Ayn Rand and the history of philosophy

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Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist and philosopher whose relationship with the history of philosophy is the subject of scholarly attention for her idiosyncratic responses to established philosophical figures and problems.

Rand's philosophical system, Objectivism, encompasses positions on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and aesthetics. While there have been "objectivist" theories in the past, Rand's Objectivism used the term in a new way: it treats knowledge and values as neither subjective, nor intrinsic in existence (the traditional meaning of "objective") but rather as the factual identification, by Man's mind, of what exists.

Rand was greatly influenced by Aristotle, found early inspiration in Friedrich Nietzsche, and was vociferously opposed to some of the views of Immanuel Kant. She also had an intellectual kinship with John Locke, who conceptualized the ideas that individuals "own themselves," have a right to the products of their own labor, and have natural rights to life, liberty, and property,^[1] and more generally with the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. She occasionally reported her approval of specific philosophical positions, including some of Baruch Spinoza and St. Thomas Aquinas. She also respected the 20th-century American rationalist Brand Blanshard, who, like Rand, believed that "there has been no period in the past two thousand years when [both reason and rationality] have undergone a bombardment so varied, so competent, so massive and sustained as in the last half-century."^[2]

Rand has been accused of misinterpreting the works of many of the philosophers that she criticized in her writing. According to Fred Seddon, author of Ayn Rand, Objectivists, and the History of Philosophy, Rand associate Nathaniel Branden stated that she never read any of Kant's works.^[3] Analytical philosopher and libertarian Robert Nozick argued in "On the Randian Argument" that Rand's solution to David Hume's famous is-ought problem is unsatisfactory.^[4] R.W. Bradford, editor of the libertarian bimonthly Liberty, states in an interview: "I don't doubt that Rand thought [her philosophy] was original...I'm told by more than one person who knew her well that her philosophy library consisted of two or three books. She wasn't familiar enough with the history of philosophy, I suspect, to realize that she was much more within a particular tradition of Western philosophy than she thought."^[5]

Contents 1 Aristotle 2 Nietzsche 3 Kant 4 References

[edit] Aristotle

Rand's greatest influence was Aristotle, especially Organon ("Logic"); she considered Aristotle the greatest philosopher.^[6] In particular, her philosophy reflects an Aristotelian epistemology and metaphysics—both Aristotle and Rand argued that "there exists an objective reality that is independent of mind and that is capable of being known."^[7] Although Rand was ultimately critical of Aristotle's ethics, others have noted her egoistic ethics "is of the eudaemonistic type, close to Aristotle's own … a system of guidelines required by human beings to live their lives successfully, to flourish, to survive as 'man qua man.'"^[8] Younkins argued "that her philosophy diverges from Aristotle’s by considering essences as epistemological and contextual instead of as metaphysical. She envisions Aristotle as a philosophical intuitivist who declared the existence of essences within concretes."^[9].

[edit] Nietzsche

In her early life, Rand admired the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, and did share "Nietzsche's reverence for human potential and his loathing of Christianity and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant,"^[10] but eventually became critical, seeing his philosophy as emphasizing emotion over reason and a subjective interpretation of reality rather than reality existing independently from the self.^[10] There is debate about the extent of the relationship between Rand's views and Nietzsche's, and over what seemed to be an evolution of Rand's view of Nietzsche. Allan Gotthelf, in On Ayn Rand, describes the first edition of We the Living as very sympathetic to some Nietzschean ideas. Bjorn Faulkner and Karen Andre, characters from The Night of January 16th, exemplify certain aspects of Nietzsche's views. Ronald Merrill, author of The Ideas of Ayn Rand identified a passage in We the Living that Rand had omitted from the 1959 reprint: "In it, the heroine entertains (though finally rejects) sentiments explicitly attributed to Nietzsche about the justice of sacrificing the weak for the strong."^[11] Rand herself denied a close intellectual relationship with Nietzsche and characterized changes in later editions of We the Living as stylistic and grammatical.

