What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.

– Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged

[This is Part 2 of a planned 3 part series on Ayn Rand and her philosophy and its influence on my life. You can read Part 1 here. This part covers some of Ayn Rand’s early life and details more of her philosophy and how it directly influenced my personal development.]

In many ways, Ayn Rand’s life showed a determination and even an obsession as strong as any of her fictional characters. Born in 1905 to a middle-class family in St. Petersburg, Russia, she witnessed firsthand the horrors of communism when her family’s pharmacy was seized by the Soviets in the revolution of 1917. At the University of Petrograd (the city’s new name given by the Soviets in place of St. Petersburg), she studied history, including American history, and became an admirer of American ideals. In 1925, she finally received permission to travel to America, on the pretext of visiting relatives, but by then she had already decided never to return to Russia.

After spending six months in America living in America, during which time she studied English, she, like so many others who have sought fame and fortune, moved to Hollywood, California. As fate would have it, on her second day in Hollywood, she met by chance Cecil B. DeMille of The Ten Commandments fame, and having impressed him with her passion and enthusiasm, was hired first as an extra and then later as a script reader. She finished her first novel, We the Living, it 1933 but only found a publisher for it in 1936. It was however only after the publication of The Fountainhead in 1943, after being rejected by twelve publishers, that she became famous and gained the financial security to work on her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. She began writing it in 1946 and published it in 1957.

Rand’s novels have always tended to be popular successes but critical failures, badly reviewed but selling well through word of mouth. There’s no doubt that by traditional standards of literature, her novels are fairly terrible: her characters are one-dimensional mouthpieces for specific ideologies or archetypes, the plots are too straightforward and convenient to be realistic and her dialogue is full of implausibly long and dramatic speeches that would bore anyone to death if actually read aloud. The 1949 film adaptation of The Fountainhead demonstrates this since Rand insisted on keeping the full text of the speech that Howard Roark delivers at his trial. On the other hand, academic philosophers have tended not to take Rand seriously, in part due to an aversion to her shrill emphasis on selfishness and more importantly, due to perceived flaws in her philosophy, a point I will return to later in part 3 of this essay.

For her own part, Rand saw herself as both a novelist and a philosopher with the two roles complementing one another and indeed such was her conviction, or as some would say, arrogance, that she could not see artistic merit in a work unless it agreed with her philosophy. It’s worth noting however that Atlas Shrugged was the last work of fiction she wrote and the non-fiction books including The Virtue of Selfishness, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and Philosophy: Who Needs It, that explained her philosophy of objectivism in greater depth appeared some years afterwards. In that sense, Rand clearly belongs in the camp of philosophers, including most notably the existentialists, who convey their ideas, and their passions, better through allegorical stories than through formal arguments.

Objectivism begins with the assertion that reality is objective and knowable to conscious minds through sensory perception. Rand further asserts that all knowledge ultimately comes from the senses, which is a departure from traditional rationalists who believed that it was possible to come by certain necessary truths through pure reason alone. This departure was necessary to ground her philosophy in objective reality and avoid wandering into the metaphysics of idealism. Reason however still plays a central role because the raw information that comes through the senses must be sorted and categorized in a process that she calls measurement omission. As she writes, “While we can know that something exists by perception, we can only identify what exists by measurement, and by logic.” The omission part comes from omitting the variable measurements of the values of corresponding attributes of a set of instances or units, but keeping the list of shared attributes, in order to form valid concepts. She explicitly denies “faith” or “feeling” as means of obtaining knowledge.

Ethically, Objectivism relies on the observation that if a person must survive and thrive, he relies on his reason as the only reliable and valid means of achieving this purpose. As with the rest of her philosophy, Rand views ethics and morality as objective matters, claiming that the nature of what man is determines what man ought to do. Hedonism for example is denigrated because it is simply the pursuit of whatever makes one happy at the moment whereas Objectivism, in its insistence that people live consciously, would have people consciously and rationally determine what their values ought to objectively be and thereby adjust their emotions and feelings. In any case, since each individual ought to strive for his own survival and well-being, only acts that are primarily in the interests of the actor are defined as moral and ethical ones while altruism is immoral.

