” the mind, thus collapsing the distinction between form and matter, essence and existence. Epistemologically, people achieve a coordination between subject and object that provides for a direct insight into both the essential and existential reality of the thing. And yet, because we are not omniscient, we are never able to know completely and exhaustively the infinite complexity of an object in its organic wholeness. Each act of discrimination and comparison is an attempt to resolve the fragmentation and incompleteness of human knowledge (Lossky 1957, 43). As a neo-Leibnizian personalist, Lossky argues that every substantival agent in the universe grasps a fragment of the whole. From the smallest electron to the Absolute World Spirit, all substantival agents are “consubstantial” and “welded into a single whole” (41). Hence it is in the Whole that the Truth is to be found.

This variation on
Hegel’s
dictum is more a metaphysical proposition than it is an epistemological one. For Lossky assumed the existence of substantival agents on levels lower and higher than the human. These are metaphysical assertions which Rand would have rejected categorically. And yet it must be remembered that Lossky presented an intuitivist perspective that he believed owed much to the concrete
ideal-realism
of Aristotle. Though he rejected aspects of the Aristotelian epistemology, Lossky saw Aristotle as a philosophical intuitivist. In later years, Rand would present an interpretation of Aristotle that linked the Greek philosopher to a similar metaphysical-intuitivist tradition. Rand explained that Aristotle affirmed the existence of essences
in
concretes.
¹⁷
Aristotle “held that definitions refer to metaphysical
essences,
which exist
in
concretes as a special element or formative power, and he held that the process of concept-formation depends on a kind of direct intuition by which man’s mind grasps these essences and forms concepts accordingly” (
Introduction
, 52).

She argued that
Objectivism
departs from
Aristotle
’s theory by regarding “essence” as epistemological and contextual, rather than as “metaphysical.” One can speculate that
Lossky
’s lectures on Aristotle provided Rand with an intuitivist interpretation of Aristotelian philosophy.
¹⁸
This might explain her insistence that Aristotle’s theory was a form of intuitivism with an emphasis on metaphysical “essence.”
¹⁹

It is clear, however, that Lossky saw Aristotle as a spiritual ally in his struggles against
dualism
and
atomism
. After all, Aristotle had opposed both the Eleatic monists and the
Heracliteans
. As
Tibor Machan
(1992) explains: “Eleatic
monism
is the affirmation of identity to the exclusion of difference and the affirmation of stasis to the exclusion of change. The Heraclitean flux is the affirmation of difference to the exclusion of identity and the affirmation of change to the exclusion of stasis” (48).

Embodying both change and identity, being and becoming, Aristotle’s notion of identity is profoundly ontological. Becoming presupposes Being, change presupposes identity. Like Rand after him, Lossky praised Aristotle’s ability to integrate these facts of identity and change, the basic axioms of existence and mind. Lossky endorsed an ontological interpretation of the laws of
logic
.
²⁰
For Lossky ([1917] 1928), “Logical and metaphysical principles fundamentally coincide: they are the expression of the same general structure of the world, considered in its different aspects (viz. in its significance for knowledge and for being)” (173). Like Aristotle, Lossky viewed the laws of logic as “therefore, no less a real than … a logical necessity.”
²¹
A
is
A, but this logical identity is not a static tautology; it too is an expression of a metaphysical fact.

Lossky appreciated Aristotle’s attempt to transcend the one-sided traditions of his predecessors. Aristotle’s emphasis on the concrete led him to condemn both the Platonic
idealists
and the Democritean atomists. For Aristotle,
Plato
had committed the fallacy of
reification
; he had inferred the existence of (specific) things from a (general) Ideal abstraction. Aristotle aimed to comprehend the universal through the part, grasping the abstraction through an apprehension of the particular.
²²
It is Aristotle’s dedication to the real concrete that enabled him to bridge the gap between universals and particulars. Thus Aristotle sought to transcend the polarity between ideas
and
sensory objects, mind
and
body. Unlike the Platonists, he saw a closer affinity between mind and body, arguing that it is only through the corporeal functions of the body, that the mind can exercise its distinctive faculties.
²³
But in contrast to the atomists, Aristotle maintained the integrity of the whole as a whole.

