Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical (43 page)

BEYOND FACT AND VALUE

As we have seen, Rand’s emphasis on reason cannot be fully understood without appreciating her antipathy toward Russian mysticism. Most Russian
religious
philosophers had elevated faith and revelation to a status equal—or superior—to reason. But
Russian philosophy
was distinctive, in both its religious and Marxist incarnations, for its rejection of the Western-positivist separation of
fact
and value.
²
Rand’s repudiation of this very distinction is a reflection of her Russian roots.

But Rand opposed the typically Russian attempts to synthesize
fact
and value through statist or supernatural means. In their efforts to combat the bifurcation of fact from value, Russian thinkers fell victim to monistic reductionism. Both Bolshevism and Russian orthodoxy aimed for a union that emphasized a different element of the polarity. For Rand, communism was a form of
materialism
that attempted to transcend the
fact-value dichotomy
by a monistic emphasis on the factual. Rand characterized communists as “mystics of muscle,” who saw all
values
as epiphenomena of material forces. They stressed a change in the material “base” as a means to the transformation of human values. Inevitably, the base could not be altered without the violent intervention of the secular, totalitarian state.

By contrast, Rand interpreted religion as a form of spiritualism in which the fact-value distinction was resolved by a one-sided emphasis on spiritual values to the detriment of material reality. The religionists, or “mystics of spirit,” saw all things in the world as infused with intrinsic worth or divinity. Ultimately, their dogmatic definition of absolute values translated into an equally authoritarian statism of the theocratic form.

Both the Bolsheviks and the Russian mystics were the paradigm for Rand’s rejection of materialism and
idealism
. Both perpetuated the bifurcation of
existence
and
consciousness
. In essence, the materialists “believe in existence without consciousness,” and idealists “in consciousness without existence.” In
Atlas Shrugged
, Rand wrote: “Both demand the surrender of your mind, one to their revelations, the other to their reflexes. No matter how loudly they posture in the roles of irreconcilable antagonists, their moral codes are alike, and so are their aims: in matter—the enslavement of man’s body, in spirit—the destruction of his mind” (1027).

The religionists had embraced a kind of
intrinsicism
. In epistemology, such intrinsicism emphasizes metaphysical essences grasped by intuitive revelation. In
ethics
, it sees the good as inherent in things or actions regardless of their context or consequences. Intrinsicism separates the concept of “value” from the valuer and his distinctive purposes. It sees the good as good “in, by, and of itself,” part of reality, and totally independent of consciousness. It tends toward dogmatism and authoritarianism.

Not surprisingly, aspects of this intrinsicist approach to
ethics
were exemplified in the works of Lossky. Lossky saw
facts
and values as part of the same reality. For Lossky ([1917] 1928): “Values do not constitute a separate realm of their own, distinct from existence” (178). It was the goal of human beings to discover those absolute values which inhered in reality, as a means to a communion with
God
. Like Solovyov before him, and most Russian neo-idealists, Lossky proposed an ethic that was profoundly mystical and
altruistic
. Lossky believed that
egoism
entailed the human separation from
the Kingdom of Harmony. As such,
selfishness
was the “
primary
evil
, giving rise to all kinds of derivative evil” (Lossky 1951, 262). In this regard, Lossky echoed the central themes of Russian ethical thought. In the writings of Kireevsky, Khomyakov, Solovyov, and the Russian Symbolists, the notion of
sobornost
’ suggested the transcendence of conflict between the individual’s selfish interests and the common interests of society. In practice, such harmony could only be achieved by the individual’s self-subordination to the whole. This conciliar union allegedly preserved the individual’s uniqueness, while achieving an integrated totality. But whereas the religious philosophers sought a mystic organic unity, the Bolsheviks appropriated the communal
sobornost
’ in their legitimation of the One State.