In line with this view, Objectivism accords to all people the basic rights to live as they wish without being interfered with. An Objectivist recognizes that others have similar rights because he recognizes the value of living in a society in which such rights are uniformly respected and enforced. From these foundations, Rand holds that as the most effective means for everyone to advance their respective interests is to interact voluntarily with each other through trade and cooperation, the best form of government is a laissez-faire capitalism that strictly stays out of economic affairs. The only proper function of government then is to defend the rights of its citizens to live as they wish and act in their own interests through such voluntary interactions.

Rand’s philosophy appealed to me greatly for its clean simplicity, its emphasis on reason and in how it puts the individual, and hence self-determination and self-reliance in the center when I first encountered it, but what truly rouses the passions is her spirited assault on traditional ideas of value. The quotation above is one such example. While other philosophers have rejected religion in their work, relatively few (with the notable exception of Friedrich Nietzsche of whom more shall follow in part 3) have made their philosophy into so explicit an antithesis of religion as Rand who decided to become an atheist at the age of 13 according to her diary. As she explained in an interview in Playboy magazine, while she recognized that religions could have a good influence on humanity and regarded religion as a primitive form of philosophy, the fact that everything in religion is based on blind and irrational faith negated any value that it might have altogether. She wrote in Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal, “The dominant chord of the encyclical’s sense of life is hatred for man’s mind – hence hatred for man – hence hatred for life and for earth – hence hatred for man’s enjoyment of his life on earth – and hence, as a last and least consequence, hatred for the only social system that makes all these values possible in practice: capitalism.” To her, all that is evil, altruism, irrationality and collectivism, comes ultimately from religion which teaches us to live for others and not ourself, to believe in faith instead of reason and to value humanity as a brotherhood instead of a collection of independent individuals.

Altruism, irrationality (in the form of mysticism) and collectivism were the subjects of a lecture that Rand delivered at Yale University in 1960, entitled “Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World” which provides more examples of Rand’s furious castigation on traditional values. Of altruism, she spoke, “The irreducible primary of altruism, the basic absolute, is self-sacrifice — which means: self-immolation, self-abnegation, self-denial, self-destruction — which means: the self as a standard of evil, the selfless as the standard of the good.” It is, she says, altruism that allows mysticism to thrive, for it is so ingrained in traditional values that senseless, irrational mysticism must be used to justify it. Altruism and mysticism combined and put in practice in society then becomes collectivism or socialism, which as she notes in the example of Soviet Russia is only all too willing to sacrifice individuals in the name of the collective good.

In stark contrast to her hatred for her country of birth, Rand’s love for her country of adoption, the United States, is fervent to such an extent that it would be embarrassing in today’s post-Iraqi invasion world. In an address to the West Point military academy in 1974 she said, “I can say–not as a patriotic bromide, but with full knowledge of the necessary metaphysical, epistemological, ethical, political and esthetic roots–that the United States of America is the greatest, the noblest and, in its original founding principles, the only moral country in the history of the world.”

Taken together, Ayn Rand’s philosophy is the only one that I know of that values reason so singularly and unwaveringly. As she said, “I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.” And indeed to her all the rest follows to include every imaginable aspect of human life, from one’s attitude towards others, to the proper form of relationships with friends and family, to which art in all its myriad forms is deemed praiseworthy, to how words and language should be used, to the organization and daily functioning of government etc. Unfortunately, for all her claims of her philosophy being all-encompassing, Rand is long on general principles but short on precise details, stating for example, that she is not a government planner when asked on the specificities of government departments and agencies.

To insist that reason be valued more highly in everyday life and especially in government decisions, is no bad thing. But insisting that everyone live their lives by consciously making every thought and decision, no matter how trivial, based on reason and logic leads to surreal results. As Kelley L. Ross notes in his essay on Rand, having Howard Roark simply sit starring at the phone all day while waiting for work in The Fountainhead is decidedly creepy and inhuman. In real life, Rand attempted to enforced her Objectivist ideals on herself and her closest companions, with disastrous results. This and other flaws of her philosophy will be covered in part 3 in which I will also try to summarize the lasting lessons that Objectivism has taught me.