Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (29 page)

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 “showing.” 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).

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.