The destruction of Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead is an example of her later view, a rejection of Nietzsche, that the great cannot succeed by sacrificing to the masses: "her [1934] journals suggest a rejection of traditional false-alternative ethics. Her May 15 entry, for example, identifies the error of Nietzscheans such as Gail Wynand: in trying to achieve power, they use the masses, but at the cost of their ideals and standards, and thus become 'a slave to those masses.' The independent man, therefore, will not make his success dependent upon the masses."^[10] Although Rand disagreed with many of Nietzsche's ideas, the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead concludes with Nietzsche's statement, "The noble soul has reverence for itself."

[edit] Kant

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See also: Critique of Pure Reason

Rand was deeply opposed to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Although Rand disagreed strongly with Kant on almost every philosophical issue, their divergence is greatest in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. In regard to Kant's essential philosophy, his metaphysics and epistemology, she had this to say:

The "phenomenal" world, said Kant, is not real: reality, as perceived by man's mind, is a distortion. The distorting mechanism is man's conceptual faculty: man's basic concepts (such as time, space, existence) are not derived from experience or reality, but come from an automatic system of filters in his consciousness (labeled "categories" and "forms of perception") which impose their own design on his perception of the external world and make him incapable of perceiving it in any manner other than the one in which he does perceive it. This proves, said Kant, that man's concepts are only a delusion, but a collective delusion which no one has the power to escape. Thus reason and science are "limited," said Kant; they are valid only so long as they deal with this world, with a permanent, pre-determined collective delusion (and thus the criterion of reason's validity was switched from the objective to the collective), but they are impotent to deal with the fundamental, metaphysical issues of existence, which belong to the "noumenal" world. The "noumenal" world is unknowable; it is the world of "real" reality, "superior" truth and "things in themselves" or "things as they are"—which means: things as they are not perceived by man.

Even apart from the fact that Kant's theory of the "categories" as the source of man's concepts was a preposterous invention, his argument amounted to a negation, not only of man's consciousness, but of any consciousness, of consciousness as such. His argument, in essence, ran as follows: man is limited to a consciousness of a specific nature, which perceives by specific means and no 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.^[13]

A "straw man" is an odd metaphor to apply to such an enormous, cumbersome, ponderous construction as Kant's system of epistemology. Nevertheless, a straw man is what it was—and the doubts, the uncertainty, the skepticism that followed, skepticism about man's ability ever to know anything, were not, in fact, applicable to human consciousness, because it was not a human consciousness that Kant's robot represented. But philosophers accepted it as such. And while they cried that reason had been invalidated, they did not notice that reason had been pushed off the philosophical scene altogether and that the faculty they were arguing about was not reason. ^[14]

Rand believed to the contrary, that man can have full, direct awareness of reality. In Rand's view, Kant's dichotomy severed rationality and reason from the real world.

In ethics, Rand criticized Kant for claiming that an action only has moral worth if it is done out of duty, a concept which, according to Rand, was an outgrowth of mysticism and the tradition of selflessness and which had no basis in reality. She also strongly disagreed with Kant's notion that morality has nothing to do with happiness.

"As to Kant's version of morality, it was appropriate to the kind of zombies that would inhabit that kind of [Kantian] universe: it consisted of total, abject selflessness. An action is moral, said Kant, only if one has no desire to perform it, but performs it out of a sense of duty and derives no benefit from it of any sort, neither material nor spiritual; a benefit destroys the moral value of an action. (Thus, if one has no desire to be evil, one cannot be good; if one has, one can.)"^[15]

In Rand's words,

I have mentioned in many articles that Kant is the chief destroyer of the modern world… You will find that on every fundamental issue, Kant's philosophy is the exact opposite of Objectivism.^[16]

In the final issue of The Objectivist, she further wrote,

Suppose you met a twisted, tormented young man and … discovered that he was brought up by a man-hating monster who worked systematically to paralyze his mind, destroy his self-confidence, obliterate his capacity for enjoyment and undercut his every attempt to escape … Western civilization is in that young man's position. The monster is Immanuel Kant."^[16]

[edit] References