I was exposed to Ayn Rand decades ago by a fellow employee who chastised me when I mentioned an altruistic endeavor in which I was involved. Never before had I considered the possibility that giving to others might be immoral, and I was intrigued enough to read a few of Rand’s books, including her most famous, Atlas Shrugged. While I am not a Rand zealot (or even a fan), I have been interested ever since.
Rand is not considered a great philosopher, and most current philosophers do not hold her philosophy (objectivism) in high regard. Nevertheless, while Rand died three decades ago, her influence has probably never been greater, especially in the areas of economics and politics, and particularly with various stripes of libertarians and conservatives.
I often wonder if those currently jumping on the Ayn Rand bandwagon really know what she believed. For sure, the admiration would not be mutual in most cases. Rand would absolutely despise much of what her current followers believe. For example, while many Christians have embraced her economic teaching, she had no patience for Christianity.
The reasons for this uneasy alliance are interesting to me, so I want to take some time to discuss Rand over a few posts. To start, let’s give Rand some credit. While many today tend to focus on her political/economic ideas, Rand was somewhat unique in that she actually had a holistic philosophy that drove those ideas. By that, I mean that she spent the time developing a system of metaphysics (theory of reality) and epistemology (theory of knowledge) that led her to her beliefs about politics and economics.
Most of us simply do not have that kind of cerebral investment behind our beliefs, and by most, I mean 99.999% of us including me. The talking heads you see on cable news have not made that investment. Nor have the politicians you see on those same programs. Compared to Rand, these people are lightweights.
To be sure, the greatest economic minds in history such as Adam Smith and Karl Marx have always had a philosophy originating in epistemology and metaphysics that drove their conclusions. Marx for example had a materialist perspective that naturally led to his economic ideas. To what extent Rand deserves to be named on the same level as Marx is debatable, but she was certainly in a very small club of political/economic thinkers in that she had a solid philosophical foundation.
For that matter, very few thinkers of any kind through history have really developed a comprehensive systematic philosophy. I am not saying that Rand’s system is on the level of Hegel’s, but at least, she made a valiant effort and came up with a somewhat unique comprehensive philosophy that we now refer to as objectivism.
Understanding objectivism helps us understand Rand, and perhaps more importantly, helps us understand why people to this day gravitate toward Rand even when she would hold nothing but contempt for them in return. So, let’s talk about what Rand offered that was so attractive.
Rand was at war with a philosophy known as idealism which had been prevalent in western thought for the past few centuries. Idealism is the belief that the human mind creates/controls reality. While there are many different variations of idealism, some idealists actually believe that no reality exists outside of the brain at all.
Now, most of us mock the concept of idealism outright. It sounds strange to our ears and leads to all kinds of apparently absurd conclusions. For example, if a doctor tells me I have cancer, can I be healed simply by convincing myself I am healed? Almost all of us would emphatically deny that possibility.
However, while the idea of idealism is universally rejected by moderns, I am quite sure that the practice of idealism has infiltrated almost all of us. You see it everywhere, from self-help techniques to the current disturbing rise of conspiracy theories. People often do operate as though reality is relative to one’s state of mind and in fact, can be controlled by one’s mind. Today’s postmodernist that talks about his own “version of truth” sounds like an idealist to me.
Now, Rand saw idealism far more broadly than just a two-century phenomenon. She contrasted idealism with her own view of reality which I will summarize in this way:
What exists exists, and it exists whether a human wants to acknowledge its existence or not.
Reality simply is the sum of what exists.
The human senses are a reliable way to learn about reality, especially when combined with rational judgments about the data provided by those senses.
Humans that want to be successful do not try to add to or modify reality. They understand that success means conforming to reality and playing by its rules.
Reality self-controls. No other entity such as a deity or the human mind controls reality.
In other words, Rand was a common-sense philosopher. While modern philosophers were debating such questions as to whether a table is really a table and whether the physical senses are at all reliable, Rand took an opposite tack that discarded those thorny questions as absurd. In general, what appeared to be reality could be accepted as reality though she readily admitted that cognitive processes were needed to interpret the data provided by the senses.
To Rand, when a tree falls in the forest, it obviously does make a sound regardless of whether any humans are around.
Or, to take another old philosophical problem, while an ax handle stuck in a pool of water may suddenly appear bent, that does not mean that our senses are unreliable. It simply means that our cognition of what our senses tell us is flawed/incomplete. Humans that want to understand reality need to improve their cognition so that they better understand the rules of reality.
To put it mildly, Rand was the anti-idealist.
Now as I said, Rand painted with a broad brush when she was labeling people as idealists. For example, in Rand’s view, religion is anti-reality because religion represents a set of mind-based rules that add to reality. A religious person is trying to change reality through the mind by adding concepts that only exist in the mind, which to her, constituted a form of idealism.
Therefore, because premodernists were religious and believed in a God that controlled reality, Rand believed that they were idealists. St. Augustine was an idealist in her view.
In fact, Rand saw all 2,500 years of western thought as driven by idealism though she divided it into three sections. The pre-modernists were idealists because they believed in a God-controlled reality, the modernists were idealists because they believed in a culture-controlled reality, and today’s postmodernists are idealists because they believe that reality is unique to the individual and controlled by the individual.
In other words, she did not really approve of any major philosophical systems from the past or present. For her, humanity is always trying to control reality from outside reality, when in fact, reality cannot be controlled. Reality just is, independent of our minds.
A natural extension of this belief was that Rand strongly believed in absolutes, and she did so in a time where absolutes were under attack. To her, every argument against absolutes was fallacious. For example, a person could not argue that a statement was relative because to do so implied an absolute definition of the term “relative.”
Aside: Rand’s argument here is easy to counter, but you hear similar rhetoric from absolutists to this day. For example, if a relativist proclaims that one cannot know anything for sure, an absolutist will ask how that can be known for sure.
So was Rand’s philosophy unique? She would have said yes, but then, she clearly had a generous amount of hubris. In actuality, she was not the only common-sense philosopher, and much of her metaphysics and epistemology is reminiscent of Aristotle (the only philosopher she could bring herself to credit).
However, Rand was definitely countercultural at least during her time, and unique from Artistotle in one particular regard: while Aristotle believed in a chief designer of reality (creator/deity), Rand saw that as a fallacy. For Rand, what exists exists and only that exists. There was no room for a creator because only religion gives us the concept of a creator, and as already stated, religion exists only in the mind.
Overall, I think I would say that Rand’s objectivism was at least modestly unique in history and certainly a substantial counterweight to the postmodernism with which she was at war.
As mentioned, most modern philosophers find a lot of Rand’s philosophy to be nonsensical. But, weak or not, in an age where postmodernism must have been driving much of society crazy, Rand’s philosophy had to have seemed like a breath of fresh air. It is easy to see why she had followers and for that matter, still has followers.
In the next post, I want to talk about how her foundation of philosophy drove her contributions to how many view economics and politics. It would be a mistake to underestimate her influence. For example, Alan Greenspan was an early Rand disciple and many attribute much of Trump’s economic policy to Rand. And on a far bigger scale, many millions have read Atlas Shrugged and adopted her beliefs.