Like Aristotle before him,
Lossky
did not isolate an abstracted particular from its
context
, a part from the whole. In Aristotle’s teleology, the
actualization of an
organism’s
potential cannot be reduced to the potentiality of each of its elements taken separately.
Allan Gotthelf
explains that for Aristotle,

The development, structure, and functioning of living organisms cannot be wholly explained by—
because it is not wholly due to
—the simple natures and potentials of the elements which constitute these organisms. No sum of actualizations … ‘element-potentials’ is sufficient by itself for the production of those complex living structures and functionings for which Aristotle offers teleological explanations.
²⁴

Thus, for Aristotle, everything is part of a system of related things:

When any one of the parts or structures, be it which it may, is under discussion, it must not be supposed that it is its material composition to which attention is being directed or which is the object of the discussion, but the
relation
of such part to the total form. Similarly, the true object of architecture is not bricks, mortar, or timber, but the house; and so the principal object of natural philosophy is not the material elements, but their composition, and the totality of the form, independently of which they have no existence.… [A] house does not exist for the sake of bricks and stones, but these materials for the sake of the house, and the same is the case with the materials of other bodies.
²⁵

Like Aristotle, Lossky rejected mechanistic conceptions in favor of teleological explanations. Mechanism sees events in simple temporal sequence and views
causality
as an external relation between disconnected elements. It implicitly accepts a vision of the whole that is inorganic and atomistic. By contrast, Lossky (1934a) argued that “the whole conditions its elements and is not the sum of them” (149). His teleological conception suggests that “a new event is conditioned not only by the preceding events but also by the future, namely, by the purpose for the sake of which the change is produced. Thus, e.g., the structure of the eye is partly conditioned by the purpose of having an organ of vision” (Lossky [1917] 1928, 154–55).

It is this Aristotelian emphasis on the integrity of the whole that was furthered by thinkers such as Leibniz and
Hegel
, modern philosophers who made a huge impact on
Lossky
.
²⁶
Lossky regarded Hegel as a great philosophical
intuitivist
, another in the grand tradition of concrete ideal-realism. Hegel “makes
logic
subordinate to the metaphysics of concretely speculative being—his logic is metaphysical.”
²⁷
Moreover, like Aristotle, Hegel argued against those who refused to grasp organic
unity
. He repudiated
“conventional opinion,” which saw things as disconnected, atomistic elements. In a now famous passage, Hegel ([1807] 1977) explains:

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (2)

Whereas some would criticize this formulation as a rejection of Aristotle’s law of identity, Lossky argued that the Hegelian dialectic posited an “
interpenetration
between different and even opposite processes (inner and outer) … not an identity of opposites, but only their
unity.
” For Lossky, the identity of opposites is a meaningless phrase, because nothing can violate the law of
contradiction
. Lossky thought it far more likely that every change embodied a unity of opposing movements.
²⁸
Hence, just as motion is not a contradiction of identity, so too, we must grasp that “both movement and rest belong to the body in different respects” (Lossky 1951, 288).

LOSSKY’S EPISTEMOLOGY

In his theory of knowledge, Lossky carried on the Aristotelian and Hegelian revolt against partial or one-sided perspectives. But his attempts to transcend
dualities
were also fully within the Russian tradition of philosophical
synthesis
. In
The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge
(1906), Lossky’s first major book on
epistemology
, there is a sustained polemic against
rationalism
and
empiricism
. Lossky argued that empiricism must inevitably dissolve into sensationalism and
subjectivism
. Though rationalism and empiricism are “diametrically opposed,” they share a commonality, “the supposition that subject and object are isolated from one another” (Lossky [1906] 1919, 68). In Lossky’s view, epistemology

must relinquish the assumption made by both rationalists and empiricists that subject and object are isolated from one another, that the object lies outside the boundaries of knowledge, and that what can be known of it is either its effect or its copy innate in the subject. The new theory of knowledge must destroy the barriers thus erected
between subject and object, recognise their fundamental unity, and in this manner bring about their reconciliation. (69)