In Rand’s view, such individual subordination was typical of all altruistic doctrines. In both Russian religious and political thought, altruism—the creed of self-denial, self-sacrifice, and self-abnegation—served as a rationalization for the individual’s subjugation. By placing God, the Collective, or the State above the self, altruism aimed for a “culturally-induced
selflessness
.”
³
Its goal was not benevolence or the relief of suffering.
⁴
Rather, its purpose was to prey on peoples’ sense of guilt and inadequacy.
⁵
The religionists had mastered the technique of guilt-manipulation by focusing on
Original Sin
. By positing an inherent human evil outside the province of choice, the religionists had perpetuated a Big Lie to serve their own authoritarian impulses (
Atlas Shrugged
, 1025).

Rand argues that in the post-Renaissance world, such mystical concepts as Original Sin were being undermined by
reason
, science, and individualism. Yet instead of overturning medieval mysticism, Western civilization internalized a lethal contradiction. According to Rand, the West attempted to sustain a culture of reason on an altruistic and neo-mystic philosophic foundation. Rand argued that this contradiction was at the heart of Kant’s thought. In Kant’s system, there is a fatal split between fact and value. Reason is given domain over the material world, whereas
faith
is recognized as the master of the spiritual sphere. Kant separated reason from “the choice of the goals for which material achievements are to be used.” He provided a philosophical justification for the belief that human goals, actions, choices, and values could only be determined by faith.
⁶
He secularized religious morality, fracturing the tie between self-interest and virtue. He argued that action could not be moral if performed from personal inclination (Peikoff 1970T, lecture 3). In the end, Kant’s deontology had rescued faith and the altruist ethic from the onslaught of reason.
⁷

Kant was certainly not the first philosopher to doubt the possibility of a rational morality of self-interest. Even before
Hume
questioned the likelihood of deriving an “ought” from an “is,” the history of philosophy was
replete with attacks on ethical
egoism
. Peikoff (1972T, lecture 2) argues that even in the pagan, humanistic culture of ancient Greece, the Sophists had identified egoism with subjectivity and brutality. But in Western thought, strong egoistic themes were to be found in the works of Aristotle, Spinoza, and
Nietzsche
.
⁸
Rand was most probably influenced by certain Aristotelian and Nietzschean themes in the creation of her own concept of egoism.

It was Nietzsche’s critique of altruism that made a huge impact on the Symbolists of the Russian Silver Age, and on Rand’s early intellectual development. Nietzsche had criticized altruism as a
slave
morality that sanctioned the dominance of the herd. In the altruist’s view, according to Nietzsche ([1886] 1966), “Everything that elevates an individual above the herd and intimidates the neighbor is henceforth called
evil
; and the fair, modest, submissive, conforming mentality, the
mediocrity
of desires attains moral designations and honors” (114).

By contrast, Nietzsche described a master morality in which all that was deemed evil by the altruist code became a source of virtue. He rejected abject selflessness and asceticism. He repudiated the altruist penchant to celebrate a nonexistent God by crucifying human beings. He aimed for the “transvaluation of values,” such that the virtues of the slave morality would be overturned by its vices, that is, by the virtues embodied in the master ethos.

Though Nietzsche’s writings are open to widely divergent interpretations, there is much evidence to suggest that his tribute to human greatness, to a “blessed
selfishness
, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful
soul
” (Nietzsche [1883–85] 1905, 211) was rooted in his exposure to the works of classical antiquity.
Walter Kaufmann
argues persuasively that Nietzsche’s projection of the reverence of the “noble soul,” the very quotation that Rand placed in her introduction to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of
The Fountainhead
, emerges from an Aristotelian base. Kaufmann cites sections of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
dealing with the “great-souled man.” As a lover of self, the “great-souled man” rarely asks for the assistance of others. He is a being of self-esteem, caring “more for the truth than for what people think.”
⁹
Nietzsche appropriated these very themes in his own paean to individual excellence.
¹⁰

