Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (41 page)

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 “epistemological 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
non
rationalistic 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.

Norman Barry (1986, 15) notes correctly that in Rand’s
social theory
, the Hayekian category of “unintended consequences” is virtually excluded. In my discussion of Rand’s social ontology, I noted that Rand had formulated only two basic categories: the metaphysical and the man-made. The metaphysically given elements of objective reality could not be altered, whereas man-made objects, institutions, traditions, and rules of conduct should never be accepted uncritically. But within the category of the man-made, Rand did not distinguish between those objects, institutions, or procedures which people
intended
to make, and those which were the unintended consequences of their actions.

And yet, in recognizing that there are articulated and tacit dimensions of thought and action, Rand seems to have accepted the very distinction she did not explicitly endorse. For Rand, emotion is one such tacit component. No one
intends
to feel a certain emotion. A specific emotional response develops within the mind as an unintended by-product of habitual subconscious
integrations. Traditions and customs are also the long-term byproducts and manifestations of habitual practices.

Rand never belabored the issue of unintended
consequences
because it appeared somewhat obvious to her. As Binswanger argues: “Even at a very primitive state of knowledge one can observe that one’s actions have two very different kinds of consequences; those which are
intended
and those which one [
sic
] did not.” The intended consequences are those which one foresees or anticipates. The unintended results of human action are accidental by-products which were not the basis of the agent’s motivation.
⁵⁴

Like Marx, Rand believed that an obsessive emphasis on unintended consequences came dangerously close to their reification as transhistorical constants.
⁵⁵
For Rand, every human institution and practice is ultimately capable of change. This is completely consistent with her view that emotions, habitual methods of awareness, and sense of life are equally open to modification—despite their resilience. However, Rand was not naive; she recognized that for most individuals the process of change was extremely difficult.

Nevertheless, by not focusing extensively on unintended consequences, Rand neglected an aspect of
social
inquiry that was central to Hayek’s worldview. Hayek was influenced by the writings of both classical conservatives, like Burke, and the classical liberals of the Scottish Enlightenment. These thinkers opposed the notion that one can step outside the
historical
process and redesign the civil order from its first elements through the “infinite” powers of
reason
. Hayek inherited this legacy and propelled it to a deeper epistemological level.
⁵⁶
As he put it:

The picture of man as a being who, thanks to his reason, can rise above the values of his civilization, in order to judge it from the outside or from a higher point of view, is an illusion. It simply must be understood that reason itself is part of civilization. All we can ever do is to confront one part with the other parts. Even this process leads to incessant movement, which may in the very long course of time change the whole. But sudden complete reconstruction of the whole is not possible at any stage of the process, because we must always use the material that is available, and which itself is the integrated product of a process of evolution.
⁵⁷

Since we are unable to get a synoptic view as impersonal, detached social actors, we have it in our power to “tinker with parts of a given whole” but never to “entirely redesign it” (Hayek 1976, 25).

It is within the larger totality—the cultural context—that Hayek situated the mind. He maintained that the mind is inscribed in a cultural setting.
It is wrong to apply one-way causal notions to either. The mind and
culture
developed concurrently. They are internally related. “It is probably no more justified to claim that thinking man created his culture,” argued Hayek (1981), “than that culture created his reason” (155). Nonetheless, many thinkers have represented Reason (“with a capital R”)
⁵⁸
as “the capping stone” of evolution that enabled human beings to design culture. But this concept of reason is highly abstract and
rationalistic
.
It obscures the interpersonal, social process in which the reasoning individual both absorbs and transmits cultural values. Hayek stated, in almost Marxian fashion, that
social theory
must start “from [those] whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society” (6). Moreover, social interaction creates effects which are greater than any individual mind “can ever fully comprehend” (7).