Rand drew from this Aristotelian and Nietzschean constellation. In one of her earliest journal entries, she wrote: “The true, highest selfishness, the exalted egoism, is the right to have one’s own theoretical values and then apply them to practical reality.” For Rand,
ethics
must begin from the self, not from society, the mass, the collective, “or any other form of selflessness.”
¹¹
Rand would come to see that an attack on “selfishness” was simultaneously an attack on the integrity of an
individual’s
self-esteem
(
Virtue
of
Selfishness
, xi). She believed that her “
most important
job
is
the formulation of
a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for this earth
.” Such an ethical achievement was a necessary aspect of Rand’s philosophical project, because it would affirm the possibility of a secular, moral existence free of religious imperatives and categorical altruistic duties.
¹²

Defending the need for morality against religious
intrinsicism
, Rand argued that a rational approach could not embrace the other, subjectivist side of the same dualistic coin. Her chief objection to “Nietzschean” egoism was its tendency to regard any action as good if it was intended to satisfy one’s own desires (
Virtue of Selfishness,
x). Rand’s interpretation of
Nietzsche
’s ethos as “subjectivist” may have taken root in her exposure to the Russian Symbolist movement. Despite their tendencies toward synthesis, the
Symbolists
had unabashedly embraced Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle, the orgiastic celebration of
emotions
, as far superior to
Apollonian
rationality
. It was against this kind of Nietzschean
subjectivism
that Rand reacted with a fervent hostility. For Rand, while the intrinsicist endorses a view of the good as inhering in reality, external to human consciousness, the subjectivist argues that the good is the product of subjective feelings or desires, bearing “no relation to the facts of reality.”
¹³

Such subjectivism characterized most conventional theories of egoism. In Rand’s view, traditional altruist and egoist alternatives shared the same collectivist premise. Much like Marx, who repudiated “vulgar” idealists and “vulgar” materialists, Rand criticized many thinkers in the individualist tradition who merely substituted the sacrifice of the many for the self-sacrificial creeds they fought: “It is in their statements on morality that the individualist thinkers have floundered and lost their case. They had nothing better to offer than vulgar selfishness which consisted of sacrificing others to self. When I realized that that was only another form of
collectivism
—of living through others by ruling them—I had the key to
The Fountainhead
and to the character of Howard Roark.”
¹⁴

More than this, Rand had begun to articulate the basis of her own, unique understanding of the “virtue of selfishness.” For those who had formulated a concept of selfishness solely “in terms of sacrificing others to oneself,” there was an apparent “psychological confession about the nature of their own desires” (
New Intellectual
, 56). Rand excoriated such thinkers as “counterfeit” individualists, whose view of human survival oscillated between conquest and defeat, exploitation and submission.
¹⁵
In Rand’s view: “The man who is willing to serve as the means to the ends of others, will necessarily regard others as the means to
his
ends.”
¹⁶

Despite this two-pronged rejection of conventional morality, several critics have argued that Rand’s definitions of altruism and egoism are
“untenable and slanted.”
O’Neill
believes that Rand maintains “a totally artificial dichotomy between
egoism
and
altruism.
”
¹⁷
Ellis
(1968, 28) agrees that both altruism and selfishness are “taken to rigid and one-sided lengths” in Rand’s thought. And
Barnes
(1967) argues further that Rand’s “altruistic” villains frequently aim to satisfy their own welfare, while utilizing the veneer—or rationale—provided by the traditional ethos of self-sacrifice. Barnes believes that such a cynical use of altruism does not adequately define its essence as a moral doctrine (135).

But none of these commentators recognize Rand’s critique of altruism as a simultaneous rejection of
conventional
egoism. Inherent in traditional
ethics
was an interpenetration of sacrificial credos, a duality involving both giving and taking. As
Robert Greenwood
(1974) explains: “A person who is expectant, even in the pragmatic sense, and counts on receiving the unearned, may be said to countenance altruism, to practice it passively, as it were, in the transactional sense, as receiver, not giver” (46).